The bland gray towers here housed hundreds of state employees from several divisions. Tess took the elevator to room 808, home to all corporate charters filed in the state of Maryland, for businesses and nonprofits alike. Cecilia's smeared copies must have come from here, from the old microfilm files, a technology now almost as quaint as telegraphs and Morse codes.

It was a dusty, overheated room, always crowded and tense. When Tess was a reporter, jazzed up on caffeine and deadlines, just being here had pushed her to the edge of teeth grinding irritation. The too-small room seemed to affect everyone's reflexes, until employees and visitors alike moved as if suspended in honey. There was always a crowd at the banks of filing cabinets, always a line at the front desk, never enough clerks to help out. Strange little gnomes, male and female, hogged the microfilm machines and tables. Tess had never known, or cared, who these people were or what they were doing.

Now she was one of them. A free spirit, liberated from the forty-hour-a-week grind. Tess waited to surrender to the same lethargy the others had, to shuffle to the front desk, where she would get the folio number for the file she wanted, then to the cabinets where the files were kept, and to the machine where she could scan to the page number she needed. But the only feeling she had was her usual urgent desire to get out as quickly as possible. It took a mere five minutes to get the reel of microfilm, but the microfilm readers were already taken by people with piles and piles of film stacked at their sides. A bad sign, Tess decided, a very bad sign. She would have to rely on her more devious instincts, becoming sharper by the day, to jump ahead in line.

"Anybody parked on Howard Street?" she asked brightly. "Because they're ticketing."

Immediately three people rushed for the doors. One left a microfilm reader vacant and Tess usurped it, ignoring the glares of those who had not moved quite so quickly. She scanned on fast, which made her head ache as the pages rushed by in a blur. The machine gave off a noxious smell, a combination of ink and dust, laced with a burning odor from the old motor. VOMA's charter began on page 1,334, fairly deep into the file. She slowed the scan to a crawl, but she had already passed it by and had to reverse direction for several hundred pages before she could zero in.

She was looking for more names to add to her growing list. Tess knew from writing about charities that a nonprofit typically had officers and a board. A lawyer filed the incorporation papers, but the lawyer usually didn't have any further dealings with the group. Still, it seemed an unlikely coincidence that Abramowitz filed the papers for a group that had at least one member who hated his guts. The original filing for VOMA, the Victims of Male Aggression, listed only Prudence Henderson as president-treasurer, and the "agent," lawyer Michael Abramowitz-the same names she had found on Cecilia's fragment in the coffehouse. No board, and nothing unusual in the bylaws, basically a statement of purpose ("a nonprofit that seeks to educate about sexual assault") and a promise not to support or oppose individual political candidates. That was boilerplate, a federal law any tax-exempt group had to follow.

Tess scanned idly through the other charters in the file, curious to see if Michael Abramowitz often helped out with filings. His name did not come up again. But there were hundreds of thousands of corporations on file here. Abramowitz could have filed for any number, or helped out on just this one. Searching for his name this way was useless. She scanned back to the VOMA charter and pushed the "print" button. The greasy, smudged copies were free, and Tess believed one should always take advantage of government freebies. Your tax dollars at work.

Before she left, she asked at the front desk to see the group's latest filing, an annual update known as the pink sheet, because of its color. If a board had been installed since the original filing, or if new officers had been named, VOMA would provide the list with its annual statement, another source of names and leads. When Tess was a reporter, a clerk would bring out the entire file, standing guard to ensure one looked only at the top pink sheet, which was public. The rest of the file was confidential. It had been a simple and painless process. Too simple and painless apparently: The legislature had changed it. The clerk told Tess she now needed twenty-six dollars, check or cash, to get the pink sheet today, nothing if she could wait for them to mail it, which could take up to two weeks. Tess wondered if she could bill it to Tyner without explaining to Tyner what she was doing. Nope. Better to go the cheaper route. Why gamble twenty-six dollars on a long shot?

She left the building, heading south to the greatest library in the free world.

Well, not anymore. Probably not ever. But the central branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library still was a place of wonders to Tess, even if the book budget had been slashed and the hours cut. Her parents had made a lot of mistakes, a fact Tess compulsively shared on first dates, but she gave them credit for doing one thing right: Starting when she was eight, they gave her a library card and dropped her off at the downtown Pratt every Saturday while they shopped. Twenty-one years later, Tess still entered through the children's entrance on the side, pausing to toss a penny in the algae-coated fish pond, then climbing the stairs to the grand main hall. If she could be married here, she would.

She found a seat in the business and technology section, between two homeless men researching the Voting Rights Act, and pulled out a small, spiral-backed notebook and her sheaf of lists, all the names she had been able to link to Abramowitz. She started with the current phone book and worked backward, using the old directories on microfilm to find numbers and addresses for those not in the most recent book. It was boring detail work, the kind of thing she had always done well. Too well. Tess had a talent for the small stuff. It was the big picture that often eluded her. In another time, another place, she would have been bent over a large quilt, sewing away at her one tiny block of fabric, the pattern so close to her eyes it had blurred.

But there were few rewards today. Most of the names on her list were not there, or too common to track. People had left Baltimore, disappeared, or died.

Except for Prudence Henderson, on University Parkway in the current directory. Tess was familiar with the area, a place of old apartments and co-ops, with a few rambling brick houses thrown into the mix. Of course, she could have found the same information by just looking it up in her phone book at home, but the discovery still pleased her. Heartened, she checked for a Cecilia Cesnik in Highlandtown, only to find too many Cesniks with East Baltimore exchanges. Did Cecilia say she still lived with her father? He could have been anyone from Anthony to Zachary.

She looked through her lists again. Who was missing? Oh, the mystery man, the disgruntled plaintiff with the Louisville Slugger. No one at the library could help with that, but she had an idea about someone who could. She gathered up her papers and went to one of the old pay phones, shutting the folding glass door and dialing a number to an office only blocks away.

"Feeney," a bored voice answered. It was a low, gruff voice, a voice that choked off all pleasantries. Kevin V. Feeney, the courthouse reporter for the Beacon-Light, worked out of a small pressroom in the courthouse, the better to escape his editors.

"Hey, Feeney, it's Tess Monaghan. Saw you in court the other day, but I didn't see your byline on Sunday's story. I bet you did a lot of legwork for Jonathan's story."

He grunted. "Yeah, I did all the scut work. As usual. But you know Jonathan. At least, that's what they say."