Babies floated across the computer screen. No, not babies plural-just one baby, the baby, the only baby that mattered in the new millennium. Move over, Jesus, Kevin thought, Andrew Porter Jr. has come to town . And his now computer-savvy mother had fed endless images of him into the computer, so when it went into rest mode, the little Andy slide show began. Andy as a tiny infant, cradled by his impossibly huge father. Andy eating, Andy with a picture book, Andy squinting at a Christmas tree. His father’s genes were stamped all over the boy’s face and bulky body, but Kevin liked to think he saw Nancy Porter’s sweet skepticism in that squint. You’re saying there’s this guy, and he brings me presents? What’s in it for him? And what the hell does the tree have to do with any of it ?

“ Pennsylvania records are fucked,” Nancy said, moving her cursor so Andy disappeared and her computer opened on an archived Web page. “Or else I don’t get how they work. In Maryland all I need is the address and the county, and I can research a property going back years. I haven’t been able to find an equivalent page in Pennsylvania, though. The only hit I got on the address you gave me showed it was owned by an LLC, which sold the property a few years back.”

“An LLC?”

“Limited liability corporation, somebody’s small business. Mercer Inc. Could have been anything, from a produce stand to a cleaning service. But there’s no Mercer in our personnel records, so it must be the previous owner we want.”

Fair and pleasantly plump before motherhood, Nancy liked to say she was frankly fat now, but the issue of her weight didn’t seem to bother her as much. When she returned to work, she’d asked for the transfer to cold cases, a request that Infante had secretly disdained. It seemed dreary stuff to him, poring over old files and looking for lucky breaks-the witness who was finally ready to tell the truth after all these years, the spouse who was tired of keeping secrets. He could see why a new mom would want a job that guaranteed regular hours, but he wasn’t sure he considered it real police work. Nancy, however, had a knack for computers and an unerring sense for finding information without ever leaving her desk. The Goddess of Small Things, as Lenhardt had once dubbed her, she now tracked down the tiniest bits of data the way she’d once been able to spot a bullet casing at a hundred paces. She wasn’t used to being stymied, but the old Keystone State ’s record-keeping had thrown her for a loop.

“Probably a wild-goose chase,” Infante said as Nancy clicked to the map, showing him the location. “But I’ll go up there, see what gives, canvass neighbors.”

“Thirty years ago. Twenty-four, if she left in 1981 the way she claimed. Does anyone live in the same place that long, anymore?”

“We just need one. Preferably one nosy old busybody with a razor-sharp memory and a photo album.”

KEVIN HEADED NORTH, marveling at the steady stream of southbound traffic at midday. Lenhardt lived out this way, and he complained constantly about the drain of commuting. He spoke of it as a kind of war, a battle waged daily. So why do it? Infante asked when he tired of the bitching. He got the usual answers: kids, schools, problems that an unencumbered guy didn’t know from.

He almost had, though. There’d been a scare, with his first wife. Or so they’d framed the incident in hindsight, when it became apparent that she wasn’t pregnant. A scare, a danger averted. He hadn’t really felt that way at the time, although he had cause to think of it that way later, when the marriage broke up. He’d been a little hopeful, actually, trying on the role of daddy in his head and feeling it fit pretty well. It was Tabitha who had been worried, fretting over her new job at the mortgage broker’s office, wondering what this would do to her plans to do real-estate closings. So they called it a scare, and she became more vigilant about protection. Then she just stopped having sex with him, and he started cheating on her. Which came first had been the chicken-or-the-egg debate at the center of their divorce. The thing that galled Infante was that even when Tabby conceded he was telling the truth, that he hadn’t fucked around until she stopped fucking, she refused to grant him cause and effect.

“You have to fight for a marriage!” she screamed at him. “You should have talked to me directly, or asked for counseling, or thought about what might make me feel…like a woman again.” He’d never been sure about the last part, but he thought it had something to do with foot rubbing, maybe bubble baths and impromptu gifts. “I’m fighting for it now,” he had screamed back. “I’m talking to you. I’m sitting here in counseling, which isn’t covered under health insurance, by the way.”

But it was over, her decision. Everywhere he went, it was the same story with divorce: The women were the ones who really wanted it. True, there were assholes, guys who cared for no one’s feelings, who dumped their wives for new models. Yet in Infante’s experience, these out-and-out jerks were few and far between. Most of the divorced guys he knew were people like himself, guys who made mistakes but had every intention of staying married. Lenhardt, whose second marriage had made him a bit sanctimonious in the family-happiness department, liked to say that a request for counseling was the first sign that your wife was ready to leave you. “Relationships are chess for women,” he said. “They can see the whole board, plan way ahead. They’re the queens, after all. We’re the kings, limited to one square in any direction, on defense for the whole fucking game.”

Infante and his second wife, Patty, hadn’t even bothered with counseling. They had gone straight to the mattresses, hiring lawyers they couldn’t afford, going into debt over bragging rights to their paltry possessions. Again he had been grateful there were no kids. No student of the Bible-no student of anything-Patty would have carved a kid up even before Solomon offered. Only instead of making a top-to-toe cut, she would have done it at the waist and given Infante the lower half, the one that shit and pissed. And the thing was, he’d known. He had stood there in the church-because Patty, while married twice before, was big on celebrating herself-and realized it was a huge mistake. Watching her come down the aisle had been like seeing a truck bear down on him.

The sex had been great, though.

Interstate 83 went to shit the second he crossed into Pennsylvania and the speed limit dropped ten miles. Still, he could see why some Baltimore workers chose to live up here, a good forty miles out, and not just because the taxes were lower. It was pretty in that rolling-fields, amber-waves-of-grain kind of way. He took the first exit and, using the instructions that Nancy had printed out from the Internet, followed a winding road west, then turned northeast. A McDonald’s, a Kmart, a Wal-Mart-the area was pretty built up. His tires seemed to hum with worry. What were the odds that forty acres had gone undisturbed in the midst of all this development?

Exactly nil. Although he was clearly in the 13350 block, he drove a few miles past Glen Rock Estates before he doubled back, in hopes that he was wrong. No, the address was now a development, one promising an “exclusive community of executive-style homes on generous lots.” In this case “generous” appeared to be defined as between one and two acres, and these “exclusive” homes were two or three years old, judging by the spindly trees and slightly raw landscaping. As for executives-the cars in the driveways spoke more to middle-management types, Subarus and Camrys and Jeep Cherokees. In a truly rich development, there would be a Lexus or two, maybe a Mercedes. Rich people didn’t have to move this far out to have family rooms and two-car garages.