But there would have been questions, he admitted to himself now, too many questions, and Murray would have broken him down, accused him of lying, which Lloyd would have denied with outraged innocence, because by then he would totally believe his own bullshit. It wouldn’t have been at all like he imagined.

Seemed like nothing ever was. The thing he had done last fall-but he hadn’t known. It was just a favor. He’d bet Le’andro didn’t know what it was all about either.

It was almost ten o’clock, and even the cleaning crew had cleared out of the U.S. attorney’s offices, but Gabe Dalesio was still at his desk, looking at office reports. Page after page after page of the most mundane stuff. The target discussed women and television shows, the Ravens, the relative merits of local sub shops. But he never alluded to drugs or crime, not unless he was using some elaborate code that they had failed to discern. Perhaps the sandwich orders could be translated into drug transactions. For example, “with hots” might be-But no, it just wouldn’t hang together. There was no doubt the guy was a dealer, given that it had gotten to a Title III. But he was cautious and disciplined-although not so disciplined that he eschewed landlines.

It hadn’t been Gabe’s bright idea to go after this particular dealer. But he had inherited the case, so he had to make it work. Some previous AUSA had been shrewd, shedding this loser. Who had initiated it? Gabe flipped back through the file. Gregory Youssef. Of course. No wonder the guy had lobbied to get into the antiterrorism unit, with these kinds of dog cases dragging him down. No one was going to make a name for himself with this shit.

Gabe’s thoughts returned, as they had almost obsessively over the last twenty-four hours, to yesterday’s conversation with Collins, out on the smoking pad. Do you spend a lot of time imagining what it’s like to get your dick sucked by another guy? A day later, Gabe still wasn’t sure what the snappy comeback should have been. He almost felt obligated to get one of those fat secretaries to lie down on his desk, timing it so Collins would be passing by his just-ajar door, know that he was verifiably straight.

He walked over to his window, which afforded a slice of a view, if you could call it that-office buildings, an old Holiday Inn with a revolving restaurant on top, that strange Bromo-Seltzer Tower glowing blue. He should have held out for a real city, Boston or Chicago. The guy who hired him had done a total sell job, claiming that Baltimore was the best office for those who were aiming up, up, up. Close to D.C., easy to stand out, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, and that guy was now hiding out in some high-priced law firm, trying to sock away enough money to retire in style.

Traffic was light-nothing happened in Baltimore at night-but there was a steady stream of brake lights in the street below. He thought again about the lines at the tollbooths. No one would wait in those fucking lines who didn’t have to, regardless of the circumstances. It would be automatic to head toward the flashing yellow light, to glide through as you had dozens of times before. Youssef had used his E-ZPass coming into the city, up I-95. Why would he have been so patient going out?

Because he wasn’t at the wheel of his own car even then. Because the person who was driving didn’t know that the car was equipped with E-ZPass, and Youssef didn’t tell him. Why? Because he didn’t see any reason to expedite his own kidnapping. And if he was kidnapped, then it was a federal crime, and Gabe’s office had every reason to stick its beak in.

The idea delighted him so much that he brought up his hands and smacked them against the glass, in essence high-fiving himself. And if Youssef wasn’t driving…well, then what? How did that jibe with what everyone thought they knew? If Youssef’s piece of trade had already freaked out, where was Youssef? Dead already-but no, he’d clearly been killed where he was found. There had been no blood evidence in the car. Still, he could have been in the trunk, or hog-tied in the backseat, although that might have caught the eye of even the most brain-dead toll taker. But if he had been in the car, alive and sentient, he could have jumped out when the car slowed for the toll, run to the little office maintained by the transportation police.

“Steady, now,” Gabe addressed his reflection in the window. “Stay cool.” He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice, running to someone to get affirmation for his latest brainstorm. He would hold this insight close, continue to mull.

He would make his name on the Youssef case, not on Youssef’s hand-me-downs and leftovers.

Whitney glided to the curb in her mother’s Mercedes station wagon, an older model that, in the WASP fashion, had not been particularly well maintained. The once-burgundy exterior had faded to the color of a scab, and the window glass was clouded with age.

Still, the car looked like a rich woman’s ride, especially after its deluxe treatment at Wash Works just that morning. A burst of opera escaped when Whitney opened the door, so loud that Whitney must have had the radio set at eardrum-bursting levels. She removed the key from the ignition, took a second to adjust the cashmere scarf draped around the shoulders of her mother’s old mink, and cut across Mount Street without looking in either direction, clearly expecting traffic to stop for her. It did. In her hands-encased in leather driving gloves, naturally-she carried an open cardboard box filled with bags of Otterbein Cookies, purchased so recently that one could almost smell them. She could not have been more obnoxiously conspicuous, her presence all but screaming, Look at me! Rob me! Carjack me!

Excellent, Tess thought from her hiding place in the alley. Whitney was like a piece of cheese in a cartoon, a yellow triangle so toothsome that the mouse in this game of cat and mouse would never notice the figurative box poised overhead, ready to slam down when the stick was removed.

Granted, it was their fifth stop this afternoon, and the plan had yielded no results, although several local soup kitchens had been happy to receive the red-and-white bags of chocolate chip and lemon sugar cookies from this glamorous and heretofore-unknown benefactor. And most of the providers were familiar with Lloyd, Whitney reported back, although they just smiled and shook their heads ruefully when asked where he might be found. Tess and Whitney were running out of stops and cookies, and while Whitney had drawn plenty of stunned looks, Lloyd had yet to put in an appearance.

Still, Tess was certain that the kid’s ruse wasn’t a onetime gig. In fact, once she had thought it through, she found his scheme rather brilliant. Stake out a street near one of the local soup kitchens, pick out a car that clearly doesn’t belong to the neighborhood. In the case of her Lexus, the parking sticker for the Downtown Athletic Club had marked it as an outsider’s vehicle. Whitney’s Suburban, while clearly a rich person’s car-only the wealthy could afford to fill the bottomless gas tank-wouldn’t register as rich in Southwest Baltimore. But her mother’s Mercedes station wagon, with its I CORGIS bumper sticker, all but screamed its Greenspring Valley pedigree.

Crouched behind a ripe, overflowing trash can, Tess kept an eye on the street. A short kid, round of face and body, ambled toward Whitney’s car and, with a quick look around, bent over and jabbed something in the tire. Damn. But she had warned Whitney that it was likely the tire would be slashed, not just flattened. “Mother has a full spare” was Whitney’s airy response.

The more troubling fact was that this squat kid clearly wasn’t Lloyd. It would be a hollow victory, nabbing the wrong culprit. Maybe the tire scam was to inner-city neighborhoods what the squeegee market used to be.