Laura Lippman - Butchers Hill

"Sure," Jackie said. She undid the ribbon and lifted a heart-shaped locket from a nest of cotton, a locket that Tess remembered well. She was surprised that Beale would part with it. But then, Beale never stopped surprising her. He had refused to sue the state, settling for a pardon. If she tried to speak to him now of what had happened that night, he said it wasn't important, the past was the past, he was too busy thinking about the future. Where should Sal go to college, for example? He had heard Princeton was nice, but he worried he should be closer to home. St. John's in Annapolis? Johns Hopkins?

"Open it," Sal urged. "It's got a little catch on the side. I'll show you how."

The photo inside was of a boy, his mouth slightly open, his eyes large and bright. The tiny heart shape had been cut from a color photo, grainy and overexposed, but it was still possible to see the joy in his eyes. Perhaps it had been Christmas, or his birthday. Perhaps it had been nothing more than a trip to McDonald's. It took so little to make a child happy. It took so much.

"It's her brother, Donnie," Sal said. "Well, half-brother, I guess. His aunt had some photos, and she let us have one. So one day, when Laylah's older, you can tell her how she had a brother and he was a pretty good kid."

Jackie thanked Sal, tears in her eyes, passing the locket to Tess, who couldn't help wondering how anyone could tell the story of what had happened on Butchers Hill. Where to begin? The night Luther Beale had gone into the street with his gun, the day he had come into her office? Did it begin the day Chase Pearson became a social worker, or on the day Donnie Moore was born? Or the day Luther Beale was born, ornery and resolute, his destiny hurtling him toward a tragic confrontation and a nickname he still couldn't shake? The Butcher of Butchers Hill. Where did anything begin?

Once upon a time, you had a brother, his name was Donnie Moore and he was a pretty good kid .

There were worse ways to be remembered.

LAURA LIPPMANwas a newspaper reporter at the Baltimore Sun for fifteen years. Her Tess Monaghan novels- Baltimore Blues, Charm City, Butchers Hill, In Big Trouble, The Sugar House , and The Last Place -have won the Edgar, Agatha, Shamus, Anthony and Nero Wolfe awards, and her novel, In a Strange City , was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her latest standalone crime novel, Every Secret Thing , was published by William Morrow in September 2003.