“Will you ever catch the person who did it?”

It was a logical question, one Tess and Tull had expected.

“We know who killed your daughter,” the detective said. “We arrested him, he confessed. But he couldn’t tell us anything about his victim, not even her name. We sent him to prison this year.”

Where he died, Tess thought. But she knew why Tull didn’t tell that part, not just yet. He wanted to give Dick Schiller the fleeting comfort of having an enemy.

“Who is this man?”

“Just a stupid punk kid. A huffer.”

“Huffer?” Dick Schiller echoed.

“A glue sniffer, someone who inhales paint and gasoline fumes.”

“People do that? On a regular basis?” Schiller looked amazed, but Patsy was nodding, almost unconsciously. Oh yeah, Tess thought, definitely a secretary who married the boss. She could almost pick out the zip code in Prince George’s County, one of the little working-class enclaves where the girls dream big, inspired by local heroine Kathie Lee Gifford. You can take the girl out of Bowie, but you can’t take the Bowie out of the girl.

“Yeah, I’m afraid they do.”

“I don’t know Locust Point,” Patsy put in. “Is it near Canton? We have some friends who live in the Anchorage. They have the prettiest view.”

“Other side of the water, ma’am.”

Dick Schiller, to his credit, did not wish to discuss Baltimore real estate. “The man who killed my Gwen, how long will he be in prison?”

Tess liked him for the use of the possessive.

“He’s dead,” Tull said. “He was stabbed to death.”

The room was silent, a silence that not even Patsy was foolish enough to fill. In less than five minutes, Dick Schiller had found out his daughter was dead, his daughter had been murdered, his daughter’s killer had been caught, her killer was dead. Most people complain justice is slow, but it had moved much too swiftly for Dick Schiller.

“Was Gwen using drugs, too?”

“No.”

The question had been Patsy’s; the emphatic denial came from Tess. She couldn’t help feeling fiercely protective of Gwen.

“I was just asking,” the stepmother said. “After all, she had…other issues.”

Tess studied the second Mrs. Schiller. She was so curvy, so pink and white, the colors of her outfit repeated in her fair, ripe flesh and carefully made-up face. She reminded Tess of the old-fashioned refrigerator cookie still found in some Baltimore bakeries, a round disc with pink swirls running through the vanilla dough.

It was a kind of cookie that looked better than it tasted.

“Mr. Schiller, how did Gwen’s mother die?”

“Ovarian cancer,” he said. “She went very fast. At least, that was her doctor’s frame of reference. It may have been fast in medical terms, but it was agonizingly slow for us.”

“Was she very thin, toward the end?”

“Yes.” He looked at Tess curiously, trying to figure out where she was going. “Yes, quite thin.”

Tess didn’t push it. It was just a hunch, an inexcusable, pseudo-psychiatric leap of faith. But it didn’t surprise her that a teenage girl who had seen her mother waste away, then watched her father bring home this strawberry sundae of a woman, had a complicated relationship with food.

“Do you have a photo of Gwen? In all the time I was looking for her, I’ve never known what she truly looked like. All I had was an artist’s sketch.” And a photocopy of a Polaroid of a corpse.

Schiller gave Tull a questioning look, as if he had already forgotten why she was here. “Tess is a private investigator. She’s the one who identified your daughter after the police department had given up. We wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for her efforts.”

He left the room and returned with a framed studio portrait, the eight-by-ten from a standard school package, with blue skies in the background. It was an old photo. Gwen had braces, the gawkiness of a middle schooler. The part in her hair was crooked, as was her smile, and her eyes were half-closed.

She was also one of the most beautiful girls Tess had ever seen. Like a painting, Sukey had said, or someone famous. Tess understood now. Gwen’s hair was glossy, as Devon had noted, her eyes dark and bright, her features perfect and yet not. Tess could stare at this photograph all day, dissect it a thousand ways, and never be able to explain why Gwen Schiller was so arresting. The dark hair, the fair skin, the lush red mouth. She could pass for Snow White.

And everyone knows what Snow White’s stepmother did when she found out she had competition in the fairest-of-the-land department. Tess would have bet all Schiller’s paper billions that Patsy had been the one who pushed for Gwen to be hospitalized, while she and her husband went on their extended honeymoon.

“She was lovely,” Tess said, handing the photograph back.

“She is, isn’t she?” Schiller said, still not ready to speak of his daughter in the past tense. “Her mother and I never knew how we produced such a specimen. Andrea was pretty, but in a more earthbound way. And me-well, you see what I bring to the table, genetically. I used to tease Andrea, ask her if she had been having sex with a swan behind my back.”

“A swan?” Patsy looked mystified. “That’s sick.”

“It’s how Helen of Troy of was conceived,” Tess said. “Zeus disguised himself as a swan and impregnated a woman named Leda.”

“Oh, yeah. Helen of Troy. The one with the face that launched a thousand ships, and the Trojan Horse, and all that.”

Tess thought it was as concise a summary of Homer as she had ever heard. Maybe Dick Schiller could make his next billion by starting an Internet company that sold Patsy’s interactive Cliff Notes over the Web.

Schiller was staring off into space. He hadn’t cried, not yet. Days might go by before he did. But Tess suspected that once he allowed himself to grieve for his daughter, he might never stop. A dead wife, a dead daughter. Patsy would be a comfort to him, Tess had to give her her due. Whatever her limitations, Patsy Schiller wasn’t the kind of woman who died young. She was pragmatic, she looked both ways before crossing streets, or marrying billionaires. She would take good care of her husband, if only because it served her own strong instinct for self-preservation.

“You know, I’m in the information business,” Dick Schiller said at last. “I can’t help thinking how ironic it is that my daughter could go unidentified for nine months, just because a missing persons report was filed in one jurisdiction and she died in another.”

“We’re not exactly at the cutting edge of technology-” Tull began, but Tess interrupted him.

“What do you mean, nine months? Gwen was missing for more than a year.”

“Gwen walked out of the clinic on her birthday, January thirty-first. I think I know my own daughter’s birthday. She had turned eighteen, and they couldn’t hold her legally against her will. The clinic staff tried to notify us before she left, but we were en route to-I’m not sure where we were in January. Chile?”

“Wherever we were right before Brazil,” Patsy said, adding for Tull and Tess’s edification: “We were in Rio for Carnival.”

“Gwen didn’t check herself out, that’s the point,” Tess said. “She ran away in October of the previous year, well before her birthday. Devon Whittaker told me she heard about the escape from someone else who was still at the clinic.”

“Impossible,” Dick Schiller said. “We continued to receive e-mail from her through January. Not much, I grant you-she was very angry at me for putting her in Persephone’s-but she stayed in touch.”

“Through e-mail,” Tess said.

“Right.”

“And you knew she was the one writing the e-mail because…”

Schiller put his head in his hands. “Because it came from her e-mail address at the clinic. How stupid can I be to think that means anything? Anyone who had her laptop could have used it to send me those notes. No wonder they sounded so stiff and impersonal. But Jesus Christ, why would the school wait so long to report her missing?”