Charm City

their red, white, and blue flowers in perfect rectangles along the house. She smiled at the image of Uncle Spike, showing up with her mother's winter mulch, ten whole bags of it, just as spring was beginning. Judith didn't use that much mulch in a decade. What had Spike been thinking?

What had she been thinking? No, the problem was, she hadn't been thinking at all. Neither had her mother, nor her father. The reason for Spike's beating had been with them all along.

Chapter 24

Tess was too anxious to take the time necessary to wrestle Esskay up three flights of stairs and settle her down with water, supper, and a post-walk treat. Friday was grocery shopping night in the Monaghan household, a time-consuming ritual in which Judith and Patrick worked the aisles at the Giant side by side, picking fights over virtually every item. Creamed corn, pro or con? Was there really a difference between name brand toilet paper and the generic store brand? But now it was almost eight, which meant Tess had less than an hour until they returned. It would be better to find whatever Spike had hidden, take it, and leave, allowing her parents to remain in blissful ignorance.

She parked on the street and walked up the driveway, Esskay trotting happily alongside her, just pleased to be in on this adventure. The garage was padlocked, but the side entrance, where her mother kept her potting bench and gardening tools, was always open.

Inside, the naked sixty-watt bulb wasn't a match for anything past dusk, and the corners of the shed were lost in gray shadows that made every shape sinister and suspect. Ten plastic garbage bags sat in the back like huge toad-stools, fat and poisonous. She opened one, sniffing. The fragrance was sharper than whatever Crow had been using, but this was definitely mulch. Now what?

She plunged her arm into the elbow, then to the shoulder, fingers wiggling in search of anything that was not mulch. It might be hard or soft, as big as a gold brick, as small as a diamond ring. Again and again, eight times in all, she repeated the exercise, coming up with nothing more than a sleeve loamy with traces of tree bark. But on the ninth bag, the mulch was only a soft, shallow cover for something harder. A handful of little triangles, dried and stiff, like misshapen tortilla chips.

Curious, she pulled a few out. Esskay sniffed experimentally, then backed away, whimpering strangely. Tess held the triangles closer to the light. No, they weren't chips, and they weren't edible, not unless a dog was a cannibal. The triangles were made of flesh and hair, and although they had shrunk when they dried, the tattooed numbers were still visible.

The ears. The ears. That's what Spike had seen, not the years.

Tess dropped them on the floor, recoiling at the light clattering sound on the concrete floor. Her first instinct was to run, as if by fleeing she could put some distance between herself and a world where someone methodically sliced the ears from greyhound corpses, ensuring they could never be traced, then beaten her uncle so he couldn't tell what he had seen, or share what he had found.

But she couldn't just run away. She had to gather up the evidence, gruesome as it was, and take it to someone. The police? The Humane Society? She'd figure it out later. Grabbing her mother's rake, she pushed the scattered ears into a pile, then dropped to her knees to put them back in their bed of mulch. Esskay's whimpering escalated into a high-pitched wail, a dirge for her fallen comrades. Ru-ru-ru-ru.

Perhaps it was this plaintive sound that masked the footsteps in the driveway. At any rate, it was only when the door creaked behind her that Tess stood and turned, but before she could make a sound, her face was smothered in a man's leather jacket-the leather jacket of someone broad-shouldered and at least 6' 6'.

'Finally,' a familiar gravelly voice said from somewhere behind the man, who held the back of her neck just hard enough to let her know he could crack her spine if he wanted to.

'Is it just the one bag?' her captor asked.

'Looks that way, but we better take 'em all, just in case. Maybe we'll get lucky and find the other thing, too.'

'We could look around. It could be somewhere else in here.'

'No time. But we'll take her, see if she has any ideas.'

Leather Jacket released the pressure on Tess's neck slightly and shoved a handkerchief into her mouth. His callused hand smelled of onions and motor oil. She thought of biting the hand that gagged her, but it seemed futile and most unsanitary. From behind her, another hand fished through her pockets for her car keys.

'Let's go,' Gravel Voice said. The two men linked arms on either side of her, as if she were Dorothy, ready to gambol down the Yellow Brick Road with Tin Man and Scare-crow. When she tried to go limp, forcing them to drag her away, one poked a hard object in her ribs-presumably a gun; she didn't have the heart to find out for sure by struggling. Where was the Ten Hills neighborhood watch when you really needed them? Why wasn't one of her mother's nosy friends peeking out her window now, taking in this scene? Esskay jogged beside them, determined not to be left out.

'Like the new car?' Gravel Voice asked, as they pushed her into the backseat of a black Oldsmobile, a far more discreet car than either of their previous vehicles. Esskay hopped in beside her. There, yet another man in a leather jacket forced her head down below the seats, using his armpit like a vise, a leathery, sweaty vise. 'We realized the other one was a little too recognizable, so we traded up.'

Tess's muffled voice almost managed to sound confident. 'My parents are going to come home soon and when they see my car at the curb, they'll have the cops out looking for me immediately.'

'Why do you think we took your keys?' Gravel Voice asked from the front seat. 'Our friend's going to follow us in it. There's not going to be any car at the curb when your parents come home, or any bags, or any dog. They'll never know you were here, and I don't think the cops are going to put out an all-points-bulletin for a bunch of dirt.'

'Jesus fuckin' Christ!' The man who had been holding Tess loosened his grip, letting her up for air, just in time to smell something even less appealing than the poorly aged leather of his jacket. Esskay, overwhelmed by the evening's events, had emptied her bladder on the floor of the car. The armpit returned, dragging Tess back into its rancid world.

She muttered into the crook of his elbow: 'If I promise to keep my head down in my own lap, would that be okay?'

No verbal reply, but the arm released her and she pressed her face into her thighs. Her black wool trousers carried a faint whiff of mothballs. Mothballs, and it was almost time to put them back in storage. It depressed her, yet another sign of incompetence on her part.

Beneath her, she felt the car make two right turns and a left, then head down a long straight-away marked by frequent intersections, judging by the stops every 100 feet or so, and more frequent potholes. This was probably meaningful information, but Tess had no idea what to do with it. The Oldsmobile also had bad shocks and a few empty cans of Miller Lite rolling around on the floor. Esskay whined at each jolt.

'Look, you've got the ears,' she said. 'Once you take them, there's nothing anyone can do to you. What else are you looking for? What do you want with my dog?'

Gravel Voice said, 'The last thing we need is another fuckin' dog.'

The man next to her shook with suppressed laughter; Tess felt the vibrations where their hips touched. Then the car was quiet, rolling to a stop in what appeared to be a long driveway.

It took a few seconds to stand straight again, once she was out of the car. Tess pretended to be stiffer than she was, which allowed her to steal a glance at the neighborhood as she stretched and stamped her feet as if they had fallen asleep. Large Victorians, set far back from the street, big lawns. Suburban, but not overly so. A block away, she could see the haze of streetlights along a fairly busy street. The traffic sound was constant, and they couldn't have driven more than twenty minutes. Catonsville, only a few miles due west of her parents' house. Either these guys didn't care if Tess knew where she was, or they didn't think she was going to have a chance to tell anyone.

They dragged her into a once-grand house, seedy after what appeared to be many months of vacancy. In the living room, with its high ceilings and old-fashioned chandelier, a man sat in a slightly ramshackle Morris chair, the only furniture in the room, holding a small dog in his lap. Tess didn't recognize the man, but she remembered the