But what if Henry was killed to end a trail, to silence someone who knew more than he was telling? What had happened to Gwen in the weeks she was missing? What kind of life had she led on the streets of Baltimore?

The place where I was it had a name like Domino’s, but I guess you could call it the Sugar House, too, she had told Sukey. That wasn’t Persephone’s.

Tess dressed quickly in the dark, left a note for Crow on his bedstand, and walked-ran through the deserted streets to the parking garage where she had left the Toyota. The world was dark at four A.M., although not as dark as it might have been, given the Christmas lights everywhere. She drove to her office, taking care to lock the door behind her, and pulled her file on Henry Dembrow.

She read his confession again, the transcript from the tape that police had made. It was different, somehow, knowing Jane Doe’s name and background. Small details took on a new poignancy.

I told her about Locust Point, my dad, how Domino’s used to be called the Sugar House. Yeah, yeah, I know that, she said.

That matched Sukey’s story. Everyone said Sukey was a liar, but so far Tess had caught her in nothing but truths, at least when it came to Gwen.

She scanned through the other papers Tull had given her-the charging documents, the official notices that went back and forth throughout the trial. She had paid only cursory attention to these before. Henry Dembrow’s trip through the legal system hadn’t been about identifying his victim.

But there was a memo, noting that Henry Dembrow was changing representation in the case. Henry had apparently dropped the public defender, someone named Hank Mooney, and switched to a private attorney. Common enough. Baltimore’s P.D.s were good, but a lot of criminals made the mistake of thinking you had to pay for value. Never mind that one of the city’s most celebrated criminal defense attorneys had watched as a mentally retarded client went off to serve a life sentence, for a crime it was later proved he didn’t commit. “You get what you pay for, or so I thought,” Ruthie had complained. Henry went to prison on the private attorney’s watch, not the P.D.’s.

A private attorney named-Tess flipped through the papers-Arnold Vasso.

Arnie Vasso, power lobbyist. Arnie “I don’t practice law, I perfect it” Vasso. Arnie Vasso who had no rep as a criminal attorney, but sometimes did favors for friends, as he had told Tess over their Piccolo Roma lunch. Arnie Vasso, who had engineered the bogus license for a bar called Domenick’s, had represented Henry Dembrow, who had killed a girl who said she once worked at a place that sounded like Domino’s.

The world was full of coincidences. Where would Reader’s Digest and movies-of-the-week be without them? But in Arnie Vasso’s world, nothing happened by accident.

Tess checked the “It’s Time for a Haircut” clock that hung on her wall, an artifact from a Woodlawn barbershop where her mother had taken her for buzz cuts. Hence today’s long braid. Tess sometimes wondered if everyone’s life was lived in reaction to those first ten or fifteen years, when one had no control. The clock said 4:30 A.M., much too early to call anyone.

She didn’t need to call anyway. She knew how the conversation would go.

She’d ask Ruthie if she had hired Arnie Vasso.

Ruthie would say no, Vasso had phoned her up and offered to take the case pro bono, as a favor to a pal at the Stonewall Democratic Club. Something like that.

Tess would ask Ruthie if a good night’s sleep had changed her mind, if Ruthie still believed Henry’s death was connected to Gwen’s death.

Ruthie would say yes, she would always believe this, she didn’t care about all the reasons Tess had piled up, the neat little sandbags of logic intended to hold back her intution. She knew the two things were related, she would go to her grave believing it.

And that’s when Tess would say: Me too.

THE PUBLIC DEFENDER WHO HAD BEEN ASSIGNED TO Henry Dembrow’s case was a large man. Not fat, but huge, tall, and broad-shouldered, with a frame so big he appeared to have been made from leftover dinosaur bones.

“Hank Mooney,” he said, standing up when she entered the Hasty Tasty, a diner favored by courthouse types. His knee bumped the table, and his coffee sloshed from cup to saucer. “Shit.”

His voice was mild, as if he were used to such accidents, as if his size put him on a constant collision course with life.

“Hey, that’s why they have saucers. Tess Monaghan.”

“Nice to meet you.” His handshake was gentle, restrained. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“From-”

“Feeney, mainly.”

“Then most of what you know is true, and what isn’t true is at least interesting.” Kevin Feeney, the Blight’s courthouse reporter, was an old friend, his devotion to her exceeded only by his devotion to making stories about her more colorful. At least he didn’t put his fiction in the newspaper, unlike some reporters Tess had known.

She asked for coffee and a pair of bagels, having skipped breakfast that morning. She had wanted to avoid meeting Tyner in Kitty’s kitchen. He wouldn’t approve of what she was doing. She wasn’t sure she approved, so she didn’t want to subject herself to anyone else’s doubts. But she needed Hank Mooney’s help if she was going to confront Arnie Vasso with anything other than her hunches.

“I don’t have much time,” Hank said, turning a tree-stump-sized wrist to look at his watch. “Another day, another docket.”

He was smiling, though, energy brimming out of him in much the same way his coffee had run out of his cup. Tess had thought a public defender would be more beaten down, struggling under a staggering caseload, wrestling with the realization that the only thing that really separated him from a criminal attorney was the salary. But Hank Mooney looked as if he couldn’t wait for his workday to begin.

“Do you remember Henry Dembrow?”

“He’d be a hard one to forget, even if the case hadn’t been in the news lately.”

“Because of the Jane Doe angle.”

“Yeah. And because she was a white woman murdered in Locust Point. Most of the people murdered in Baltimore are young black men, killed on the East or West sides. Jane Doe-”

“Gwen Schiller.” Having restored the girl’s name, Tess was determined to make others remember it.

“She was unusual in every way. I shudder to think how the case would have been handled if they had known who she was at the time. Her father probably would have been breathing down the state’s attorney’s neck, screaming death penalty.”

Tess wasn’t sure if Dick Schiller was capable of screaming for anything. Any rage he could feel now was directed at the clinic. Gwen had been alive for six weeks after running away. Forty-two days, forty-two lost opportunities to change her destiny.

“I understand you moved to have his confession thrown out, on the grounds he was denied counsel.”

“It was worth a try. I was hoping he might be so high when they interrogated him that he was incapable of informed consent. Did you listen to the tape?”

“I read the transcript.”

“He sounds a little spaced out on the tape, but he’s not confused. If anything, I had the impression he thought he was being really crafty.”

“Crafty?”

Their food arrived. Mooney’s breakfast was surprisingly small, a glass of grapefruit juice and a toasted English muffin, which he ate dry. Tess had expected a Paul Bunyan-esque stack of hotcakes, maybe a Western omelet the size of her head. Mooney bit into his English muffin with a sound like someone’s spine cracking, scattering crumbs down his front.

“Yeah, I know-the kid was a hardcore huffer. Yet Henry thought of himself as real smart, an operator. It was like he had some scheme he didn’t want to tell me. Then he got his own attorney, and it wasn’t my problem anymore. Hasta la vista, baby.”