Page 59 of Thin Ice

Elias: Mercer's out on foot in the CWE, personal time, do not approach, do not follow close. He is not to know.

I sent the watcher because I could live with being the villain of the morning. I couldn't live with what might happen without it.

There was nothing to guard and nothing to investigate, so I did the one useful thing left to do in the condo. I moved myself out of Nolan's space.

It didn't take long. My toothbrush and razor retreated to the guest bathroom. I removed my watch from the left nightstand. Three of my shirts hung in his closet. They were at the end of the rod with an inch of air between them and his suits, as if they'd known not to get comfortable.

I collected it all in an armload and carried it down the hall to the guest room. There it was, with the bed made up for me. I packed the shirts into my duffel instead of hanging them in the closet.

The second mat was still in the bedroom, rolled and standing in the corner on what had been my side. I left it—going back would mean entering the room again, and there would be a cost for that.

The neighborhood woke up on schedule. At six-fifteen, the little man came around the corner with Baxter, right on time. The dog's enormous black head moved through the fog like the prow of a tug.

Across the street, in a second-floor apartment window I'd logged as unoccupied the day I arrived, there was a woman looking out. She was older, wearing a powder-blue robe, while watering a window box that was new. Red petunias spilled over the edge.

She must have set them out yesterday while most of the city focused on the action in the arena. I looked at the petunias until my eyes stung, and I told myself it was the fog.

Scrubs began moving in singles and pairs toward the medical campus. It was the morning shift change.

Across the street, at ground level below the petunias, a man in a Steamers t-shirt opened the door, picked up his paper, and looked up and down the block both ways.

None of them knew about the events in Nolan's condo. The whole neighborhood continued without noticing. The words I'd spoken about Nolan came back to me—Most of the real work is private.

I'd told Frey that at a hotel bar on Euclid, six blocks from where I stood. I said Nolan's maintenance program was disciplined like you wouldn't believe.

Baxter and the little man turned the far corner, the scrubs crossed the intersection, and the street was empty again. The fog was thinning at the top of the sweetgum, changing from dirty gray to light pearl.

My phone rang.

"Elias." It was Michael.

"You've got news?"

"Russ Tierney is dead."

For a second, I didn't say anything. Tierney was only a voice on a burner phone two states away, but he'd touched a nerve. He asked me did Ray suffer? We'd made plans for a future conversation. Death wasn't part of the equation.

"When?" I asked.

"Found yesterday afternoon. A cousin does a weekly grocery run for him. She let herself in when he didn't answer and found him in his chair with the TV going." Everything was silent on Michael's end, not even the sound of typing. "It cleared the sheriff's blotter overnight and tripped my monitoring an hour ago. I've been sitting here reading it over and over, expecting it to say something different."

"Cause?"

"Apparent accidental overdose, but here's the thing, Elias. You're ready to question that, like me, but it holds. It's entirely plausible. Tierney filed a workers' comp claim in 2013 for repetitive strain, and he's been on pain management ever since. There's a trail of prescriptions from three doctors across two states."

"Coincidence?"

"I'm not ready to say that, but the drug history means it's not an autopsy priority. The coroner isn't interested. A rural county with a four-man police force isn't going to spend money trying to figure out why a man on those pills for that long finally took too many." A pause. "It's not going to be investigated because there's nothing to investigate. It's a death that looks like nothing."

"That fits."

"Fits what?" Michael asked.

"Halloran's heart stopped two days after he got chatty. We know that, but from the outside, it looks like his body waved the white flag at the cancer."

"And Hawkins's death thirteen years earlier was a cardiac arrest, too." Michael's keyboard started. "Three deaths, Elias. Too many connections."

"He told me he wouldn't open the door for anyone: census worker, missionary, or lost pizza kid." I heard Tierney's voice in my head.