Page 30 of Thin Ice

He entered the room slowly, stopping at the dresser and looking down.

"The ball's on the wrong side." He crouched and pointed without touching it. "It lives here on the left side of the bed, so I can get it off the floor without standing up, because standing up is the part that—" He stopped. "It's on the right. Somebody put it back on the right."

"Don't touch it."

He stood and walked to the bathroom. I watched from the doorway while he opened the medicine cabinet.

"These are wrong too," he said. "They're in a row. Labels out." He shook his head. "That's not my order. Mine's the order I take them in, dawn to night. You'd have to know the— " He turned and looked at me. "Somebody took every one of these down. Read them. Put them back the way a normal person would think they go."

"And got it wrong," I said, "because your order isn't on the labels."

He looked at me, and then back at the shelf.

"Nothing's gone," he said.

"That's right. I checked the living room twice."

A stranger had entered Nolan's condo. No forced entry meant keys or competence, or both. The cleaning service had keys. The building had staff who could access the space.

Somebody had used the one guaranteed empty window, the night the North American sports world focused on an arena five miles east.

"Somebody was here while I was standing on the blue line holding an old woman's arm," he said.

"Yes."

He turned back down the hall to the bathroom. For a moment he only looked at the cabinet, the neat row, labels out. It was a stranger's idea of order.

"This is the part nobody sees," he said. "The whole point of it is that nobody sees."

Then he swept the shelf. A dozen bottles hit the sink and the floor, clattering into corners.

He was breathing hard.

I didn't move toward him and tell him it would be all right or that we'd find them. The locks would be changed by tomorrow, but that wasn't what he needed in the moment. I stayed where I was, silently witnessing.

"You were supposed to be watching," he said. "That's your only job. You watch."

"I was watching you," I said. "Everything I had was pointed at the arena. So was everything Doyle had. Whoever did this counted on that being the case. They were right, and this won't happen again."

He looked at me for a long moment. The anger didn't leave; it simmered. He crouched again and started pulling pill bottles out of the sink. I knelt on the floor beside him and gathered those that had rolled into corners.

Nolan's bedroom door closed a little after two. He didn't slam it; it closed with a quiet click.

I took my phone to the living room window and woke Michael.

He answered on the second ring, like he'd been sitting with the phone in his hand. I described everything.

"Nobody touches anything else," he said. "Photograph it all at first light, before the locks change. I want the pad's position, the cabinet, everything, exactly as you found it. And Elias." A beat. "The car from last night just got promoted."

"I know."

"I'll have better questions for the traffic cameras. Hold for Mac."

Mac skipped the hello.

"How is he?"

"Contained," I said. "He'll play Game Two on no sleep."