The open meadow at the top of Stony Run Park soon turned into a narrow path through dense woods. A synagogue was planned here, but construction had not yet begun and it was an isolated place. Tess was grateful the trees were bare, allowing her to see for some distance. Statistics said she was safer here, in zip code 21210, than she had ever been in 21231. But she didn’t always feel that way. If someone approached her now-well, it was fair to say Esskay was not the only one who enjoyed having a Doberman along these days. Miata might feel despondent, but she still looked pretty ferocious. Tess wondered if she should start taking both dogs to the office with her. Certainly, it was healthier for Miata to be away from the renovation fumes.
Who would kill for a bracelet? It must be worth far more than she realized. Still, she couldn’t imagine that the world was waiting breathlessly to see the bracelet worn by an emperor’s momentary sister-in-law. You had to be a sick sick puppy to care that passionately about such an obscure piece of Baltimore history.
It was Sunday, a day of rest. Even the self-employed-especially the self-employed, especially someone who had just taken a case for $1-deserved a day off after working every day for almost two weeks straight. Like Scarlett O’Hara, she would think about all these things tomorrow.
Crow was patient with all forms of popular culture except television, and he had broken Tess of her habit of relying on it for relaxation. He had many ideas for ways to distract and soothe her, some even vertical.
But on Sunday nights, she had a standing date with The Simpsons and King of the Hill. She was sure it said something revelatory about her personality that she preferred her entertainment animated. But she was laughing much too hard to care. Tonight was a rerun, one of her favorites: Marge was starring in the musical of Streetcar Named Desire, while Maggie was plotting a Great Escape-type caper from the Ayn Rand Daycare Center. Tess and Crow tried to catch all the film references and failed happily, even though Tess had seen this particular episode five or six times. Then they muted the set and let the light wash over them while they tried to find new territories to colonize on each other. This was one part of their life together where Crow would not tolerate Tess’s taste for ruts. He had a point.
She fell asleep in his arms, starting awake as the ten o’clock news came on, police lights flashing from the screen. Ah, it was the classic top story of the weekend, a homicide. There was the reporter standing outside in the cold, hair blowing; there was the yellow tape; there was the toothless bystander-why did the people willing to speak to television reporters always seem so orthodontically lacking?
“He was a nice man,” Tess prompted, yawning.
“A quiet man,” Crow added.
“He kept to himself,” they chorused.
She assumed it was the usual mundane murder, a domestic or drug-related slaying in one of the city’s sad-sack neighborhoods, the supply of which never seemed to dwindle, no matter how robust the local economy. But when the camera pulled back, the backdrop was one of the city’s nicer hotels, not the usual block of dilapidated rowhouses.
“A fatal downtown? Talk about your red ball.” She grabbed the remote and clicked on the volume. “If it’s a tourist, the city will go nuts.”
“Police are releasing few details at this time, and hotel officials have declined to be interviewed on camera, but details obtained by Channel Six-”
“Which is to say, the Channel Six reporter showed up and listened to the police spokesman,” Tess muttered.
“-indicate the victim was returning to the Harbor-South Hotel from dinner at a nearby restaurant when he was accosted by a would-be robber and stabbed after a brief struggle.”
“The Visitors and Convention Bureau is going to love this. Everyone said when they built that hotel it was too far from downtown, that people would never want to walk that far east.”
“But the neighborhood is as safe as any other downtown location,” Crow said. “Safer, in some ways. I’d rather walk there than around the Convention Center.”
Tess saw her one friend in the police department, Homicide Detective Martin Tull, in the background, conferring with the uniforms on the scene. Television cameras were unkind to him, highlighting his pitted skin and the narrowness of his face. He was handsome in real life, almost pretty.
But he wouldn’t be the one to comment on camera. That task always fell to one of the public information officers, who knew so little about police work that they were never at risk of saying anything interesting or relevant. Tonight, the PIO on duty was a woman, and Tess had to wonder if she had been so well dressed and beautifully coiffed before the homicide call came in.
“We know the victim is a fifty-three-year-old Caucasian male,” the PIO droned to the reporter. “A witness has told police the victim was about a block from the hotel when he was accosted by a man. They appeared to exchange a few words, and then the victim fell to the ground. The witness ran to the hotel, shouting for help. When police arrived, the man’s personal effects were spread around him, as if his attacker had emptied his pockets after wounding him. His wallet was found a few feet from the body, emptied of all his cash, and he’s not wearing a watch, so we think the robber may have taken that as well.”
“What was the weapon?”
“He was stabbed, but no weapon was recovered from the scene.”
“Can you release his name to the public at this time?”
The public information officer glanced down at her notes. “Yes. We located his wife at their home in Washington, and she has made a tentative ID. The victim, who was on business here, was”-she stumbled a little over the name-“Jim Yeeger-no, Yeager. His wife says he works in television.”
The reporter continued to blather on, doing the microphone tango with the PIO- your turn, my turn, your turn, my turn-but Tess was having a hard time concentrating on the words. Jim Yeager, stabbed. Jim Yeager, dead-seventy-two hours after his ugly confrontation with Cecilia. Not that Cecilia, or anyone in her ad hoc group of activists, would ever do such a thing. It was unthinkable. And if someone had killed Jim Yeager to make a political point, why disguise it as a street robbery? Unless, of course, the point was to show Jim Yeager that it didn’t matter if someone stabbed you for your wallet or your sexuality, dead was dead.
Crow took the remote from her hand and pointed it at the television, clicking on some nonexistent button. “Sorry,” he said sheepishly, as the reporter and the public information officer chattered on, “but I want everything to work like a computer mouse. I keep thinking I can zoom on the television screen, magnify the images I want to see.”
“What caught your eye?”
“There’s something there”- he continued to wield the remote like a pointer, as if he could force it to take on new properties through sheer will-“at the edge of the tape. Tull was kneeling in that spot for a moment. But it’s dark. I can’t tell exactly what he was looking at.”
He clicked to another channel, found another view of the same scene, another reporter with hair ruffling in the wind, waiting his turn for the public information officer, like a dateless man in a stag line. Forced to fill the time, he was chatting with the anchor back in the newsroom, answering the very questions he had probably told the blond newscaster to ask him just before they went on the air.
“And there are no suspects at this time, Bart?” the anchorwoman chirped.