revenge-surely it was Calvin Bayard who was the wronged party here. And what did that have to do with Marcus Whitby-aside from his interest in Kylie Ballantine?

The crane dropped its load. The sound didn’t reach me over the traffic noise along the bridge, but the end of the show galvanized me back into motion. At the corner of Damen, a drunk was panhandling. I gave him the quarter I’d gotten on Wells Street. He wasn’t grateful-these days a quarter is a pathetic handout.

Tessa’s truck was in the parking lot. When I passed the door to her studio, I stopped for a moment to watch. She was working weekends to finish a commissioned piece for a Cincinnati park, highly polished chunks of chrome that made you want to touch and slide on them. Despite the cool day, she had the heat turned off and was working in a tank top and shorts under her protective apron, her beaded hair pulled back under a hard hat.

I’ve learned not to interrupt her when she’s got her blowtorch going full blast, but when she saw me in the doorway she turned off the flame and came over to me, removing her hard hat and flipping her protective eye shield up over her head. “Are you still full of germs? How far away do I have to stand from you?”

“Keep burning your blowtorch under your nose; it’ll kill any viruses.” She laughed and came over to the door. “How many people have you given your office keys to lately, Warshawski?”

“Just one-a young economics Ph.D. who’s doing a little work for me.” “Some men were here yesterday and again this morning who didn’t seem to have any trouble with your front door. What’s going on?”

So much for trying to operate without the fear that leads detectives to unacceptable levels of nerviness. “They think I’m hiding an Arab terrorist.” “If you are, keep him buried until these guys lay off they’re a thoroughly mean-spirited bunch. If I didn’t have to finish `Children at Play’ this week, I’d take a hike, too-they make me nervous. These are what-federal agents? You know, my mother’s family was from Cameron, Mississippi. My grandparents had to run away in the middle of the night when the local sheriff led a group in burning down their house because it was in a spot where some local white muckety-muck wanted to build. I am not crazy about citizens having to stand helplessly by while the law takes over their homes.”

“Me, neither, but I don’t know what to do about it at this point. They keep waving that damned Patriot bill in my face.”

“Bastards!” She took me to a glassed-in cubicle at the back of her studio. She sat at a drawing board and began sketching rapidly with charcoal. In a minute, she had drawn four faces, two each on two separate sheets of newsprint. They were the same two men, dressed in service overalls in the first picture, in suits in the second. One of them was the man who’d insisted on searching my apartment last night.