She was impressed by her handiwork. The corner of his right eye was discolored and beginning to swell. Her nails, although short, had scratched two parallel lines from cheekbone to forehead. Blood beaded in the narrow grooves-actual blood.

"I think I broke your nose," she said solemnly.

"My nose? You broke my fuckin' nose?" Jonathan had a nice straight nose, one that his father, a plastic surgeon in the Washington suburbs, liked to tell patients he had sculpted. In fact it was a gift of nature and one of Jonathan's greatest vanities.

"Just kidding. Come on upstairs. I'll give you a washrag and some brandy. You can use them in whatever way you see fit."

In her apartment, as Jonathan examined his face in the bedroom mirror, Tess took off her blazer, slipping the diskette out of the pocket and trying to slide it unobtrusively onto the bedside table.

"What's that?"

"My work for Uncle Donald."

"I thought you turned in hard copy. I thought your Mac wasn't compatible with the state IBM clones."

"There's some program that translates it. The system manager does it." Typical. Jonathan had never shown the least bit of curiosity about her work for Uncle Donald before this.

"I've never heard of anything like that," he persisted. "The state can't even computerize its own welfare cases, but their system manager can do stuff like that?"

"Did you come by to scare me to death or quiz me on my part-time employment?" She yanked her shirt out of the waistband of her jeans. She hated clothes that made contact with her body, that pressed in at the waist. Ideally she would have liked to wear a caftan all the time, but she didn't want to look even larger than she was. Slowly, deliberately, she began unbuttoning her shirt.

"Still got that body?"

"Why don't you come over here and find out?" Tess sat on the edge of the bed and began to take off her jeans.

His face damp and warm from the washrag he had been pressing against it, Jonathan knelt between her legs and finished the task for her. She placed the back of her left hand on his forehead, as if testing for a fever. Her right index finger traced the lines she had drawn across his face.

"If you had been a mugger," she said tenderly, "I would have kicked your ass."

"Really?" He pushed her back on the bed, holding her down by the shoulders, squeezing the tight muscles that bunched up there whenever she was under stress. "You row. You run. You lift weights. Me, I play basketball once a week if I'm lucky. Try to get up."

She didn't try, for she knew she would fail, knew how hard it was for a woman to be as strong as a man. Strangely she heard Cecilia's voice in her head. It must be nice to be so strong. She hated being weak, hated knowing Jonathan could do just that if he wanted to.

"In the alley I wasn't on my back."

"You might have been if you hadn't let me inside."

The heightened adrenal rush of their earlier encounter, the bourbon buzz from Frigo's, the memory of Crow's worshipful stares, the very nature of this politically incorrect conversation-it all combined to make Tess feel wanton and powerful. Jonathan's equal. In the past year, when he had come back into her life, it had been under his terms. He came when he wanted to, he slept with her, he owed her nothing except an orgasm or a good-faith attempt at one. She had pretended-to others, to herself-this was all she wanted, too. But she had known, and Jonathan had known, it was all she could get. She had been settling.

He had straddled her. She raised her right leg slowly, her foot caressing his leg until she could press her knee against the underside of his groin.

"If I wanted to get up, all I would have to do is push this knee up a little more with all the force I can muster, and your balls would be up around your liver. Luckily for you I don't want to get up."

"Isn't that convenient?" Yes. It was the way she had always been, pretending what she had was what she wanted.

She snaked her legs outside his, first the right and then the left, and wrapped them around his waist. He was right. No matter how much she lifted, how fast she ran, how hard she rowed, she could never match him in upper body strength, not without a good dose of steroids or human growth hormones. Below the waist, however, it was a different story. She squeezed her thighs together, thinking about the 200 pounds she pressed when doing her adductor work. Jonathan weighed 175, 180 tops. Unlike a weight machine, he could exert force of his own.

"I've still got you pinned," he gloated, enjoying her python act.

Tess, as much to her amazement as his, bit him on the wrist, breaking the skin. Shocked, he pulled his right hand away, which gave her the chance to roll on top of him.

"Still got that body?" she asked.

He nodded, liking this new game, the danger in it, the right amount of danger. She pulled his jeans down and lowered herself on him. She was in the position he had held a few minutes before-her legs straddling him, her hands pressing his shoulders into the bed. She held him there, making love to him, interested only in her pleasure. If Kitty was listening that night, she heard Tess's cries long before Jonathan's.

When they finished, Tess sent Jonathan to the kitchen to scavenge for provisions. As soon as he was gone, she hid the diskette in her desk, which locked. She supposed it was a bad sign be so skeptical of someone who had just left her bed. Then again, she knew him awfully well.

"All I found was white burgundy and Swiss chocolate," he said upon his return.

"What more do you want?"

They munched distractedly, wrapped in private thoughts. Tess was longing to read Abramowitz's disk and hoped Jonathan would leave after he finished eating. But Jonathan, now that sex was past, seemed gloomy and depressed. She steeled herself for a late night, in which she would be expected to make lots of supportive, murmuring noises. To her surprise she had run out of them.

He sighed elaborately, her cue to start. "OK, what's wrong?"

"I'm having more problems than I thought with that story. I haven't been able to fit all the pieces together."

"What's it about, anyway? You wouldn't tell me anything last time-except that it was going to shake Baltimore to its foundations." She laughed a little cruelly.

"It wasn't an exaggeration. This story's huge. But my source is getting cold feet. He's a real twisted fucker, Tess."

"Nice way to talk about a source."

"Hey, it's not just me. Everyone calls him that. It's practically his nickname. But he had a great story to tell. Now he wants money for telling it, and the Beacon-Light doesn't make those kind of deals. He's threatening to go to the television stations. Of course, they don't pay either. But the tabloid shows do."

"How credible is he?"

"He's on Death Row for a crime he admits he committed, so he doesn't have much to gain. Except a little flurry of attention before he dies. Remember I told you I thought Thanos's execution changed the dynamic on Death Row? Well, it's not quite the way I imagined it. A lot of these guys don't want to play Avis to Thanos's Hertz. Nobody remembers number two. So this guy comes forward with a story about a crime someone else committed but got away with because he was rich and connected."

"Someone local? How rich, how connected?"

"He won't tell me. He gave me all these tantalizing hints, but when I went to see him yesterday, he suddenly pops up with this request for $25,000."

"What's a guy on Death Row going to do with $25,000?"

"I don't know. Give it to his mom, maybe, except he hates his mom. He just likes playing with people. The money is about leverage." He sighed again. "He is one twisted fucker."

"Death Row, huh? But it doesn't have anything to do with Abramowitz? I guess that's possible-only three of the thirteen guys there were his clients."