Sloane stepped to the railing. The concrete lip was smooth under her palm, warm from a sun she could not see. The caution tape fluttered at the corner of her vision, yellow and torn. There was a small scuff on the railing's top edge, near where a joiner's mark would have been, and she traced it with one fingernail without quite meaning to. Something about it tugged at her. She catalogued the spot. She would come back for it later, when she had the rest of the puzzle assembled.
She unspooled the spiral notebook from her bag and uncapped the pen with her teeth. Page one, a clean white field with the Hartford Mutual logo faked in the corner from Rae's color printer. She wrote nothing yet. Instead she scanned the terrace in slow arcs, the way her old editor back at the Tribune had taught her to scan a crime scene, nose to the horizon, working left to right, naming what she saw before naming what she suspected.
To her left, a steel pergola wrapped in dead ivy clung to the far wall, its slats throwing thin lines of shadow across a seating area of teak benches and planters full of winter-dead lavender. The planters were new, she noticed, the soil dark and unmuddled, the wood of the benches unstained by weather. Whoever had replaced the terrace fixtures had done so in the days since the judge's fall. Insurance language, restorative language, the kind of vocabulary that says the building has been returned to its market rate. To her right, the door to the penthouse proper was closed, polished brass, no handle on the outside, a security feature for a man who had very publicly feared his own mortality.
The wind picked up. Sloane felt it first along her neck, then at her wrists where her sleeves had ridden up. She smelled something else beneath the concrete and sealant now, something older and less industrial, a trace of cigar smoke long since dispersed, the faintest ghost of bourbon and leather. The terrace had held bodies before the judge died. The terrace had held celebration. The air remembered it the way walls do, the way upholstery does, even when the upholstery has been replaced.
Sloane crossed to the caution tape and stopped three feet short. The yellow plastic stretched between two weighted sign bases, its tape edges curling where the adhesive had dried out. Beyond it, the northeast corner of the terrace was still raw, the railing replaced by a temporary pipe-and-cable assembly that did not match the rest. New bolts showed bright against old concrete. A worker's chalk line ghosted across the slab.
She did not cross. She made a note instead. Date. Time. Cloud cover. The absence of bird sound in a city that was otherwise loud with it. A grocery bag caught in the ivy at the pergola's base, white plastic knotted into a knot someone had tied in a hurry. The bag might mean nothing. The bag might mean a man had stood here smoking the night he fell, and a delivery had arrived at the wrong hour, and he had dealt with it himself rather than call the front desk. Sloane wrote that down too. She wrote everything down.
Her phone buzzed once in her pocket. Rae, probably, checking in on the felony. Sloane let it buzz. She was doing math in her head, the kind she did best when nobody was watching. The coroner had placed the time of death between nine and eleven at night. The maintenance worker had found the body at six in the morning. The terrace door to the penthouse was on a code. The railing was thirty-eight inches off the deck, regulation height, but the judge had been six foot two in the shoes his son had bought him for his birthday last spring. Six two plus two inches of stacked heel. Six two plus a bourbon poured heavy. Six two plus whatever Hattie had known and written down on a postcard and mailed without a return address.
Sloane tucked the notebook back into the bag. She took one last look at the caution tape, at the bright new bolts, at the place where the railing ended and the building gave way to sky. The wind had shifted and was coming up the side of the tower now in long restless breaths, pulling at her hair and the hem of her blazer. Somewhere below, a car horn bleated twice. Somewhere above, a helicopter passed, its rotors a low thump she felt in her molars.
"The gravel pattern," she said, half aloud, and stopped herself.
There was no gravel up here. The terrace was poured concrete. The gravel she was thinking of was the decorative river rock fourteen floors below, spread beneath a fountain that had been dry for years. The gravel Hattie had described in a letter Sloane would not find until two days from now, a letter Hattie had written in pencil from a hospital bed, a letter that put a name to a woman the county had done its best to forget. Sloane could not have known any of that yet. She only knew the word sat wrong in her mouth, the way a key sits wrong in a lock.
"Okay," she said, to no one. To herself. To the wind, which did not bother to answer.
She turned back toward the double doors. The doorman was waiting for her at the elevator, his hands folded, his expression the careful blankness of a man counting the minutes until his relief arrived. Sloane smiled at him, the kind of smile that asks nothing and promises less. The doors opened. She stepped in. She pressed the button for the lobby and watched the numbers above the frame tick downward through her reflection in the polished steel.
She had what she came for. She had not yet begun to understand what it meant.
The elevator dropped. Her stomach followed. In the lobby, past the brushed marble and the revolving door, the city waited with its questions. The first of them was already waiting in her text messages, bright and urgent in Rae's handwriting. The second was waiting in a stack of manila folders on the passenger seat of Sloane's car. The third was waiting in a county clerk's basement three blocks east, in a cold-case file marked with a sticker that said DO NOT OPEN in letters red enough to mean it.
Her phone buzzed again. She answered this time. Rae's voice came through warm and fast, the way her friend's voice always came through, like a window thrown open in a stuffy room. "Tell me you did not get arrested."
"I did not get arrested," Sloane said.
"Tell me you did not commit a felony."
"I did not commit a felony." Sloane pushed through the revolving door into the late-morning light. "But I'm about to commit a conversation."
"With who?"
"With the woman who answers Marcus Webb's phone."
The line went quiet for a beat. Sloane could hear Rae's chair creak, the tap of a fingernail against a desktop. "Sloane," Rae said, careful now, the warmth banked down to something cooler and more careful. "Tell me you have a plan."
"I have a list."
"A list is not a plan."
"It is where plans start."
The doorman's podium shrank behind her as she crossed the marbled lobby toward the street. She could see her car at the curb, a gray Civic with a dent in the rear fender and a parking ticket tucked under the wiper. Somewhere above her, on a terrace that smelled faintly of smoke and new sealant, a patch of yellow tape moved against the building's side like a small, persistent flag.
She climbed into the Civic. She did not start the engine. She sat with her hands on the wheel, her notebook open on the passenger seat, the page still mostly empty except for the date and one underlined word she had not yet found the courage to write a second time.
Terrace. Gravel. The name of a woman the county had buried twice.
She turned the key in the ignition before she could change her mind.
The Civic coughed, caught, and idled with the rough patience of an old animal. Sloane eased out of the metered spot and turned north on Main, past the courthouse with its copper dome gone green, past the closed flower shop, past the barbershop where her uncle Roy had taken her for her first haircut when she was six. She did not let herself look at any of it for more than a second. Sentiment was a luxury she could not afford today.
The Webb building occupied the better part of a block on Birch Street, eight stories of limestone and brass that had been the pride of the county in 1929 and was now the home of three dozen law firms, a wealth manager, and the penthouse that Judge Webb had kept for forty years. Sloane circled the block once, twice, looking for a way in that did not involve the front desk. She found a service entrance off the alley, propped open with a rubber wedge for the cleaning crew, and a moment later she was in a corridor that smelled of floor polish and stale coffee.
She rode the freight elevator to the eighth floor. The panel above the button read PENTHOUSE in small gold letters. She pressed it. The elevator groaned upward, cables humming, and when the doors parted the smell hit her first: cold smoke, the acrid ghost of something burned hours or days before, and beneath it the waxy lemon of fresh polish. Someone had cleaned up.
The tape was still there. Yellow, ragged, stretched across the doorframe at chest height. Sloane studied it for a moment, then pulled a folded Band-Aid from her coat pocket and pressed it over the edge of the tape where it met the jamb. She slid her fingers under and lifted, peeling the strip cleanly away without tearing it. She pocketed the tape. A habit she had picked up from a detective in Louisville who had taught her, over bad bourbon and good advice, that you never leave your prints on a crime scene and you never leave a crime scene untouched.
The door was unlocked. Of course it was unlocked. The killer did not need to lock it on his way out. He had the only key.
She stepped inside.
The foyer opened into a wide room that ran the length of the building, its far wall made entirely of glass. The city lay below in a haze of late-morning light, rooftops and chimney pots and the slow crawl of traffic on the interstate. A sitting area occupied the center of the room: two sofas in pale linen, a glass coffee table, a bowl of dried hydrangeas the color of old bone. The furniture had been arranged with a careful, almost feminine precision that Sloane did not associate with Judge Webb. His office, the few times she had seen it, had been all dark wood and heavier things.
She let her eyes move slowly. There. By the fireplace.
The hearth was a wide slab of black marble, and inside it lay the ruins of a small fire: ash, a few curls of paper that had not caught, and in the center of it, propped against the andiron as if placed there on purpose, a photograph. Half of it was gone, burned away to a brown crisp that crumbled when the air touched it. The half that remained showed three people standing in front of a house Sloane did not recognize, a low ranch-style place with a chain-link fence and a car in the driveway she could not place. One figure was cut cleanly down the middle by the burn, leaving only a shoulder and a sliver of a checked shirt. The second was a woman, dark-haired, laughing at something outside the frame, her face untouched by the fire. The third was a younger woman, standing slightly apart from the other two, her expression guarded, her eyes on the camera as if she had been told to look but had decided not to smile.
Sloane crouched. The ash smelled of old paper and something sweeter, the faint vanilla of print fixer. She did not touch the photograph. She studied the faces. The laughing woman she almost recognized; she had seen that dark hair, that mouth, in the society pages of the county paper from a decade ago. The younger woman she did not know at all. The figure in the checked shirt was a ghost, half a stranger, gone.
She rose and turned to the wall above the mantel. A Cézanne print hung there, a still life of apples on a table, in a thin gilt frame that did not quite match the room. She had seen enough estate auctions in her time to know a real Cézanne would have been framed in something heavier. This one was a copy, a respectable one, hung because it looked the part.
She lifted it from its hook.
Behind it, set into the plaster, was a safe. Small, older than she expected, the dial a circle of polished brass gone dull with years. The brand name was embossed in the metal above the handle: Mosler. A good safe. A safe that had been there for a long time, hidden behind a picture no one would think to move.
The door was closed. The dial was set at zero. She tried the handle. Locked.
She let the print rest against the wall and stood for a moment, listening. The room was very quiet. Outside, a siren wailed somewhere on the interstate, dopplering away. Inside, she could hear the soft tick of a clock she could not see, and beneath it the almost inaudible hum of the building's ventilation. No one else was here. The cleaning crew had come and gone. The police had come and gone. The killer, perhaps, had come and not gone, had stayed long enough to burn what he did not want found and to leave the rest as a kind of message, or a kind of confession, or both.
She crouched again, this time in front of the safe, and studied the dial without touching it. A Mosler of this age would have a three-number combination, possibly four. The numbers would be something the owner could remember. A birthday. An address. The year of a victory or a loss. Judge Webb had been a man of habit and of history, a man who kept his papers in alphabetical order and his suits in chronological rotation. He would have chosen a number that meant something to him.
She did not have time to guess. She had time to look.
She rose and moved through the rest of the apartment, slowly, carefully, her hands at her sides. The bedroom was undisturbed, the bed made with hospital corners, a single book on the nightstand, a Bible with a ribbon marker at the Book of Job. The bathroom was clean, the towels folded, a glass still inverted on the marble shelf. The kitchen had been wiped down. The pantry held a row of identical jars of soup, all of them Campbell's, all of them tomato, none of them opened. A man who ate the same thing every day of his life. A man who did not entertain.
She returned to the living room and stood at the window, looking out at the city she had spent the last twelve years trying to forget. Somewhere out there, Delphine Webb was sitting in a house with the curtains drawn, drinking tea from a china cup and answering her son's phone with the patience of a woman who had been answering other people's phones for half a century. Somewhere out there, Marcus Webb was shaking hands and smiling and being photographed for the campaign literature. Somewhere out there, a woman had been buried twice, once in the ground and once in the official story, and Sloane had come home to find out which grave held the truth.
The photograph in the fireplace. The safe behind the print. Someone had been here before the tape went up. Someone had burned what they did not want the police to see and had left the rest as a kind of dare, or a kind of warning, or a kind of invitation to the next person who walked in with questions instead of a badge.
Sloane took out her phone and photographed the half-burned photograph without moving it. She photographed the safe. She photographed the print leaning against the wall. She put the phone away, replaced the print on its hook, and walked back through the foyer to the door.
In the elevator going down, she called Rae.
"Talk to me," Rae said.
"Someone cleaned the apartment before the police did," Sloane said. "Someone burned a photograph in the fireplace and left the ashes for me to find. Someone tried a safe behind a Cézanne print and either could not open it or chose not to."
"What was in the photograph?"
"A house. Two women. And half a man."
The line went quiet. Sloane could hear the newsroom behind Rae, the murmur of copy editors, the distant ring of a phone that no one was answering.
"Sloane," Rae said, after a long moment. "What are you going to do about the safe?"
"I am going to find the woman in the photograph," Sloane said. "And I am going to find out why someone wanted her face turned to ash."
She hung up before Rae could answer. The elevator reached the ground floor. The doors opened onto the service corridor, and Sloane walked out into the alley, into the light, into the next question.
The alley smelled like rust and hot dumpster grease and the particular sweetness of summer rain that had not yet fallen. Sloane stepped out from the service corridor with her phone still in her hand and her pulse still running a half-beat ahead of her thoughts. The sun hit the tops of the buildings on either side of her but had not yet dipped low enough to reach the pavement where she stood. She was in shadow, and she liked it. She liked, for a moment, being no one.
Then a voice behind her said, "Avery."
She turned. Rae Cordova was leaning against the brick of the service entrance with her arms folded and a leather folder tucked under one elbow. She was wearing a charcoal blazer over a white shirt, no tie, slacks that broke clean over plain black oxfords. A badge hung on a lanyard around her neck, glinting where the alley caught the light.
"You going to tell me you were just visiting," Rae said.
Sloane stared. "What are you doing here?"
Rae pushed off the wall and came forward a few steps. Her hair was shorter than the last time Sloane had seen her, cut sharp along the jaw, and she had the particular stillness in her shoulders that Sloane remembered from the night they'd sat on the floor of Rae's apartment in Chicago and split a bottle of wine and agreed, both of them, that they were going to stop writing the kind of stories that did not cost them anything.
"I'm working," Rae said. "Or I was, until I got a call from building security saying a woman matching your description had just ridden a service elevator to the sixth floor and used a maintenance key to open the Webb penthouse."
Sloane's mouth thinned. "I didn't use a maintenance key."
"You used something. They have you on the elevator camera. They have you on the corridor camera. They have you walking into that unit at two-seventeen in the afternoon like you owned it." Rae glanced at her watch. "Which, for the record, you do not."
"Rae."
"Cordova," Rae said, and the warmth in her voice did not quite mask the steel under it. "Here I'm Cordova. We're not in Chicago. We're not in the office. We're standing in an alley in a county where a man I have known since I was a kid died two weeks ago under circumstances that have not yet been explained to my satisfaction. And you just walked through what is, at minimum, an active crime scene."
"It wasn't secured."
"It is now." Rae opened the leather folder, pulled out a printed incident report, and held it up. "Service camera. Timestamped. You on the sixth floor at fourteen-seventeen. You exiting the Webb residence at fourteen-thirty-one. Fourteen minutes inside, Sloane. You want to tell me what you touched?"
Sloane looked at the folder. She looked at Rae. The sun moved a finger's width down the brick on the east wall, and somewhere a few blocks over a dog barked twice and went quiet.
"Fireplace," Sloane said. "The print above it. The safe behind the print. I didn't open the safe."
"You tried."
"I confirmed it was locked. I didn't pick it, I didn't drill it, I didn't break the door down. I confirmed." Sloane heard her own voice going flat and controlled, the voice she used when she was being very careful not to say anything she could not afford to have heard. "I also didn't touch anything I didn't have to. I wore gloves. I photographed, I didn't remove."
Rae looked at her for a long moment. Rae had always been able to do that, look at Sloane as if she were reading a wire story Sloane had not yet filed. It was one of the reasons Sloane had liked working for her, and one of the reasons she had stopped.
"Building security wants me to file trespassing charges tonight," Rae said. "I told them I'd handle it. I told them I knew you. I told them I'd give you forty-eight hours to come in voluntarily with whatever you found and make a statement, or I'd file the charges myself."
"Rae."
"Cordova. Sloane, listen to me." Rae stepped closer. The badge swung on its lanyard and caught the light again. "I know what you're doing. I know why you're here. I knew your aunt. Hattie called me once, maybe four years ago, and left a voicemail that was mostly static and a sentence I'll never forget. She said, 'Rae, if anything ever happens to me, don't let Sloane come back to this county alone.' I kept that voicemail. I still have it on my phone. And two weeks ago, when Judge Webb turned up dead, I drove down here from Chicago because I had a feeling you were going to do exactly what you just did."
Sloane said nothing.
"I am not the enemy," Rae said. "I have never been the enemy. But I am also the one who has to write the report if you do not give me something I can put in the report. So here is what is going to happen. You have forty-eight hours. In forty-eight hours, you are going to walk into the sheriff's substation on Court Street, you are going to sit down with me, and you are going to tell me everything you have. The photograph. The safe. The woman in the print. All of it. And if what you tell me checks out, we are going to figure out how to keep you out of a cell. If you do not show, I file. I will be sorry about it. I will also do it."
"I need more than forty-eight hours," Sloane said.
"You have forty-eight hours." Rae tucked the folder back under her arm. "Use them."
Sloane's hands were steady. That was the thing about Rae. Even when she was handing you the worst possible version of a day, she did it in a voice that still sounded like a friend. It was the most dangerous voice Sloane knew.
"The woman in the photograph," Sloane said. "Two of them, actually. Younger. One of them might be Delphine Webb before she was Delphine Webb. The other one I don't know yet. There's a house behind them. White clapboard. Wraparound porch. A garden that had not been planted yet. I want to know where that house is."
"Then find out," Rae said. "You have forty-eight hours. Starting now."
Rae turned and walked back toward the service entrance. She had not gone three steps before she stopped and looked back over her shoulder.
"Sloane," she said. "Hattie was right about one thing. You should not be here alone."
"I'm not alone," Sloane said. "You're here."
"That isn't what I meant." Rae held her gaze for a beat longer than was comfortable. "Forty-eight hours, Avery. Don't make me come find you."
She went back through the service door and was gone.
Sloane stood in the alley for a long minute after that. The dog barked again somewhere. A truck rumbled past on the cross street. A woman came out of the building's main entrance two doors down and gave Sloane a curious look and kept walking.
Sloane took out her phone. She looked at the photograph she had taken of the half-burned image. Two women. A house. Half a man. She zoomed in on the clapboard of the porch, on the angle of the railing, on the shape of the garden bed that was waiting to be planted. There was, at the very edge of the frame, almost lost in the curl of the flame, the corner of a sign. White. Green letters. The first letter looked like a J. The third looked like an N.
She saved the image. She put the phone away. She turned up the alley toward the street, toward the light, toward the next forty-eight hours of her life.
She had a photograph. She had a safe. She had a judge's widow who had poured two drinks at three in the afternoon and not touched her own. She had a son who had smiled like his father and answered questions like a lawyer. She had a detective who used to be her friend and was now something more complicated. She had an aunt who had left her a house she had never lived in and a voice mail she had never listened to until tonight. She had a town that smelled the same as it always had.
She had forty-eight hours.
She started walking.