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hollowed-out look beneath the eyes, a long-lived exhaustion. The eyes flickered open for only a moment, then closed again.
    â€œI’m so tired,” she murmured. “Do we have to do this now, Gloria?”
    â€œHe won’t stay long, sweetie.” Sweetie? “He just needs the first part.”
    The first part? Then what was the second?
    â€œBut that’s the hardest part to talk about. Can’t you just tell him and let me be?”
    He needed to assert himself, stop waiting for the introduction that Gloria didn’t seem intent on making.
    â€œI’m Kevin Infante, a detective with Baltimore County homicide.”
    â€œInfante? As in Italian for baby?” Eyes still closed. He needed her to open them, he realized. Until this moment Infante had never considered how vital open eyes were to what he did. Sure, he had thought about eye contact, studied the way that various people used it, knew what it meant when someone couldn’t meet his gaze. But he’d never had a subject sit there—lie there in this case—with eyes closed tight.
    â€œSure,” he said, as if he’d never heard that before, as if two ex-wives hadn’t thrown that back at him time and again.
    Her eyes opened then. They were a particularly vivid blue, kind of wasted on a blonde. A blue-eyed brunette, that was his ideal, the light and the dark, an Irish girl with eyes put in with a dirty finger.
    â€œYou don’t look like a baby,” she said. Her voice, unlike Gloria’s, carried no whiff of flirtation. She wasn’t playing it that way. “It’s funny, for a moment I had this vision of the cartoon character, the giant one who wore the diaper and the little cap.”
    â€œBaby Huey,” he said.
    â€œYes. Was he a duck? Or a chicken? Or was he a baby -baby?”
    â€œA chicken, I think.” Maybe they should get the neurosurgeon into see her. “You told someone you knew about an old murder here in Baltimore County. That’s what I need to talk to you about.”
    â€œIt began in Baltimore County. It ended—actually, I’m not sure where it ended. I’m not sure it ever ended.”
    â€œYou’re saying someone started killing somebody in Baltimore County and finished it elsewhere?”
    â€œI’m not sure—in the end…well, not the end but the part where bad things happened. By then I didn’t know where we were.”
    â€œWhy don’t you just tell me your story and let me figure it out?”
    She turned to Gloria. “Do people—I mean, are we known? Still?”
    â€œIf they were here, they remember,” the old lizard said in a much-gentler-than-usual voice. Was she hot for her? Was that why she was willing to risk taking a case that might not pay? It was hard enough to figure out other men’s taste in women sometimes, much less a woman’s, and Gloria wasn’t sentimental that way in Infante’s experience with her. “Maybe not the name, but the moment they hear the circumstances. But Detective Infante’s not from here.”
    â€œThen what’s the point of speaking to him?” She closed her eyes and settled back on the pillow. Gloria actually gave an embarrassed what-can-I-do shrug. Infante had never seen her so gentle with a client, so solicitous. Gloria took good care of the people she represented, but she insisted on being the boss. Now she was all deferential, motioning him to follow her out into the hall. He shook his head and stood his ground.
    â€œ You tell me,” he said to Gloria.
    â€œIn March 1975 two sisters left their family’s house to go to Security Square Mall. Sunny and Heather Bethany. They were never seen again. And they weren’t not seen again in the sense that police had a hunch what happened but couldn’t prove anything. Not like the Powers case.”
    Powers was shorthand for a decade-old homicide, one in which a young woman had vanished,