In Big Trouble

'Did you find Crow?'

'Found him-' She stopped to calculate. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Had so little time really passed? 'Two days ago.'

'And he's fine?'

'More or less.' Probably less than more, what with a corpse in a pool house, an unexplained shotgun under his bed, a missing femme who might be fatale in every sense of the word, and some bad-ass ex-con on the loose who was likely to be miffed about his dead buddy, assuming he wasn't the one who had killed him. Then there was the part about her hormones kicking in at a most inopportune moment, but that was so much more information than Kitty needed.

Tess heard a high-pitched babbling on Kitty's end of the connection. 'Is Laylah there?'

'Yes, Jackie dropped her off. She has a date.'

'Jackie has a date?'

'Dinner with this nice man who was interested in hiring her for a capital campaign for Sinai Hospital. She says it's business, I say you don't wear a backless red dress unless there's some pleasure involved. Wait, Laylah wants to talk to you.'

A brief silence, then Tess heard Laylah's snuffly little breaths as she panted into the phone. Laylah felt that telephone communication was largely telepathic. She just held on tight and thought lovely thoughts, until they flew through the line.

'Hey, Laylah, it's Tesser.'

No response. Laylah knew the piece of plastic that Kitty held to her face wasn't Tesser.

'No, really, it's me. Esskay is here, Laylah. What does Esskay say? What does the doggie say?'

More snuffly breaths. Then, suddenly, clear as a bell: 'Hey, hey, Esskay. Go yo' way. Hey, hey, Esskay.'

It was a fragment of the sausage company's hotdog jingle, the one that Cal Ripken had been pretending to sing all summer long on the Orioles' radio broadcasts. Tess laughed so hard she almost fell off the bed. She was still laughing, and Laylah was still repeating the jingle, very pleased with herself, when Kitty took the phone back.

'She takes after you, Tesser. Your first sentence came from a commercial for pork products, too. ‘More Parks sausages, Mom-please?''

'Bullshit,' Tess said, but she couldn't stop laughing, and her room at La Casita no longer seemed quite so dark. Somewhere, there was a place she knew, a place where people knew her. She'd get back there eventually. She could be there the day after tomorrow if she really wanted. Get in the car right now and drive without stopping. Steal a cat nap somewhere in Tennessee, and pull up to Kitty's bookstore early Tuesday. Part of her longed to do just that.

But she wasn't finished here yet. Finding Crow had proved to be only the beginning. Now she had to save him, too. From what, she wasn't quite sure. His own good intentions, some twisted sense of honor, a trouble much bigger than anyone had anticipated? She rummaged through her bag and her pockets until she found the card Rick Trejo had given her. No answer at his home. On a hunch, she called the office number. He picked up on the first ring.

'Working on a Sunday night?'

'I'm the hardest working man in show business.' And happy to be so, judging by his cheerful, upbeat voice. 'What can I do for you, sweetheart?'

Stop with the stupid endearments for one thing. But it was hard, for some reason, to take offense. The sensible-seeming Kristina put up with Rick Trejo and she was, well, a sweetheart.

'They're not finished with him, are they?'

'Your friend Crow? Not by a long shot. Screwing up the search was a temporary setback. Guzman is a good detective. When he's pissed, he's a great one.'

'Crow couldn't kill anyone.'

'You don't have to convince me, baby. But he knows something. Got any idea what it is?'

'Not a clue.'

'Well, don't hold out on me. That's rule number one. My hunch is that Emmie Sterne is neck-deep in some shit, and he's trying to protect her. Our best-case scenario is that she's the one who stashed the gun under his bed, then called the cops and fingered him.'

'Why would she do that?'

'Because if she killed that guy, she needs a fall guy. And because she is crazy. Big- time, fucked-up, welcome-to-the-snakepit crazy. Of course, a lot of the old-money Anglos in this town are, but I guess she comes by her nut-house shtick legitimately.'

Tess thought of the photos she had seen, and the sad legacy of the Sterne family, where everyone ended up orphaned. Although Gus Sterne had a little boy, according to the book. Clay, a year younger than Emmie. He had beaten the family curse, made it to adulthood with his parents alive.

'I don't think Crow would stand by if he thought Emmie was a cold-blooded killer. Only she knows what she's up to.'

'Or where she is,' Rick pointed out.

'Hire me,' Tess said. 'I'll find her. I'll go back to her godmother, for one thing, and find out why she was so determined to mislead me-sending me to the wrong place to find the band, glossing over the family history.'

'You're not licensed to work in this state.'

'There's got to be a way around that.'

'Yeah. You could work for free. After all, my client is officially indigent.'

'His parents have money.'

'He says if I call his parents, he'll find someone else to be his lawyer. And, baby, I want this case. Trust me, they can come into court with a video of Mr. Ransome offing Tom Darden, and I can get a jury to let him walk.'

'I thought the goal was to keep Crow from being charged at all.'

'The goal is to win. I'll take it in the early innings or in the bottom of the ninth, with bases loaded, two men out. If you think finding Emmie Sterne is going to help, you go for it. But bear in mind, it could hurt, too. We could end up with two coconspirators pointing fingers at each other, with the race on to see who can cut the fastest deal with the DA. Ever think about that?'

'It doesn't make any sense,' Tess insisted. 'There's no reason for Emmie Sterne to kill Darden. Guzman told me he thought he could link Darden and Weeks to the murders, but he never told the families that he was working that angle.'

'I know, I know,' Trejo said. 'I talked to him, too. I can't decide if this helps us or hurts us. Then again, anything we don't know can hurt us. I tried to impress that fact upon Crow when I caught up with him later today. He swore he was telling me everything he knew.'

'And?'

'He lies pretty well, but not well enough. Sometimes I wonder if I'm ever going to have a client that starts off telling me the truth. Probably not. Even the criminal attorneys who represent the white boys in white collars probably have to listen to a lot of lies in the beginning.'

'Probably.'

There was a moment of silence on the line, as Tess and Rick were lost in their own abstract musings-he on his class of clientele, no doubt, she on Crow's loyalty. One of his greatest strengths, but strengths could become weaknesses. Why was he so insistent on protecting Emmie? Why was he upset when he couldn't find her in the Alamo?

Time was a factor, and not because some record producer was coming to town. All I needed was a week. What could happen in seven days? God could create the world and take a day off. An ordinary mortal could work forty hours, get shit-faced and still have a day left to recover. Personally, she had gone through a complete set of days-of-the-week underwear and done a wash. Anything could happen. Everything could happen.

'So where do we start?' she asked Rick.

'Darden's buddy, Laylan Weeks, is out there, somewhere. I've got an old client in town who might have some ideas about where to find him. I say we go looking for him. You can look for our crazy little lead singer on your own time. Man, I wouldn't mind being her lawyer. The baby found at the scene of the city's most famous unsolved