SUNDAY
1

Tess, do you know who the Baltimore Four were?"

It took Tess Monaghan a moment to surface from her own thoughts, but she eventually came up for air, leaving behind the various newspaper articles and computer printouts strewn across her dining room table—and rug and hallway and breakfront—in seemingly random stacks that were actually quite methodical. She had tried to confine this project to her office, but with the presentation now just twenty-four hours away, such compartmentalization had to be sacrificed. The future of Keyes Investigations Inc., the lofty-sounding name that encompassed exactly one employee—three if you included the dogs, who accompanied her to the office every day—was riding on this assignment.

"I should hope so," she told her boyfriend, Crow, who had found a corner of the dining room table large enough to hold a bowl of cereal and the New York Times acrostic, which he was working between bites with his usual infuriating nonchalance. "Any native Baltimorean who doesn't should have his or her birth certificate revoked."

"Well, it's not like they were super famous, not as famous as the guys who came after. And it was before you were born."

"My father didn't neglect my education in key areas, I'm happy to say."

"Your dad didn't know either. I asked him the other day at work, and he said it sounded familiar, but it didn't make much of an impression on him."

"Didn't make much of an impression?" Tess, who had been on her hands and knees, the better to crawl through her paper labyrinth, rocked back on her heels. "It was only one of the transforming events of his life."

"Wasn't he already married when the Vietnam draft started?"

"What are you talking about?"

"What are you talking about?"

"The Baltimore Four—Palmer, McNally, Cuellar, and Dobson, the four Oriole pitchers who had at least twenty wins in the regular season in 1971."

Crow laughed in his easy way, a laugh that excused her ignorance—and his. "I'm talking about four antiwar activists who poured blood on records at the U.S. Customs House in 1967, sort of a runup to the Catonsville Nine. Philip Berrigan—Berrigan, Lewis, Mengel, and Eberhardt. I heard about them when I was making my rounds at the soup kitchens last week."

Tess was staring at a photograph of a dark-eyed, dark-haired man. "You and that do-gooder crowd. Just remember, no good deed—"

"Goes unpunished. Jesus, Tess, you'd probably have mocked Gandhi if you met him."

"Not to his face."

"Anyway, I think they were pretty cool. Berrigan and that group. Can you imagine someone pouring blood on records today?"

"Yes. And I can imagine that person being detained at Guantánamo without legal counsel, so don't get any ideas."

Tess returned to sorting her papers, only to find her shoulder-length hair falling in her face. It was an impossible length—not quite long enough for the single braid she was trying to coax back into being after an untimely haircut, but too long to be allowed to swing free. She fashioned stubby pigtails on either side of her head, securing them with rubber bands, and went back to work.

"Hey, you look like Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters," Crow said approvingly. "Circa 1999. You going to wear your hair like that tomorrow?"

"It's a thought." An amusing one, actually: Tess as her authentic self, in her favorite sweats, henley shirt, and ad hoc hairstyle, standing in front of the buttoned-down types that had infiltrated the local newspaper. But at the prices the Beacon-Light editors were paying, they expected and deserved the bogus Tess—hair slicked behind her ears into some semblance of order, a suit, real shoes with heels, which Tess actually liked, as they made her almost six feet tall. "I can't believe they want a PowerPoint for this thing. I'd rather spend the afternoon at Kinko's, photocopying twenty-five sets of every package, instead of fighting with my scanner to load all these images."

Copyright © 2006 by Laura Lippman.