“Katarina Hartigan. Josie Patel. Perri Kahn.”

“Dale’s daughter? But she was the one who was killed, right? Poor guy. When I read that in the paper, it reminded me there’s always someone whose troubles are worse than your own.”

“So Kat was your baby-sitter?”

“Oh, no. I just know Dale from, you know, around. He’s a good guy. So I recognize Kat, but those other names-it could be either one. I’m sure it was one of those y names. Josie. Perri. Terry.”

“But you saw the baby-sitter, would know her if you saw her again, right?” Perri’s parents had already confirmed that their daughter baby-sat for this family, but Lenhardt was keen to determine that the other girls couldn’t have procured the gun. The Kahns’ lawyer would sure as hell find out if they had access, if Kat or Josie had so much as rung the doorbell in the past three years.

Delacorte looked a little sheepish. “I suppose so. I-I worked a lot. That’s the reason Michael left. Part of the reason. The baby-sitter was…thin. Kind of bony.”

That description could apply to Perri Kahn or Josie Patel.

“Tall? Short?”

Delacorte shrugged.

“Um, ethnic?”

“Ethnic?”

“Like, Asian or Indian. Not American Indian but the other kind.”

“Oh, no. I don’t recall ever seeing anyone like that in the house.”

“And there was only the one baby-sitter?”

“On Thursdays. She came in on the nanny’s day off, because, you know, God forbid Michael would have to spend an entire day alone with Malcolm.”

“Why did your wife have a gun?”

Delacorte gave Lenhardt what he obviously thought of as a man-to-man smile. “I don’t know, but believe me, I’m thinking about it.”

“How do I get in touch with her?”

“Beats me. She won’t tell me where she’s living and hasn’t let me see my son since she moved out. Is that even legal?”

“Not exactly. But you need a family lawyer-”

He held up a hand. “I know. The question was largely rhetorical.”

“You got a number for your wife?”

“A cell. She won’t answer when I call, though. She always makes me talk to voice mail.”

“I thought I could call it.”

“Oh. Oh, of course.” Delacorte began to wander the room, pulling open drawers in various end tables and chests, looking for paper and pencil. Lenhardt felt a stab of pity, watching a man roam his own home, incapable of finding so much as scrap of paper.

He handed him his own pad and pen, asking, “Who’s Maurice?”

“My driver. It’s about an hour to Harrisburg. I can’t afford that much downtime, so he drives, I work. I moved here because I thought I could commute by helicopter, but the neighbors went berserk on my ass. That’s how I got to know Dale. He tried to broker a compromise, but there was no dealing with these nuts. I could have fought them in court, but it wasn’t worth it, not with everything else going on.”

“Why are you going in on a Sunday, though?”

“The usual things,” he said. “Papers to go through. Some things to box up and put into storage.”

His tone had the vague, innocent air of a lying kid, and he was no longer making eye contact.

“It’s illegal, you know. Getting rid of stuff once an investigation is under way.”

“Thanks for the free legal advice, Sergeant. Helps defray the cost of the official advice that costs me six hundred dollars an hour. Got any other pearls of wisdom for me?”

Lenhardt knew he was being put down, but he pretended to take the guy’s words at face value. “Okay, one more tip: Everything you steal, your wife is entitled to half of, under Maryland law. So if she knows where you hid all your assets before you gutted your company, you’ll have to cut her in.”

He left in a good mood, even though he hadn’t established anything other than the probability that Perri Kahn was the only girl who could have taken the gun from this house. It would be interesting to pin down the when, which would suggest just how long she had been planning her morning of havoc. And Delacorte hadn’t been able to place Josie in his home, a complication that Lenhardt had been happy to sidestep, even if he did think the girl was lying her head off.

What if she stalled on purpose? The thought hit him with a happy shock as soon as he was back on the highway, another possible resolution to the inconsistencies that were nagging at him. What if she hoped that refusing to open the door, pretending to be incapacitated, would be more likely to lead to the other girl’s death?

He filed it away and continued to the office, where he and Infante were going to write up the paperwork necessary to get permission for a medical examiner to eyeball the girl’s wound. According to the X-rays, the trajectory had been remarkably straight, as if someone had held the gun directly over the girl’s foot and fired. As if she had stood still, polite and proper, the best-behaved kid lining up for a flu shot.

Alexa had her Sunday routine down pat-the gym, then the farmers’ market under the expressway, shopping for whatever new recipe she had picked out for that night’s supper, usually something from Gourmet, or Food & Wine, or Nigella’s column in the New York Times, but not Martha, never Martha, even before her legal problems. Martha Stewart was cold, while Nigella Lawson had an earthy sensuality that Alexa believed was not unlike her own nature. Warm, giving. And although Alexa sometimes invited Washington friends to her Sunday-night suppers, entertaining was not the point of her ritual. In fact, she prepared meals just as elaborate when alone-single portions of pot-au-feu, soufflés, paella. She refused to be one of those women who were stingy with themselves, postponing pleasure until the proper husband or boyfriend showed up.

That was one reason it had been so important to buy her own house, rather than settling into some sterile rental. The house needed quite a bit of work, but Alexa was patiently renovating one room at a time, which meant living in a perpetual cloud of dust. Only the kitchen had been done before she moved in, because the kitchen is the heart of any home. She had a hunch that granite was over, and she couldn’t afford it anyway, so she had gone with an almost retro look, all white wood and milk glass. In the eighteen months since then, she had completed the downstairs half bath and the dining room-refinishing the floor, installing her own moldings, even finding an old chandelier at a flea market and rewiring it herself. It was a beautiful, sensuous room with cranberry red walls and a mahogany dining room set that Alexa had unearthed at an antique store not far from Glendale.

The antique stores and flea markets in north county had been her primary solace after being assigned to Glendale by the nonprofit that was underwriting her pilot program. A certified teacher and guidance counselor-Alexa preferred to think of herself as an ethnographer-she had designed a curriculum intended to tap into current concerns over girls’ self-esteem. Unlike others in the field, who concentrated on psychology and sociology, Alexa had designed her program around language, the girls’ weapon of choice. She had assumed she would find a berth in Montgomery County, which would make it possible to keep her apartment in D.C.’s Adams-Morgan, close to her friends from graduate school. When she found out she was being sent to the distant reaches of north Baltimore County, she had insisted on living in the city, a curious choice in the mind of her new colleagues, who couldn’t see why anyone would choose the city over the suburban apartments and condos, especially with so many move-in specials available. “I suppose you get a lot more house for your money in Baltimore,” Barbara Paulson, the principal, had said, in a tone that suggested she didn’t understand at all. “And the reverse commute isn’t so bad.”