“Here’s the thing” Tess parroted back. “How often does that really happen?”

Vasso slurped in the leaf he had left dangling on his lip.

“I’m just saying women have some advantages, if they want to tap into them. Some do. Believe me, some do.”

“How am I going to find out who really owns that bar on Hollins Street?” Tess wasn’t even sure why it seemed so important. The discrepancy in the bar’s ownership didn’t make it any more likely that Jane Doe had worked there. But it was a lie, and other people’s lies made her crazy.

“Ask your daddy.” The simple phrase sounded ugly, insinuating. “Not that he knows anything. But he should know enough to tell you to drop it.”

Tess looked at Vasso, who was bent over his plate, dredging a large piece of foccacia through olive oil. From this angle, she could see the tanned bald spot at the crown of his head, see the way his neck oozed from his collar in tight little rolls. For the first time in her life, she knew how to use “oleaginous” in a sentence.

“I’m not really hungry,” she announced.

“But you’ve got all this food coming.”

“I’m sure you’ll find a way to write it off. Or find some senator who’s willing to eat my leftovers. Hey, maybe you’ll get lucky and he’ll grope you under the table.”

Vasso’s mask of bonhomie slipped just a little then. Without his fake smile in place, he looked shrewd and not a little scary.

“Maybe you don’t want to be my friend, but you don’t want to be my enemy, either. I’m a hired hand, I work for those who pay me and stay on the good side of those who can help me bring home the goodies for my clients. Someone asks me to go to a liquor board hearing, help a guy out, it’s no skin off my butt. And it’s not exactly a conspiracy, you know what I mean? If you were one of those little Columbia J-School grads that the Blight sends down here from time to time, I’d understand why you had such a big stick up your ass-”

“Your butt, my butt, could you work your way toward a different kind of imagery?”

“Hey, I gave you polite already. All I’m saying is your uncle worked for one of the biggest crooks that ever came through Annapolis, and that includes Spiro T. Agnew and Marvin Mandel. Your dad was appointed by Senator Ditter, who wasn’t exactly racking up high scores on Common Cause’s list of good legislators. So who are you to get all huffy and holier-than-thou about how business is done down here? Let me put it for you this way: It’s none of your fucking business. I don’t know from any dead girls, but I know you’re going to be one sorry little girl if you don’t leave some stuff alone. Just let it be. Now let’s have some antipasto, talk about the weather, and why the Ravens suck.”

“I’m sorry, I just don’t have any appetite.”

Vasso laughed, and grabbed another piece of bread from the basket. “See, it’s all personal with you. I guess I was wrong. Even with the right clothes, you’d never make it down here.”

Tess got up to leave, bumping the table with her hip so that a glass of ice water toppled into Vasso’s lap.

“You stupid-”

“An accident,” she said, and it was, except in the Freudian sense. “Don’t take everything so personally.”

HIGHWAYS WERE TOO CONDUCIVE TO THINKING, AND Tess didn’t want to be alone with her own thoughts. She bypassed 97, smooth and new, and took Route 2, the old Governor Ritchie Highway. It was a relief to concentrate on the stop-and-go traffic and potholes, rather than reflect on her almost-dinner with Arnie.

The thing was, he was right: She did take things too personally, and now she had made an enemy for no good reason. Even sleazeballs had their uses. Especially sleazeballs. Her mother’s voice scolded inside her head, recounting the virtues of honey versus vinegar, vis-à-vis fly catching. Then Ritchie Highway rewarded her with its endless snarls and wretched drivers, and Tess managed to crawl outside of her own head and stay there for most of the way back to Baltimore.

Her brain kicked in again as she crossed the Patapsco on the Hanover Street Bridge. By force of habit, she glanced west first, toward the boat house. No one on the water at this time of day, this time of year. Then her eyes tracked east, toward the Key Bridge, Fort McHenry, and Locust Point.

Locust Point. What if Sukey had been lying about everything? Or not lying exactly, but so desperate to please that she had made up the little shred of conversation with Jane Doe, just to have something to say, just to please another grown-up. Tess decided to detour through Locust Point and question the girl again, ever so gently. She couldn’t get back the time she had already dribbled away, but she could stop throwing good effort after bad. Why did she even care who owned Domenick’s? The bar’s screwed-up license didn’t have anything to do with Jane Doe. Once again, she had mistaken momentum for progress.

So, find Sukey, put it down. The only problem was, Tess couldn’t remember the girl’s last name, or where she lived, and she didn’t want to wander the streets of Locust Point, asking if anyone knew a round-cheeked girl named Sukey, given to fantastic tales.

The mini-mart at the gas station seemed a logical place to start.

“ Try Latrobe Park,” advised Brad the convenience store manager. “She got a new book out of the rack today, said she was going to read.”

“A little raw to read outside, isn’t it?”

“She always says to me she doesn’t like to be inside unless she has to.” Brad tapped his forehead. “She’s odd, that girl. She’ll tell you blue is orange, and not know the difference herself. She can’t help it. When she’s saying it, she believes it.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m worried about.”

Tess left her car and walked to the park. Locust Point was a strange mix of residential and industrial. It seemed amazing that people would have chosen to live cheek by jowl with marine terminals and manufacturing plants, but this had been the norm for Baltimore ’s lower-middle-class families after World War II. If there were still good jobs here, it might still be the norm. Today’s kids, faced with so few opportunities, left these neighborhoods readily enough, but the older folks stayed on and on. Down at Wagner’s Point, where the neighborhood was little more than a toxic dump, people had fought leaving even when the city announced a buyout.

It was home, they said. How can you put a price on my home?

Tess found the swings, but Sukey was nowhere in sight. She sat in one, imagining she could channel Jane Doe, that the young woman had left some trace of her identity on this rectangular piece of wood. The autopsy said she could be anywhere from her late teens to her early twenties, but Tess knew, just knew, she was on the younger edge of that range. Maybe seventeen, eighteen tops.

She dragged her toes in the groove beneath the seat, much too long-legged to make it go. And much too old, not that such a consideration would have stopped her. She remembered the wondrous discovery that a swing would move, would soar ever higher, through the simple pumping action of one’s own legs. Her earliest physics lesson. Actually, her only physics lesson. At seventeen, informed that she was not required to take any more science classes under state law, Tess had decided she knew enough about light and particles and inertia.

At seventeen, she thought she knew enough about everything.

Seventeen. Junior year. She had a boyfriend, she was on the honor roll and the track team, and she could make calories disappear by sticking her finger down her throat. She ate whatever she wanted and never gained weight, thanks to her magic finger. Poor Billy Baker. She couldn’t have been fun to kiss, given her hobby, but he never complained. They had met in his parents’ basement rec room after school, stealing shots from the wet bar, messing around, solving a few algebra problems in their downtime. Latchkey kids. Funny to think about all the dire predictions people had made about such arrangements.