Laura Lippman - By A Spider's Thread

"So your father-in-law is closer to you in age than your wife is?"

"Not by so much. I'm twelve years older than Natalie, he's eight years older than I am."

Tess willed herself to have no reaction. "How did you meet anyway?"

"Who?"

"You and Natalie."

"Oh. Well, I had seen her around-Baltimore is small that way, northwest Baltimore smaller still." This was true, Tess knew. Baltimore wasn't so much a metro area of 1 million-plus as it was a dozen small towns that overlapped in various places. "The first time we spoke was in the old Carvel's on Reisterstown Road. She worked behind the counter. I stopped in for a cone, and we got to talking."

"I thought you said she never worked."

"Did I? I mean that she never had a career. She had summer jobs, like any other teenager. Carvel's, babysitting." He shook his head, as if burdened by his memories. "Isaac loved that story. He'd ask us to tell it again and again. I thought that was odd, because boys don't usually care for that kind of detail. But he was very aware of the fact that he would not exist if it weren't for the chance encounter of his parents. It was almost like a suspense story for him. What if we hadn't met? What if we hadn't spoken?"

"Why do you think," Tess said, "that she took them with her? The children, I mean?"

"She's their mother. She loves them."

It was what he had said before, and while it was perfectly reasonable, Tess was not yet convinced it was a complete answer. "Is that the only reason?" He looked bewildered. "Is she trying to get at you? Did she take the children because she knew it would hurt you?"

"Why would she want to hurt me?"

"I don't know." Tess wished she could plug him into the virtual world of the SnoopSisters, whose members would have been happy to enlighten Rubin about the many reasons women want to hurt, or at the very least startle, the men with whom they shared their lives. So many women in relationships had bouts of feeling they had been more colonized than courted, subsumed by a larger, more powerful entity. And when they rebelled, it was nothing short of the Boston Tea Party. Everything-everybody-went overboard.

"You should go home," she said. "Nothing's going to happen, not here, not tonight. I'm going to go toodle around on my laptop, see if I can find a match for Boris Petrovich in the Indiana phone book."

"You won't." Even in his frenzied grief, Mark Rubin retained his irritating, know-it-all quality.

"Well, we'll find out by this time tomorrow if your family is still in French Lick, and maybe that's all we need. I'll call you-" She caught herself. "I'll call you as soon as the Sabbath ends."

"You could call earlier. I think I would be allowed to answer the phone under such circumstances."

"Do you have caller ID?"

"No."

"Then how will you know it's me who's calling? Wait until sundown. Gretchen probably won't get to me much sooner than that anyway."

"And what if my family has left French Lick?"

"Then we're where we were this morning, no different."

"No, it will be worse, because I've had this moment of hope. If I had been here the first time he called…"

"We have a lead. If Gretchen finds out anything significant, she'll stay throughout the weekend, keep digging. That will cost you, though. Her extra expenses are on top of my per diem."

"I told you, money's not an issue."

"Yeah, people always say that-and yet it always is somehow."

Her laptop open on the dining-room table, Tess checked the clock in the upper-right-hand corner-7:15. The dogs looked at her with mournful patience. She could take them for a quick one around the block, then return to work, or finish up and then give them the nice long saunter they had earned after being cooped up all day. It was a beautiful night, dry and cool since the sun had gone down. And it was a clear night, so the stars would be visible overhead.

She started to close her laptop. The search for Petrovich could wait a few hours, although Rubin would probably writhe in anxiety if he knew she was postponing any task, even for a few minutes.

Except… for all his impatience about everything else, Rubin had been so certain she wouldn't find Boris Petrovich/Peters that he didn't care if she tracked him down at all. He had, in fact, seemed determined to keep her from following that one lead, using that fake name. If she hadn't been an English major, Boris Pasternak might have slid right by her.

She sat back down, ignoring the dogs' profound disappointment, and began dropping the two variations of the name into every database she had. Rubin was right about one thing: Petrovich was a common surname. There were a surprising number of Boris Peterses on the planet, too. But by working backward from the property records for Labyrinth Road-for Boris had been on the deed before the divorce, according to the city tax rolls-she was able to find an MVA record, which led to his date of birth.

Bit by bit the information accrued-name, age, last residence, which appeared to be not far from Labyrinth Road, although that house had been sold as well, about thirteen years earlier, and there was no new address and no phone. But he wasn't on the Social Security database, so he was either still alive or not in their system at all. Dead end-until Tess thought of one last search, a place where a man might live without generating much of a paper trail. It wasn't a record that civilians could access easily, but Tess had a back door, thanks to the systems manager at the Beacon-Light .

Tess had paid dearly for this dummy account that allowed her to skim the wide array of online information available to Beacon-Light reporters. The trick was to be judicious with her access, for each search cost money, and profligate users were sometimes flagged in random audits. Tess typed in her user name-Jimmy Cain-and the password, "Indemnity." Given how rapidly management changed at the Beacon-Light , it was entirely plausible that this familiar version of the novelist's name would escape notice even in the event of a wide-scale audit that kicked out everyone. But he had been a Baltimore journalist before he headed out to Hollywood. Tess liked to imagine an assistant city editor staring worriedly at a staff roster and asking his boss, "Hey, who's this Jimmy Cain kid? I don't remember seeing his byline lately." Yes, here was Boris Petrovich at last, with an all-too-permanent address-the Maryland Correctional Institute in Jessup, where he was serving a twenty-year sentence for second-degree murder.

Tess's Uncle Donald winced when he entered the Kibbitz Room at Attman's Delicatessen. The pained expression puzzled Tess. He normally doted on the restaurant, one of two holdouts on the once-thriving block known as Corned Beef Row, and he loved the food. "More than it loves me," he often said, for his doctor despaired when Donald indulged in things like corned beef and Matjes herring.

"Why the long face?" she asked. "It's a beautiful day, you have a pastrami sandwich and a Dr. Brown's celery soda. What more could you want?"

"I feel like I'm visiting a ghost town when I come here," he said, unloading his tray. "Thirty years ago you couldn't move three paces down the sidewalks here on a Saturday. Now you could drive your car along them and not hit anything, except the occasional rat. Corned Beef Row indeed. Don't you need more than two places to make a row? It all just makes me feel old and sad and tired."

"Still, the food is good." Whenever Tess came to Attman's, she wondered why she wasn't there at least once a week. "Best deli in Baltimore, by my lights."

"Which is great if you're a healthy bundle of metabolism like yourself. My blood pressure goes up just looking at this food." He took a mournful bite of pickle.