Chapter 6 The Third Man

The third one was found in the courthouse garage, in a car that still had the engine running and the heater on, as if the man inside had meant to be gone in a minute and had simply never gotten the chance. The security guard who found him was young and had been on the job six weeks, and he stood at the far end of the row with his back to the car until Sarah arrived, because he could not make himself look at the face. Marcus Thorne had been an assistant district attorney for fourteen years, the kind of prosecutor who took the cases nobody else wanted and made them boring enough to win. His briefcase was on the passenger seat, closed. His coffee cup was in the holder. His eyes were open and empty, and Sarah had stopped needing Vance to tell her what that meant. Vance came down the ramp ten minutes later, and she did not speak until she had run her scanner over Thorne's temple and studied the small screen. "Three in three months," she said at last. "Hale. Avery. Thorne. Same hand, same machine, same unhurried way of doing it." "Whatever this is," she went on, "it has a routine, and routines can be traced." "Or a routine can be a signature," Sarah said. "Something to leave behind on purpose." Vance looked at her. "Then someone wants us to know it's one person, which would make it easier for us to look for one person and miss the people around him." She packed her scanner away. "I'll have the full workup by morning." "But Sarah," Vance added, "whoever did this, they did it in a public garage, in a building full of cameras, and no one saw a thing. That takes planning. That takes a reason." Sarah found the reason in the trunk. Thorne had kept a second case file, one that was not in the district attorney's system, in a fireproof box under the spare tire. Inside were years of notes in his tight, careful hand: names, dates, places, all of them circling the same territory Sarah had been circling for weeks. The old line. The room under it. A phrase she had read in a dead man's notebook, repeated here like a refrain: they sell what we forget. There were photographs too, taken from across the street: a service entrance on Harbor Road, a van with no plates, a man in a department coat standing watch while the van was loaded. Sarah studied the photographs for a long time. Thorne had been ahead of her, months ahead, and he had been careful, and care had not been enough. At the back of the box, folded under the photographs, was a list of three names, each one crossed out in a different ink. Hale. Avery. And the third was a name Sarah had never seen: a witness coordinator from the state's attorney's office who had left the job two years ago and been found dead in a house fire that the fire marshal had called an accident. "Everyone who got close," Sarah said quietly, standing in the garage with the box open on the hood of the car. "Everyone who pulled at the thread. He took them out one at a time." She worked the box onto the back seat of her own car and drove it to the precinct without calling anyone, and she logged the contents in the green notebook before she logged them anywhere else. Thorne had not trusted the district attorney's system. Thorne had been right. The notes were the first independent confirmation she had that the Curator was real, that the room existed, that the market was not a rumor but a business with a service entrance and a department coat standing watch at the door. That afternoon she asked to see her captain, and she put the photographs on his desk and told him what she had found. Reyes studied them without touching them, the way you study a thing you do not want to be connected to. "This is a district attorney's case now, Sarah," he said. "Thorne was one of theirs. Let their office carry it." "Thorne was murdered for carrying it," she said. "And the man who did it is still walking around with the keys to a room under this city. The DA's office will bury this in a month. They always do." Reyes was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "What do you want from me?" "A partner," Sarah said. "Someone clean. Someone outside the rotation, outside the people who've been watching this case from the beginning. I can't do this alone anymore, and I can't trust anyone who's already part of it." Reyes looked at her, and something moved behind his eyes that she could not name. "I'll find you someone," he said. "A transfer from another division, someone with no history in this building. Give me a few days." "Days might be all I have," Sarah said, and she walked out. She laid the Harbor Road photographs out on the kitchen table that night and studied them the way Thorne must have studied them: the van, the gate, the man in the department coat. Somewhere in the frame there was a face she should know, and she did not know it yet, and it sat at the edge of her vision like a word on the tip of a tongue. That night she stood in her bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror for a long time, and she tried to remember what her own face had looked like before the warehouse, before Avery, before the first time she had understood that the city underneath her had a different set of rules. She could not quite picture it. The face in the mirror was a face she recognized, but it had the patient, waiting look of a woman who had started checking her own reflection for changes, and she did not like what that meant. She slept with her weapon on the nightstand that night, and in the morning she added a fourth name to the list in the green notebook: her own. She did not write it in the same column as the others. She wrote it at the bottom of the page, alone, with a question mark beside it, because she did not know yet whether she was a name the Curator had already been given, or one he had not thought to ask for. Either way, she was on the page now, and that changed everything. ---