“But as you said, the reporters can’t break the law.”

“True.” Tess allowed herself another pause-and-stretch on her crawling path among the documents. “But they can use information of dubious provenance if they don’t probe too closely the whys and wherefores of how it was obtained. My hunch is that this whole enterprise is sort of…an overture on the newspaper’s part. I think Feeney’s bosses would like to figure out a way to put me on retainer.”

“To what purpose?”

“You know how banks and businesses can launder dirty money? A private investigator could launder dirty information for a media outlet. Take credit reports, for example. I can get those in a heartbeat. Fact is, so could the Blight, using its own business offices, but that would be unethical-and illegal.”

“Then wouldn’t it be equally wrong to get the same information from a third-party source?”

“Probably. But newspapers are so besieged right now. On the one hand, they’re all playing Caesar’s wife, suspending and even firing reporters for the tiniest slip-ups. But they’re also trying to compete with the weekly tabloids on the gossip front.”

“Would you be interested?”

“I’d like to avoid it. It’s one thing to run a daylong seminar on how PI techniques can be applied to investigative reporting. If they like me, I could parlay that into a national gig. But actually working on stories? I’ll probably say no.”

“Probably?”

“If money continues tight…” She tried for a lighthearted shrug.

“I could kick in more. There’s no reason you have to carry the mortgage alone. I’m not asking for equity, just saying I could pay rent.”

“I don’t see how you could contribute more than you do. I know what you make, and my dad’s much too cheap to give you a raise.”

“I’ll give up my MBA classes, get a part-time gig, find some money…somewhere.”

“No, no. Don’t sweat it. We just need to implement some belt-tightening measures-fewer steaks from Victor’s, more wine from the marked-down barrel at Trinacria. And maybe-” Tess turned her gaze on the two dogs that had been keeping mute sentry at Crow’s elbow, in hopes that a bite of cereal might fall. Esskay, the greyhound, was the unlikely alpha dog of the pair, while Miata was the world’s most docile Doberman. “And maybe stop feeding those two parasites altogether.”

Esskay’s ears actually seemed to twitch in alarm, while Miata’s sorrowful eyes held, as always, untold worlds of misery. Tess and Crow laughed, snug and warm on a rainy Sunday, delighted with the mundaneness of their problems. So money was tight. So Tess had a job she didn’t particularly relish. Things would work out. They always did. Until they didn’t.

Gregory Youssef’s face stared up at her from the floor in mute reproach. He had almost movie-star good looks, but his image had grown meaningless from repetition, another face in the news. They all ran together after a while. The guy who killed his wife, the guy who got killed, the guy who raped and pillaged his company. Four months after his murder, all Youssef’s face evoked was a vague sense that one had seen him somewhere before. Oh, yeah, that guy. Everyone knew of him, yet no one really knew him. As Tess studied the photo, it seemed to dissolve into a series of dots until his face disappeared completely, became an abstraction. Yet he would never become abstract or obscure to his widow. Tess hoped Mrs. Youssef had found a version of the truth that allowed her peace, no matter how wrong it might be. Who could be mean enough to begrudge her the myths that would pull her through, the story she was even now preparing to tell a child who had never known his father? Besides, Youssef’s secret life, whatever it was, didn’t void his love for his wife. People were more complicated than that.

The problems of three people didn’t amount to a hill of beans, Bogart tells Bergman. But a hill of beans can seem mountainous when it’s your hill of beans. Tess actually felt a tear welling up in her eye, and she swabbed it with a corner of her T-shirt. What was wrong with her? She had started crying over The Longest Yard last night, too, although she had told Crow it was because she was imagining what a desecration the remake would be. Truth was, she had been blubbering for Caretaker, the sly fixer who could anticipate everything but his own death.

She must be premenstrual. Or more anxious about her financial status than she was willing to admit. She shouldn’t, in hindsight, have turned down all that work around Valentine’s Day. A fussy private detective was a paradox, like a gardener who refused to touch soil or mulch or fertilizer. Tess had come to embrace Dumpster diving, because a hot shower banished the experience so readily. Entering a man’s secret life, even in theory, made her feel far dirtier.

Now Youssef’s staring face seemed castigating, accusing. Tess placed a stack of papers over it and returned to the confidential documents she had found in the governor’s trash, including copies of several e-mails that would seem to indicate that the governor’s wife had been directly involved in a smear campaign against the Senate president. Really, couldn’t the state of Maryland afford to requisition a shredder for the governor’s mansion?

“Shit.”

Crow couldn’t have been inside the Holy Redeemer parish hall more than ten minutes tops, dropping off produce that the East Side soup kitchen would stretch into salad for three hundred. How had his right rear tire, which had started the journey as plump and round as the others, gone so suddenly flat?

Worse, it wasn’t even his tire. It was Tess’s, on her precious Lexus SUV, which she had lent him reluctantly because Sunday’s rain had turned to Monday’s snow and sleet-what the local weather forecasters called a wintry mix-and Crow had deliveries to make all over Baltimore. She had insisted on taking his Volvo for her shorter trip downtown. The Volvo wasn’t bad in the snow, but it needed a new muffler and a brake job that Tess thought Crow couldn’t afford. And it was easier to let her continue thinking that for now than to get his car repaired.

“You want help changing that, mister?”

The young man seemed to appear from nowhere on the empty street. Fifteen or sixteen, he was ill dressed for the weather, a fleece hoodie thrown over baggy jeans and no gloves on the raw, chafed hands that-oh, so providentially-held a tire tool. At least he had a pair of Timberlands, although the brand had lost its cachet. Maybe that was the reason he was willing to expose the pristine suede to the elements.

“I mean, if you’ve got a spare, I can take off the lug nuts.” He brandished the tool in his hand.

How convenient, as Tess would have said. But then, Tess would have been onto this kid the moment he appeared. Crow had allowed him the benefit of the doubt. Only for a second, but it was that split second of optimism that defined the difference between them. He was the original half-full guy, while she saw everything as half empty.

“I can change my own tire,” Crow said shortly. “Is it simply flat, or did you puncture it?”

The young man widened his eyes in an excellent show of innocence, undercut only by their amber color and cat shape, which suggested an innate cunning. “Hey, I just happened to be walking by earlier and I saw it was flat, so I went home and got this. I didn’t do shit to your tire.”

“Sure.” Crow popped the trunk, grateful that Holy Redeemer was his last delivery of the day. At least he didn’t have to shift boxes of food to get to the spare. He moved quickly and capably. It wouldn’t be the first tire he had changed, or even the worst circumstances under which he had changed one. The ever-shifting precipitation was now a light, fluffy snow, and the wind had died. In early winter such a snowfall would have been picturesque. In the penultimate week of March, it was merely depressing.