“They ran down some leads, but it never came to anything. When the trial was over, she was history. If anyone’s mourning her, they’re doing it privately.” Ruthie leaned forward. “I think they’re getting their revenge privately, too. Henry was killed because of who he killed. What other explanation is there?”
Tess leaned back against the cracked leatherette of the booth, still trying to fathom how anyone could swim through all the identity nets of the modern age, untouched, unknown, untraceable. No fingerprints meant no criminal record. It also meant she hadn’t worked for certain government agencies, or applied to be in the Big Brother/Big Sister program. The lack of a missing persons report indicated no one cared when Jane Doe didn’t come home one night.
“If someone cared enough to kill Henry,” Tess said slowly, “why didn’t the person come forward and claim her body? Why would someone let her continue to be known as Jane Doe?”
Ruthie had an answer at the ready. “There are people who don’t much care for police, or official channels for things. They’re the same kind of people who might kill a man in prison, you know what I mean?”
She knew. “But you’re not asking me to find them, right? Because if such people exist, I don’t want to know them.”
“All I want is a name, an ID. I’ll take it from there.”
A Christmas carol boomed from Frigo’s jukebox, so tinny and speeded up that Tess needed a moment to place the familiar tune. “What Child Is This?” Very appropriate. She was still thinking about Ruthie’s theory, trying to find all the flaws. Like a bridesmaid’s dress made by a neighborhood woman who tippled, it didn’t hang quite right.
“Ruthie, is this your way of making amends, some sort of Christmas mission? If I find the girl’s name, are you going to track down her family, give them a chance to reclaim her bones and lie beneath her own marker, in her hometown cemetery?”
Ruthie’s green eyes were even greener above her tight turtleneck, the same one she had worn at the Sour Beef dinner, to such great effect. “I don’t care what happens to that glue-sniffing skank in the next life, or the life after that. I want to know who my brother killed because I know he died for a reason. I’ll start with a name, if you can find one.”
“And if I can’t?”
“Merry Christmas, you still get your fee. Pat explained that part to me.”
Tess sensed this toughness was an act, but she couldn’t figure out whether it was for her benefit, or Ruthie’s. “Look, I understand. You want a reason for your brother’s death. You want it to matter. Has it occurred to you that Jane Doe has family out there somewhere, family with even more questions than you have?”
“Fuck them. Fuck her. She shouldn’t have tried to get into my house. Then Henry wouldn’t have pushed her, and none of this would have happened. Okay, maybe Henry isn’t dead directly because of her. But the two things are connected. I want to know who she was, how she came to meet my brother that day, why she was in a neighborhood where she didn’t belong. That’s all.”
No, Tess thought, you want someone to blame, someone other than yourself. She hadn’t been able to save her brother, so what? They would have been okay if Jane Doe’s family had been able to save her. It was a head-on collision, and all Ruthie wanted was the comfort of knowing her brother wasn’t the one who crossed the center line.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said.
“You’re a good kid, Tesser.”
If her name had sounded odd enough in Ruthie’s mouth, her family nickname seemed a sacrilege.
chapter 3
“HOLIDAYS IN BALTIMORE DON’T END,” CROW OBSERVED. “They merely succumb.”
Tess glanced approvingly at him, forgetting for a moment the snarl of traffic that had them stuck on a ramp to the Jones Falls Expressway. She didn’t have a clue what he meant, but it held the promise of being diverting. For Crow, Baltimore was a second language-one he spoke exceedingly well, but with odd formalisms that gave the native new insights.
“Keep going,” she encouraged him.
“Well, it’s very good at dressing up for holidays, isn’t it, enthusiastic about the build-up. Look at all of us, in a traffic jam because we want to see the lights on Thirty-fourth Street in Hampden. But the city’s not much good at the moment itself. As soon as one set of decorations goes up, I always have the feeling that people can’t wait to tear them down and start preparing for the next one.”
“Yes,” Tess said, even as she edged the Toyota onto the ramp’s not-quite shoulder and put it in reverse, rolling backward toward Madison Street. He had given voice, as he often did, to something she had long felt but never been able to express. Crow held a mirror up to her life. Only it wasn’t her own reflection she noticed so much as the beaming, happy face above the frame, a face that promised to love what she loved-and to love her as well. “They tore down the cornucopia and Pilgrim cutouts before the sun set on Thanksgiving, and now they’re already itching to retangle the lights they just put up, to unwrap the doors they’ve made look like Christmas boxes and cover them with red foil and Cupids for Valentine’s Day.”
Horns sounded angrily as she squeezed down the narrow channel and into the intersection. Tess assumed the other drivers were just angry they hadn’t thought of the idea first, or because their cars were too wide. Served them right for driving SUVs.
“And once the Cupids go up, they’ll already be thinking about shamrocks, green foil and Saint Patrick’s Day.”
“As one of our local literary lights likes to say, welcome to the church of the next right thing,” Tess said, thinking of a short-story writer who had given a reading at her Aunt Kitty’s store just a few nights back, an exuberant man with the unlikely name of Ralph Pickle. He had filled Women and Children First with his ex-girl-friends, ex-fiancées and ex-wives, who bought multiple copies of his book. Kitty had encouraged him to write more-and date more.
Tess was now in the middle of Madison Street, where she braked sharply, jerked her steering wheel to the right, then headed up the Fallsway, which ran between the JFX and the prison.
“Like a hostess, who puts out guest towels, then paces in the hallway, worried someone might actually use them,” Crow continued.
But Tess, glancing at the prison wall that ran the length of the block, was thinking about Henry Dembrow now. She still couldn’t imagine a scenario in which someone would allow a loved one’s body to go unclaimed, yet went to the trouble of exacting revenge against her killer. Ruthie was grasping at straws. Well, as long as she willing to pay her usual hourly fee, Tess was more than happy to indulge Ruthie in this particular game of pickup sticks. Besides, her father had said he owed Ruthie a favor, and her father considered favors a kind of currency, more important than money. She was really indulging him.
She took the Preston Street overpass above the clogged highway, then headed north, feeling smug. So smug that she shot past her turn at 29th Street, losing any advantage she had gained.
“Damn, now I’ll have to double back.”
“It’s eight-fifteen,” Crow said. “We’re supposed to meet Whitney in fifteen minutes.” He sounded worried. Whitney scared Crow a little. Whitney scared almost everyone, except Tess.
“She’s always late.”
“She’s always late, except when we’re late, and then she gives us unmitigated shit.”
“Let me try one more approach into Hampden, this time from the north.” Tess had a peculiar vanity about her ability to find shortcuts and new routes through her hometown. They had set out to see the lights in Hampden, and she would not be denied.
They were in Baltimore ’s richest precincts now, Guilford and Roland Park, where the homes were decadently large and the tax bills were a kind of status symbol. Look, the houses seem to proclaim, we’re paying $12,000 a year in property taxes and we still send our kids to private schools! These rambling mansions filled Tess with loathing-and yearning. One stone house had stood empty for years, neglected and haunted looking, until an exasperated neighbor purchased it to protect his property values. She could never forget that story, never stop marveling at the idea that some people bought houses the way she bought sweaters at The Gap.