Devon had said she didn’t know Gwen that well, but she had known she had left. At the time, she said she had heard it from one of the other girls, but the clinic maintained no one else who was there knew Gwen had escaped. They had kept it quiet.

Besides, why would Gwen call someone who was in? Only someone who was out, and on her own, could help her. Devon was out by then, starting her freshman year at Penn, living off campus. Perhaps Gwen, not knowing about Devon’s watchful bodyguard, had expected her to take her in, or at least come to Baltimore to bail her out of whatever trouble she was in. She was waiting for someone, Sukey had told her. The someone never came, so Gwen was still in the park the next day, ready for fate when it arrived in the shape of Henry Dembrow.

It took a solid two hours to make the 100-mile trip to Philadelphia. Tess burned up another 45 minutes in wrong turns before she found her way back to Devon’s apartment. She found a space halfway down the street, rang the apartment from the foyer. No answer. She bought a pretzel from a street vendor and took it back to the car. She couldn’t remember when she had eaten last.

It was almost dusk when Devon turned down the street. She moved self-consciously-shoulders hunched beneath the weight of her knapsack, eyes on the pavement, her body hidden in the voluminous folds of a man’s vintage cashmere coat.

Tess stopped her just outside the apartment building.

“Devon.”

She needed a second. Maybe it was the dim light. “The private detective. The one who was looking for Gwen.”

“She called you, didn’t she? The day before she was killed, she called you.”

Devon’s eyes returned to the sidewalk, then slid to the right. “I wasn’t home. She left a message, but I wasn’t home, and I didn’t know what time she called. There wasn’t anything I could do. Until you came here, I thought she was alive.”

“We need to talk about this. Can I come inside?”

Devon nodded, then shook her head. “Hilde’s there.”

“Are you saying you can’t talk about this in front of Hilde? We can go sit in my car if you like.”

“No. She’ll give us privacy, if I ask.”

“Then ask,” Tess said. She shouldered her own knapsack, followed Devon into the small vestibule of her building, watched her fumble with the keys at the inside door, which was even balkier than the last time. Tess noticed the veneer around the lock was scratched, which struck her as a seedy note in such a nice building. The stairwell was dark, too, as if the landlord were too cheap to turn on the lights one minute before dusk was complete.

Later, forced to recount the events that followed-and Tess was forced to recount them several times-she remembered feeling as if she had left her body, that she was standing outside herself and what she was seeing. “That’s funny,” Devon was saying, “the lock doesn’t want to-oh, there it goes.” Devon flipped a switch, but the stairwell light didn’t come on. “Burned out,” Devon said matter-of-factly, and began climbing the stairs.

It was then that Tess grabbed her arm and dragged her into the street. She wasn’t sure how her gun came to be in her hand, safety off, but she must have opened her knapsack because Devon was holding her cell phone. She heard a voice, her own voice, above the dull roaring in her ears. Call 911. Call 911. Even as Devon was trying to make the call, Tess was dragging her across the street, looking for someplace safe, untouchable.

She settled for the Philly cheesesteak cart, stationed behind someone’s very nice and very white BMW. Time was out of sequence for Tess. It seemed to her that she threw Devon to the ground before the shots were fired, but that didn’t make any sense. The phone bounced from Devon’s hand, even as the call was going through. Tess could hear the operator’s voice buzzing from the sidewalk, increasingly impatient. “911, may I help you? May I help you? Are you there?” She hoped the 911 operator could hear them, could hear the panicked screams on the street around them.

“Yell out the address,” she shouted to Devon. “Scream as loud as you can.” A second round of shots, and although Tess did not dare look up, she knew they were coming from Devon’s apartment. Luckily, whoever was waiting there had assumed they’d be doing their work at much closer range. They didn’t have the guns, or the target skills, for this distance, although Tess heard a few shots ringing into the BMW. The cheesesteak vendor abandoned ship, running down the block. The first wave of sirens started, not too far in the distance. The shots stopped as suddenly as they had begun.

“Is there a back entrance to your building?” Tess asked Devon.

She nodded, looking a little dazed. “And a fire escape. Do you want me to show you?”

“No, I just need to tell the police when they get here. My guess is whoever was in your apartment will leave that way. But we stay here until the cops arrive.”

Slowly, Tess was returning to her own body. She became aware of the cold air, the rough sidewalk beneath her cheek, the fact that her left arm was around Devon’s narrow waist. People had begun to move in the street again, but no one would come close to them, although a teenage boy kicked Tess’s cell phone so it skittered back to her. Maybe it was the gun in Tess’s right hand. Maybe it was because no one saw any percentage in cozying up to the targets.

“The cheese and onions are making me sick,” Devon said. “The smell, I mean.”

“There are worse smells,” Tess said.

HILDE WAS DEAD. THE PHILADELPHIA COPS, OVER Tess’s objections, made Devon come inside the apartment and identify her keeper’s sturdy body. Tess, who knew more about murder scenes than she wanted to, could see that Hilde had been shot as she came through the door, then dragged to the kitchen. The homicide detectives seemed to find this curious, and spent a long time pacing the path of dried blood she had left, looking for pieces of evidence to bag. Why had the body been moved, they kept asking one another, when the answer seemed obvious to Tess. Hilde’s killer wanted Devon to be inside the apartment before she knew anything was amiss. A corpse by the front door would have ruined the element of surprise.

She kept her thoughts to herself. Baltimore cops had never been particularly enamored of her ideas, and there she was a taxpayer. Here, she was an out-of-state PI. An out-of-state PI who hadn’t bothered to check if her license to carry transferred across the Mason-Dixon line. Oops.

Devon handled herself well. She was tougher than Tess had thought. Oh, she cried, and looked as if she might become sick, yet she seemed remarkably composed. Did she understand she was the intended victim, that Hilde had been nothing but an unexpected obstacle? Probably not, and Tess didn’t see any reason to tell her. The realization would come soon enough and, along with it, the electric guilt of surviving when someone close to you is dead. That was the hard part. The secret euphoria you felt at still being alive.

The cops kept Tess and Devon apart as much as possible, taking them to the police station in separate vehicles and sequestering them in different interview rooms. It did not strike Tess that they feared the two women were collaborators, who would conspire to tell one version of events. No, they were from different caste systems. The cops were deferential to Devon-the hometown girl, the Main Line deb, with a Philadelphia lawyer waiting for her at the station, along with her parents. Tess was the scruffy outsider and although they knew she was not to blame for what had happened, they couldn’t seem to shake the idea she was a troublemaker. She didn’t help matters by refusing to divulge details about the case that had brought her to the City of Brotherly Love.