KOLYA
The room we use for this kind of work sits in the back of the compound, below ground, where the walls are thick enough to keep secrets and the light never changes, so a man loses track of whether he has been awake ten hours or thirty. I had been awake for closer to thirty. On the wall in front of me hung three faces, and not one of them was the right one.
Petya set a coffee at my elbow without being asked and then did not leave, which is how he tells me he has something to say.
"She slept four hours," he reported. "Up twice to check the door. Made tea she didn't drink. Shouted at the television once, at a cooking program, which Galina would treat as a glowing reference." He hesitated. "She asked me where you were, boss."
"And what did you tell her?"
"That you were working. Which is true." He looked at the boards. "It just isn't all of it."
"No," I said. "It is not."
"Walk me through them," I said.
Maks reads data the way I read rooms, which is to say completely and without mercy. He tapped the first face, a soft-looking man in an expensive shirt.
"Caleb Render. The ex. Two years with her, ended eight months ago, ended ugly. While they were together he put a tracking app on her phone and called it keeping her safe. He still texts her on a cycle, every few weeks, and the cycle is escalating." He shrugged. "On paper, he's your man."
"And off paper?"
"Chicago. For two of the deliveries. The airline had him in a window seat at thirty thousand feet while somebody restocked her tea." Maks shook his head. "He's a coward and a bully. He isn't our ghost."
"And the second?"
"A patient." A gaunt face, hospital pallor, eyes that had seen the wrong things and decided to keep them. "She brought him back on her table fourteen months ago. An overdose. He woke up convinced she'd been sent to him by something holy. Started turning up at the hospital, got himself trespassed off the property twice." He let out a breath. "But he's been in a court program upstate for ninety days with a monitor on his ankle that swears he hasn't crossed the county line. Wrong man."
"The third?"
This one Maks left blank. A gray rectangle where a face should have been.
"That's the problem," he said. "The third isn't a suspect. The third is a shape. Whoever this is knows her schedule before she does. Knows which nights she drives and which she takes the train. He got into a locked car in a hospital structure wired with cameras on every level and left nothing behind, not a hair, not a print, not a smudge on the mirror he turned to face her seat. He doesn't stand out on the footage, because he belongs on the footage. This isn't a stranger who learned her. It's somebody who was already there."
"A coworker," I said.
"Or near enough to wear the badge. Someone with a reason to be in those corridors at three in the morning. We're pulling personnel files now, but it's a long list. Hospitals do not run on small numbers of people."
"How long to narrow it?" I asked.
"Days, if I cut corners. A week if I do it so cleanly that no one ever knows I was looking." He waited. "Which do you want?"
"Both."
"Those are not the same request."
"They are today."
Something that on another man would have been a smile crossed his face. "Then I'll cross every badge that entered that parking structure on the delivery nights against her shift calendar. If he draws a paycheck from that hospital, the overlap will sketch his face for us. Patient men leave patterns. A pattern is only a confession that takes longer to read."
"What kind of man?" I said. "Give me the shape of him, not the badge."
Maks thought about it. "Helpful. The kind people are relieved to see. He brings the coffee, remembers the birthday, walks the tired nurse to her car so she doesn't have to cross the lot alone. Nobody flags the man who is always kind, because kindness is the one disguise we never think to search." He turned to the blank gray square that still had no face. "He isn't hiding in the dark, boss. He's hiding in the light, standing exactly where she already trusts him."
It was the most useful thing anyone told me that day, and I did not yet understand why it would come to matter so much.
There was a second board on the far wall, and Ruby's hunter was not on it. That one held a single face, and I had been carrying it behind my eyes for three weeks without putting the name in the air, because a name spoken aloud becomes a fact, and I had wanted this one to stay a possibility a little longer.
"You confirmed it," I said. It was not a question.
