The pause on the other end was the sound of a man searching his memory with sudden, anxious precision.Then: "Marissa.Marissa Skelling.She was talking about it maybe two weeks ago, in the break trailer.Said she’d found out she had—I don’t remember exactly—Middle Eastern heritage, I think?Syrian or Lebanese.She was surprised by it.A few of us were in the trailer and she was showing the results on her phone."
"Who was in the trailer?"
"Me.Palmer—Raymond Palmer, the historian.Hess was in and out.A couple of the crew guys.It was just a lunch break conversation, you know?People share things."
People share things.And sometimes the things they share get them killed.
"Is Skelling on the furlough list?"Isla asked.
"Yeah.Everyone’s furloughed since the building got shut down.She’s at home, I assume."
Isla was already on her feet, reaching for her jacket.Vaughn mirrored the motion on the other side of the desk, phone still pressed to her ear as she asked DiMaggio for Skelling’s home address.
"One more question," Isla said, loud enough for the speaker to pick up."Raymond Palmer.What can you tell me about him?"
"Ray?He’s our local history consultant.Brought on to advise on the exhibit narratives—the interpretive text, the historical context for each gallery.Soft-spoken guy, early fifties, very knowledgeable.Keeps to himself mostly, but always pleasant.Been with the project about eight months."
"Does he have a background in genealogy?Family history?Anything related to ancestry or heritage?"
Another pause, longer this time."Actually—yeah.He mentioned once that he did genealogical research on the side.Said he’d helped families trace their roots, that kind of thing.I didn’t think much of it.It fit with the history work."
It fit with everything.Isla looked at Vaughn across the desk.The detective’s brown eyes held the same cold recognition that was settling into Isla’s chest—the feeling of a picture snapping into focus, the relief and the dread arriving simultaneously because the answer was always worse when it had a name.
"We need to get to Skelling’s house," Isla said."Now."
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The house was quiet for the first time in what felt like weeks, and Marissa Skelling intended to enjoy every second of it.
Derek had taken the kids—both of them, which was the critical part—to the seven o’clock showing of whatever animated movie had been advertised on every cereal box in the grocery store for the past month.He’d suggested it after dinner, reading the tension in her shoulders the way he’d learned to over twelve years of marriage, the way a person learned to read weather by watching the sky.Go take a bath, he’d said.Put on that music you like.I’ve got the monsters.He meant the children.He always called them the monsters when he was being affectionate, which was most of the time.
Marissa had kissed him and the monsters and watched the minivan pull out of the driveway with the particular relief of a woman who loved her family deeply and also loved them leaving.The furlough was supposed to have been a reprieve, but three weeks at home with a seven-year-old and a five-year-old, while the news ran constant coverage of the Armory murders, had turned it into a siege.The kids didn’t understand why Mommy couldn’t go to work.Marissa didn’t fully understand it herself—she was a tile specialist, for God’s sake, brought onto the renovation to restore the Armory’s original floor work.She laid tile.She didn’t know anything about bayonets or maces or whoever was turning a construction site into a crime scene.
But three of her coworkers were dead, and the building was sealed, and the police had told everyone to stay available and stay careful, which were two instructions that occupied very different spaces in Marissa’s mind.Available meant waiting.Careful meant afraid.She was both.
She padded upstairs in her socks and started the bath, turning the hot tap to full and adding the lavender salt she'd been hoarding since Christmas.The bathroom filled with steam.She set her phone on the vanity, queued up the Norah Jones playlist that Derek teased her about, and refused to apologize for, and was reaching for the towel rack when the doorbell rang.
She paused.Considered ignoring it.The bath was running, the music was starting, and the list of people she wanted to talk to right now was exactly zero names long.But the doorbell rang again—not insistent, not aggressive, just the polite, slightly tentative press of someone who wasn’t sure they should be bothering her.
She turned off the tap, went downstairs, and opened the front door.
Raymond Palmer stood on her porch with his hands in the pockets of a dark wool overcoat, his shoulders slightly hunched against the March cold.He looked the way he always looked—mild, unassuming, the kind of face you’d forget five minutes after a conversation ended.Wire-rimmed glasses, thinning brown hair combed neatly to one side, the soft features of a man who spent more time in archives than outdoors.He was smiling, but the smile had an uncertain quality, as though he’d rehearsed it on the drive over and wasn’t sure it had landed.
"Marissa.I’m so sorry to bother you at home."His voice was quiet, almost apologetic—the voice of a man who navigated the world by taking up as little space as possible."I tried calling, but I think your phone might be off."
It wasn’t off.It was upstairs, playing Norah Jones to an empty bathroom."Raymond.Hi.Is everything okay?"
"Yes, yes.I just—I wanted to ask you about something.The ancestry test you mentioned at work, a couple weeks ago?The one with the Middle Eastern results?"He adjusted his glasses with a gesture she recognized, the habitual nervous fidget of a man who touched his frames the way other people cracked their knuckles."I've been doing some research for the exhibit narratives, and your results—the Syrian heritage—actually connect to a really fascinating thread in the region’s immigration history.I was hoping I could ask you a few questions about it."
It was such a Raymond thing to say—earnest, academic, slightly tone-deaf to the fact that showing up unannounced on a Saturday evening to discuss genealogy was not standard social behavior.But that was Raymond.He lived inside the history the way other people lived inside their own heads, and the boundaries between professional curiosity and personal intrusion were lines he genuinely didn’t seem to see.
"Sure," Marissa said, and stepped aside to let him in."I was about to take a bath, but I’ve got a few minutes."
He walked past her into the living room, and she closed the door against the cold and followed him.The house was warm, lamplight pooling on the hardwood floors, the faint sound of Norah Jones drifting down from the second floor like something heard through water.Palmer stood in the center of the room and looked around with the quiet, cataloging attention he brought to everything—she’d seen him do the same thing at the Armory, standing in the middle of a gutted hall and reading the space the way other people read a page.
"Can I get you anything?Coffee, or—"
"No, no.I won’t keep you long."He turned to face her and his hand moved inside his coat—not to his glasses this time, not the familiar fidget, but deeper, into the lining, with a deliberateness that was different from anything she’d seen from him before.The smile was still on his face, but it had changed.The uncertainty was gone.What remained was something patient and focused and absolutely still.
