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over the pile of burgundy panties. This time two pairs fell into her open briefcase.
    Tess blinked in shock. Her aunt’s cautionary words echoed in her mind. The underwear must have fallen on the floor. Or Ava was using her briefcase as a shopping basket and planned to pay for everything when she was finished.
    She couldn’t be a thief.
    Ava walked to a table full of camisoles and repeated the same trick. Touch, recoil, brush—into the briefcase! By Tess’s count Ava now had two pairs of panties, burgundy, and three emerald green camisoles. A salesclerk approached her as she fingered the lace on a nightgown, and Ava threw her right hand up, a friendly but stern warning. “Just looking,” she pantomimed and quickly left the store. No one stopped her.
    Ava the shoplifter . She might be having a breakdown, Tessthought. Ava the kleptomaniac . It could explain her strange behavior toward Rock. But was shoplifting the problem or the symptom? And if it was the problem, how did it account for the late hours and the canceled vacation? Was she part of some odd ring, or a bored lawyer, boosting to make her lunch hour fun?
    Rock wouldn’t care. He would be content with this bit of information, almost desperate for it. Tess wasn’t. Instinctively she knew it was one piece of a puzzle, a key to a door she hadn’t found yet. A single fact was like an unripe avocado, something whose time could not be rushed. You rolled it in flour and you waited.
    Lost in this thought, Tess didn’t notice that Ava had moved on. By the time she spotted her, she was a floor below, getting off the escalator. Tess tried to follow quickly, but the escalator was stacked with carefree tourists, the kind of people who don’t stand to one side because they assume everyone is on vacation. Unless she wanted to send bodies flying, she had to wait her turn to travel the ten feet of ribbed rubber Ava had already crossed.
    By the time Tess reached the first floor, Ava had disappeared. Tess thought she saw her toward the rear of the building, where the shops ended and the hotel lobby began. But there was no flash of crimson or pearly gray, no briefcase overflowing with green camisoles and burgundy panties, no dark hair.
    Ava was gone.
    Tess ran outside, thinking she might still catch her. Perhaps she was heading back to the office to stick death certificates in the files of asbestos victims or turn away another grieving relative. Or maybe she had stopped by the small amphitheater across the street, where jugglers and fire-eaters performed in the warm-weather months. But when Tess worked her way through the semicircle of gawking tourists, there was no performer at all, just an old man sleeping on the hot sidewalk.
    “Do you think he’s dead?” a woman asked no one in particular.
    Disgusted, Tess yanked the Gabor wig from her head, exposing her own matted, sweat-flattened hair. Three Scandinavian students mistook this for the opening flourish of a street performer’s act and threw a dollar bill at her, applauding wildly.
    “What do you think this is, some G-rated version of the Block?” Tess asked. “Or my performance-art tribute to Blaze Starr?”
    The students clapped and shouted something that appeared to be “More, more, more” in their native tongue.
    Tess dangled the wig in her hand and looked at the dollar bill on the pavement. The trio of blondes, their faces red with sunburn, stared at her hopefully. She started to throw the bill back, then thought better of it. She had given her last dollar to the old woman on the bench. This, with the change in her pocket, would buy a cup of Thrasher’s fries. Twirling the wig, Tess pocketed the money, blew her Scandinavian admirers a kiss, and ran to the food stands. Surveillance could wait.
    It was lunchtime.

Chapter 4
    F or eighteen years Tess’s Uncle Donald had been a moving target in the state government, jumping from do-nothing job to do-nothing job just ahead of the legislators who tried to sack him in