is my baby sister. Missing, possibly dead, possibly in jail. Another catastrophe I failed to predict or prevent.
The television now shows jerky footage of a line of South Asian men behind a table, green military uniforms with gold epaulets, one of them speaking sternly into a microphone. A guy two stools down from me makes an agitated harumph. I take him in, a soft middle-aged man in a Harley jacket, a thick mustache and beard; he says, “You mind?” I shrug, and he climbs up onto the counter, balances awkwardly on his knees to change the channel.
My phone is shivering.
Culverson.
“Hey, Detective.”
“How you feeling, Henry?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m all right.”
The Pakistanis on the TV are gone, replaced by a pitchman, grinning obscenely before a pyramid of canned food.
Culverson runs through what he’s got so far. Theodore Gompers, in his office with his bottle, heard a shot fired at around 2:15, but by his own admission he was pretty drunk, and it took him several minutes to set out in search of the noise, and then several minutes more to locate the narrow storeroom, where he found Naomi’s body and called the police at 2:26.
“What about the rest of the staff?”
“It was just Gompers in there when it happened. He’s got three other employees at present, and they were all out, enjoying a long lunch at the Barley House.”
“Bad luck.”
“Yeah.”
I stack the blue books, spread them out, shift them into a square, like a fortification around my coffee cup. Culverson is going to do a ballistics workup on the bullet—on the off chance, the way-off chance, he says, that this gun was bought legally, pre-IPSS, and we can trace it. In the corner of my eye the bearded guy in the Harley jacket mops up egg yolk with a crust of toast. The TV pitchman scornfully tosses the canned food into the garbage, and now he’s demonstrating some kind of countertop vacuum sealer, dumping a bowl of strawberries in its stainless-steel funnel. McConnell, says Culverson, canvassed the rest of the Water West Building, four stories of office suites, half of them empty, no one saw anything or heard anything strange. No one cares. The old security guard says no one came in or out that he didn’t recognize—but there are two back entrances, and one of them leads directly to the rear stairwell, and the security cameras are long gone.
More clues. More puzzles. More facts.
I stare at the TV screen, where the pitchman dumps out his cardboard carton of blueberries into the funnel and switches on the machine. My counter-mate whistles appreciatively, chuckles.
“And the uh—” I say.
And then I’m just frozen, I’m sitting there, holding my head in my forehead. Right at this moment I have to decide, is the thing, am I going to leave town and go north to Maine and find a house on Casco Bay and sit there and stare out the window with my sidearm and wait, or am I going to stay here and do my work and finish my case. My cases.
“Palace?” says Culverson.
“The files,” I say, I clear my throat, I sit up on my stool, stick a finger in my ear to block out the TV and the bad music, reach for a blue book. “What about the files?”
“Ah, yes, the files,” says Culverson. “The terribly helpful Mr. Gompers basically says we’re up the metaphorical creek, on that front.”
“Huh,” I say.
“Just eyeballing the file cabinet, he says there are maybe three dozen files missing, but he can’t tell me what the claims were, or who was working on them, or anything. They gave up on computer files in January, and there are no backups of the paper files.”
“Bad luck,” I say, I get out a pen, I’m writing, I’m getting it all down.
“Tomorrow I’m going to try and track down some friends and family on this Eddes girl, give ’em the bad news, see if they know anything.”
“I’ll do that,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“Sure.”
“You sure?”
“I’ll take care of it.”
I get off the phone and pack up my notebooks, sliding them one by one into the pocket of my blazer. The question as before is why. Why does anybody do this? Why now? A murder, calculated, cold blood. To what purpose, for what gain? Two stools over the mustache man makes his agitated harumphing noise again, because the infomercial has been broken into by a news report, women in abayas somewhere, running in a panic through a dusty marketplace.
He turns my way with doleful eyes, shakes