The elevators in the Baltimore County Public Safety Building were famously slow, so all but the laziest workers had an informal rule known as “one floor up and two floors down.” Nancy, however, always checked the elevator bays before ducking into the stairwells. You never knew when the commissioner or a major might be waiting there, or a detective with whom she needed to compare notes. This was the kind of thing she had learned from her uncle Stan, who had been known as the thirty-three-thirty-three lieutenant, for he had attained that rank at the age of thirty-three and advanced no higher until his retirement thirty-three years later.

But there was zero expectation of a useful chance encounter on a Saturday morning, especially over a holiday weekend, so Nancy went straight for the stairs, almost running the steps from the tenth floor, home of Homicide, to the eleventh, which housed the crime lab. The eleventh was the top floor, and the lab was there for a practical reason: the placement reduced the building’s exposure to damage if the lab’s contents ever exploded. Nancy had found this possibility ludicrous when she first joined the department, but it no longer seemed so. Everything was possible now.

“I didn’t know you were working this case,” said the lab tech, Holly Varitek. “Isn’t it awfully fast for you to be up again?”

Nancy shrugged, determined not to bitch. Infante had thrown a tantrum when Lenhardt changed the rotation on them last night, following the sergeant into the men’s room to plead his case. Infante had planned to drive out to Deep Creek Lake with the redheaded barmaid, Charlotte something. He had slammed out, and been curt to Nancy the rest of the night. Guys could get away with being bratty. Nancy had to be stoic. She even had to be stoic about being stoic.

“Well, at least your snatcher was considerate,” said Holly, a chatty type inclined to fill silences. Brisk and wide-eyed, with shiny dark hair and vivid coloring, Holly was one of those people who seemed to be put together with higher quality parts than everyone else. Even her metabolism was better than the average person’s, for she could eat anything she wanted and not get fat. Nancy couldn’t help noticing that.

“Considerate how?”

“Well, first of all he-you’re assuming a he, right, given that the stuff was found in the men’s room-left the girl’s hair with the jumper. It’s like he wanted to make it easy for us to compare the DNA if the blood didn’t match. Of course, we still needed the mother’s sample, for control, because you wouldn’t want to assume the pile of hair is the girl’s hair. You see-”

“I know,” Nancy said, trying not to let her impatience show. The people with technical expertise-the lab techs, the M.E.’s, even those who conducted ballistic analysis-were all a little in love with their knowledge, like eleven-year-old boys who had just learned some basic fact of science or math and had to bore the rest of the world with it. “Do we have a match on the blood or not?”

Holly’s easygoing temperament made her impossible to offend. “The spots on the jumper are definitely blood, but it’s not the missing girl’s, or the mother’s. No match. It does, however, match this man’s T-shirt, which was balled up in the same trash can and had a lot more blood on it.”

“Huh.” Nancy slumped against the counter, thinking. It struck her as a backward break, the kind of information that widened the investigation for now, but could narrow it later, with luck. The blood on the jumper was probably the kidnapper’s, although it wasn’t 100 percent. If they made an arrest, they’d have a key piece of physical evidence.

The only problem was how were they going to make an arrest? The biggest break in the case would be the saddest one as well-the discovery of a body, which might yield more clues than the men’s room at Westview Mall. Nancy had barely slept last night, wondering if the girl might still be alive. She so wanted her to be alive. The case had been given to Homicide because of the large amount of blood on the T-shirt, but now they knew it wasn’t the girl’s blood, so it was a not unreasonable hope.

“Does it seem weird to you,” Nancy asked the lab tech, “that the blood is on the front of the jumper?”

Holly shrugged. “Not particularly. Someone was bleeding heavily. A head wound could have dripped. Then again, the bloody T-shirt could have nothing to do with the jumper, could have stained it when someone tossed it in the trash.”

“But if you were standing behind a child, cutting hair-” Nancy mimed the motion more for herself than Holly, and finished the thought in her head. It would be hard to cut oneself that severely with a pair of scissors, harder still to drip just a few drops of blood on the girl’s jumper while leaking blood all over a T-shirt. But if the kidnapper were standing in front-she acted out that scenario, too. No, it didn’t make sense. Perhaps the blood had fallen on the jumper after it was removed. Or, worse luck, maybe Holly was right, and the blood-soaked T-shirt had landed in the trash after the jumper, staining it by accident. Nancy could imagine some homeless man reaching into the garbage can to find a rag to stanch a wound.

Had the child reached out and scratched the person who was cutting her hair? Children didn’t like haircuts, or so Nancy had heard from her cousins with kids. But you could hardly call this a haircut. Based on the thick coil of hair found in the trash can, the kidnapper had sliced the hair just below the elastic band that held Brittany Little’s ponytail. The act had been swift, with little attempt to shape or style the hair left on the girl’s head.

Nancy carried the news, such as it was, back downstairs to Infante, who was cursing his luck at being the primary on this case. Not only was the disappearance of Brittany Little not a dunker or a gimme, it was going to attract press attention once the details began to shake loose. The department had managed to stall the press on Friday with the usual wink-wink, nudge-nudge signals. A few years back, there had been a rash of what Lenhardt called six-hour kidnappings. Teen girls in the city, girls who were apparently too impatient to take the nine months necessary to have their own babies, had started grabbing other people’s children as if they were dolls left untended. But it’s hard to steal a baby without drawing attention to yourself if you’re a teenage girl living with your own family, so those cases were always wrapped up in a matter of hours. “Easier to hide a pregnancy than a child,” Lenhardt sometimes said, usually when they were trying to track down a girl who had left her own baby in a Dumpster.

The rash of six-hour kidnappings had been during the spring, seven years ago. The city cops had thought Olivia Barnes was one of those cases, Nancy recalled, at least in the beginning. There had been a baby-sitter, a heavyset, dimwitted girl whose story hadn’t tracked. Another seventy-two hours passed before they asked the academy class to search Leakin Park. Even then, they had thought it was more of a field exercise for the cadets than a mission that would yield results.

“Stranger blood, huh?” Infante echoed when Nancy told him what she had learned on the eleventh floor. “Now, if I were a lucky guy, it would match the boyfriend.”

“I thought they both came up pretty clean. No Social Services file, no neighbor complaints, no record of 911 calls to the address.” When a parent-or a parent’s partner-killed a child, there were usually a few practice runs.

“Yeah, other than an assault charge on her and a weapons charge on him, they’re the nicest young couple since Mary and Joseph. But it’s the only thing that makes sense. Boyfriend goes too far administering discipline, he and panicky girlfriend concoct a cover-up. Who grabs a little girl from Value City? That’s not exactly the best place to find the next Lindbergh baby. You just know it ain’t going to be a big payday.”