“Are you…?”

“Get me a lawyer, Kay. A good one.”

Infante took the as-the-crow-flies route to the hospital, traveling straight through the city instead of taking the Beltway around it. Damn, downtown Baltimore was getting shiny. Who’d have thought it? He almost regretted not buying a place in town ten years ago, not that he’d still have it anyway. Besides, he had been raised in the suburbs- Massapequa, out on Long Island -and he had a soft spot for the jumbled secondary highways and modest apartment complexes where he lived up in Parkville. IHOPs, Applebee’s, Target, Toys “R” Us, gas stations, craft stores-to him this was what home looked like. Not that he had any intention of going back there, where it was now almost impossible to live on a police officer’s salary. He kept his allegiance to the Yankees and played the part of the brash Noo Yawkah for his colleagues’ amusement. But in his head, he knew that this town, this job, was right for him. He was good at what he did, with one of the better clearance rates in the department. “ Baltimore punk is my second language,” he liked to say. Lenhardt was on him to take the sergeant’s exam, but then-people always thought you should do what they did. Be a firefighter, his dad said, on the island. His first wife had cajoled, C’mon, watch Law amp; Order with me. She wanted her favorite show to be his favorite show, her favorite meal to be his. She even tried to convert him to Rolling Rock over Bud, to Bushmills over Jameson. It was as if she were working backward, trying to create a logical match from one that had been all heat and desire from the jump. In that way she reminded Infante of himself in high school. He decided where he wanted to go to college-Nassau Community College, no major brain bust, that, it was all they could afford-then gave the guidance counselor the info that would make her computer spit out that school. That way his only option became a choice, instead of something that was forced on him.

He breezed through the city, making the hospital in less than forty minutes. But it wasn’t good enough. Gloria Bustamante-the biggest ballbuster of any defense attorney he knew, male or female, straight or gay-was in the hospital corridor.

Fuck me.

“You look absolutely crestfallen,” the alcoholic old lizard said. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever had cause to use that word in a sentence before, but now I see it-crestfallen. Like a blue jay whose little tuft is drooping in the front.”

She pulled at her own forelock, a stray piece of red-brown hair that showed an inch of gray at the root. Bustamante was her usual wreck of a self-lipstick in and out of the natural line of mouth, suit missing a button. Her shoes, expensive ones once upon a time, were scuffed and banged up on the toes, as if she’d been kicking something very hard over and over again. Probably a detective’s shin.

“She hire you?”

“I think we have an arrangement, yes.”

“It’s yes or no, Gloria. Are you her lawyer?”

“For now. I’m taking her at her word that she can pay my fee.” Her eyes flicked over him. “You’re here for homicide, right? Not traffic investigation?”

“I could give a fuck what she did with her car.”

“If she talks to you about the murder, can we make the traffic thing go away? No one was really at fault, she panicked-”

“Shit, Gloria. Who do you think you are, Monty fuckin’ Hall, trading me the accident for what’s behind the curtain? Any deal requires a prosecutor’s approval. You know that.”

“Well, then maybe I won’t make her available to you this morning. She’s exhausted, she has a head injury. I’m not sure she should speak to anyone until a doctor can determine if the injury has affected her memory.”

“They checked her out last night.”

“She was treated for her injuries. And she’s just passed a psych exam. But I’d like to bring an expert in, someone from neurosurgery. She might not even remember the collision. She might not be aware that she left the scene of the accident.”

“Save the bullshit for a summation, Gloria, and put the goods on the table. I have to determine that this case is in our jurisdiction.”

“Oh, it’s very much in your jurisdiction, Detective.” Gloria made it sound kind of dirty, her style when talking to men. When Infante first got to know her, he thought the innuendos were a way of her fronting, trying to hide her sexual orientation. But Lenhardt insisted it was a highly developed sense of irony, the kind of mindfuck that a professional mindfucker like Gloria used just to stay in practice.

“So can I talk to her?”

“About the old case, not about the accident.”

“Shit, Gloria, I’m a murder police. I could give a crap about some fender bender on the Beltway. Unless-Wait, did she do it on purpose? Was she trying to kill the people in the other car? Man, maybe this is my lucky day and I can get two clearances, just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

Gloria flicked her eyes over him, bored. “Leave the humor to your sergeant, Kevin. He’s the funny one. You’re the pretty boy.”

THE WOMAN IN the hospital bed had her eyes closed tight, a kid playing possum. The light in the room showed up the fine hairs on her arm and the side of her face, blond peach fuzz, nothing intense. And there was a hollowed-out look beneath the eyes, a long-lived exhaustion. The eyes flickered open for only a moment, then closed again.

“I’m so tired,” she murmured. “Do we have to do this now, Gloria?”

“He won’t stay long, sweetie.” Sweetie? “He just needs the first part.”

The first part? Then what was the second?

“But that’s the hardest part to talk about. Can’t you just tell him and let me be?”

He needed to assert himself, stop waiting for the introduction that Gloria didn’t seem intent on making.

“I’m Kevin Infante, a detective with Baltimore County homicide.”

“Infante? As in Italian for baby?” Eyes still closed. He needed her to open them, he realized. Until this moment Infante had never considered how vital open eyes were to what he did. Sure, he had thought about eye contact, studied the way that various people used it, knew what it meant when someone couldn’t meet his gaze. But he’d never had a subject sit there-lie there in this case-with eyes closed tight.

“Sure,” he said, as if he’d never heard that before, as if two ex-wives hadn’t thrown that back at him time and again.

Her eyes opened then. They were a particularly vivid blue, kind of wasted on a blonde. A blue-eyed brunette, that was his ideal, the light and the dark, an Irish girl with eyes put in with a dirty finger.

“You don’t look like a baby,” she said. Her voice, unlike Gloria’s, carried no whiff of flirtation. She wasn’t playing it that way. “It’s funny, for a moment I had this vision of the cartoon character, the giant one who wore the diaper and the little cap.”

“Baby Huey,” he said.

“Yes. Was he a duck? Or a chicken? Or was he a baby-baby?”

“A chicken, I think.” Maybe they should get the neurosurgeon in to see her. “You told someone you knew about an old murder here in Baltimore County. That’s what I need to talk to you about.”

“It began in Baltimore County. It ended-actually, I’m not sure where it ended. I’m not sure it ever ended.”

“You’re saying someone started killing somebody in Baltimore County and finished it elsewhere?”

“I’m not sure-in the end…well, not the end but the part where bad things happened. By then I didn’t know where we were.”

“Why don’t you just tell me your story and let me figure it out?”

She turned to Gloria. “Do people-I mean, are we known? Still?”

“If they were here, they remember,” the old lizard said in a much-gentler-than-usual voice. Was she hot for her? Was that why she was willing to risk taking a case that might not pay? It was hard enough to figure out other men’s taste in women sometimes, much less a woman’s, and Gloria wasn’t sentimental that way in Infante’s experience with her. “Maybe not the name, but the moment they hear the circumstances. But Detective Infante’s not from here.”