The Hollow Hours: Old Wounds

Maren Holt set her coffee on the counter and picked up the phone she kept specifically for people she did not want to have her real number. The device was a TracFone she had purchased at a Walgreens on Western Avenue two winters back, and it had made exactly seven calls in its lifetime, all of them to sources who had since stopped returning them.

She dialed from memory. The line rang once. Twice.

Becca Stein stood in the doorway of the small kitchen, her shoulder against the frame, her arms folded across the front of a coat she had not taken off since she came in from the cold. She had been watching Maren decide to make this call for the better part of an hour. She had not once offered advice, which was the kind of restraint Maren had come to admire in her, and the kind she had also come to distrust.

"Holt," said the voice on the other end, before the third ring finished. "You got a death wish, or you got information for me?"

That was Ray Borelli. He had not changed in seven years, which was not a compliment.

"Information," Maren said. "And maybe a question or two of my own. Can you do the Billy Goat at six?"

A pause. Somewhere on Borelli's end of the line, Becca could hear the muffled noise of a squad room, a chair rolling, somebody laughing at a joke she could not quite make out. Then Borelli said, "The Goat. Where you and me used to drink after we ran in Dago's crew off the Kennedy."

"That was the one."

"You know what happened the last time we drank there, Holt."

"I remember."

"You got fired off the unit for beating the brakes off a Latin King who told you where a body was. A body we never dug up, because it turned out he made the whole thing up to get you to stop hitting him." His voice was gravel and patience, the kind of voice that had been used to reading suspects their rights so many times the words had worn smooth. "You remember that, or do I need to refresh you?"

"I remember every case I ever worked, Ray. Every one."

Another pause. Longer this time. Becca watched Maren's thumb move across the lip of her coffee mug in a slow circle, the kind of self-soothing gesture that Becca recognized because she did it herself and hated it in others.

"Holt," Borelli said, finally. "You got something real, or you got something you think is real and want me to tell you you're not crazy?"

"I got something real."

"How real?"

"Real enough that I'm not going to say it on this line."

"Jesus Christ." A breath. A sigh that sounded like a man setting down something heavy. "Six o'clock. Buy your own burger. I'm not buying for somebody who got herself bounced off the unit."

He hung up. Maren set the phone on the counter and looked at Becca for the first time since she had dialed.

"Well," Becca said.

"Well," Maren agreed.

Becca pushed off the doorframe and walked to the window. Outside, a late autumn wind was moving through the alley behind Maren's apartment building, pushing a candy wrapper along the concrete in small jerks. The light had the flat gray quality of a Chicago afternoon that had decided, without consulting anyone, to give up on being anything other than cold.

"You sure about him?" Becca asked.

"I was sure about him seven years ago," Maren said. "That was the last time I was sure about him."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I got."

Maren picked up her coffee and took a sip that Becca could see was not really about drinking. Maren's eyes were somewhere else, somewhere seven years gone, in the back room of a bar on Michigan Avenue where the walls were covered in newspaper clippings and the floor smelled of beer and Pine-Sol. The Billy Goat. The place where she had once been somebody on the police beat who might have had a future, before she had decided, in a single ten-minute span she could still play back in her head with clinical precision, that a man named Ruiz was going to tell her where a thirteen-year-old girl was buried, or else.

Ruiz had told her. She had believed him. She had gone to Borelli with the location. Borelli had taken a backhoe out to a vacant lot on the Southwest Side, and they had dug until the backhoe hit a sewer line, and there had been no body. Just the smell of old earth and the look on Borelli's face when he came back to the car, which was the look a man wears when he has just realized that his partner is the kind of partner who gets people killed.

Becca turned from the window. "You going to tell him what we have?"

"No," Maren said. "I'm going to find out if he is still the same Ray Borelli I remember, or if the city has finished turning him into somebody else. There is a difference."

"And if he's somebody else?"

"Then I buy my own burger, drink my own beer, and figure out who else in this town might still owe me a favor from before I became a person nobody returned calls to." Maren set the mug down with a small ceramic click against the counter. "Get your coat. We're going to be early, and I want to sit where I can see the door."

Becca did not move yet. She looked at Maren for a long moment, the way you look at a person when you are trying to decide whether the thing you are about to do together is the kind of thing you will be proud of in a year, or the kind you will wish you had never started. She thought about Selena Vance. She thought about the photograph in the folder under the loose floorboard in her own apartment, the one she had promised herself she would not look at again until she had something to look at it with.

She thought about the name Frank Dellacroix, and the way the name felt in her mouth, like the taste of a coin you have held too long.

She picked up her coat from the back of the kitchen chair, where she had hung it an hour ago when she had first come in, and she put it back on.

They did not speak on the walk to the car. Maren drove. Becca sat in the passenger seat and watched the city slide past the window in long smears of brown brick and sodium light, the L trains clattering past on their overhead tracks every few blocks, throwing shadows that moved across their laps like the hands of a clock she did not want to read. The radio was off. Maren did not play music when she was thinking, and Becca had learned, in the weeks they had been working this thing together, that the silence between them was not the kind of silence you were supposed to fill. It was the kind that was doing work.

The Billy Goat Tavern sat on Lower Michigan Avenue the way it had sat since 1934, wedged into a strip of storefronts that had survived three recessions, two fires, and the entire thirty-year run of a Saturday Night Live sketch that had nothing to do with the place and everything to do with the country's idea of Chicago reporters drinking doubles. The neon sign out front read BILLY GOAT in green letters, one of which had been out for as long as Becca had been alive. The windows were steamed over. Through the glass she could see the shapes of people standing at the bar, the long cherry wood, the cash register up on a raised platform where the old Greek who used to run the place used to bark the tab at you like an insult.

Maren parked in a garage two blocks south. She did not park directly in front. That was a habit from her years working vice, when the people she was buying drinks with were also the people she was trying not to be seen buying drinks with. Becca wondered, sometimes, how much of who Maren was now was who she had been then, and how much of it was who she had been forced to become after.

They walked the last two blocks in the cold. Becca could feel the lake wind coming off the river, picking at the cuffs of her coat, finding the places where the stitching had come loose at the shoulders. She did not button up. Buttoning up felt like giving in.

Maren pushed through the entrance and held the door for her with one hand, the way a man holds a door, without looking. The warmth inside hit them both at once, a wall of fried grease and old beer and the particular smell of a place that had been mopped with the same brand of solution for sixty years. Becca's glasses fogged. She took them off and cleaned them on the hem of her coat, and when she put them back on, the room came into focus in pieces, the bar, the booths, the long mural of newspaper headlines along the back wall, and there, in the second booth from the corner, with his back against the brick and a beer he had not yet touched sweating a ring onto the wood in front of him, sat Ray Borelli.

He was older. Of course he was older. Seven years had done what seven years do to a man who had spent twenty of them working nights in Chicago, which is to say, they had not been gentle. His hair had gone the color of iron filings. The lines around his mouth had set into something that was not quite a smile and not quite a grimace, but some third thing in between, the expression of a man who had stopped expecting things to go well and started expecting them to go, which was different. He was wearing a charcoal suit that fit him the way off-the-rack suits fit cops who buy them once every four years. His tie was loosened. His eyes found Maren the moment she came through the door, and stayed there.

Maren stopped just past the entrance. She did not move toward him. She stood with her hands in the pockets of her coat, and Becca watched her take one breath, and then another, and then a third, and Becca understood, in that moment, that what Maren was doing was not gathering courage. Maren did not need courage. What she was doing was putting something down. Some piece of herself she had been carrying for seven years, the way you set a suitcase on a bench at the airport before you decide whether to check it or carry it on.

Maren took her hands out of her pockets. She crossed the room. Borelli stood up. They were the same height, almost exactly. Becca watched them look at each other across the small wooden table, and she thought, this is what it looks like when two people who used to trust each other are deciding whether they still do.

"Sit down, Holt," Borelli said. "You look like you're about to throw up, and I don't want to have to fill out the paperwork."

Maren sat down. Becca slid into the booth beside her, and Borelli looked at Becca with the patient appraisal of a man who had been told there would be two of them and was deciding whether to be annoyed about it.

"And who's this?"

"Becca Stein," Maren said. "She works with me."

"On what?"

"On the thing I came to talk to you about."

Borelli sat back against the booth. He picked up his beer, took a long pull, set it down, and said, "Order your drinks. I'm only going to say this once."

Becca flagged down the bartender, a thin man with a shaved head and a face that suggested he had been startled once too often and had decided to make it his permanent expression. She ordered a bourbon, neat, because that was what detectives drank in every movie she had ever seen, and because the alternative was admitting she had no idea what to drink in a place like this. Maren ordered the same. Borelli did not look at her when she ordered, but Becca noticed his hand shift on his beer, a small movement, almost involuntary, the kind of tell that poker players spent decades trying to eliminate. He was calculating whether Becca was going to be a problem or a witness, and he had not yet decided which.

The drinks arrived. Becca wrapped her hand around the glass and felt the warmth of it first, then the cool edge of the rim, then the smell, which was sharper than she had expected, like woodsmoke and something almost sweet. She did not drink it yet. She watched Maren pick hers up and take a small sip without flinching, which told Becca something important about how many bars Maren had sat in over the past seven years, and about how many of them had been like this one.

"You look good, Holt," Borelli said. It was not a compliment. It was a measurement.

"I look tired," Maren said.

"You look tired. You also look good. Those are not mutually exclusive." He took another pull of his beer. "You eating enough?"

"Ray."

"I'm asking."

"I'm here to ask you questions, not answer them."

Borelli set his beer down. The glass hit the wood with a sound that was not quite a thud and not quite a click, somewhere in between, the way a man who had learned to control his own strength would set something down. "All right," he said. "Ask."

Becca pulled her phone out of her pocket and set it on the table, screen down. She did not press record. She wanted to see whether Borelli would notice, and whether noticing would change what he said. He noticed. He did not comment. The fact that he did not comment told her he had already decided what he was going to say, and that he was, in his own way, choosing to say it.

Maren laced her fingers around her glass. "The Vance loft," she said. "Nine years ago. Selena Vance. The scene was never processed as a homicide."

"No," Borelli said. "It wasn't."

"You were the lead."

"I was the lead on a lot of things in '14."

"You were the lead on this one. And you never collected the loft for prints. You never canvassed the neighbors above and below. You never pulled the elevator security footage for the forty-eight hours before the body was found. You never interviewed the doorman a second time. You filed it as a probable suicide, consistent with the decedent's known history, and you closed it in eleven days."

Borelli did not interrupt her. He sat with his forearms on the table, hands loose around his beer, and he listened with the stillness of a man who had been accused before and had learned that interrupting only prolonged the accusation. When Maren finished, he exhaled through his nose, a short sound, almost a laugh.

"Known history," he said. "Where'd you get that phrase? Out of a file?"

"Out of the file," Maren said. "Which you should not have shown me."

"I didn't show you anything. You stood in my doorway and asked questions until I got tired of saying no."

"I asked three questions."

"You asked three questions forty different ways, Holt. That's a talent. It was always a talent." He picked up his beer. Drank. Set it down. "All right. The Vance loft. What do you want to know that isn't in the file?"

"Why you closed it."

"I didn't close it."

"You signed the closure."

"I signed the paperwork. The case was closed by the deputy chief's office before I ever set foot in that loft with a kit."

Becca felt the sentence land in the booth like a third person had sat down. Maren's face did not change, but her thumb, the one wrapped around the glass, went pale at the edge, the blood retreating as her grip tightened. Borelli saw it too. He looked away, out toward the bar, where a man in a Bears jersey was trying to get the bartender's attention with a wave that suggested he had been trying for some time.

"Dellacroix," Maren said.

"I didn't say a name."

"You didn't have to."

Borelli was quiet for a long time. The jukebox in the corner, which had been playing something with a pedal steel and a female voice, cycled into a song that Becca did not recognize but that sounded, to her ear, like a man apologizing to a woman who was no longer in the room. Borelli's jaw worked. He was chewing something that was not food.

"The call came in on a Tuesday," he said. "I was in my office. I had just come off a triple homicide in Englewood that had kept me up for thirty-six hours. I was sitting there with my boots still on, and my phone rang, and it was Frank Dellacroix." He paused. "You've heard the voice. You know what it sounds like on a phone at seven in the morning when you haven't slept."

"I know what it sounds like," Maren said.

"He told me there had been a death at the Vance residence on Lake Shore Drive. He told me the decedent was Selena Vance. He told me she had a long history of depression, that she had attempted twice before, and that the family was requesting that the matter be handled with discretion and with respect for the family's privacy during what was obviously a difficult time." Borelli stopped. He looked down at his hands. "He told me that the family would of course cooperate in any way necessary, but that he was confident, given the history, that this was what it appeared to be."

"And you believed him," Maren said. There was no judgment in her voice. There was something worse than judgment. There was understanding.

"I wanted to believe him. There's a difference. I was tired. I was coming off a triple that I had closed clean, and I wanted one that was going to be what it looked like. I wanted a Tuesday." He drank again. The beer was almost gone. He did not signal for another. "I got in a car. I went to the loft. The body was where he said it would be. The scene looked the way he said it would look. There was a note."

"There was no note," Maren said.

"There was a note. There was a note on the bedside table, in her handwriting, that said she was sorry, and that she couldn't do it anymore, and that she loved her family. I read it. I put it in an evidence bag. I logged it in. And then Frank Dellacroix called my lieutenant, and my lieutenant called me, and I was told that the note had been reviewed by the family and by their counsel and that it was not to be released as part of any public filing, that it was a private communication, and that the Vance family would be making a statement through their representatives."

"And the note disappeared," Maren said.

"I don't know that the note disappeared."

"Ray."

"I know that the note was never introduced into evidence. I know that it was logged in and that when the file was closed it was not in the file. I know that I asked about it, and I was told that the matter had been handled. I know that I did not pursue it further, because I was told, by a man who was not my lieutenant and not my chief but who spoke as if he were both, that pursuing it further would be a waste of the department's time."

Borelli stopped talking. He sat very still. His eyes were focused on a point somewhere past Becca's shoulder, and Becca understood, watching him, that he was looking at the inside of a memory he had not opened in a long time and that the air in it was not good.

Maren waited. Becca waited. The bartender walked past and asked if they wanted anything else and Borelli waved him off without looking at him.

"I made a mistake," Borelli said. His voice was quieter than it had been at any point in the conversation, and rougher, and Becca thought that this was what his voice sounded like when it was not being used as a tool. "I made a mistake. I walked into that loft and I let a man who was not a cop tell me what I was going to find before I found it. I let a name and an address and a phone call dictate how I did my job. And when I caught the edge of it, when something didn't sit right, I didn't push. Because pushing would have made my life difficult. Because pushing would have put me in a room with a man I did not want to be in a room with. Because I had a daughter in grammar school and a mortgage on a house in Mount Greenwood and a wife who needed me home on the weekends, and I made a decision about what kind of cop I was going to be on a Tuesday morning in March, and I have been living with it ever since."

The jukebox clicked over to silence between songs. In the gap, Becca could hear the ice settling in the bucket at the bar, and the hiss of the draft lines, and somewhere in the back a dish clattering into a sink. She could smell the bourbon in her own glass, untouched, and beneath it the stale-beer-and-cedar smell of the booth itself.

Maren reached across the table and put her hand on Borelli's wrist. She did not squeeze. She just laid it there, lightly, the way you lay a hand on something you are not sure you have the right to touch. Borelli did not pull away. He looked down at her hand, then up at her face, and something in his expression shifted, a small fracture in the cynicism that Becca had mistaken, at first, for indifference.

"That's why you're here," he said. It was not a question.

"Yes," Maren said.

"And that's why you brought the kid." He nodded at Becca without looking at her.

"Becca," Becca said.

"Becca," Borelli repeated, as if testing whether the name would fit in his mouth. It did not quite. "She's recording."

"I know," Maren said.

"You're going to use this."

"I haven't decided what I'm going to use."

"You've decided. You decided before you walked in the door. You decided when you got on a plane." He pulled his wrist out from under Maren's hand, gently, the way you pull a paper off a surface you don't want to damage. "I don't care. Use it. I have said what I have said, and I will say it again, in a room, under oath, if that's what it takes. I rushed the Vance case. I was told to rush the Vance case, by a man who had no authority to tell me to rush it, and I let him, because it was easier than not. And if you are trying to find out what happened to Selena Vance, then you are going to have to go through Frank Dellacroix, and you are going to have to go through Richard Vance, and I am telling you, as someone who has done this for twenty years and who has seen what those people do to people who get in their way, that you should think very carefully about whether that is a road you want to walk down."

Becca picked up her bourbon and drank it in one go. It burned on the way down, and then it didn't, and then it did again, and she set the glass on the table and felt the warmth of it move through her chest like a small, slow flame.

She pressed record on her phone. Borelli saw her do it this time, and he nodded, once, and the nod meant something, and Becca would spend a long time afterward trying to decide exactly what it meant, and never quite succeeding.

The bar had grown quieter, or maybe Becca's hearing had narrowed, the way it does when the body decides everything outside the current conversation is no longer relevant. The hum of the ceiling fans, the clink of distant glassware, the low murmur from the back corner where two men in Bears jackets argued about the bullpen, all of it receded to a soft static beneath Borelli's voice.

Borelli leaned back in his chair. The wood creaked under him, a small sound that seemed to satisfy something in him, the way old men settle into old furniture. He looked at his own hands, turned them over once, then set them flat on the table.

"Alderman Solomon Pratt," he said.

The name landed in Becca's chest like a stone dropped into still water. She didn't move. Maren, beside her, went very still in the way that meant she was listening with her whole body.

"Pratt has held the forty-second ward seat for nineteen years," Borelli continued. "He was first appointed to fill a vacancy, then he won the election, then he won it again, then he won it again. He has never lost. He has never been seriously challenged. His name appears on every permit, every zoning variance, every block-level grant that passes through that office, and his name appears on a great many things that do not pass through any office at all."

He paused. The fan overhead turned, and the light shifted, and the shadows on his face rearranged themselves into something older and more tired.

"Richard Vance built his first tower in 1986," Borelli said. "A residential high-rise on what was then a vacant lot in the West Loop. The permits were pulled in eleven days. Eleven days. In this city, a permit for a backyard deck takes longer than that. The inspector who signed off was a man named Gerald Fisk, who retired three months after the building opened and moved to a house in Longboat Key that I have personally seen the property records for and that a detective with a grade-school education could not afford on a grade-school salary and a detective's pension. I am not telling you anything I could not tell a grand jury. I am telling you what a grand jury would do with it, which is nothing, because Gerald Fisk is not the story. Gerald Fisk is a line item."

Borelli's voice had gone flat, the way it does when a man has said a thing many times and is no longer interested in how it sounds.

"Solomon Pratt is the story. Pratt sits on the zoning committee. Pratt sits on the contract compliance committee. Pratt sits on the committee that awards the city's affordable housing tax credits, and in the year that Vance Holdings received the largest single allocation of those credits in the history of the program, Pratt received a donation to his campaign fund from a limited liability company registered in Delaware, and the LLC's only asset was a condominium in the building that received the credits. The condominium was not, as far as anyone has ever been able to prove, ever occupied. It exists on paper. It exists as a transaction."

He stopped. He looked at Becca, and then at Maren, and the look was the look of a man who has set a match to something and is now waiting to see which way the wind blows.

"Aldermanic protection," he said, "is the polite word for it. The other word is a firewall. Pratt has been a firewall for Vance for two decades. Every complaint that has ever been filed against a Vance property, every worker who has ever tried to organize, every inspector who has ever raised a flag, every reporter who has ever gotten close, all of it stops at Pratt's office. It does not proceed. It does not surface. It is received, and it is filed, and it is never heard from again."

Maren shifted in her seat. The leather of her jacket made a small sound against the chair back. "And you think Selena's case goes through the same channel."

"I don't think it," Borelli said. "I know it. When the case was closed in 2003, the file went to the prosecutor's office for review. It did not arrive. When I requested it last month, I was told it had been purged under a records-retention schedule that, as far as I can determine, no other missing persons file from that year has ever been purged under. I requested the case notes from the original investigators. I was told they had been lost in a server migration in 2009. The server migration in question was described in a memo that I could not find a copy of, despite the fact that memos of that kind are supposed to be archived for the life of the building they reference. The building is still standing. The memo is not."

He picked up his glass. There was nothing in it. He set it down.

"I have spent twenty years in this department," he said. "I have buried cases. I have helped bury cases. I have been the man at the meeting who said the quiet part out loud, and I have been the man at the meeting who didn't, and I have been the man who was not invited to the meeting at all but who understood, from the silence that followed, what had been decided in the room he had not been allowed to enter. I am not telling you that the Chicago Police Department is corrupt. I am telling you that the Chicago Police Department is a place where corruption can take a very long nap, and when it wakes up, it does so because someone has decided it is time for it to wake up."

Maren's hand was on the table, near the recorder, not touching it. Her fingers were very still.

"Who decided," she said.

Borelli looked at her for a long time.

"Ma'am," he said, "I have told you what I can tell you. I have told you what I will say under oath. I have not told you who decided, because I do not know who decided, and because knowing and not knowing are different things, and because there is a difference between a detective who can follow a thread and a detective who can survive following it."

He pushed his chair back. The legs scraped against the floor, and the sound cut through the soft murmur of the bar like a knife through cloth.

"I am not a brave man," he said. "I want you to understand that. I am a man who has done what he was told, and a man who has not done what he was not told to do, and a man who has, on more than one occasion, looked the other way when looking would have been easier than looking away. I am telling you what happened with the Selena Vance file, and I am telling you it was wrong, and I am telling you that if you take what I have said and try to make it into a story, the story will not end well for you, because the story does not end well for anyone who tries to make it."

He stood. He was shorter than Becca had expected, or maybe the chair had made him look taller, or maybe she had been imagining him as the kind of man who filled rooms, and he was, in fact, the kind of man who stood in them quietly and let the room do what it wanted.

"Ray," Maren said.

He stopped. He did not turn all the way around. He turned enough.

"The alderman," she said. "Pratt. Is he the reason the case won't move?"

Borelli was quiet for three heartbeats. Becca counted them.

"Ma'am," he said, "the case won't move because the case is not supposed to move. The case is supposed to remain where it was placed. The case is a brick in a wall, and the wall is load-bearing, and the wall holds up a great many things that would not be standing if the brick were removed. I cannot tell you who placed the brick. I can tell you the wall is standing. I can tell you that if you start pulling at the brick, you are going to find out what the wall is holding up, and you are going to wish you had not."

He turned then, all the way around, and he looked at Becca.

"Miss Stein," he said.

Becca's breath caught. She hadn't told him her name. She looked at Maren. Maren was watching Borelli with the flat, patient expression of a woman who has been recognized and is waiting to see what comes next.

"Miss Stein," Borelli said again. "The podcast. 'Cold File.' I have listened. I have listened to all of it. I listened on the drive down from Wisconsin, and I listened at the motel last night, and I have a folder in my car that I have been carrying for three weeks because I could not decide what to do with it."

He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a manila folder, the kind that has survived several decades of being filed and re-filed. It was soft at the corners. It had been opened many times.

"I am giving this to you," he said, "because I have carried it long enough."

He set it on the table. The sound it made against the wood was very small.

"I am not giving it to you because I believe you will do right by it. I am giving it to you because I have decided that what is in it is no longer mine to keep. What you do with it is between you and whatever god you pray to, if any."

He walked toward the door. The bar was quiet enough now that Becca could hear the tap of his shoes against the floor, the rhythm even and unhurried, the rhythm of a man who has decided to leave and is leaving.

He pushed the door open. The evening air came in, cooler than the inside, carrying the faint diesel smell of the street and the sound of a siren somewhere far off.

"Detective," Maren said.

He stopped in the doorway. The light from the street caught him from behind and made a shadow of his face.

"Solomon Pratt," she said. "Is he compromised, or is he the rot?"

Borelli was quiet for a long time.

"Ma'am," he said, "I don't know how deep it goes. I have spent twenty years trying to figure out how deep it goes, and I have concluded that figuring out how deep it goes is not the kind of thing a man does if he wants to keep doing his job. I am telling you this so that you will know what you are walking into. I am telling you this so that you will know that the man who gave you this folder does not know how deep the rot goes, and that the man who does know how deep the rot goes is not the kind of man who gives folders to journalists in bars."

He stepped out into the street.

"He is the kind of man who gives folders to lawyers," he said, "and the lawyers give them to aldermen, and the aldermen give them to the people who need them, and by the time they get where they are going, they are no longer folders. They are the absence of folders. They are the silence that is left behind when the folder has been put somewhere that no one will ever think to look."

The door closed behind him. The bar seemed to exhale.

Becca looked at the folder on the table. Maren looked at the folder on the table. Neither of them moved to pick it up.

The fan turned. The light shifted. Somewhere in the back corner, one of the men in the Bears jackets laughed at something, and the laughter sounded, to Becca, like it was coming from a long way off, like it was coming from another country, like it was coming from a year that had ended before she was born.

She reached across the table and put her hand on the folder. The manila was warm where his hand had been. It was warm where his body had held it against his chest, all those nights, in whatever room he had been sleeping in, in whatever city he had been waiting in, in whatever slow countdown he had been running out.

She picked it up. It was heavier than it looked.

Maren was watching her. Her face was very still, and her eyes were very bright, and she did not say anything, because there was nothing to say that the folder on the table was not already saying.

Outside, in the street, the siren had come closer. It was not a happy siren. It was not the siren of an ambulance on its way to save someone. It was the siren of a city doing what cities do at night, which is to continue being what it has always been, which is to hold, in its many rooms, in its many silences, in its many folders, the things that no one wants to be held responsible for.

Becca slid the folder into her bag. The bag was heavy already. It would be heavier now.

She finished her bourbon. The ice had melted. It tasted like water with the memory of bourbon in it, which is what everything in Chicago tastes like, eventually, if you stay long enough.