"I know I am."
"I'm sorry.I've been useless since Hayes called."
"You’re not wrong,” she said with a smile.“But I know this is a lot for you.I get it.But we need to move forward.Agreed?"
"Agreed."
Vic stood and went back to the desk.She pulled up the list of names again, the eight people who still needed to be investigated."All right.Let's go through these together.Tell me what you see."
Miles got up from the bed and joined her at the desk.He leaned over her shoulder, looking at the names on the screen.His focus was still scattered, still partially on Kane, but he was making an effort.That was something.
"Claudia Ashford is our best suspect.Even if she was innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt, she’d be a well-spring of information.But we should look at the others, too.Anyone with platinum expertise, anyone who lost significant income when Ashford closed."
"That's what I was thinking.Kim's pulling detailed backgrounds on all eight.We'll have them by morning."
"Good."
They worked together for another hour, going through the names, making notes, building profiles.Miles was getting better, more engaged, though Vic could still see the tension in his shoulders.Kane's escape was going to haunt him for a while.But at least he was functioning now, at least he was present.
Around two in the morning, they called it.Miles took the bed closer to the window and Vic took the one by the door.In the darkness, Vic could hear Miles shifting restlessly, could see the glow of his phone screen as he checked for updates on Kane.
But he didn't turn the television back on.And when morning came, he was up and ready to work.
It wasn't perfect.But it was enough.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Miles was awake before the alarm went off.
He lay in the half-dark, staring at the ceiling, listening to Vic's quiet breathing from the other bed.The digital clock on the nightstand read 5:58.He hadn't slept well, drifting in and out of something that was less sleep than a kind of suspended consciousness, his thoughts never fully releasing him.At some point around 4 a.m., he'd checked his phone for Kane updates without even consciously deciding to do it.
At 6:00, the alarm went off.He silenced it before the second pulse.
Across the room, Vic shifted under her covers, pulling the pillow over her head with the irritation of someone who had been roused too many times by other people's schedules.Miles sat up, grabbed his phone from the nightstand, and headed for the bathroom, pulling the door most of the way closed behind him.
He ran the tap cold and bent over the sink, splashing water on his face.When he straightened up and looked at himself in the mirror, he looked more or less like he felt.He reached for his phone almost as a second nature.
The news coverage had not slowed down overnight.If anything, it had amplified.There were new angles of the prison building, new analysis, interviews with guards and other employees from the prison.He scrolled through the updates the way a person pokes at a sore tooth, knowing it will hurt but doing it anyway.There was an op-ed from a former bureau analyst questioning whether Miles's capture of Kane had ever truly neutralized the threat.There was a cable segment with two retired agents debating whether the FBI had been too relaxed about prison security.
He closed that one quickly.And then before he could let the worry of it all consume him, Miles opened his contacts and found the contact information he’d been given for the front desk at the prison—an email address that would skip standard filtered channels and go straight to those who would be happy to answer his requests.
He quickly typed out an email, asking about the availability of surveillance footage from the hours preceding the explosion, specifically the utility access corridors and visitor processing areas.He hesitated for only a moment before sending it.The email itself wasn’t in direct opposition of Hayes’ orders, but it was a far cry from obedience.
He set the phone on the edge of the sink and looked at himself again.
Kane had been out for more than eight hours now.Every minute that passed widened the circle of possibility, the radius of where he could be, who he might have contacted, what he might already be setting in motion.Miles knew Kane's methods well enough to understand that the escape itself was not a destination.It was a starting point for something Kane had been planning since the day Miles put him in that courtroom.
And Miles was standing in a hotel bathroom in Midtown Manhattan with no direct role in the manhunt, no access to the Marshals' intelligence, and a meeting to conduct in a few hours with a woman who might help him identify a murderer.He turned the problem around carefully in his mind, the way he'd learned to do in therapy when his first instinct was emotional rather than rational.Hayes hadn't benched him out of spite or doubt.Hayes had kept him exactly where the work was.The platinum killer had already murdered two people, and the evidence was pointing sharply at someone associated with Ashford.If Miles walked away from that now to chase Kane across whatever state the Marshals thought he might be heading toward, there would be a third victim.Maybe a fourth.People who were alive right now, people who might be wearing a piece of platinum jewelry and going about their normal lives without any idea of what they were wearing.
That was the job in front of him.That was the thing he could actually control.
Kane was in every capable pair of hands the Marshal Service could put in the field.Miles inserting himself, distracted and raw, would add noise to a search that needed precision.He knew that.The part of him that wanted to be in on it, the part that felt sidelined and almost personally embarrassed by the escape, was not the part he should be listening to right now.
He thought briefly of Dr.Mitchell, of the conversations they'd been having over the past several months.He'd been doing well.Better than well, actually.He'd been sleeping, keeping perspective, not letting the work eat him the way it had in the worst periods.One night of poor sleep was not a relapse.Checking the news obsessively at 4 a.m.was not a crisis.It was a bad night, and bad nights happened, and what mattered was what you did the morning after.
He splashed more water on his face and reached for a towel.
When he came out of the bathroom, Vic was sitting up in her bed, squinting at him with one eye.Her dark hair was loose around her shoulders and pushed to one side from the pillow.She looked roughly as rested as he did.
