“No, they’ve yet to make an arrest in the death of Gregory Youssef.”

“You-who?” His voice cracked a little.

“Gregory Youssef, the prosecutor. His murder remains unsolved. That guy.” She tapped the photo.

Lloyd turned his attention back to the computer screen, his posture rigid, his fingers poised above the keys like a bird’s talons, curved and prehensile. He seemed not offended but suddenly annoyed by Tess’s presence, irritable. “How come the horses can’t move straight?”

“The knights. And I don’t know the whys of chess. Crow’s good at it, but it doesn’t play to my strengths. I suck at what our chief executive calls strategery. I prefer the Pickett’s Charge approach to life.”

“What?”

“ Gettysburg?” It didn’t seem to register. “The Civil War?”

“Oh, yeah. That.”

“ Gettysburg was one of the pivotal battles in the war, the so-called high tide of the Confederacy. Pickett went straight up the middle-and lost all his men.”

“Well, that was ignorant,” Lloyd said, and Tess really couldn’t disagree. Truth be told, she had no admiration of Pickett, and she had related the story just to make conversation. Her tactics were quite the opposite of Robert E. Lee’s. She wanted to lead Lloyd back to the story of Gregory Youssef, and she didn’t dare do that too directly. How could one know the name but not his face, or the larger story of his death?

But the name had clearly meant something to Lloyd-something that terrified him.

“So,” she said, coming into the kitchen and closing the old-fashioned swinging door behind her. When she had overseen the renovation of the house, her father and Crow had tried to persuade her to create a great-room effect, allowing the living room, dining room, and kitchen to blend into each other. But Tess had decided to respect the bungalow’s old divisions. Tess liked walls. “What the hell are you up to?”

“Nothing but lamb stew.”

“We can’t run a shelter, Crow. Not for even one kid.”

“Tomorrow I’ll take him by South Baltimore Station or someplace like that, see what they can do for him. But I couldn’t leave him out there tonight.”

“South Baltimore Station is for adult addicts in recovery, and it has a waiting list. Does he have a substance-abuse problem?”

“I don’t get that vibe from him.”

“He seems to be familiar with neighborhood dealers. He knew they all got ‘jacked up’ when investigators thought Youssef’s murder was connected to his job. The very mention of Youssef’s name made him jumpy and anxious.”

“Knowing drug dealers in his part of Baltimore is like knowing Junior Leaguers in Roland Park. You make small talk with plenty of young Muffys and Paiges down at Evergreen Coffee House, but that doesn’t mean you put on a big hat and sell lemon sticks at the Flower Mart.”

“Fair enough. But he’s a dropout who tried to cadge money out of you, changing a tire that he punctured.”

“No, another guy did it. He just bird-dogged that guy’s scam. It’s very enterprising, if you think about it.”

“That’s a distinction of little difference, Crow. What do you really know about this kid? Just who have you brought under my-our-roof?”

“Taste this.” Crow spooned a little lamb in her mouth, but all the rosemary and garlic in the world couldn’t distract her.

“One night only,” she said. “Then he goes.”

Summoned to dinner, Lloyd said a brief prayer over his food, which made Tess squirm a little at how much she took for granted in her life. And someone had dinged manners into him along the way, although the job wasn’t entirely finished. He gamely tried the lamb stew, chewing as if he were being forced to consume balsa wood but ultimately cleaning his plate. He then poked at the salad, clearly suspicious of the dark green leaves and toasted nuts.

“This lettuce go bad?” he asked Crow.

“It’s spinach. We eat it for the lutein.”

Lloyd pointed with his fork. “This a peanut?”

“Pistachio.”

“For real?” He shrugged and ate it, without enthusiasm, but also without resistance. When he took a bite out of the chipotle corn muffins that Crow had made from scratch, however, he bellowed as if something had bitten him.

“I thought they was cornbread,” he said after gulping down half his glass of water-tap water this time, at his request. “Shit’s all hot and spicy.”

“They’re corn muffins with chilies in the batter,” Crow apologized. “They just caught you off guard.”

“My mother says right people put sugar in their cornbread,” Lloyd said as if announcing a core belief on a par with monotheism. “I coulda eaten cornbread without sugar, but this shit is just wrong.”

“Where is your mother?” Tess asked. “What’s her name?”

Ignoring her, Lloyd tried another bite, and it did seem to go down easier now that he knew what to expect. And he had no quarrel with dessert-a choice of chocolate, pistachio, or strawberry ice cream from Moxley’s, served with homemade brownies. His plate cleared, he stood to return to his chess game.

“Want to give me a hand cleaning up?” Crow asked in his easygoing way.

“You cooked. Why doesn’t she clean?”

“Sometimes she does. But Mondays are my day off and she worked today, so I don’t mind carrying the full load.”

Lloyd looked at Tess, sitting at the table with her glass of wine, scratching Esskay behind one ear. “Did you go spying today?”

“Spying? Oh, no. I just gave a presentation down at the newspaper, talked about investigative techniques.” Curious to see how he would react, she embroidered a bit. “That’s why I had that picture of Youssef.”

“You got nunchucks?”

“Excuse me?”

“Nunchucks. For kung fu.” Lloyd did a demonstration that owed more to Karate Kid than it did to John Woo.

“I have a gun. That’s the best form of self-defense.”

“‘Can I see it?”

“No.” But Lloyd’s question reminded Tess that she needed to lock the Beretta in the safe next to her bed. She didn’t always remember, but with a young guest in the house, she had to be at her most conscientious.

She came back and watched Lloyd clear the table, which had more than its share of suspenseful moments. Her everyday dishes were also her only dishes, a mismatched collection of state commemoratives culled from flea markets and yard sales. They would be impossible to replace, except via eBay, which always struck her as cheating. The quest should be as important as the object when one was a collector. But Tess was trying not to be a person who prized things too highly, so she clenched her jaw and let Lloyd go, reasoning that his agreeable helpfulness was more important than keeping North Dakota in one piece.

After dinner they watched Minority Report on DVD, which Lloyd seemed to like once he got used to the idea that it was supposed to be the future. “Parts of Baltimore look worse ’n that,” he said dismissively of Philip K. Dick’s Washington as imagined by Spielberg and his designers. The movie over, they left him to his own devices, telling him to feel free to use the television or Tess’s laptop. “You can also read anything you like,” Crow said, gesturing to the shelves in Tess’s office.

“You got any comics?” Lloyd asked.

“No, but I’ve got some books about comics,” said Crow, ever game. He brought down Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Jay Cantor’s Krazy Kat, then grabbed an omnibus volume of Dick. “And this is the book that inspired the film we saw tonight.”

Tess stifled a laugh, but not the surge of affection behind it. Where some might have seen an almost woeful ignorance in Crow’s suggestions, she understood that he loved these books. And whatever Crow loved, he wanted to share. Besides, Lloyd might like Philip K. Dick, although she would have been inclined to start him on Richard Stark or Jim Thompson, something hard-boiled and brutal.