Page 56 of Thin Ice

At the bottom, where it should have listed the parties to a bodyguard contract, it didn't say principal. Instead:

Subject: Mercer, Nolan (STL).

I stood in the lamplight, holding the page in both hands, afraid of dropping it. I wasn't a client. I was a case. Days of boring phone calls arranged themselves in my head like a shelf of pill bottles arranged by a stranger's hand.

Down in the building's guts, the service elevator woke up and began to climb.

Chapter fifteen

Elias

Michael picked up on the first ring. "Tough game."

"They played fine. Either team could have won, but the Steamers got the bad bounces." I stood on the sidewalk surrounded by the fragrance of the linden trees. "Anything more on Tierney?"

"Quiet, which is what we want. Second call's logged, conditions are logged, and nobody will knock on his door. The man's spent ten years making himself hard to find, and frankly, his paranoia is better security than anything we could build for him. He'll keep until the Cup Final is over." A pause. "You holding up?"

"Ask me after Game Six."

I walked one slow lap of the block to let the call drain out of me, then rode the service elevator back up, still feeling a bit sick over the lost game.

I turned the first lock, then the second, and the door swung open. The light was wrong. The lamp by the recliner had been turned to its brightest setting, with the shade tilted.

Nolan stood beside the chair. He squared himself toward the door, as if he were standing on a blue line. My work bag was open on the seat with the side pocket unzipped, and my charging cable lay beside it, partially coiled.

He held a sheet of paper in both hands.

I didn't need to see the seal to know which page it was. I'd carried the folder with me the entire time I was in St. Louis. The break-in had already proven why it was necessary to keep it on my body. Either it stayed with me, or I destroyed it. It didn't occur to me that Nolan would look for it and find it.

"My phone died," he said. "The cable in the wall's been fraying for a month. You had one in the bag. I watched you take it out in the car this morning."

"Okay," I said.

"That's the whole story. I want you to have it, because you're probably already wondering what I was doing rummaging around in your bag, and the answer is borrowing a charger from the man who sleeps in my bed." He set the page down on the chair arm. "So. I'm going to ask you the question again."

I knew what he was going to ask. I'd dodged it the last time he asked.

"Did the team really send you?"

"No," I said. "At least that's not the full story."

His expression didn't change.

"Sit if you need to," I said. "I'm going to tell you everything."

He didn't sit.

I unpacked everything in order.

"Just days before the Final, a man named Ray Halloran died in his sleep at a retirement home outside Raleigh, North Carolina. He was the equipment manager for the Carolina organization for thirty years. As you probably already know, that included your years there."

I reached my hands behind me, clasping them together, and continued the story. "He had pancreatic cancer. After he received the terminal diagnosis, he spent a lot of his remaining time trying to reach you. He left voicemails with the Steamers' front office. Two certified letters were sent care of the team."

Nolan shifted his weight fully onto his good side.

"I never got any letters."

"I know. They're in an evidence folder in Seattle. They never got past the mailroom's forwarding service. His letters were lost among ten thousand pieces of fan mail." I watched him take that in. "He told his daughter, on his last good day, that there was something he should've told one of Hawkins's old teammates a long time ago."