had even been in Pakistan, but I felt as sure as I could be based on nothing more than a hunch. What I needed was a piece of paper that had it down in black and white. It did no harm to offer up what I thought I knew. If I was wrong, this man would be happy to say so. If I was wrong, I wanted him to smirk and jump in to correct me before he had a chance to realize that maybe it wasn’t something he was supposed to do. It was different with the old general. They were like two trees that reacted differently to the same breeze.

“She has a name, I assume.”

I wrote it down and pushed it over the desk. He looked, then blew out a puff of air. “A person of interest, apparently. Someone already came and took away her file.”

“You saw it before it disappeared?”

“I didn’t read it.”

“You looked at it; it happened to open as you were retrieving it, and you happened to see something?”

“Some files have clasps on them. This one didn’t.”

I nodded. “What about the husband?”

“That will take me a while. It’s hard to search files when the lights go on and off.”

“Give me a call when you find something. If you don’t call, I’ll be back when you don’t expect me, and I might have some wire cutters with me next time.” He recoiled slightly. “Find a flashlight somewhere in this building. There’s enough light to see the files with that. Maybe Miss Ban can help.”

He looked up at the ceiling, but I couldn’t see his expression because the lights flickered again and then gave way to the dark. I saw myself out.

10

“Are you actually so at ease with yourself, Inspector? I wonder if you are; or is it that you are as completely empty as always, void of all feeling?” My old friend the acting chief of personnel sat in my office. She didn’t have the air of someone who had the hots for me. Her question might have been the start of a late-night argument, just like old times, but it was only noon. It should have been a warning when she called and said she needed to come over. So why did I ignore the warning, the ominous tingle in my spine? Maybe I was distracted by the glare of the sun off the snow on the street outside my window. If I had been wearing my sunglasses, the glare wouldn’t have bothered me. If I’d had on my sunglasses when she walked in and sat down, I could have looked directly in her face and she couldn’t have seen into my soul, where I was surprised to discover she still lurked. I would have had time to stop myself, to keep my mouth shut. “Me? Ill at ease?” I turned and did the only thing I could. I laughed.

She smiled, and I suddenly remembered she had several. One of them was real, pure starlight and moonbeams. This wasn’t it. “Happy to see me again so soon?” She could keep her tone eerily even, the same calm surface that killer sharks love to cruise beneath. She did it before she ripped you apart, tore huge chunks out of your existence before you had time to shout for help. Even now, when her tone was so deadly flat, her face was round and her cheeks dimpled. The smile might be unreal, but the dimples weren’t. The dimples killed me. They were mantraps.

All the conversations we’d ever had came back at me. On our walk the other day, I only remembered a few things, snatches of emotions. Now, with her sitting so close, everything was accessible. I frantically rewound all the tapes in my head, trying to remember with precision, to wade through the flood of memory onto something solid, to someplace where I couldn’t see her dimples. She didn’t help; she just sat and looked into my eyes. Walking beside the river, putting our steps in rhyme, I didn’t really have to look at her. Anyway, she had been all business. Mostly all business. But now she was across from me, looking into my eyes. She read everything. Nothing escaped her. That was always the problem. That’s probably why they put her in personnel.

There had been a time when I considered poking them out, my eyes, so she couldn’t read me. It was the only solution that I could think of short of killing myself, which