taxi lurched over a pothole on West Twenty-Third, and Vivian Marlowe braced her shoulder against the door. Chelsea smelled of wet brick and diesel this time of evening, the gallery lights flickering on along the row of converted warehouses, each one a small bright rectangle against the gathering dark. She pressed the postmark against her thigh, the ink bleeding faintly through the brown envelope, the cursive address still legible beneath her thumb. Julian Vance, Studio 4B, 211 West Eighteenth.
Something tightened in her chest. Not fear, exactly. Recognition.
She paid the driver, stepped out onto the curb, and saw the yellow tape.
It sagged between the brass railing and the brick pillar of 211 West Eighteenth, the words POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS stenciled in black against plastic the color of old teeth. A uniformed officer stood just inside the doorway, hands folded, jaw set with the particular boredom of a man posted at a scene that would outlast his shift. Behind him, through the open door, Vivian could see the dull gleam of a freight elevator, and beyond that, voices. Low, professional. The cadence of men cataloging something.
Vivian crossed the street before she had time to think better of it. Her heels struck the pavement in a quick, deliberate rhythm, the sound swallowed by the hiss of a passing bus. She had left the office at seven, she remembered. It was now seven forty-three. She had called three times on the way. No answer. She had texted twice. Nothing.
"Ma'am." The officer stepped forward as she approached the stoop. "Building's closed."
"I'm looking for Julian Vance. He has a studio on the fourth floor."
"Ma'am." He said it again, the same flat tone, and she understood then that Julian Vance was not coming down to meet her.
The freight elevator groaned somewhere above, and Vivian's stomach turned over. She had stood in the archive room at the paper that morning, reading the old arrest blotter, smelling the dust and floor wax of a basement that had not changed since 1986, and she had thought, with the particular clarity that comes only after months of nothing, that she had found something. The postmark had been in a file her mentor had never shown her. The brown envelope had been sitting in a desk drawer at the Record for thirty-seven years, waiting for someone to ask the right question.
She had asked the wrong one, apparently. Or the right one, too late.
"Detective." She raised her voice, not shouting, just lifting it enough to carry past the officer into the dim mouth of the lobby. "I know there's a detective up there. I need to speak with him."
The officer glanced over his shoulder. A moment passed. Then a figure appeared at the top of the interior stairs, one hand on the railing, the other holding a coffee cup that had gone cold. He was tall, mid-forties, the kind of build that suggested a college football player who had let himself go in the shoulders but kept the legs. His suit was navy, wrinkled at the elbows. His tie was loosened, and he looked at her the way men at crime scenes looked at civilians, with the exhausted patience of someone who had already explained things three times tonight.
"Miss." He descended two steps. "I'm Detective Ryan Forde, NYPD. This is an active scene. You can't come in."
"Vivian Marlowe." She reached into her bag, found a card, held it up between two fingers. "I'm with the Metropolitan Record. Julian Vance was a source of mine. We had an appointment this evening."
Forde took the card. He studied it, turning it over once as if checking for something on the back, then handed it back. His face shifted, just slightly. Not surprise, exactly. More like the recognition of a name he had been expecting to hear.
"You're the one who called the precinct."
"Yes."
"He didn't mention any journalist."
"He wouldn't have." Vivian kept her voice level. "He was cautious."
Forde looked at her for a long beat. Behind him, the elevator settled with a metallic sigh, and a second uniform emerged carrying a cardboard evidence box, its flaps folded shut. The box was small. That was the detail that snagged in her chest. A big box would mean a sprawling scene. A small box meant a single room, a single body, and a single answer.
"What time was your appointment?" Forde asked.
"Seven-thirty."
"He was alive at seven-fourteen. The super found him." Forde paused. "You want to tell me why a retired history professor was meeting with a reporter tonight, Miss Marlowe?"
"He had information. About a case from 1986. The Chelsea Strangler."
Forde's mouth did something complicated. He took a breath, let it out slowly through his nose, and glanced up at the officer on the door.
"Molloy. Let her through. She comes up with me. She doesn't touch anything."
The officer stepped aside. Vivian climbed.
The stairwell smelled of old plaster and something sharper underneath, a chemical tang that she recognized from her years of covering building collapses and basement fires. Lysol, maybe. Or what the crime scene techs used to draw the smell of death out of a room. The steps were poured concrete, scuffed at the edges. A fluorescent tube buzzed overhead, its light the color of dishwater. Forde walked ahead of her, his hand trailing the railing, and she watched the back of his neck, the way his collar sat slightly askew, the small triangle of pale skin visible above his shirt.
She had seen his name in her mentor's notes. Ryan Forde, junior partner, 1991. The partner of the man who had died before he could finish the Chelsea Strangler case. The partner who had inherited the file and apparently done nothing with it.
"You knew Frank Calabrese," she said, not a question.
Forde stopped on the landing. He turned, and in the ugly fluorescent light, his face looked older than it had at the bottom of the stairs. Tired in the bones.
"Everybody knew Frank."
"You were his partner."
"I was his partner." He said it simply, without inflection, the way one confirms the weather. "He was a good man. He's been dead eighteen years. And now his case has a dead witness, which means the case is going to stay cold, which is why I'm standing here talking to you instead of working."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry." He started climbing again. "Be useful."
Studio 4B was at the end of the hall. The door stood open, and beyond it Vivian could see a rectangle of yellow light, and within that light, the slow movements of people who knew how to be quiet in a room that held something dead. The smell hit her before she reached the threshold, a sweet, thick, vegetal scent that her body recognized before her mind did. She had been to enough scenes. She knew the smell. It was the smell of a body that had been sitting in a closed room for hours, beginning its long argument with the air.
Forde put out a hand. She stopped in the doorway.
Julian Vance lay on his back in the center of the studio, beside an enormous tripod-mounted camera that looked like something from another century. His eyes were open. His hands were folded on his chest, the fingers long and ink-stained, arranged with the deliberate neatness of a man who had been a photographer and had known, perhaps, that this was how the light would find him last. He wore a corduroy jacket with patches at the elbows. His hair was white and uncombed. He looked like a man who had fallen asleep waiting for a subject that never arrived.
The medical examiner was crouched beside him, a small gray woman with reading glasses pushed up onto her forehead. She did not look up when Vivian entered, but her pen kept moving across the form on her clipboard.
Vivian stood very still. The room was full of photographs. Thousands of them, she thought at first, then realized it was probably fewer, but they covered every wall, pinned and taped and tacked in overlapping layers, a kind of wallpaper made of faces. Men in fedoras. Women in cat-eye glasses. Street scenes in black and white. The Chelsea of forty years ago, frozen in silver halide and gelatin, looking down from every surface at the man who had lain down among them.
"He was still holding this." Forde held up an evidence bag. Inside, a brown envelope. She recognized the postmark before she recognized her own handwriting on the front. "It's addressed to you."
Vivian's throat went dry.
"He mailed it before he died," Forde said. "The super found it in the mailbox downstairs. He hadn't opened it yet. You want to tell me what's inside?"
"I don't know." Her voice came out smaller than she intended. "I sent him a letter. Two days ago. Asking him to confirm a date. That's all."
"A date."
"A date in October 1986. The night Ellen Shaw was killed."
Forde looked at her for a long moment. The medical examiner shifted her weight, her knee cracking in the quiet. Somewhere in the building, a pipe shuddered and went still.
"You knew Ellen Shaw," Forde said. Not a question.
"I know her case. I've been working it for two years. Frank Calabrese was working it before me."
"And Julian Vance was a witness."
"He was supposed to be." Vivian looked at the body, at the ink-stained hands, at the camera standing over him like a sentinel. "He was supposed to be the last one left."
Forde turned the evidence bag over in his hands. The envelope shifted inside, and Vivian could see, through the clear plastic, the flap still sealed.
"I'm going to open this," Forde said.
"I'd like to be here when you do."
"Miss Marlowe. This is a homicide scene."
"Detective." She met his eyes. "That envelope has my name on it. And the man who wrote it is dead on the floor. So I'd like to be here when you open it."
Forde studied her. Somewhere in the building, the freight elevator began to groan again, rising from the lobby, bringing up another pair of hands to help seal the room. The medical examiner finished her form and stood, brushing off her knees.
Forde broke the seal.
The flap tore unevenly, the aged paper crumbling at the crease. Forde tilted the envelope into his palm, and a single photograph slid free, along with a folded sheet of paper the color of old teeth.
Vivian leaned in before she could stop herself. Forde didn't object.
The photograph showed a street at night. Not a New York street, she realized after a moment. The storefronts were wrong, the signage in a language she didn't recognize, the sky that particular bruised orange of sodium vapor lamps. A young woman stood near the curb, half-turned from the camera, her face in shadow. She was wearing a coat that looked expensive, even in grainy black and white, and her hand rested on the shoulder of a child, maybe six years old, whose back was to the lens. The child was holding a stuffed animal of some kind, a pale shape pressed against her chest.
Vivian's breath caught. She knew that coat. She'd seen it in three different evidence photos from 1986.
"That's Ellen Shaw," she said.
Forde held the photograph closer to the desk lamp. The light caught the edge of something in the woman's other hand, something dangling from her fingers like a length of string. He didn't answer. Instead, he unfolded the paper and began to read, his lips moving faintly, his jaw tightening as he went.
Vivian watched him. She counted his breaths. Four, five, six.
"Sit down," he said.
"I'd rather stand."
"Suit yourself." He turned the paper so she could read it, holding it between them like a bridge.
The handwriting was shaky, the ink the same blue-black that stained the dead man's fingers. The letter read:
To whoever finds this:
I have lived with this photograph for forty years. I took it on the night of October 17, 1986, in a town I have never returned to and will not name here. The woman in the picture is Ellen Shaw. The child is her daughter, Rebecca, who did not survive the week. The thing in Ellen's hand is a key, and I will not say to what.
I was not a witness. I was a photographer, and I was there because I was hired. I have spent every day since trying to determine who hired me. I failed. I am done failing.
I do not know what happened in this apartment tonight. I came home, and I found myself on the floor with a gun in my hand. If you are reading this, I may already be dead. If I am dead, please give the camera and its contents to the woman Vivian Marlowe, who will know what to do with them.
Forgive me. I am tired.
J.V.
Vivian read it twice. Then a third time. Her hands had gone cold, and she pressed them flat against her thighs to keep them from shaking.
"Convenient," Forde said.
"What?"
"The letter." He set it on the desk, smoothing it under the lamp. "Names you specifically. Tells the cops exactly what to do with the evidence."
"You think I wrote it."
"I think someone wanted to make sure you'd get the camera." He looked at the Pentax still hanging from its strap above Julian Vance's body. "That's not nothing, Miss Marlowe."
"Then explain the ink on his hands. Explain the gun."
"I don't have to explain anything yet." Forde pulled a pair of latex gloves from his coat pocket and snapped them on. "That's the medical examiner's job. But I'm going to walk this room, and you're going to let me walk it, and when I'm done, I'll have questions for you. Real ones."
Vivian said nothing. She watched him circle the desk, his eyes moving the way she imagined a safecracker's did, looking for the thing that didn't fit. He paused at the desk blotter. He paused at the wastebasket. He paused at the camera bag slumped against the chair leg.
She saw it before he did.
The camera bag was unzipped. Not all the way, but enough. The interior dividers were visible, a honeycomb of black fabric meant to hold lenses and bodies. Two of the slots were empty.
"Where are the memory cards?" she asked.
Forde stopped. He looked at the bag, then at the camera, then back at the bag.
"What memory cards?"
"In a Pentax like this, the photographer shoots digital on compact flash cards. The bag has space for three. There are none in the camera and none in the bag." She pointed. "See the velvet loops? They're empty. Someone took them."
"Or he hadn't downloaded yet."
"Julian Vance was meticulous." She heard her own voice sharpen, and she didn't soften it. "I spoke to him on the phone six times over two years. He kept backups of everything. Multiple copies. He told me once that he hadn't lost a single frame since 1979."
Forde straightened. His gaze traveled from the bag to the body, and Vivian saw him doing the math, the geometry of the room, the angles, the distances. She saw the moment it landed.
"The spatter," he said quietly.
"Yes."
"Come here."
She came. The body lay on its back, the right arm extended, the pistol cradled in the dead hand as carefully as a sleeping infant. The blood had pooled beneath the head, dark and almost black under the lamp, and the spatter pattern fanned out across the hardwood in a narrow arc, concentrated to the left of the skull.
"That's a contact wound," Forde said. "Powder stippling. That's consistent with a shot from a couple of inches."
"I know."
"But the spatter angle." He crouched, bringing his eye level with the floor. "See how it trails? It goes left and up. If he was sitting in that chair and the gun was in his right hand, the spatter would go right and up, because the impact would push the blood and tissue away from the barrel."
"It would," Vivian said.
"Unless." Forde stood, his knees popping. He turned and looked at the window, at the desk chair, at the body. "Unless the shot came from somewhere else."
Vivian let the silence hold. The freight elevator had stopped. Somewhere below, a phone was ringing, a tinny and persistent sound that no one was answering.
"You said he was supposed to be a witness," Forde said.
"He was supposed to be the last one left. Everyone else who was there that night in 1986 is dead. Four people, over twenty years. Heart attacks, car accidents, one overdose that the medical examiner initially ruled accidental." She paused. "Julian was paranoid. He changed his locks every year. He paid his rent in cash. He told me once that he kept a loaded gun by his bed."
"Was it this one?"
"He had two. He told me that too."
Forde looked at the gun in Julian's hand. He didn't touch it. He didn't have to.
"Miss Marlowe." His voice had changed. The roughness was still there, but underneath it something else had surfaced, something she recognized from her years of interviewing cops who had just realized the case under their feet was bigger than the folder it came in. "I need you to tell me everything. From the beginning. Not the version you gave the desk sergeant. The real one."
"I told you. I sent him a letter."
"Why?"
"Because I found a name." She reached into her own bag, into the manila folder she'd carried up the fire escape, and she pulled out a photocopy of a page from a 1987 municipal archive. "Eleanor Cross. She was a clerk in the town clerk's office in 1986. She's the only person I can find who processed a document related to Ellen Shaw's death that doesn't match any other record in the system."
"A document?"
"A death certificate amendment. Filed six weeks after Ellen Shaw died, signed by a doctor who died in 1994." Vivian held the page out. "I sent it to Julian two days ago. I asked him if he recognized the signature. That's all."
Forde took the page. He studied it.
"And now he's dead," he said.
"Now he's dead."
The fluorescent tube above them flickered, buzzed, steadied. The medical examiner had stepped out to make a call. The apartment was very quiet, and very still, and Vivian could feel the weight of every object in it pressing against her skin, the camera and the bag and the gun and the letter and the photograph of a woman and a child she had never seen alive.
"There's one more thing," she said.
"Of course there is."
"The letter mentions a key. The thing in Ellen Shaw's hand." She pointed at the photograph, still lying on the desk. "He says he won't say what it opens."
Forde looked at the photograph for a long time.
"Miss Marlowe," he said finally. "Who else knew you were coming here tonight?"
"No one."
"And who else knew you'd sent that letter?"
She thought about it. She thought about the postmark, the street she had walked to the mailbox on, the woman at the copy shop who had smiled at her while the machine spat out the page. She thought about how thin the walls were in a city like this, and how a name like Eleanor Cross could travel from a clerk's office in a town three hundred miles away to a desk in a metropolitan newsroom to the ears of whoever had been waiting forty years for the last witness to stop talking.
"I don't know," she said.
Forde folded the photocopy and put it in his pocket.
"Then we find out," he said. "Starting now."
He reached for the photograph. He reached for the letter. And above the body of Julian Vance, the Pentax swung gently on its strap, the lens catching the light, the shutter waiting, patient as a held breath, for someone to press it again.
de moved through the apartment with the efficiency of a man who had walked through death often enough to know exactly where it left its traces. He photographed the body from three angles before he touched anything. He logged the position of the camera, the bag, the letter, the key. He bagged Vivian's gloves separately from his own.
Vivian stood by the window and watched him work. The city was quieter now, the late-night rush faded into the thin trickle of cabs and the occasional shout from the street below. Somewhere a siren wailed and died, then wailed again from a different direction, the city breathing its restless sleep.
"You knew him," she said.
Forde did not look up. He was labeling a bag. "Who told you that?"
"The way you touched the doorframe. The way you said his name."
He straightened, his knees popping. He was not a young man anymore, she realized. He had the kind of build that carried weight around the middle, the kind of face that had learned its lines early. His eyes were pale and watchful, and they did not soften when they met hers.
"I knew him," he said. "Not well. He was a witness in a case Marcus worked. Fifteen years ago. Marcus put him in a hotel for three months until things cooled down. Vance never forgot that." He looked back at the body. "Or maybe he never forgave me for letting Marcus work the case in the first place."
"The tipster," Vivian said. "The one who reached out to me. Did Marcus know him?"
Forde was quiet for a moment. He sealed the bag and set it aside. "Marcus didn't tell me everything. That was his way. He said it was the only way to keep a witness safe, was to be the only one who knew." He let out a breath. "He was wrong about that, but he was wrong in a way that got him killed, so I don't say it lightly."
He walked to the desk and looked down at the photograph. The woman and the child. He did not touch it.
"You want this kept open," he said. It was not a question.
"I want this kept open."
"Miss Marlowe, I am a detective in a precinct that has had four budget cuts in six years. I have a caseload of forty-three open homicides. I have a captain who measures my performance by what I close, not by what I open. And I have the body of a retired professor who, until twenty minutes ago, was a healthy seventy-one-year-old man with a bad hip and a subscription to The New York Review of Books." He turned to face her. "Why would I keep this open?"
"Because someone killed him."
"People kill each other for a hundred reasons."
"Because he was the last witness."
Forde's mouth tightened. He looked at her for a long moment, then walked to the window. The streetlight threw his shadow long across the floor. He stood with his hands in his pockets, watching the empty street.
"Marcus believed him," he said finally. "He believed Vance saw what he said he saw. He believed there was a photograph. He believed the photograph showed something that mattered." He paused. "Marcus was a good detective. The best I ever worked with. He was also stubborn as a mule, and he had a habit of pulling on threads that unraveled the whole cloth."
"He was killed."
"He was killed. Three years ago. A mugging that wasn't a mugging. A witness that nobody could find. A weapon that disappeared from the evidence locker." Forde turned back to her. "I tried to keep that case open too. The captain told me to stop asking questions. The union told me to take a vacation. I took the vacation. I came back. I asked one more question. The captain moved me to a desk in Records."
Vivian said nothing.
"You want me to keep this open," Forde said. "I can try. I can file the right paperwork. I can mark it as connected to Marcus's death. I can request the original case files from the Archives division, the ones they sealed in eighty-seven. But I want you to understand what you are asking me to do."
"Tell me."
"You are asking me to step back onto a floor that swallowed Marcus whole. You are asking me to take a second look at a photograph that powerful people have spent forty years making sure nobody sees. You are asking me to put my name on a piece of paper that will land on a desk where people have learned, very patiently, how to make problems disappear."
He came back to the desk. He picked up the photograph and held it where the light caught the woman's face.
"She was twenty-three," he said. "The girl. Her name was Diane Castle. She was a secretary at a brokerage downtown. She had a son, Jonathan, who is fifty-two now and living somewhere in Oregon under a different name. Her husband was a lineman for Con Ed. He died in eighty-nine. Heart attack, the record says. The record says a lot of things." He set the photograph down. "The brokerage was owned by a man named Whitford Hale. Hale died in two thousand and four, rich and respected, with a foundation in his name that gives scholarships to underprivileged kids. The foundation is still active. The Hale family still has money. The Hale family still has lawyers."
"Lawyers," Vivian said.
"The kind of lawyers who call the district attorney by his first name. The kind who get meetings that don't show up on calendars." He looked at her steadily. "You understand what I am telling you."
"I understand."
"Do you? Because I have seen what happens to people who write stories that certain people don't want written. I have seen their bylines disappear. I have seen their sources dry up. I have seen their cars get keyed and their mail get opened and their phones start ringing at three in the morning with nothing on the other end. I have seen them get reassigned, get demoted, get bought out with a severance package and a non-disclosure and a seat at some foundation board where they sit quietly and never say a word."
Vivian held his gaze. "I have seen those things too."
"Then why are you still standing here?"
"Because somebody has to."
Forde exhaled through his nose. He walked to the kitchen and came back with a glass of water he did not drink. He set it on the desk and stood looking at it.
"Marcus said something to me, the week before he died. We were having coffee at that place on Ninth, the one with the bad espresso and the good pies. He said, Ryan, there are two kinds of cases. The ones you can solve, and the ones you have to survive. He said the trick is knowing which is which before you decide to keep going."
"What did you say?"
"I told him to stop being dramatic and pass the sugar." A ghost of a smile crossed his face and vanished. "I should have said something else. I have had three years to think about what I should have said."
He picked up the water glass and turned it in his hands.
"I will keep this open," he said. "I will file the paperwork tomorrow morning. I will request the sealed files. I will mark it connected to Marcus, which means it lands on the same captain's desk, which means I will be standing in his office by Wednesday explaining why I am doing this instead of working the open homicides I am assigned." He set the glass down. "I will do it because Marcus would have done it. I will do it because Vance deserved better than to die alone in his apartment at seventy-one with a key in his hand. And I will do it because you asked me to, and you are the first person who has asked in three years."
Vivian let out a breath she had not realized she was holding.
"But you need to understand something," Forde said. His voice dropped. "You are not a cop. You are not protected by the badge or the union or the regulations that keep a detective's family from being named in the papers. You are a reporter, which means you are a target with a byline. From the moment you sent that letter, from the moment you walked into this apartment, you have been visible. You have been countable. And there are people who count very carefully."
"I know."
"Do you? Because the people who wanted this buried in eighty-seven are still alive. The lawyers are still practicing. The money is still moving. The foundation is still giving scholarships. And somewhere in this city, somebody walked into this building tonight and shot Julian Vance in the chest and walked out again, and they did it because they knew he was about to talk, which means they knew about your letter before you got here."
The room felt colder. The hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen seemed louder.
"You think the tipster was watched," Vivian said.
"I think the tipster led you here, and someone else followed both of you." He looked at the door. "I think this apartment is going to be crawled by my colleagues from the precinct in about two hours, and every piece of evidence in it is going to be logged and sealed and eventually lost or misfiled or ruled inadmissible. I think the photograph in your bag is the only copy that matters, because the original is going to disappear, and the digital files are going to suffer a catastrophic failure, and the witnesses are going to forget what they saw."
He crossed to the desk and picked up the envelope.
"Vance kept this letter. He read it often enough that the paper is soft at the folds. He was ready. He had the camera loaded. He had the key in his hand. He was waiting for you, Miss Marlowe, and he was expecting to die."
The words landed in the room like something heavy dropped from a height.
"You think he knew," Vivian said.
"I think he knew the moment your letter arrived. I think he spent the last week of his life arranging his affairs so that when the knock came, there would be something left to find." Forde held out the envelope. "Take this. Take the photograph. Take the key. Do not let them out of your sight, and do not tell anyone where you keep them. Not your editor. Not your sources. Not the person you trust most in the world, because you do not know who is listening."
Vivian took the envelope. The paper was warm from his hand.
"What do I do?"
"You write the story," Forde said. "You write it carefully. You write it in a way that protects your source and protects the evidence and gives the DA enough to act without giving away so much that the evidence disappears. You write it in a way that makes it impossible to bury without burying the paper along with it." He paused. "And then you watch your back, because the people who killed Vance are going to read that story, and they are going to know your name, and they are going to know your face, and they are going to decide whether you are a problem they can solve with a phone call or a problem that requires a different kind of solution."
Vivian folded the envelope into her bag, next to the photocopy of the letter. She zipped the bag shut and held the strap against her shoulder.
"I can do that," she said.
"You can try."
He walked to the apartment door and opened it. The hallway was empty, the carpet lit by the pale glow of the exit sign at the far end. He checked both directions, then stepped back.
"I am going to call this in," he said. "I am going to tell the precinct I was in the neighborhood on an unrelated matter and heard a disturbance. I am going to tell them I found the body. That buys us a few hours before the bureaucracy wakes up and starts asking questions. You need to be home before the night editor notices you are missing."
She stepped into the hallway. The air was cooler out here, carrying the faint smell of cooking from somewhere down the hall, garlic and onions, the ordinary life of a building going on around the extraordinary thing that had happened in apartment 4C.
"Forde," she said.
He looked at her.
"Thank you."
He nodded once, his face unreadable. "Don't thank me yet. Thank me when the story runs and you are still alive to read it."
She turned and walked toward the stairwell. Behind her, she heard him close the door of Julian Vance's apartment, and then the soft click of a deadbolt, and then nothing but the sound of her own footsteps on the carpet, and the weight of the bag against her hip, and the key in the envelope pressing against her ribs like a second heartbeat.
The street was waiting. The city was waiting. And somewhere in the dark, the people who had killed a seventy-one-year-old retired professor for the secret in his hand were already watching the door.