Chapter 7 The Keys

Sarah tested the building the way she tested everything now, with a small lie and a patient eye. She planted a false evidence transfer slip in the warehouse box—a page that listed a new exhibit number, one that did not exist—and marked the folder with a dot of blue ink in the corner of the flap, a watermark no one would notice unless they had opened the folder and closed it again. For two nights nothing moved. Sarah checked the folder every morning before anyone else came in, and the dot was still there, and the slip was still there, and she began to wonder if she had misjudged the whole building. On the third night she drove to the precinct at two in the morning and watched the evidence wing from the street. The lights were on. A figure moved past the windows with a shopping bag, unhurried, as if the night shift were the only shift that mattered. Sarah waited until the figure came out through the loading door and stood in the spill of the security lamp, and she recognized him: Raymond Tate, the evidence clerk. A man who signed chains of custody for a living, who had a wife and two children and a schedule you could set a clock by. She followed him. He did not go to his car. He walked two blocks and met a man in a department coat who took a plain envelope from him and put a smaller one in his hand in return. The man in the coat was gone before Sarah could get a look at his face, but she got the plate of the sedan he stepped into, and she wrote it down in the dark before the car pulled away. She did not confront Tate. She had watched him long enough to know that he was not a conspirator. He was a man with keys, which was different. The people who had him were not asking for his loyalty. They were asking for his access, and they were paying him for it in small, patient installments, the way you feed a dog you intend to use. Sarah thought about the wife and the two children and the schedule you could set a clock by, and she felt a small, cold pity for a man she had never spoken to. The next morning she looked up the plate. The sedan belonged to a fleet company that leased vehicles to the city, which meant nothing and everything, because a hundred department cars came from the same lot. She wrote the number in the green notebook and closed it. The building had keys. She had known that. Now she knew which keys, and which hand they were paid into. Assistant Chief Tom Brandt called her in that afternoon, which surprised her, because the assistant chief did not normally summon detectives two weeks into a case. He was a tall man with a careful smile and a desk that held nothing personal, and he waved her to a chair the way you wave at a cab you have already decided to take. "Sarah," he said. "I've been reading your file on the Hale and Avery deaths. Impressive work under difficult circumstances. The department is behind you, fully, and I want you to know that." "Thank you, sir." "I do have a question, though." Brandt leaned back. "Both victims had ties to City Hall. Hale worked for the mayor's office. Avery ran a councilman's calendar. That's a coincidence I find hard to believe in, detective." "Have you asked anyone in the mayor's office," he said, "about what those two men might have been involved in together?" Sarah kept her face still. It was a fair question. It was also a question that told her Brandt knew more about the shape of the case than any summary could have given him. "We're looking into it, sir," she said. "I'll keep you informed." "See that you do." Brandt smiled again, and the smile did not reach his eyes. "This is the kind of case that makes careers, Sarah. I'd hate to see you mishandle it." She walked out of his office with her hands steady and her heart going, and in the stairwell she stopped and wrote in the green notebook: Brandt asked about City Hall. He knows the shape. She did not know what it meant. She knew it was not nothing. That night she found the apartment. It was the small things. The book on her nightstand was a finger's width off the edge it had been resting on. The lock on her kitchen window had been freshly oiled. Her coat, which she hung on the hook by the door with the collar facing the wall, was hanging with the collar facing the room. Someone with keys had been in her home, and they had been careful, and care was the whole point. Sarah stood in her living room and did not turn on the lights, and she went through the apartment slowly, cataloging what was missing. Nothing was missing. That was the message. They had not come to take anything. They had come to show her they could, whenever they wanted, and she would never know. She did not sleep in the apartment that night. She drove to a motel off the interstate and paid cash for a room that smelled of bleach and other people's fear, and she lay on the bed in her coat with the green notebook beside her and her weapon on the pillow. In the morning she called Reyes and told him she needed the partner now, not in a few days. Reyes said he had found someone and to come to the precinct at noon. She stood under the hot water of the motel shower for a long time, letting it run over her, and she made herself a promise the way her father had taught her to make promises: quietly, to herself, where no one could hear. Whatever was inside that building, whatever had keys and coats and friends in high places, she was going to walk into it, and she was going to come out the other side with the truth in her hand. The only question was who would be standing beside her when she did. ---