Laura Lippman Read Online Free PDF Page B

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, maybeHenry 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

    “H OLIDAYS IN B ALTIMORE DON’T END ,” C ROW 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