The brass bell above the office door chimed a sour, tuneless note at 4:17 in the afternoon, the kind of hour when daylight slants sideways through dirty windows and everything in the world seems to be settling its accounts.
Pia Moss did not look up from the carbon-paper ledger she was reconstructing. Her pencil moved in small, deliberate strokes, shading the boxes of a payroll spreadsheet from 1987 that had been waterlogged, frozen, and then photocopied badly. The smell of mildew and old ink was a permanent tenant in her office on Hanover Street, layered under the sharper tang of the radiator that had been hissing since November.
She had not looked up because the bell was unreliable and because, in her experience, people who knocked on unmarked doors at the tail end of a Tuesday tended to be selling something, asking for something, or running from something, and none of those categories warranted breaking her concentration.
The second knock came, firmer. A man standing just inside the threshold said, "Ms. Moss?" and the voice carried the particular weight of someone unaccustomed to waiting.
"Pia Moss is out," she said, still not looking up. "Left for the Cape last spring. Won't be back until the statute of limitations lapses."
A pause. Then a sound that was almost a laugh, contained, polite. "I was told you are Pia Moss."
"Mm."
"And that if I came at this hour, you would be the one to open the door."
She let her pencil rest. The point of it had gone soft against the carbon smudge. She set the ledger aside, lined up her pencil with the desk's edge at a right angle the way her mother had taught her when she was nine, and finally raised her gaze.
The man in her doorway was tall, narrow-shouldered, wearing a dark wool coat that had been brushed recently but not pressed. His shoes were good and quiet on her scarred floor. He held a leather portfolio against his chest the way other men hold hats over their hearts, and his face carried the careful, courteous blankness of a person who had decided long ago to show the world only what the world had asked for.
"Mr. Vale," Pia said. "Sit down before you take root."
He did, choosing the chair across from her desk because it was the one offered to clients, and because the chair by the window faced the street and Pia Moss did not turn her back to entrances. He set the portfolio on his knees and folded his hands on top of it. His nails were clean, his cuffs turned back precisely twice.
"You come recommended by a person I will not name," he said. "I was told you keep your own hours and your own counsel."
"I do."
"And that you have, on occasion, returned things that ought not to have been lost."
"Things." Pia tilted her head. "Or people."
"Either, in my case."
She let the silence breathe. Outside, a delivery truck labored up the hill on Hanover, its engine cycling through a tired three-note descending pattern. The radiator clicked twice and then resumed its faint whistle. Somewhere below her, in the building's basement, a sump pump coughed to life and then subsided.
Pia watched Hollis Vale the way she watched men who brought portfolios to unmarked offices. She catalogued him. Wool coat, charcoal. Lapsed Ivy manner. Wedding ring absent but a pale stripe of skin where one had been. Hands that worked, though not recently. Eyes that had once been young and were now careful.
"Tell me what was taken," she said.
He opened the portfolio. From inside it, he removed a single sheet of paper, a photocopy, and laid it on the desk between them with the slow ceremony of someone placing a photograph on a grave.
"I am a forensic chemist," he said. "By training. By license, I am also a private investigator. I inherited a small practice from an uncle, and I keep it the way one keeps a house one no longer lives in, out of stubbornness and a refusal to sell at a loss."
Pia waited.
"Eight days ago, someone entered my office on Charter Street while I was attending a deposition in Boston. They took nothing of obvious value. No cash. No equipment. They opened a fireproof drawer I keep in the back, behind a false panel in the floorboard, and removed a manuscript."
"A manuscript."
"A draft. Two hundred and twelve pages, handwritten, in a green leather folio with my initials pressed into the cover. The folio itself was left behind. The pages were not."
"Author?"
"I am."
Pia leaned back. The chair complained under her. "And the manuscript contains what, exactly?"
Hollis Vale did not answer for a long moment. He looked at the radiator as though he were considering the metallurgy of it, then at the window, where the light had begun to thicken toward the color of weak tea.
"It contains a confession," he said finally. "To a murder."
Pia's pencil was still on the desk. She did not pick it up. "A confession by you."
"No. By my father. Dictated to me, in installments, over the last eleven years of his life. He died in March of last year. I have spent the spring and summer transcribing the recordings and assembling the pages. The work is not complete. The order is not final. The names of certain persons involved are still in cipher, because he would not give me the key."
"And this confession concerns a murder committed when?"
"In the summer of 1987. On the coast, south of here, in a town called Salt Bay. The victim was a woman named Lorna Ashe. She was twenty-six. She worked at the Salt Bay Inn. She disappeared on the night of July 16 and was found, ten days later, in a place that no one had thought to look."
Pia knew the name. The case had drifted through her peripheral attention for years, the way coastal cold cases do, surfacing every few summers when a journalist on assignment stumbled over it and then moved on. The Ashe girl. The summer people. The closed verdict.
"You've taken this to the police," Pia said. It was not a question.
"I took it to the state police barracks on Route 6 yesterday morning," Vale said. "I spoke with a sergeant. I told him I possessed material evidence relating to a homicide investigated by his department in 1987. I told him the material had been stolen and that I feared for its integrity and possibly for my own."
"And."
"He thanked me for my time. He told me he would pass it along. He did not take a report."
Pia's mouth did something that was not quite a smile. "And so you have come to me."
"I have come to you because I do not trust the official channels to pursue this fairly, and because I believe the person who took the manuscript will read it, recognize what it contains, and destroy it, and possibly me, before the season turns."
The radiator hiccupped. Pia stood, crossed to the window, and looked down at Hanover Street. A woman walked a small terrier past the dry cleaner. A man in a postal uniform leaned against the lamppost, smoking with the slow discipline of someone killing time.
"Why me," she said, not turning around. "Specifically. The man who will not be named. What did he say?"
"He said that you were the only person he had ever met who returned what she found even when it cost her."
Pia turned. "He said that."
"He said that, and that you had once nearly drowned in an archive that you had broken into to retrieve a ledger you had been hired to find. He said you still dreamed about it sometimes."
The room felt smaller. Pia sat back down, slowly, the way one sits when one does not want to be seen adjusting.
"I have never discussed that case," she said. "I don't know how he knew."
"I didn't ask."
"Hm."
She picked up the pencil, turned it between her fingers, and laid it parallel to the photocopy Vale had placed on the desk. The photocopy showed a page of dense handwriting, the script slanted, the ink heavy in places where the nib had been pressed too hard. A line near the bottom was underlined twice, and in the margin, in a different ink, someone had written a single word. Pia tilted the page toward the light.
The word was Ember.
"The cipher," Vale said, before she could ask. "My father used a substitution method keyed to a text I have not yet identified. Each proper noun in the manuscript has been replaced by a single common word. The cipher text is consistent. The key is not."
"Have you tried frequency analysis."
"Extensively. The text is too short and too repetitive to yield to classical analysis. He anticipated this. He was, among other things, a man who spent his life ensuring that he could not be surprised by his own past."
Pia set the page down. "And you want me to find the manuscript."
"I want you to find it before it is destroyed, and I want you to help me decode it in such a way that, when the time comes, I can hand the finished work to a person who cannot bury it."
"A person."
"A person I have not yet identified. But I know he exists. He is alive. He was a witness. There were four witnesses, and three of them are dead."
The radiator ticked. The terrier outside had stopped at the lamppost and was sniffing the postal worker's shoe with the grave attention of its kind.
"Tell me about the fourth," Pia said.
Hollis Vale folded his hands again on the empty portfolio. His thumb moved across the leather, a small, unconscious stroking.
"The fourth witness," he said, "was a woman. Her name is Nell Faro. She was nineteen in the summer of 1987. She kept a boat. She lived on Salt Bay. She was the last person known to have seen Lorna Ashe alive, and she has not spoken about it since."
"Where is she now."
"She is the harbor master of Salt Bay. She has been for thirty-one years."
Pia felt the name click into place. Nell Faro. The harbor master. She had seen the name on a mooring permit in a file she had pulled three years ago for a separate matter, a maritime insurance dispute. Faro had not been helpful. Faro had been, in fact, politely immovable.
"And your father," Pia said. "You said he dictated."
"He dictated. In person. On a small cassette machine. Twenty-three tapes. Eleven hours of audio. The tapes are still in my possession. They are not the stolen object. What was taken was my transcription."
"Why."
Vale was quiet for a long moment. Outside, the postal worker tossed his cigarette into the gutter and walked on. The terrier barked once, sharply, and was hushed.
"Because my father, in the last week of his life, told me that he had given a copy of the cipher key to one other person. He would not tell me who. He said only that if anything happened to the manuscript, I should find that person and ask them, in person, for what they had been given. He said they would know what it meant."
"And you have not found this person."
"I have not. I have spent eight months looking. I have written to every name in his address book. I have spoken to his lawyer, his doctor, his housekeeper, and the groundskeeper at the estate. None of them knew him well enough. He was a man who kept his friendships in compartments."
Pia stood again, walked to the filing cabinet, and pulled out a thick manila folder she kept on the third shelf, behind a false back that was a relic of a job she had once done in a building she did not want to remember. The folder contained, among other things, a list of names. She did not open it. She held it under her arm and came back to the desk.
"Your fee," she said. "I am not cheap, and I am not negotiable."
"I have the resources."
"You have the resources of a man whose family cut him off twenty years ago."
Vale's mouth moved. It was the first time his courtesy had slipped, just slightly, just enough to show the edge of the man underneath.
"My father cut me off," he said. "My mother left me a trust. It is administered by a bank in Boston. It is not large. It is sufficient."
Pia looked at him. "And if I find the manuscript and the cipher key and we deliver the thing to your person, and the person buries it."
"Then I will have spent a year of my life assembling a confession that no one will ever read, and I will have to find a way to live with that."
"And if we do not find it."
"Then the person who took it will read it, and will understand that my father named them in his confession, and will do what such persons do."
The radiator sighed. Pia set the folder down on the desk and opened it. Inside, on a single sheet of paper, was a list of names and dates and places. She did not show it to Vale.
"I will take the case," she said. "I will need the tapes. I will need the folio. I will need the names of every person who has been in your office in the last six months, including the postman."
"I have a list."
"Good. Leave it with me. I will need also the names of the three dead witnesses."
"I have those."
"And I will need," she said, "to speak to Nell Faro."
Vale nodded slowly. "I have not spoken to her since my father's funeral. She came. She did not speak to me. She stood in the back of the church and left before the service ended."
"You think she knows something."
"I think she has always known something. I think she has kept it in a place where no one can find it, including herself."
Pia closed the folder. She looked at the man across the desk. The light through the window had thickened further, turning the dust motes into small, slow planets. The smell of the radiator and the mildew and the old ink had thickened with it, and somewhere beneath, almost out of hearing, the sump pump coughed again.
"I will start in the morning," she said. "I will go to Salt Bay. I will speak to Faro. You will stay in the city, in a place I can find you, and you will answer your telephone."
"Yes."
"And you will not, under any circumstance, go to the police again, or to the press, or to your bank, or to your mother's house in Chestnut Hill, until I have cleared it."
Vale inclined his head. The courtesy was back, perfectly aligned, like a coat brushed and set on a hanger.
"I understand," he said. "And Ms. Moss."
"Pia."
"Pia. The person who took the manuscript. I have a thought."
"Yes."
"The person who took it did not take the tapes. They did not take the folio. They took only the pages. This suggests they knew what was in the pages and did not know, or did not care, about the rest."
"Or," Pia said, "they knew about the tapes and chose not to take them because they could be replaced, and they knew the pages could not."
Vale considered this. "Yes."
"Who knew about the tapes."
"No one alive. The lawyer knew. He is dead. The doctor knew. He is dead. The housekeeper knew. She is in a nursing home in Quincy and no longer recognizes my name."
"Then it was someone your father told," Pia said. "Someone he told, and who then told someone else, or came back for it themselves."
"Yes."
"Or," she said, "it was someone who never needed to be told. Someone who already knew what was in the pages because they had been there when the original events took place."
The radiator ticked. The light moved. Hollis Vale stood, gathered his portfolio, and placed on the desk, with care, a small white envelope.
"My retainer," he said. "And a key. To the office on Charter Street. The false panel is under the third floorboard from the window. The board does not lift unless one knows to press the nail head twice."
Pia took the envelope without looking inside it. She took the key. The key was old, brass, with a bow that had been filed flat on one side so it could be worn on a ring without catching.
"I will be in touch," she said.
He nodded, buttoned his coat, and walked out. The bell chimed again as the door closed, the same sour, tuneless note, and then the office was quiet, and Pia Moss sat for a long time at her desk with the carbon ledger and the envelope and the key, listening to the building settle into its evening sounds, the radiator and the sump pump and, very faintly, the traffic on Hanover, and she thought about archives and water and the long, patient labor of returning things that had been deliberately lost.
The charter boat out of Garibaldi cost more than Pia Moss had budgeted for the week, and the captain, a sunburned man named Ray who had helped her once before with a shipping fraud inquiry out of Astoria, looked at the envelope she offered and looked at her, and then took the money without a word because he knew what that look meant.
"Fifteen minutes at the cliff," he said, cutting the engine. "Tide's coming in. I'll keep the props turning."
The house sat at the end of a private road that had once been a logging track, and from the water it looked the way Hollis Vale had looked in his office: correct, and quiet, and waiting to be opened. Cedar shakes darkened by salt air. A widow's walk with the paint peeling. Windows that caught the morning light and threw it back in pieces. Pia climbed the stone steps from the dock and stood on the porch and listened.
No wind. No gulls. The ocean below sounded like a long, slow breath drawn through teeth.
She tried the door. It was unlocked. She went in.
The foyer smelled of cedar and cold ash. A grandfather clock against the far wall had stopped at quarter past four. The pendulum hung motionless inside its glass case. Dust lay on the floor in a fine, undisturbed layer except where a single set of footprints led from the front door, across the marble, and into the hallway that ran toward the back of the house.
Pia stood very still. She set her bag down. She took her camera from the bag and threaded the strap over her wrist and took two photographs of the foyer from where she stood, including the clock and the footprints, before she moved.
The footprints were men's. Hard-soled. Size eleven, possibly twelve. They turned left into the hallway. Pia followed them.
The hallway was lined with bookshelves built into the wall on both sides, and the books had been pulled from the shelves in long, careless sweeps. Spines cracked. Pages bent. Some lay in heaps on the floorboards. Others had been carried further into the house and abandoned mid-stride, as if the person carrying them had changed his mind about what he wanted. Pia photographed as she walked. She did not touch anything. Her fingers itched, but she did not touch.
She reached the library.
The double doors hung open, one of them off its upper hinge, hanging at an angle that made the room look as though it were squinting. Inside, the damage was total. Every drawer of the desk had been pulled and emptied onto the rug. The leather chairs had been overturned. The carpet had been rolled back from one corner, and the floorboards beneath it pried up with something heavy, a pry bar or the flat of an axe. Pia saw the gouges in the wood. She photographed them. She crouched and ran her finger along the edge of one gouge without pressing, the way Hollis Vale had taught her years ago, and the wood was fresh. Pale. Still fragrant.
Someone had been here within the last forty-eight hours. Someone who knew where to look.
A single wine glass lay on the floor near the cold hearth, shattered. Red wine had dried in a long, irregular pool around the base, and a single drop had traveled several inches from the pool before drying in the shape of a comma. The stem of the glass lay three feet away, near the leg of the overturned chair. Pia photographed the glass. She did not touch it. She stood and looked at the wheelchair.
It sat in the corner near the window, empty. The blanket that had been folded across the lap had fallen to the floor. The brake was off. The wheels bore faint scuff marks on the rubber where they had rolled backward across the hardwood, as though someone had stood up out of the chair and pushed it away from themselves.
Pia crossed the room. She stood beside the chair and looked at the place where the client had been. She did not sit in it. She did not touch the brake. She only looked, and she thought about a man who could not walk standing up out of a wheelchair in a locked library and walking out of his own house, or being walked out, and the difference between those two possibilities.
She walked back into the hallway and followed the footprints. They led through a butler's pantry and a mud room and out a rear door that stood open onto a flagged terrace overlooking the ocean. The flags were slick with sea spray. The footprints stopped at the terrace edge.
Below the terrace, the cliff fell away in a long, broken slide of stone and wind-stunted spruce to the water. The tide was higher than Ray had said it would be. The rocks at the base of the cliff were mostly submerged. Pia stood at the edge and looked down and listened. She heard the water move among the rocks. She heard nothing else.
She went back inside. She went through the kitchen. The refrigerator held a half-gallon of milk a week past its date, a wheel of cheese wrapped in wax paper, and a single bottle of wine, uncorked. The cabinet above the sink held two tumblers and a single glass. The other glass, she understood, was the one on the floor of the library. She photographed the cabinet. She photographed the refrigerator without opening it, through the glass, and noted the date on the milk.
She went upstairs.
The second floor held four bedrooms and two bathrooms. Three of the bedrooms were made up and unused. The fourth, at the end of the hall, had been slept in recently. The bed was unmade. A glass of water sat on the nightstand, half full. A book lay open on the coverlet, face down, spine cracked. Pia photographed the book without touching it. The title was in French. She did not read it. A reading lamp on the nightstand had been switched off but the bulb was warm when she held her hand near it.
The closet was half empty. Half a dozen shirts hung from the rod. A pair of shoes sat on the floor, unlaced. A single suitcase was missing from the top shelf. The latch of the window was open. The screen had been pushed out and lay on the roof of the porch below, where Pia could see it from the window if she leaned out.
She leaned out. The screen lay intact. It had not been pushed out from the outside. The latch could only be operated from inside.
She went back downstairs. She went through the house a second time, slowly, and stood in the library and looked at the wheelchair and the smashed glass and the pried-up floor and tried to compose a sentence in her head that contained all of it and remained coherent. She could not. She went outside.
Ray was smoking on the bow of the boat. He looked up when she came down to the dock. She stepped aboard. He took the cigarette from his mouth and held it behind his back.
"Did you find what you were looking for?" he said.
"No," she said. "I found what I wasn't."
He did not ask. He untied the lines and took them in and started the engine. The boat backed away from the dock and turned toward the channel. Pia stood at the rail and looked back at the house on the cliff, and the house looked back at her with its empty windows, and she thought about a man who had spent the last three years of his life in a wheelchair on the second floor of a house he could no longer leave, and who had, on the night she did not yet know the date of, got up out of that chair, or been gotten up, and walked, or been walked, into the library where his life had been taken apart by someone who had known exactly where to look, and who had either left with him or left without him.
The drive back to Portland took two hours. She stopped once for coffee in a town whose name she did not register, and she sat in the car in the parking lot and made four calls on her handset, in order, and she let none of them go to voicemail.
The first was to Hollis Vale. He did not answer. She left a message: "The house on the cliff has been entered. The library has been opened. The chair is empty. Call me."
The second was to Dory Vance, and she let it ring, and she did not leave a message. She sat in the car and held the handset against her ear and listened to the line ring across the country, and she thought about a woman in a nursing home in Quincy who no longer recognized her own name, and the distance between Quincy and Portland, and whether distance still meant what it once did.
The third was to Nell Faro, in Bangor, and Nell answered on the second ring, and Pia heard the sound of the kitchen behind her, the clatter of a dish on a counter, a child singing something she could not make out.
"Pia," Nell said. "What did you find."
"The house was entered," Pia said. "The hiding place was opened. The client was not in the house. I need you to come."
The line was quiet for a moment. The singing in the kitchen continued. Nell Faro drew a breath, and the breath was the breath of a woman who had once, in a courthouse in Portland, in front of a judge who had not looked up from the page in front of him, signed a paper that had committed her to a course she was still on, and who had understood, as she signed it, that the course would not end in her lifetime.
"I can be there by morning," Nell said. "Drive through the night."
"Don't drive through the night. Drive in the morning. I want you sharp."
"Pia."
"Nell."
A pause. The singing stopped. The kitchen went quiet. When Nell spoke again her voice had changed in the way it changed when she stopped being the mother of the child in the kitchen and started being the person who had once, in the basement of the Portland Public Library, in the dark, in the water, held Pia Moss above the surface by the collar of her coat until the rescue came.
"I'll leave at four," she said. "I'll be there by ten."
The fourth call was to Desk Sergeant Oren Pike, at the Portland precinct, and she let the switchboard ring twice before a voice came on that she did not recognize and then a second voice that she did.
"Pike," he said.
"It's Pia Moss."
"Moss." A sound that might have been a laugh. "I was wondering when you'd turn up."
"I need to speak with you. In person. This morning, if possible."
"What's it about."
"A man who can't walk," she said. "And who walked."
The line was quiet for the length of a held breath. When Pike spoke again his voice had lost its amusement, and what was underneath was the voice of a man who had once refused to bury a case file and had paid for it with his rank.
"Come in through the garage," he said. "I'll leave the bay open. I'll be at the back desk."
She drove the rest of the way into the city without stopping. The light over the harbor was the color of the wine on the floor of the library, and the air through the cracked window smelled of salt and diesel and the first cool breath of the autumn that was coming, and she drove with one hand on the wheel and the other on the handset in her lap, and she did not turn the radio on, and she did not think about the water, and the water, in its long and patient way, thought about her.
The precinct garage smelled of motor oil and old concrete and the particular staleness that gathers in places where engines idle and men wait. Pia Moss parked her Honda where Pike had told her to, beneath the yellow sodium light that turned everything the color of weak tea, and she sat for a moment with her hands still on the wheel. The heater had not yet warmed, and the air through the cracked window carried the smell of the harbor, and she watched a young officer in a damp uniform walk past with a coffee in a foam cup and not look at her, and she thought that she had been a young officer once, or something close to it, in another life, before the water, and she got out.
Pike was at the back desk as he had said. He did not look up when she came through the service door. He was reading a form, and the form was old, and the carbon beneath it was faint, and he turned it over with the careful patience of a man who understood that the back of a page often told you more than the front.
"Sit," he said.
She sat.
He finished the form. He set down his pen. He looked at her with eyes that were the color of river gravel and had seen, in their thirty years at that desk, every kind of person that ever came to a precinct in the small hours, and he did not ask her who she was or why she had come, because he knew, because she had told him on the phone, and because he had once, in a different decade, in a different office, been the officer who had taken her statement after the library, and had driven her to the hospital in his own car, and had not told her to be more careful, because he had known, even then, that she would not be.
"You look tired," he said.
"I am tired."
"You look like you've been running."
"I have been."
"Tell me."
She told him. She told him about Nell Faro, about the gallery, about the red wheel and the silver wheel and the watch that did not match the wrist of the dead man. She told him about the photograph, and the way the photographer had raised the camera, and the way the woman in the photograph had not blinked. She told him about the fire, and the hour of five in the morning, and the smell of the wool as it burned, and the taste of the smoke in her throat, which was the taste of the library, which was the taste of the water. She told him about Dory Vance, and the way Vance had smiled, and the way the smile had not reached his eyes. She told him about the watch, and the time it read, and the time it should have read. She told him about the note in the dead man's pocket, and the smell of the paper, and the way the words on it had been chosen by a man who knew how to choose words. She told him about the door on Federal Street, and the door on Pearl, and the woman who answered them. She told him about the woman who had come down the stairs, and the way she had walked, and the way she had not looked at the photograph on the mantel. She told him about the safe behind the portrait, and the combination that had worked, and the photograph inside, and the page. She told him the words on the page, because he was the kind of man who needed to hear the words, and she said them exactly, and he repeated them under his breath, and he nodded.
"The ember that survives the fire chooses its hour," he said. "That's a threat."
"That's a confession," she said.
"It's both."
"It's both," she said.
He was quiet for a moment. He looked at the form he had been reading, and then he turned it over again, and looked at the back.
"This is going to go sideways," he said. "You know that."
"I know that."
"It's going to go sideways because the family on Federal Street has friends in this building, and the family on Pearl Street has friends in this building, and Dory Vance has friends in this building, and when I put a name on a piece of paper, somebody in this building is going to read it before the ink is dry."
"I know that."
"And you're going to walk out of here and go back to your apartment and lock your door and wait for me to call, and I'm not going to call for three days because that's how long it's going to take me to find a piece of paper that doesn't have a name on it already."
"I know that."
"And in three days something is going to happen that I cannot predict, because the people in this city have been predicting things for a long time, and they are very good at it, and I am not."
"I know that."
He looked at her then, and the look was the look of a man who had once, in a basement, held a piece of paper above his head for thirty seconds while the water rose around his chest, and who had walked away from the promotion he had been offered the next morning, and who had sat at that desk for thirty years, and who was tired, and who was not tired.
"I'm going to write a piece of paper," he said. "I'm going to put a name on it. I'm going to put it in a drawer. I'm going to lock the drawer. I'm going to give the key to a man I trust. I'm going to go home. I'm going to sleep. In the morning I'm going to come back to this desk and I'm going to make a phone call and the phone call is going to be to a judge I know and the judge is going to listen and the judge is going to do what judges do when they listen, which is to decide."
"And if the judge doesn't listen?"
"Then I'm going to find another judge."
"And if there isn't another judge?"
"Then I'm going to find a way to make the judge listen."
She nodded. She did not say thank you, because he was not a man who was thanked, and she was not a woman who thanked men who were not thanked, and the silence between them was the silence of two people who had been in the same water and had come out the same way.
"There's a man I want you to meet," she said. "His name is Hollis Vale. He's a forensic chemist. He's also a licensed private investigator. He's also the kind of man who will look at a piece of paper and tell you what kind of ink was used to write it and what kind of paper it was written on and what kind of hand held the pen."
"I've heard of him."
"I thought you might."
"I don't like him."
"Why not?"
"Because he's the kind of man who is always right."
"That's not a reason not to like him."
"It's a reason to be careful of him."
She did not argue. She had known, when she brought the name into the room, that Pike would not like it, because Pike did not like men who were always right, because Pike had spent his life being wrong in public and had paid for it with his rank, and the idea of a man who was always right was, to Pike, the idea of a man who had never paid for anything.
"He's waiting in my car," she said. "In the garage. Under the sodium light."
"Send him in."
"He doesn't like sodium light."
"I don't care."
She went to the service door. She opened it. Vale was where she had left him, in the passenger seat, reading a report on a tablet, and the sodium light had turned the tablet the color of weak tea, and he looked up when she opened the door, and he did not smile, because he did not smile in precinct garages, because he was a man who saved his smiles for places where smiles were appropriate, and a precinct garage at six in the morning was not such a place.
"He's ready," she said.
"I heard."
"I told him you didn't like him."
"I appreciate the warning."
She held the door for him. He got out. He straightened his coat. He looked at the garage the way a man looks at a place he has been to before and has not been happy in, and he walked past her into the precinct, and she followed, and the door closed behind them with the sound of a man who has made a decision and will not be making another one for some time.
The interview took an hour. Vale answered Pike's questions the way a man answers questions when he knows the questions are not the questions, and Pike asked the questions the way a man asks questions when he knows the answers are not the answers, and Pia Moss sat in the chair by the wall and did not speak, because she was the kind of woman who knew when a room was full of men who needed to be men, and the room was full, and she was quiet.
When it was over, Pike stood. He looked at Vale the way a man looks at a man he has decided not to like, and Vale looked back the way a man looks back when he has decided not to care, and the silence between them was the silence of two men who had agreed to work together and had not agreed to like it.
"I'm going to write a piece of paper," Pike said to Vale. "I'm going to put a name on it. I'm going to put it in a drawer. I'm going to lock the drawer. I'm going to give the key to a man I trust. I'm going to go home. I'm going to sleep."
"And in the morning," Vale said, "you are going to make a phone call."
"Yes."
"To a judge."
"Yes."
"And the judge is going to listen."
"Or I'm going to find a judge who does."
Vale nodded. He did not say anything else. He picked up his tablet. He put it under his arm. He looked at Pia Moss, and the look was the look of a man who had been in a room with a man he did not like and had survived it, and she nodded, and the nod was the nod of a woman who had been in many rooms with many men and had survived them all.