Charm City

confection of turrets and stained glass. Stock footage, Tess realized, shot the day before, when the Blight's story had run and all the TV reporters had camped out in front of Wink's property, waiting in vain for him to comment.

'What's the point of a new house designed to look old?' Crow wondered.

'I guess it's for people who have to have wainscoting, ivy, and a subzero refrigerator. Louder, please. I still can't hear.'

The anchor's voice, so deep and rich it vibrated on Tess's cheap set, filled the room: 'Channel Eight has learned tonight that Wink Wynkowski plans a news conference Monday to respond to the charges against him in the local press.' The footage changed to shots from the gym-Wink pedaling, Wink thumping the heavy bag, Wink flirting.

'That's your arm!' Crow exulted. 'I recognize the mole on your elbow.'

'And although he took time out to sweat at Durban 's gym today, Wink assured me, in an exclusive interview, that he wasn't sweating the basketball deal.' So the reporter had stolen the line after all.

Cut to a shot of Wink outside Durban 's gym, breathing clouds of smoke in the wintry air as he spoke into a microphone. Tess was thankful he had put a jogging suit on over his singlet.

'All I want to tell my supporters-and I know I have a lot of them-is to rest easy. I always knew we'd have people fighting us on this. I just didn't expect they'd be right here in my hometown.' He paused, as if he expected cheers or applause, then remembered he was being taped for television. 'You know, maybe when I wrap this deal up, I ought to look at starting a new newspaper, or convince one of the big chains to buy the poor excuse for the one we got. You know what they say about Baltimore? It's the biggest city in the country without a daily newspaper.'

'What about those charges in the Beacon-Light, Wink?' the anchor asked, puffed up with pride at his daring. 'Any truth to them at all?'

Tess rolled her eyes. 'He's going to hit this one farther than the home run Frank Robinson hit out of Memorial Stadium.'

'I can't comment on that now, but I expect to have a detailed response by Monday after talking to my advisers. It's a complicated situation and I have to keep my priorities straight, not get distracted. The game plan is, number one, buy the team, number two, get it here, and then, number three, I'll worry about those little dogs nipping at my heels.'

'But what about the information on your, uh, youthful transgressions? Can you elaborate on that? Some people have noted that three years is a long time to send a juvenile away on robbery charges.'

To Tess's surprise, Wink's eyes began to tear up in what seemed to be a genuinely spontaneous show of emotion. He started to speak, stopped, cleared his throat, and continued, almost seething and crying at the same time.

'There's a reason they keep your name confidential when you do things as a kid, you know. It gives you a chance to start over, get things right. And I did pretty well with the chance I got, better than most. Yet I get singled out. Is that fair? You gonna open up the records of every guy in town who went to Montrose? Because I'm not the only one, you know. I'm not the only guy in this town who needed a fresh start.'

Tess and Crow were so mesmerized by this performance that Esskay was able to make another lunge toward the Chinese food, snaring a gnawed sparerib from Crow's plate. Her victory was short-lived: she began retching, the bone lodged deep in her throat.

'Try the Heimlich maneuver,' Tess cried, panicking. Unruffled, Crow reached his hand down the dog's throat and extracted the rib, gooey with drool and sauce. Esskay stared at the bone as if she had never seen it before, then tried to snatch it back from him.

'Pavlov, indeed,' Tess snorted in disgust, but her heart was still beating a little fast. 'This stupid mutt can't learn anything. She can't even remember she almost choked to death on that same damn bone ten seconds ago.'

'Oh, I don't know,' Crow said, forgiving as always. 'We all have things we desire even though we know they wouldn't be good for us. Don't you have a few spareribs in your life?'

A rhetorical question, one of Crow's flights of fancy, nothing more. To Tess's consternation, an image of Jack Sterling flashed through her mind-his blue eyes, the strange little sensation she had felt when they shook hands, as if he had caught a spark of static electricity from the carpet in the conference room and passed it on to her. Blushing, she hid her hot face in Esskay's hotter neck, stroking the dog until she was sure the telltale color had subsided.

Chapter 8

'I can think of five other things I should be doing right now. I really don't have time to be your tour guide.'

It was Friday morning, and metro editor Marvin Hailey was leading Tess through the newsroom, which looked more like an insurance office gone to seed. Scurrying behind the reluctant Hailey, Tess tried to keep tabs on where she was going in this maze of cubicles, dented metal filing cabinets, and ancient computers rigged with various accessories to make them slightly less lethal to the users and their wrists. Cardboard file boxes were stacked around some desks, creating makeshift walls, while old newspapers rose toward the ceiling in shaky yellowing towers. Recycling was apparently too avant-garde for the staid Beacon-Light.

'It looks like you're running out of space,' Tess said, trying to make conversation with the unsmiling editor.

'We are,' Hailey said, glancing over his shoulder as if acknowledging even this obvious fact was fraught with risk.

'Any chance of the whole operation moving out to the 'burbs? I know you're already printing the paper out there.'

'We had to have new presses, and it made sense for delivery purposes to be outside the Beltway. But the other departments will remain here until Five-uh, Pfieffer-can get a good price for the property.'

'Forever, in other words.'

Hailey grunted, a safely neutral noise.

It was 9 A.M., a rare quiet moment in the cycle of an all-day newspaper. Within an hour, the skeleton crew of overnight editors would put to bed the 'evening' paper, a publication identical to the morning paper except in layout and the updates on predawn carnage provided by a lone police reporter. Most of the other reporters had yet to arrive, with the exception of a dark-haired woman with her feet propped on an open desk drawer, reading the morning paper while she listened to a police scanner. A phone rang on the city desk, but no one was there to answer it.

'So this is where you make the magic happen,' Tess said.

Marvin Hailey lunged for the still ringing phone, succeeding only in knocking over an old mug of coffee. Tess watched him try to stem the milky-brown spill with wadded-up newspapers, only to spread the puddle over more of the desk top. Such a dry husk of a man-shoulders speckled with dandruff, lips whitish and cracked from constant, nervous licking. He looked as if he might break up and blow away in a strong breeze.

'Oh, hell,' he sighed. The newspaper had finally absorbed the coffee, only to leave his hands black with ink. Resignedly, he tossed the crumpled sheets into a nearby trash can, wiped his palms on his pilled trousers, and sat down at his computer.

'We've got you all set up on our system. To sign on, you hit this button and type in MONAGHAN,' he said, doing just that. Even his typing had a jumpy, paranoid rhythm, as if he expected someone to creep up behind him and find fault in whatever he did. 'Now the computer wants a six-letter password. You want me to pick something out for you? It's not as if you'll need a secret one.'

'That's okay, I'll do it.' Tess slid the keyboard away from Hailey and tapped in the first six-letter word that came to mind: E-S-S-K-A-Y, which showed up on the computer only as a series of asterisks. Who knew what secrets she might want to keep as this progressed? 'Now what?'

'Well, I assume you're going to start interviewing people. I drew up a list of people we know were here that