"Still, what if Feeney-"

"Look, I'll let you in a secret, but don't let it cloud your judgment: the smart money's on Rosita. No one thinks Feeney is capable of something like this. He may bitch and moan more than most, but he wouldn't risk losing his job over one story. Besides, Feeney has an ironclad alibi."

"He does?"

Giggling, Whitney punched her in the arm. Such physicality was a sure sign of drunkenness, better than any Breathalyzer test. A punch was about 0.08 on the Talbot scale, while arm-wrestling indicated she was well over the legal limit. It wouldn't be the first time Tess had made a bed on her couch, or put Whitney in a cab for the trip home to Worthington Valley, where she still lived with her parents. If living in a guest house on a twenty-acre estate could be properly described as living with one's parents.

"Very funny, Tesser," Whitney said, still giggling and jabbing. "Feeney told me today the two of you were out drinking past midnight. In fact, it's about all he can remember from last night. Now, that's not the sort of thing you want to tell the editors, given the circumstances, but he couldn't have a much better alibi, could he?"

Tess chewed on the inside of her cheek, a habit she thought she had outgrown. It hadn't even been eight o'clock when Feeney had lurched out of the Brass Elephant. Why had he told Whitney it was midnight?

"Tess?" Whitney tried to punch her again, but missed, sending her bourbon glass crashing to the alley below. "So what do you think?"

"I think as alibis go, that's a pretty good one."

Tess had been to the Beacon Light on official business once before, for a job interview after the Star had folded. She had bought a suit she couldn't afford from Femme, borrowed Kitty's best pocketbook, and put on pantyhose that she had managed to avoid running until she got back into her car. The paper had granted interviews to every one of the Star's 383 newsroom employees. They offered jobs to fewer than ten. A new suit, a borrowed pocketbook, and intact pantyhose were not enough to make Tess one of them.

Luckily, the suit had stayed in style, even if the store that had sold it had gone out of business. Nothing went out of style in Baltimore, especially the simple clothes suited to Tess's unfashionable figure. Almost three years later, her interview suit was still smart, as her mother would say: navy blue, with a fitted jacket that didn't require a blouse, and a straight skirt to the knee. With her hair up and navy high heels, she was the picture of demure femininity, stretched out over six feet.

"A real lady," Tyner judged, inspecting her Thursday morning as she turned slowly in front of the full-length mirror inside his office's closet door.

"The neckline is kind of plunging," said Whitney, who had ended up spending the night on Tess's sofa. She had awakened with a headache that she refused to admit was a hangover, and was now perched on Tyner's desk, lost inside a sweater and skirt borrowed from Tess. On Whitney, the too-big clothes looked chic and deliberate.

"Thanks, Whitney. You're a real pal."

"I'm not being rude. But if they were making a training film about sexual harassment, you'd be cast as the doe-eyed secretary. Someone could fall into your cleavage and never be seen again. It's too sexy. You lack authority. You need a scarf."

"Of course. I've noticed the President always wears one during the State of the Union address."

Ignoring her, Whitney dug through her Dooney amp; Burke bag until she produced an Hermès with a Western motif-lassos, spurs, and horseshoes in shades of copper and gold, against a navy-and-ivory background.

"Cool," Tess said. "Now can you make a quarter come out of my ear?"

"I've got better tricks than that." Whitney arranged the scarf so it filled in the expanse of flesh without making Tess look as if she were a cross-dressing Boy Scout. "There, that creates interest around the face, as they say."

"It does make the outfit," Tess admitted grudgingly. "But if they didn't want me as a reporter, why would they want to hire me as an investigator?

Whitney put her arm around her shoulders, joining her in the mirror. Cool Snow White and flushed Rose Red stared back. White bread and rye bread, baked potato and potato hash.

"Half the editors at the Beacon Light today weren't even there when the Star folded," Whitney reminded her. "The other half can barely remember what their wives look like, much less the hundreds of supplicants they've turned down over the years. You'll be a whole new person to them, someone with the power to turn them down. By the way, I hinted you might not be able to take the job, because you're so much in demand."

"Wives?" That was Tyner, who seemed to be enjoying his temporary membership in this girls' club. Tess expected him to start wielding a lipstick or mascara brush in her direction any moment. "I never thought I'd catch you being a sexist, Whitney. You mean spouses."

"No, I mean wives. Little women. Helpmates. There's only one woman in the upper ranks at the Beacon-Light, the managing editor, and she's got the biggest balls of all of them. She had a husband once, maybe two, but I think they went into the federal witness protection program. Now she makes do with a little slave boy at home, running around in nothing but a ruffled apron, with a Scotch and water at the ready when she comes clomping home at ten or eleven."

"It doesn't sound so bad to me," Tess said.

"Well, that's what you have, isn't it?"

The Beacon-Light's founders, the Pfieffer family, had been savvy about many things. Real estate was not one of them. The family had calculated on the city's center moving west over time, beyond the great department stores along the Howard Street corridor. So after World War II, when the expanding paper needed a new building, Pfieffer III had built the plant on Saratoga Street, near the ten-story Hutzler's, the grandest of all the stores. The result was a marvel of blandness, a building of tan bricks with no discernible style. Its only charm had been its real beacon, a Bakelite lighthouse revolving on a small pedestal above the entrance. The lighthouse had been torn down in the '70s and was now the Holy Grail among local collectors. The City Life museum was dying to find it, but rumor had it that a former Star columnist had unearthed it at a flea market and kept it on the third floor of his Bolton Hill townhouse, where he performed quasi-voodoo rituals intended to make Baltimore the country's first no-newspaper town.

Tess glanced up at the empty pedestal as she climbed the low, broad steps, picking her way among windblown McDonald's wrappers and crumpled newspaper pages. The local department stores, the few that had survived the '80s, were long gone from downtown. A drunk was sleeping among the daffodil shoots in an ill-kept flower bed. Squeegee kids-really, squeegee adults, a few squeegee senior citizens-had staked out the intersection. As the Pfieffers had predicted, the city had moved. Only it was in the other direction, south and east, toward the water. The Beacon-Light was a lonely and inconvenient outpost on the edge of an urban wilderness. Reporters consoled themselves with its proximity to two of Baltimore 's best dining experiences, the open stalls of Lexington Market, and the white tablecloths of Marconi's. The Beacon-Light also was convenient to St. Jude's shrine. According to newsroom lore, reporters made pilgrimages there after deadline, always uttering the same heartfelt prayer to the patron saint of lost causes: "Please, St. Jude, don't let the editors fuck up my story."

Feeney had told Tess about this ritual. And now she was facing the prospect that Feeney was the one who had fucked up. It seemed unlikely-certainly he had been too drunk to sneak into the building, perform a little computer hackery, and leave without a trace. But if the trail did lead back to him, Tess was determined to be there to protect him, even if she hadn't figured out how.