“If you mean I had no formal training as a private investigator, then yes, I started as a self-taught amateur. But I apprenticed to a PI, as required by law, and took over his agency when he retired to the Eastern Shore.”

This was true, as far as it went. Tess seldom bothered to explain that she had never met her mentor face-to-face. Edward Keyes was a retired Baltimore cop and old family friend. As a former detective, he was given a PI’s license automatically and then “hired” Tess. He had signed the incorporation papers, expedited her license, and sold her the agency for a dollar, all without leaving his home on the Delaware shore.

“Tess was a reporter at the Star,” Kevin Feeney put in. “But in just three years, she’s had a lot of success running her own business.”

“Are you expanding?” the same floppy-haired man demanded. “Taking on staff? Landing big corporate accounts?”

“Well, I got this one.” This earned her a generous laugh. Apparently her interrogator wasn’t popular with his colleagues either. “As for expansion, I don’t think I’d be particularly good at managing others. ‘Hell is other people,’ as Sartre said. Instead I work with a loose network of female PIs, nationwide. We trade out our time and brainstorm together, but we remain independent contractors.”

“Why all women?”

“Why not?” No laugh this time, just stony looks of confusion, although Tess thought she saw Miss Universe hide a smile behind her left hand while raising her right and waiting to be recognized. The men raised their hands, too, but they seldom waited for Tess to call on them.

“Is your work dangerous?” Miss Universe asked.

“Not if I’m doing it right.”

Her one insistent questioner was not done. “But you killed a man, right? Didn’t you have to kill someone in self-defense?”

Her grin faded, and behind the podium her hand reached instinctively for her knee. “Yes.”

“How does it feel-”

“One more question,” Feeney cut in. “Preferably from someone who hasn’t asked one yet. Then it’s back to work.”

“Do you actually enjoy what you do?” asked a man at the back of the room. “Your work seems even more dependent on human misery than journalism is.”

The question caught her short, no glib reply at the ready. Tess knew she liked working for herself and was proud of the middle-class living she had managed to achieve, touch-and-go as it could be at times. Just a few years ago, she had been living in a below-market rental in her aunt’s building, carrying balances on her credit cards, scrimping and saving for the tiniest indulgences. Now she had a house that was appreciating so fast the tax bill was threatening to overtake the mortgage-and that was without the city’s assessment division catching up with all the improvements made since she bought the little bungalow.

But did she enjoy her job? The means to the various ends were often unpleasant, a constant reminder of humankind’s capacity for venality. If no one ever cheated an insurance company, much less a spouse, if no one tried to outthink security systems or steal others’ identities…well, then, Tess wouldn’t have been able to purchase a Lexus SUV, even a used one.

She had reunited a family, she reminded herself. Safeguarded a secret that the entire city held dear. Eased a woman’s tortured conscience, stopped a monster in his tracks, cleared a man’s reputation. Saved the lives of three children, whose father remained on friendly terms with her. In fact, Mark Rubin wanted Tess and Crow to attend second-night seder at the family’s house next month.

“Yes,” she said. “I do. I really do.”

After a polite round of applause, the star reporters of the Beacon-Light filed out in dutiful, orderly fashion. Ah, Hildy Johnson had long ago left the building, no matter which gender embodied the part. Once they had cleared the room, Tess turned to Feeney and rolled her eyes.

“In my day it was the television reporters who asked how one felt.”

“Sorry, Tess. I told them to avoid that subject out of common courtesy. He’s not the sharpest crayon in the box. If he were a Crayola, he’d be burnt sienna.”

“Burnt sienna? Feeney, only one person in this entire room even approached beige.”

“I mean he’d be one of those second-class colors that no self-respecting kid touches until all the good ones are gone.”

“Ah, but in that case,” Tess said, “he would be the sharpest crayon in the box.”

Feeney laughed. “There are days when I wish I had one of those little built-in sharpeners at my desk and I could just insert their heads in there. Don’t get me wrong. They’re good kids, bright and earnest. But they’re inexperienced and they don’t know the city. Aggressive, yet hamstrung with fear. It ain’t the best combo. That’s why I was hoping a maverick like you might fire them up, inspire them to ‘think different,’ as that ungrammatical ad campaign had it.”

“The best question I got all day,” Tess said, “was if they made female-friendly equipment for bladder relief.”

“I must have stepped out during that part. Do they?”

“Yes, but I prefer the old-fashioned way whenever possible. Speaking of which…?”

“Down the hall, on the left.”

The newsroom that Tess walked through bore little resemblance to her beloved Baltimore Star, dead for almost a decade. In fact, it no longer resembled the Beacon-Light newsroom of just two years ago. Reporters often complained that modern newspaper offices could be insurance companies, but Tess thought the Beacon-Light looked more like an advertising agency where the employees had been kept in sensory deprivation tanks for too long. There were few flashes of personal identity in the pretty maple-veneer cubicles-no toys or rude posters or dartboards with the boss’s face pinned to them, things once common to newsrooms. It took a moment longer to identify what else was missing. Laughter. Chatter. Noise of any kind. No one was joking or shouting or even berating someone over the phone. H. L. Mencken had once complained that copy editors were eunuchs who had never felt the breeze on their faces. But with telephones, the Internet, and e-mail, far too many reporters spent their entire days staring into the sickly glow of computer terminals, removed from human contact. They were at once more connected and less connected.

Still, stupid and impertinent questions aside, Tess’s gig was a godsend-a nice chunk of guaranteed cash for very little effort-and Feeney was probably right when he said that she could spin it into a regular venture, flying to newspapers and television stations all over the country. With budgets cut to the bone, the big media companies would rather pay a onetime fee to a PI than hire seasoned editors and reporters.

Her cell phone vibrated, and she glanced down: Crow, although their wireless service announced him as E. RANSOME. A daytime call from him was rare enough to give her pause; he was not much for idle chat, and he understood that her work often prevented her from answering the phone. Besides, Crow’s own days were fuller and fuller, almost frighteningly so. “He’s growing up right before your eyes,” Tess’s friend Whitney had observed, meaning to make a joke. After years of a rather feckless, careless existence, Crow seemed to have found his inner workaholic, throwing his energy into creating a reputable music club in the most unlikely corner of far west Baltimore, then trying to eradicate hunger in his spare time. The change encouraged Tess, but it also unnerved her a little, as all change did.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“We’re going to have a houseguest tonight. Just wanted to give you a heads-up.”

“Cool. Some college friend passing through?”

“No, more of a friend in need.”

“A friend?”

“Well, a new friend. An acquaintance.”

“Crow-”

“Tess, I met this kid, and he doesn’t have anywhere to go or anywhere to stay, and-I just can’t leave him on the street in this weather, and he doesn’t want to go to the shelters or the missions, and who can blame him?”