Chapter 1. The Assignment.

The appointment came in at seven-twelve. She read it like a grocery list. Marcus Webb. Bartender. Murder charge. Fine.

The victim’s name — she hadn’t looked it up yet. She would.

The Eisenhower was moving. Barely. She’d left enough time — she always left enough time for the Eisenhower — and still it was that particular crawl, the one that tells you nothing about when it’ll end. Her hands knew this route. They didn’t need her. She could think or not think and the car would end up at Cook County either way.

The sky was flat grey. October. Not dramatic, not anything.

The trees along the overpass were losing it — most of the leaves already gone, the ones left not beautiful, just still there.

It wasn’t melancholy.

It was just October, the same October it always was, the city not caring one way or the other.

She tapped the wheel once and let the thought go.

Marcus Webb. Bartender. She’d google the victim in the parking lot before she went in. Or after. The broad facts were enough to start.

She merged and let the traffic take her.

* * *

The line at intake moved the way it always moved, which was not well. She’d been here — she didn’t count anymore. More times than she’d counted, and then some. Her body went through it without consulting her. Badge out before they asked. Keys in the tray. Arms slightly out, weight balanced for the scan. The fluorescent lights in there did what they always did to faces, which was make everyone look like they hadn’t slept in three days, including her probably.

The smell. Disinfectant and something underneath it that disinfectant never quite covered. It wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t fine. It was just what this place smelled like. She’d stopped registering it somewhere around year four.

The guard at the secondary desk was new. She could tell because he looked at her badge twice. She waited. He cleared her.

The room they gave her was the third one down, the one with the overhead light that flickered at a frequency too slow to ignore and too fast to be sure of. She set her legal pad on the table. Uncapped the pen. Sat.

Marcus Webb, when they brought him in, did not look like what she’d expected. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected. He was somewhere in his mid-thirties. Lean. He carried himself — and she was watching for this, she was always watching this first — like someone who still believed the situation was temporary. That wasn’t nothing. A lot of them lost that within the first seventy-two hours. He hadn’t.

He sat across from her and said, «Ms. Malloy.»

She said, «Tell me about the night of the eleventh.»

He told her. She wrote. He’d been working at Sotto — bar shift, five to close. Closed out the last customer maybe twelve-fifteen. The staff could confirm it. Two of them walked out with him. He said the alley cut time off the walk to the train, said he took it most nights after closing, said he found her — he stopped when he said found her — she let him stop. She wrote stops at found her on the pad, to the side. — said he found her, tried to check for a pulse, called 911. Stayed until the police arrived. Gave them everything.

«You didn’t know her,» Kate said.

«No.»

«Rachel Mays.»

She watched him. She was good at watching. There was a particular kind of blank that people manufactured when they wanted to signal they didn’t know a name, and there was the actual blank. He had the actual one. He didn’t know what he was supposed to be doing with his face because no one had told him a name to react to yet. He was just — nothing. He didn’t know that name.

She wrote it down. Not because it meant he was innocent. Just because it was true.

«They have your fingerprints.»

«I told them about the fingerprints.»

«Before you had an attorney.»

He looked at the table, then back at her. «I’d just found a body. I wasn’t thinking about — I was trying to explain what happened.»

She wrote that down too. The way he’d said it. Not defensive, not performed. Just — that was the fact of it, for him. She’d heard a lot of people explain themselves across tables like this one. Some of them were telling the truth.

«The alibi,» she said. «Nicole.»

«She came over around one-forty-five. Maybe two. She can tell you.»

«That wasn’t in my file.»

He looked at her. «Should it have been?»

She didn’t answer that. She made a note with a line under it. «Is there anything you’ve told the police, told anyone, that I haven’t asked you about?»

He thought about it — genuinely thought, she could see him going through it. He said there wasn’t.

She capped the pen. «Don’t talk to anyone about the case. Not the other inmates, not whoever calls to ask how you’re doing, no one. Call me directly if something comes up. Everything else waits.»

He said he understood.

She gathered her notes, capped the pen a second time out of habit, and got up. The light flickered once more, or she imagined it.

* * *

The wind had picked up while she was inside. She could feel it through the door of the Audi before she even started it — just the car moving slightly, the way they do in a real gust. The legal pad on the passenger seat. Her handwriting from the interview.

Okay.

She didn’t start the car yet.

The gaps first. Go through the gaps. No physical evidence putting him in that alley during the window — he was inside Sotto, that’s documented, multiple staff. Time of death somewhere between eleven and one, and he’s behind the bar until twelve-thirty at the earliest. So where’s the prosecution going. They’re going to the prints. They have to go to the prints because they don’t have much else. His prints on her neck.

Which — he told them about. Before he had an attorney. Called 911, stayed on scene, told the responding officers I checked for a pulse. Put it in the record himself. So now they want to use against him the thing he volunteered. That plays both ways. She’d played it both ways before. You can work with that.

Motive. Nothing. Zero. They didn’t know each other, the no-response to Rachel Mays’s name was — she’d been watching him, it was real. That particular blankness you can’t manufacture because you’d have to know to manufacture it. He didn’t know the name. Which either means he didn’t know her or he’s good enough that she should have noticed something else and didn’t. One or the other.

And the alibi. Nicole. One-forty-five, she’s at his apartment, she confirms it. Except that wasn’t in Kate’s file.

She was looking at the legal pad. The underline under that note.

Someone put together that file. Someone decided what went in it.

Not thinking about that yet.

The witness. Tall Black man, dark jacket, eleven-thirty. Half the men she’d passed coming out of the jail — that description covers most of them. It’s garbage and a jury won’t see garbage, a jury sees a description that matches and that’s the thing you have to work around. Always is.

So: beatable. Not easy. Beatable.

She’d defended worse.

That was enough.

She started the car.

Price called before she’d made it to the Eisenhower. Of course he did. The speakers picked up and there he was, that voice, calibrated warmth like a thermostat. Victor Price never just called. He arranged calls.

Delmore. That’s what this was. He wanted to align — his word, align — on the disclosure timeline before his team sent supplementals. She said Thursday afternoon review, documents by end of day. He said that worked perfectly. He said that about things that had merely not inconvenienced him.

She was watching the merge onto the Eisenhower. Truck in the middle lane not committing.

«Before I let you go—» Price said.

She waited.

«That unfortunate business in West Loop last week. The woman in the alley, over by Randolph. The Sotto situation.» A pause with a shape to it. Not quite a breath. «I have a client who eats there occasionally. Small world.»

Sotto.

From where — the file. This morning. The —

«I don’t watch much news,» Kate said.

«Smart. None of it helps.» The laugh. That specific laugh he had, the one that sounded like he’d practiced it in a car once and kept the take. «Documents this afternoon. You’re a miracle worker, as always.»

Goodbye. Merge. Grey lake ahead, grey sky above it, the same grey.

Delmore. She needed to look at the Mayer clause before Lucas sent the — and lunch, she should eat before the afternoon review, she’d skipped breakfast. Thai place near the office was fine. Or the sandwich place if the line was—

She filed the thing about Price away and kept driving.

* * *

Lucas had the Delmore files spread across the conference table when she walked in. Of course he did. He was like that — he prepared for conversations by making them unavoidable. She could see him start to pivot toward the Webb folder, which was also on the table, somewhere under Delmore.

«Mayer clause,» she said. «Before we do anything else.»

He got that look. The one where he had a question he’d decided was the real question and he was recalculating whether this was the moment. It wasn’t. She let him recalculate.

«Okay,» he said. «So Mayer clause — the timeline in section four-B doesn’t track with what Price’s team submitted last week. If they’re using the original delivery date—»

«They’re not. They’ll use the amended one. Pull the amendment.»

He found it. They went through the clause, the amendment, the gap between them. Lucas marked three points where Price’s team would push. She told him how to counter two of them and said the third one was actually fine for their side if he read it correctly, which he hadn’t been. He looked at it again. He saw it.

They covered what needed covering. She took the Webb file from under the stack — he let her take it without saying anything, which she appreciated — and went to her office.

* * *

She set the file on her desk and opened it to the arrest photo.

Marcus Webb looked back at her. Holding the booking number. Not scared. Not defiant.

Rearranged. Still catching up.

He probably did it. That was the base assumption, with anyone. Most had done something, even when not the specific thing.

That wasn’t the work.

The work was procedure. Was the evidence sufficient. Did the state do what it was required to do.

His prints were explainable. His alibi had a gap in her file that shouldn’t be there. The witness description was thin.

Beatable.

She closed the Webb file. Pulled the Delmore folder. Found the Mayer clause on page seven.

Outside her window the sky was still that grey. Same grey it’d been all morning. The building across the street, the street below it, the few people down there not looking up.

She got to work.

The file sat where she’d left it.

Not finished.

Not closed.

Just waiting.

психологическая проза

The Rule of Silence

Дверь без вывески

Доверие

Игра на убывание

Корни на песке

Последний рейс. Книга III

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