“I wouldn’t say I know them,” Nancy said, choosing her words carefully. She had never spoken to Ronnie Fuller before today, and Alice Manning was still nothing more than a face she had glimpsed at the courthouse long ago. It was their handiwork that had gotten tangled up in her life, the evidence of their venality, not the girls themselves. “I had a…minor connection to the Olivia Barnes case. So, some coincidence, huh, me working this case?”

She was giving Infante a chance to contradict her, to tell her if Lenhardt had moved them up in the rotation for any specific reason.

“I don’t know. You work in law enforcement long enough, you’re going to see certain people more than once, even if you change jurisdictions. Like Lenhardt and the Epstein case.”

“Yeah.” Nancy didn’t have a clue what Infante was referencing. She didn’t mind asking questions when she didn’t know something, but she had also figured out that much would be revealed from context, if a person was patient. The Epstein case. She filed it away, knowing the story would emerge eventually.

They were on the Beltway, completing the long, sweeping loop around the city, making their way back to headquarters. The vast, inefficient expanse that was the county still amazed Nancy. Driving, just driving, accounted for a third of her overtime every year. Some people said the county was shaped like a wrench, and Baltimore was the lug. Nancy thought it looked like a piece of snot hanging from the Pennsylvania line. “So much space, so little crime,” Lenhardt said, his voice almost wistful for the felony-dense precincts of the city. It had to be an easier place to hide. But then, Ronnie didn’t know the county either. She was a city girl, and the only place she had known for the last seven years was whatever juvenile facility had held her.

All Ronnie had was a five-minute head start on them, but so far it had proved to be enough. That’s how long they had needed to conclude that she wasn’t going to emerge from the kitchen, wasn’t hanging up her apron, or going to the bathroom, or combing her hair. O’lene, the girl who worked the ovens, just shrugged her skinny shoulders and said she hadn’t noticed anything. The manager, Clarice something, had been as unhelpful as she dared, her loathing for Nancy and Infante palpable. A middle-aged black woman living and working in Southwest Baltimore was not likely to be a fan of the police under any circumstances. But Clarice’s antipathy had been pronounced, personal. Nancy had the impression that the woman didn’t want anyone to talk to Ronnie until she had a chance to question her.

Yet it was Clarice who, unwittingly, told them what they needed to know: On Friday, the day Brittany Little had disappeared, Ronnie had left the store at 3:30 P.M. Clarice had told them this as a way of praising Ronnie’s constancy, her excellent work habits, and they had nodded, as if they agreed. But all it meant was that Ronnie was off on her own, a few hundred yards from Value City, only a few hours before Brittany was reported missing.

“ Brittany Little’s mother called the police about six-thirty,” Infante said. “That gives Ronnie Fuller three hours to walk across the parking lot, buy whatever she needed, then pick out her victim.”

“But see, that doesn’t make sense if the whole point is that the girl looks like the younger sister of the baby Ronnie killed seven years ago. If Cynthia Barnes is right, it’s a case of mistaken identity. But Ronnie knows what Cynthia and her husband look like. If she saw Brittany with her real mother, she wouldn’t make that mistake.”

“Maybe she thought the woman was a baby-sitter or something. I will say Maveen Little was pretty convincing, stupid as she is. Her story stayed constant, late as we talked to her last night. Hey, you ever date a black man?”

Now it was Nancy ’s turn to follow Infante’s twist of thought. “Just because her boyfriend is black, and her baby’s father is black, doesn’t mean she dates only black men.”

“I bet she does. It’s a type, you see it all the time, especially in South and Southwest Baltimore. What’s that about, anyway-white girls who date only black guys? I never got that.”

“I don’t know.”

“So did you ever date a black guy?”

“I’ve been with Andy since I was in high school. I barely dated anyone.”

“Yeah, but would you? Like…Denzel Washington. Would you go out with him? I mean, not him, because hell, I’d probably bend over for him, rich and good-looking as he is. But say there’s a guy in, I don’t know, Auto Theft, and he’s attractive and nice and treats women right. Would you go out with him?”

“I’m married, remember?”

“But if you weren’t. C’mon, play with me, Nancy. Would you date a black guy under those circumstances?”

“Yeah, sure.” Actually, she didn’t think she would, although she would never rule it out. Her taste happened to run to blond men, men like the Polish boys she had known all her life, a Daddy thing.

“I’d love to go out with a black girl.”

“I thought your thing was redheads.”

“I’m-what’s the word-inclusive.”

Nancy had to laugh at that. Infante’s candor about his weaknesses made them easy to forgive. He didn’t pretend to be anyone other than who he was.

She wished she could say as much about herself.

The sun was setting when they got back to the office. The longest day of the year had come and gone, but the days were still plenty long, and a case like this offered no natural stopping point. Sometimes, going home was a form of discipline, a way of admitting you were only human, needing sleep and food. But who would leave work, much less sleep, when a girl was missing? They had put out the Amber Alert this morning, and Lenhardt had told them the commissioner wanted to launch a search if they didn’t have any solid leads in twenty-four hours. The only question was where would they search, how could they establish a grid? In the area around the mall, the area around Ronnie Fuller’s home?

Or the site of the old crime, the place where Olivia Barnes had been killed.

Leakin Park, taunted a voice in Nancy ’s head, a voice she had been shouting down all day. You’re going to have to go back to Leakin Park. It was a cool, detached voice, one she had begun hearing more and more as she advanced in the department. She thought of the voice as an older, wiser self, visiting from the future. Sometimes she wished the voice would tell her everything it knew. Other times she just wanted it to go away, leave her alone.

Besides, the Chicken Man’s house surely was long gone. It had been decrepit seven years ago, and the trail project should have meant its demise. Or the Barnes family had made sure that the shack was bulldozed. That sad, broken-down place wasn’t the kind of memorial anyone wanted for their child.

Infante’s pager went off in the parking lot and he looked down. “Weird,” he said. “It’s coming from inside the building, from the switchboard.”

They walked into the lobby and the desk attendant looked up, not at all surprised by the synchronicity that brought the two detectives into view seconds after they had been paged.

“These ladies,” the attendant said through the perforations in the Plexiglas, “are here to see you.”

Infante and Nancy turned and realized that the two women sitting in the lobby were Helen Manning, who looked different in her street clothes, and a hulking, almost obese woman in a pink T-shirt and brightly printed stretch pants that were being forced to live up to their name.

“I’m Alice,” the fat woman said, “and I want to help you any way I can.”