the desk facing the elevators, using it as a barrier between the files and anyone entering the Vaults. Not that anyone ever came down except for the courier from Headquarters, and he—or they, since there had been several of them during Puskis’s tenure—never proceeded beyond the desk, where the files were dropped off and picked up.
The other four desks were placed in locations in the Vaults that, presumably, someone had thought would be convenient for some reason. One was more or less in the middle of the C section, where files on most homicides were kept. Another was in the Stable. The third was in the A section, where files on open investigations were kept. The final desk was in Q section, that eclectic mix of financial crimes, arson, and election fraud. Q section was the farthest from the elevators, probably the reason for the desk’s placement there.
None of these chairs had, as far as Puskis knew (and nobody would have a better sense than he), ever been sat in. He had never used one, and his predecessor, Abramowitz, had claimed to have never used one. That accounted for four decades or so of the chairs sitting empty. Yet the cleaning crew was just as diligent about keeping the chairs and virgin desks spotless as they were the files, so they looked as if they could have been purchased yesterday.
In some ways, the moment that Puskis fully comprehended that he was entering into an unfamiliar and potentially hazardous endeavor was when he took the files in the C4571 series to the desk in the C section and sat down in the green leather chair, which hissed with escaping air as, for the first time, it encountered human weight.
The earlier phone call had been from the Chief’s secretary, reminding him of the next morning’s scheduled meeting. He had wanted to ask several questions, but he had merely assured her that he would be there and hung up. Then, because he had been more content during the years when the phone never rang, he pulled the cord from the phone.
The mystery surrounding the subject of this meeting with the Chief worked at the edges of his mind as he leafed through the files, the contents of which he knew by heart. His looking was merely a way to allow the information contained within to form into something more tangible and profound than his memories of things read at some points in the past.
The pictures, as upsetting as any of the thousands that he had seen, commanded the most attention. These matter-of-fact black-and-white documents chronicled the depths of human behavior. The bodies of men and women and, mostly, children, scattered among the tables at a small restaurant, blood pooling by each corpse. There was no question about their sleeping, Puskis reflected, because their bodies were in poses that clearly indicated fatal trauma. Other photographs showed the restaurant with the furniture now removed but the bodies undisturbed so that they looked as if they had been dropped out of the sky and come to rest, shattered, like baby birds. Close-ups showed the bodies and then the faces, many with their eyes open, staring without sight at the camera.
Looking at the head shots jarred something in Puskis’ memory, and he stood up from the desk and hurried down the aisles between the shelves toward his desk. Once there, he unlocked the center drawer of his desk and removed a folder that he brought back to the desk in C section. He opened the folder, and inside were the two photos that had been in the two DeGraffenreid files. He took the one that he knew to be DeGraffenreid and put it aside. This left the photo of the spectral man with sunken cheeks and the sideburns and the odd stare. He put it among the head shots of the victims he had before him. In this context it was so obvious that Puskis might have felt foolish if he were prone to assessing himself in such a way. This man clearly belonged in the company of the subjects of these other photos. It was the face of a corpse. Ellis Prosnicki, he thought. DeGraffenreid’s victim.
This realization did not seem to provide any particular insight other than that, if it was indeed Prosnicki, the person who had doctored the files had an agenda that Puskis ought to be able to deduce. It was a matter of ordering his thoughts correctly.
That evening, when he was ready to