Page 39 of Thin Ice

Nolan's door opened when I was three rooms away. He stood in the gap in a t-shirt and sweatpants, tablet in one hand, the room dark behind him.

"Thought I heard you not making any noise, so I decided to check," he said.

"That's a real talent, hearing someone being silent."

"I listen for the wrong kind of quiet. It comes with experience."

"You should be asleep."

"I should be a lot of things." He looked down the corridor, one way and then the other, and then leaned his shoulder into the doorframe. "Stay a minute."

I stopped and stood with him in the hotel room doorway. We talked in low voices about the team. Nolan thought Jamie was too young to know he should be nervous. It wasn't a conversation that meant anything, but I could have stood there for an hour. He reached out for my wrist and held it for five seconds.

"Go do your rounds," he said. "One of us should be good at his job."

He checked the corridor again before he shut the door.

Michael called at one when I was back in my room. I took it while standing at my window with the harbor lights in the distance.

"I've got the whole name," he said. "Russell Tierney, protocol technician, on the Carolina engagement's full run, 2012 through '14. He filed the workers' comp claim in '13 about a repetitive strain injury. After Carolina, he cycled through two more Tarn engagements, and then he disappeared from the records. I can't find him anywhere in the industry. No license renewals, LinkedIn, or conference registrations. I found him in one other place. It's a property record. He owns a house two states from yours, free and clear."

"Alive?"

"The utilities are current and in his name." Michael paused. "Elias, he's the only one. I've been through every payroll twice. Everyone else from the delivery side of that engagement is either dead, retired and impossible to trace, or so far inside Tarn's current org they'd be plotting before we finished saying hello. Tierney is the one living human who can corroborate the medical side."

"Then we don't talk about him," I said. "Not to Doyle, the league's people, or anyone in that clinic, no matter how helpful they've been."

"Agreed."

Through the wall, faint and rhythmic, I heard a sound. It was Nolan. There was a slow exhale every thirty seconds. He was on the floor working a lacrosse ball into his hip before the next Cup game.

I turned off my light and tried to sleep.

***

The following morning I grabbed a few moments away with Nolan free skating with half of Boston's police force securing the arena. Frey was already in a booth when I arrived at a diner two blocks from the hotel.

"I ordered you coffee," he said. "It's terrible, but it's the good kind of terrible."

He looked like he hadn't slept much. He had his sleeves shoved up with a legal pad placed at his elbow. When the server left with our orders, he started.

"I re-read the white papers," he said. "They are the published ones from that era. Anybody can pull them." He turned the legal pad around so I could see his handwriting.

"Read the language. It has these terms: Signal management, perceived-exertion recalibration, nociceptive threshold training, and interoceptive load tolerance." He tapped each one. "Elias, these aren't enhancement language. There isn't one word in eleven papers about making anybody faster or stronger. It's all—" he searched for the word—"volume control."

"Suppression," I said.

"That's the word. Yeah, suppression." He sat back. "We weren't making them better. We were making them quieter."

We. He hadn't been there. He'd told me it all predated him. Was it a slip or the truth?

"There's more," he said in a lower tone. "I probably shouldn't share this." He glanced around the room. "We get alumni through the clinics sometimes. They are players from that generation, in their forties now, referred for the usual forty-something reasons. At least that's the way I've always seen it."

He started to annotate his comments with moving hands. "But it's not right, Elias. There's joint deterioration you wouldn't expect until at least a decade later. The injuries have no in-game history attached. The retired players can't point to a game where it happened. What's really weird," he leaned in, "is you put pressure on the joint and know he should be screaming with pain, and the response just isn't there."

The server glanced at our coffee cups for refills, but we hadn't touched them.

"What are you going to do?" I asked.