There was a rapping on the window above. They looked up to see Devon’s “governess” waving happily, motioning for Devon to come in.
“Lunchtime,” Devon said. “Soup with things in it. Oh boy.”
Tess stopped at the cheesesteak cart before trying to find a taxi back to the train station. It was as good a version of the famed local dish as any other, she supposed. Famed local dishes were usually overrated, more about nostalgia and stereotype than real taste. The thing was, after spending even a short time with Devon Whittaker, eating was too fraught with significance. She couldn’t stop thinking about food, about the process. How odd it was to sink her teeth into something and tear away, ripping flesh, chewing it into ever-smaller pieces. One reason Tess had never smoked cigarettes was because the action seemed essentially ludicrous. Suddenly, eating seemed no less ridiculous. Halfway through the sandwich, she tossed it in the trash.
In the cab on the way to the train station, she looked at the sketch she had shown Devon. Gwen Schiller. It was a good name for her, old-fashioned in a way, capturing some timeless quality in that face. Gwen Schller. When she had been Jane Doe, it had made sense for her to die in someone’s cemented-over backyard in Locust Point. She had been a street kid, a huffer, someone who would never be missed. But Gwen Schiller, no matter how much she professed to loathe her father and stepmother, shouldn’t have been able to go missing for so long. Someone should have noticed she was gone.
Someone should have cared.
chapter 15
WITHIN A DAY, DENTAL RECORDS OBTAINED FROM A Silver Spring orthodontist made it official. The Dead Girl Formerly Known as Jane Doe was Gwen Schiller. Martin Tull was impressed, and generous enough not to hide it.
“I can’t believe how much you did with so little,” he kept saying to Tess. They were sitting in a sub shop near police headquarters. Tess was never really comfortable inside the stale air and unrepentantly macho culture of the city police department. Cops made her nervous. She couldn’t help thinking they knew her every misdeed-every red light run, every mile over the speed limit.
“I started with a lucky break and Whitney turned it into something concrete. She was the one who picked up on the significance of the decayed back teeth.”
“Beginner’s luck. You were the one who parlayed it into establishing the girl’s identity. How did you track down the friend?”
“I think this is one of those things that falls under our don’t ask-don’t tell policy.”
“Misdemeanor or felony?”
Tess was toying with a turkey sub, her usual-lettuce, tomato, extra hots, no mayo. So virtuous it practically qualified as health food. She didn’t have much of an appetite as of late.
“I’m not sure I broke any laws per se. But you’d still feel obligated to lecture me, so let’s leave it alone. How are her parents doing?”
“About how you’d expect. We had to call her father to ask for the name of their daughter’s dentist. He can’t help knowing what that means. The thing that gets me is the father insists there’s a missing person report, but I sure never saw one. I think I’d remember a billionaire’s daughter from Potomac. Talk about a red ball.”
“A paper billionaire,” Tess said, remembering Devon Whittaker’s dismissive tone. “You’ll tell them face to face, right? Not over the phone?”
“Yeah.” Tull pinched the flesh between his thumb and forefinger, which meant he had a headache. “I’d like you to be there.”
“No way. My ghoul days are over, I don’t have to confront grieving next of kin anymore.”
“Yeah, it sucks. But it’s a cinch they’ll ask me something I don’t know, Tess, and I’ll look stupid. We already look stupid. And when the father finds out his daughter’s killer is dead, his rage isn’t going to have any place to go. He’s going to blame the police.”
“Not Baltimore PD,” Tess said. “Montgomery County, or some Eastern Shore county, maybe even the State Police, wherever he filed the report. All she did was die in Baltimore.”
This failed to cheer Tull. He switched hands, pinching the flesh on the right one as he trained his brown, sorrowful eyes on Tess. They had met over a corpse, and it had occurred to Tess more than once that if someone had to show up on your doorstep with news that was going to destroy your world, Martin Tull was the man for the job.
But just because someone was good at something didn’t mean he liked it. Besides, he wasn’t asking her to do it in his stead, merely to watch, back him up. It wasn’t much of a favor, given all the favors he had done her.
She reached for his hand to shake it.
“Thanks, Tess,” he said, then pulled his hand back and resumed his headache cure.
“You know,” she said, “if you didn’t drink so much coffee, aspirin wouldn’t hit your stomach so hard, and you wouldn’t have to rely on pinching your pressure points to get rid of these headaches.”
“If I stopped drinking coffee, the withdrawal headaches would be so bad that no amount of aspirin could touch it. My one vice, Tess. Isn’t everyone entitled to at least one?”
“I couldn’t be friends with someone who didn’t have at least one vice.”
Tull’s pager went off. She offered her cell phone, but he waved it off as if it were a bribe and went to the pay phone on the wall. His voice rose so quickly, in anger and surprise, that she could hear it across the room.
“What? What? Where did you hear that? No, no comment. No comment means no comment. Later. You’ll be glad you waited, I promise. No. No.” He hung up. “Shit.”
“What was that about?”
“Herman Peters, the police reporter at the Blight, is already sniffing around. Someone told him we have an ID on Jane Doe, and he wants to go with it. No name, just the fact we ID’d her. I tried to tell him it will be a better story if he’ll wait until I notify next of kin, but he’s not buying it. I sure wish I knew who leaked it.”
“Could be your own communications department, trying to grab a little good press.” And shaft me in the process. If there was going to be a story, Tess should be part of it. She had earned a little free publicity.
Then she thought of Gwen Schiller, dead forever, and felt a twinge of guilt.
“Naw, those guys don’t know anything unless they’re told. Could be the medical examiner, could be the orthodontist for all we know. Anyway, you ready to take a little ride in my deluxe city vehicle? The sooner we get this done, the less I have to worry about her parents reading it in the paper, or seeing it on television.”
“Where are we going?”
“I told you, I set up a meeting with the Schillers, all the way down in Potomac.”
“I thought they were coming up here.”
“These are rich folks. We go to them.”
Tess thought of Potomac as an old money enclave, full of Kennedys and horsey types. There was even a saddlery shop at the main business intersection, which locals, predictably, referred to as the village.
But new money had taken up residence here, fortunes so vast that they couldn’t be housed in the older mansions, with their laughably small bathrooms and lack of central air conditioning. Some of these were large and garish, the epitome of nouveau riche. But the most expensive of the new homes had been designed to look old. The Schillers lived in one of these.
The father was younger than Tess had expected, barely in his forties, with a boyish face and an asymmetrical white patch in his dark hair that made him look as if he had been slapped with a paintbrush. The stepmother was older than Tess expected, in her late thirties. Given what Devon had said, Tess had expected a trophy wife, but Patsy Schiller was more like a prize given out at a boardwalk shooting gallery. Blond and blue-eyed, she wore a pink suit and white blouse that were too ugly not to be expensive. Unfortunately Patsy’s figure, all breast from collarbone to waist, wasn’t quite right for the lines of couture clothing.