She walked over to the convenience store on Broadway and asked for a kosher dog.

"It'll take a minute," the sullen girl behind the counter told her.

"Luckily I've got a minute. Hand me that paper, will you?"

The Beacon-Light she shoved at Tess was not the Saturday paper, but the early Sunday edition, the bulldog. Filled with fake news and feature stories, the paper was of little use, except to those who wanted a jump on real estate ads or the Super Deals at the Giant. Tess, lacking the space to store toilet paper purchased in bulk and the funds to buy property, usually had little interest in the bulldog. Then she saw Jonathan Ross's byline on page one, under a catchy headline:

THE LAWYER, THE ROWER, THE LADY: UNLIKELY TRIANGLE LEADS TO TRAGEDY

Friends called Darryl Paxton "Rock." The nickname was a testament to his discipline as a sculler, a demanding sport that requires an almost absolute fanaticism if one is to be successful.

But "Rock" also referred to his daunting physique, the heavily muscled arms, back, and legs that had carried him to so many victories, time and time again.

Sunday night, police say, Paxton used that strength to crush his latest opponent-famed lawyer Michael Abramowitz, believed to be a rival for Paxton's fiancée, Ava Hill, a young associate who had been working with Abramowitz. Four days later Paxton went before a judge: not to show remorse, or enter a plea, but to request that his murder trial not interfere with his sculling schedule.

In an exclusive interview the woman at the center of this unlikely triangle told the Beacon-Light that Paxton was insanely jealous of anyone close to her. His mind poisoned by misinformation, Ms. Hill said, he had even come to believe that Abramowitz was sexually harassing her.

"I tried to tell him he had it all wrong," said a tearful Hill, recounting the night of the murder. "But once Darryl had an idea in his head, nothing could dissuade him."

Paxton appears calm and cool to those who know him best, but he is no stranger to violence. In college in Pittsburgh, he once beat a man in a local bar, injuring him so badly he required medical attention. The man, however, declined to press charges. Contacted today, ten years after the incident, he says he still fears Paxton too much to go on the record against him.

Meanwhile, childhood friends of Paxton describe cold, uncaring parents, interested only in his rowing accomplishments. His father, in particular, is described as a brutal taskmaster who would berate a young Paxton whenever he failed-whether at rowing or his studies. His father wanted him to be a doctor, according to one family friend, but Paxton preferred the less stressful life of a researcher.

Neighbors in Baltimore described Paxton as a quiet man who kept to himself. "He always seems a little preoccupied when I see him down at the mailbox," said Tillie Van Horne, who lives in his building. "Polite, but not real interested in other people. When his girlfriend was with him, he couldn't see anyone else in the world."

It was all there. Rock, faithful to at least one of Tyner's instructions, had not spoken to Jonathan, so Ava's account was allowed to float out over Baltimore, unchallenged and untested. In spite of herself Tess was impressed by Ava's ability to weave lie within lie. Caught in a compromising position, she had made up the story of sexual harassment to defang Tess. When it had backfired she claimed the story was a figment of Rock's overheated imagination. Abramowitz was dead, so no one could corroborate Rock's hearsay account that Ava had initiated the affair.

By the end of the overblown piece, which Tess read still standing in the Nice N Easy, her hot dog growing cold, the average reader would be convinced of two things: Rock's guilt and Ava's innocence. Every detail of their lives had been offered up to serve that purpose. Rock emerged as the brooding, obsessive Heathcliff of the Patapsco. Jonathan even called him a "loner," newspaper code for deranged. Ava was a golden girl, the straight-A student from Pikesville High School whose only false step was her involvement with this lunatic. Oddly Abramowitz hardly figured into his own murder story. A single man with no living relatives, he had no one to speak for him and no life to re-create outside the law. Old associates at the public defender's office recalled him only as a prickly workaholic. His current partners had declined to be interviewed for the story, saying the tragedy was too fresh.

But Tess didn't care about Abramowitz. And she wasn't particularly concerned about the article's effect on the case. Ava could lie to a newspaper reporter. She could even lie to Rock, convince him she was quoted out of context, or that she granted the interview only to help his case. In court she'd have to tell the truth, or at least settle on one, noncontradictory version of the truth.

No, Tess saw the article as a gauntlet, flung down by Jonathan to prove he could always get what he wanted, even without her cooperation. He had ferreted out details of Rock's life not even Tess knew-she had always assumed his parents were dead-and gotten the interview with Ava before it occurred to Tess to talk to her. Jonathan was a far more vicious opponent than Rock, who ultimately rowed against himself and his own records.

Jonathan couldn't win unless someone else lost.

Tess read the story again. Abramowitz was barely a person, just a MacGuffin, setting the story into play. What did anyone really know about him? Tess thought again about the little man with the baseball bat who had chased Abramowitz around and around the desk. She remembered the bitter woman, the one who had joined a support group just to forget her experience against him in court. Certainly they could help flesh out what was known about Abramowitz.

Of course, if Jonathan had read the Beacon-Light's files, he knew about these people, too. But he hadn't tracked them down. He had gone for the easy story, the one visible from the surface. Let him have the lady and the rower. She was going in search of the lawyer.

Tess rehearsed her cover story on her way to meet the women of VOMA. She had concocted an elaborate tale of date rape, in which she was defiled by a star football player who had taken her out for coffee after studying for a test on the 19th-century novel. As Tess climbed the broad stone steps of the old school administration building, she was wondering if she could summon up tears on cue.

The gray stone building, an elegant Victorian, had been defiled during a 1960s stab at modernization. Egg yolk yellow, Sunkist orange, shiny contact paper in a floral pattern-inside it was mod with a vengeance. Time had not dulled the yellow linoleum, and the heavy wooden doors were still imprisoned in layers of shiny orange paint, chipped in places and coated with a thin film of grime.

The city school district owned the old school, but it was not foolish enough to use it, preferring to spend millions to renovate a nearby high school for its own headquarters. The old administration building now functioned as a kind of community center, although there was no community to speak of in the blighted area. And if nature did not abhor a vacuum, then support groups must. More than a dozen had rushed in to fill the cavernous space, and each classroom that night was filled with people at various stages along the twelve steps.

Tess walked past hand-lettered signs for AA, NA, Adult Survivors of Incest, Al-Anon, Shoppers Anonymous, and, cryptically, Bings of Baltimore, which she thought might be for people who couldn't stop watching White Christmas. Then she saw the women inside, hands wrapped tightly around cups of black coffee, hushed voices speaking rhapsodically about the merits of various doughnut shops.