Chapter 25 The Broadcast

Maggie did not play the tape alone. She did not even play it in the same room as herself, not at first. She carried it back to the city in a zippered pocket in the lining of her coat, where she had carried the Harper file and the Voss file, where she had carried every piece of paper that had ever mattered, and she brought it straight to Rosa Ibarra's studio, and she sat in the corner of the room with her back to the wall while Rosa worked the cassette the way a jeweler works a stone, slowly, with tools that had cost more than the tape. Rosa played it once, alone, through headphones, her face unreadable. Then she played it again, and stopped the machine, and looked up with an expression Maggie had seen on her face exactly twice before -- once when she had found a voice buried under fifty years of hiss, and once when she had realized whose voice it was. There are three voices on this tape, Rosa said. Susan Harper. The man in the bookshop, though he does not call himself that on the recording. And a third voice, after the tape should have ended. Someone left the machine running. Someone stood in that room for a long time after she was gone, talking to a man who had just killed her, and it was not the man in the bookshop. Rosa paused. He calls the man in the bookshop by a name, she said. He says, take the Greyhound to Madison. Tell them your name is Merrick. And then he says -- she looked down at her notes -- he says, and if anyone ever comes asking, you call me. You remember that I am the one who knows where you live. Maggie sat very still in the corner of the studio, hearing, as clearly as if the phone were ringing again, the voice saying the killer is still listening. She had spent five days believing that voice belonged to the man in the bookshop. He had been the hands, yes. But the voice on the tape -- the voice that had told a killer where to go and what name to take, that had made a dead man's file vanish from an evidence locker in 1997 and a witness die of a heart attack in his own kitchen -- had always been someone else's. She made the call on Monday morning, and Danny booked the studio, and Rosa rolled the machines, and Maggie sat down in front of the microphone and told the story of Angela Voss and Greta Nyland and Susan Harper, and of the man who had watched all three from doorways and bus stops and the far side of quiet streets. She played the confession. She played the tape, cutting it where a third voice had begun, because there were still things she needed to know before the world knew them. She named Elias Merrick. She named Emmett Vane. And when she finished, she opened the phone lines, and the first caller was a deputy sheriff in Harlow, Wisconsin, who told her, on air, that the man at Merrick Books had been taken into custody an hour ago, and that he had asked, when they told him he was being charged with the murder of Susan Harper, whether Maggie Calloway had heard him say it. The episode ended. The phones kept ringing. Maggie sat in the quiet studio with her headphones around her neck, watching the little red light go dark, feeling the stillness that comes after you have told the truth to forty thousand people and it has gone out of your hands. Danny was on the phone with a news outlet. Rosa was pulling the files. And on the studio table, in a stack of message slips from the tip line, one slip had been set aside, face down, the way you set aside a card you are not ready to show. What is that, Maggie said. Rosa picked it up. There was a note on the line, she said. The only one like it in the whole stack. He called in during the last ten minutes, when you were reading the names. He said to tell you that you played the wrong man's voice, Maggie. Rosa turned the slip over. He said the right one is still listening. Maggie took the slip. The handwriting was printed, careful, unnatural -- the handwriting of a man who did not want to be recognized. She called up the second voice Rosa had isolated, and she played it through the studio speakers, alone, with her back to the wall, the way Merrick had told her to. It was an old voice, even on the 1985 recording, with the flat, patient cadence of a man who has spent his life around paper, around the places where other people's secrets are kept. And Maggie had heard it before. Not on a recording. In her own studio, two years earlier, when she had interviewed a retired evidence supervisor named Curtis Foyle about a theft from a property room, a case he had described, with a shrug, as the one that got away. She sat very still in the chair, with the voice still in the room, and she understood, all at once, the way you understand a thing that has been in front of you for years. Foyle had stolen the Harper file in 1997. Foyle had known Roy Caldwell had seen the man at the bus stop. Foyle had built Emmett Vane a new life, brick by brick, the way Merrick had said, because Merrick knew what Foyle had done and Foyle knew Merrick could not survive without him. They had carried each other for forty years, the killer and the man who kept his paper. And now the killer sat in a chair in Harlow, Wisconsin, and the man who kept his paper was still out there, listening. The studio was very quiet. The red light was off. Somewhere outside, the city was going about its evening, and forty thousand people were talking about a woman named Susan Harper, and Maggie sat in the chair with the message slip in her hand and thought about the package that had arrived in October, tied with twine, addressed in a dead man's handwriting. She had believed the package was the beginning of the story, and the truth was in the pages, and the confession, and the tape. But the truth was larger than the pages. It was the size of a man who had spent his life in rooms full of other people's secrets, waiting. It was the size of a voice that had helped a killer disappear, and a file that had vanished from a locker, and a witness with a fine heart, and a dead detective who had known he was carrying a story someone did not want told. She reached for her phone. The first bus to Madison left at dawn, and the records of the city property room were still there, and Curtis Foyle was still on the retirement list. Because the man who kept the paper had been watching her for seven years, since before she knew his name, since before she knew there was a name to know. And if he had called the tip line during the broadcast to tell her she had played the wrong man's voice, then he was not running. He was waiting, the way he had always waited, to see what she would do with the paper he had left her. The last line of the episode played in her head as she stood up, the line she had said into the microphone without knowing how true it was: the paper cold case was warm now. It had a pulse. It had been listening all along.