When the center fielder himself was called out at third trying to stretch a double, the players quarreled furiously, and a fistfight seemed imminent, but the players quickly backed down.

Dusk and the last out came almost simultaneously and the men gathered around a cooler filled with Carling Black Label. It wasn’t legal to drink in the park, but Tess couldn’t imagine the Southeast cop who would bust them. She sauntered over, suddenly aware that there were no other women here, not even as fans. The men watched her and the greyhound approach, and she decided that she would not have any problem engaging them.

Getting them to speak truthfully, about the subject she wanted to discuss-that was another matter.

“Habla inglés?” she asked.

All of them nodded, but only one spoke. “Sí,” said the center fielder, a broad-shouldered young man in a striped T-shirt and denim work pants. “I mean-yes, yes, I speak English.”

“You play here regularly?”

“Yesssssss.” His face closed off and Tess realized that a strange woman, asking questions, was not going to inspire confidence.

“I have an uncle who owns a couple of restaurants nearby and he’s looking for workers. He’s in a hurry to find people. He wanted me to spread the word, then interview people at my office tomorrow. It’s only a few blocks from here, and I’ll be there nine to five.”

“We got jobs,” the spokesman said. “And not just in restaurants. I’m a-” He groped for the word in English. “I make cars.”

“Well, maybe some of you want better jobs, or different ones. Or maybe you know people who are having trouble finding work-for whatever reason. My uncle’s very…relaxed about stuff. Here’s my card, just in case.”

The card was neutral, giving nothing away about her real profession, just a name and number. The center fielder took it noncommittally, holding it by a corner as if he planned to throw it down the moment she left. But Tess saw some bright, interested eyes in the group.

“Hey, lady,” the spokesman said as she began to walk away.

“Yes?” She couldn’t believe that she was getting results so swiftly.

“If your uncle plans on cooking tu perro, your dog, he better put some meat on it first. You-you’re fine.”

Even the men’s laughter sounded foreign to her ears-not mean or cruel, just different.

THE NEXT DAY, SHE KEPT her office hours as promised, although she wasn’t surprised when no one showed up. She filled the time by reading everything she could find about Bandit’s bout of turista. Herb Marquez thought this was all about him, but wasn’t it also possible that someone had targeted Bandit? But she was stunned by the sheer volume of baseball information on the Internet. She wandered from site to site, taking strange detours through stats and newspaper columns, ending up in an area earmarked for “roto,” which she thought was short for rotator cuff injuries. It turned out to be one of several sites devoted to rotisserie baseball, a fantasy league. Overwhelmed, she called her father, the biggest baseball fan she knew.

“You’re working for Bandit Gonzales?” He couldn’t have been happier if she had called to announce that she was going to marry, move to the suburbs, have two children, and buy a minivan.

“Not exactly,” Tess said. “But I need to understand why someone might have wanted to make him sick last week.”

“Well, a real fan would have made the owner sick, but it’s not all bad for the Orioles, Bandit getting the heaves.”

“How can that be good for the fans?”

“Because it happened July thirtieth.”

His expectant silence told Tess that this should be fraught with meaning. But if a daughter can’t be ignorant in front of her father, what’s the point of having parents?

“And…?”

Mock-patient sigh. “July thirty-first is the trade deadline.”

“Let me repeat. And?”

“Jesus, don’t you read the sports section? July thirty-first is the last day to make trades without putting guys on waivers. A team like the Orioles, who’s going nowhere, tends to dump the talent. The Mets-” Her father, as was his habit, appeared to spit after saying that team’s name; 1969 had been very hard on him. “The Mets were going to take Bandit to shore up their pitching. I gotta admit, the thought of it just about killed me.”

“So is he going to the Mets?”

“Jesus, the least you could do is listen to Oriole Baseball on ’BAL. The Mets decided to pick up some kid from the Rangers. Maybe they would have gone that way no matter what. Maybe not.”

“Dad, I know you were joking about poisoning Bandit’s food”-Tess hoped he was joking-“but could someone have done it? Who benefited? The Orioles, as you said, wanted to dump him. So who gained when he didn’t go?”

“The Atlanta Braves.”

“Seriously, Dad.”

“I was being serious.” He sounded a little hurt.

“What about Bandit?”

“Huh?”

“Is there any reason he might not want to be traded?”

“You’re the private detective. Ask him.”

“Right, I’ll just go over to where Bandit Gonzales lives and say, ‘Hey, did you make yourself puke?’”

“Yeah. Yeah.” Her father suddenly sounded urgent. “But before you ask him that, would you get him to sign a baseball for me?”

THE PROBLEM WITH LOOKING for something is that you tend to find it.

Once Tess fixated on the idea that Bandit Gonzales might have doctored his own food, she kept discovering all sorts of reasons why he might have done just that. A property search brought up property in the so-called Valley, not far from where Ripken lived. Gonzales had taken out various permits and a behemoth of a house was under construction. At the state office building, Tess found the paperwork showing that Gonzales had recently incorporated. A check of the newspaper archives pulled up various interviews in which Gonzales mulled his post-baseball future. He had started a charity and seemed knowledgeable about local real estate.

Oh, and he wanted to open a restaurant. He had even registered a name with the state-Bandit’s Cuba Café.

BANDIT LIVED AT HARBOR COURT, a luxury hotel-condo just a few blocks from Camden Yards. His corner unit had a water view from its main rooms but paid respect to Bandit’s employers with a sliver of ballpark visible from the master bath. Tess knew this because she faked a need for the bathroom upon arriving, then quickly scanned Bandit’s medicine cabinet for ipecac or anything that could have produced vomiting on demand. She didn’t find anything, but that didn’t persuade her that she was wrong in her suspicions. She went back to the living room, where a bemused Bandit was waiting. Well, waiting wasn’t exactly the right word. He was sliding back and forth on an ergometer, a piece of workout equipment that Tess knew all too well. A sweep rower in college, she still worked out on an erg, and a proper erg workout pushed you to the point where you didn’t need bad meat to throw up.

“You said you were from the health department?” Bandit had no trace of an accent; his family had escaped to Miami before he was born.

“Not exactly. But I am looking into your…incident.”

Bandit didn’t look embarrassed. Then again, athletes gave interviews naked, so maybe getting sick in front of others wasn’t such a big deal. He slid back and forth on the erg, up and back, up and back.

“So who do you work for?” he asked after a few more slides.

“Do you know,” Tess sidestepped, “that Johns Hopkins is doing all this research in new viruses? We’re talking parasites, microbes, the kind of things you used to have to travel to get.”

He stopped moving on the erg, his complexion taking on a decidedly greenish cast. “Really?”

“Really.”

“How can you know if you have one?”

“Dunno.” Tess shrugged.

“But you work for Hopkins.”

“I didn’t say that.” She hadn’t.