The Blade Itself

Matthews groaned. “We don’t find a witness, state’s attorney’s going to kick this back to us.”

“Yeah.”

“You ask me, the first squad on the scene should have thrown rocks at the body till it drifted back across the river. Let Area Four deal with it.”

Nolan laughed. There was an answering machine on the dresser. He went to look at it. The old-fashioned tape kind. The message indicator was blinking, and he pushed PLAY.

“Paaaaaatrick,” a woman’s voice. “Where are you, my bad boy? David’s in Milwaukee, and I’m lonely.”

Nolan rolled his eyes at Matthews, walked over to check the bedside drawer. Condoms, a couple of motorcycle magazines. The woman went on for another minute, hung up without leaving a number. They’d have to pull the phone records and find out when she’d last seen him, work forward from there. Sounded like she was married – the husband could be a suspect.

After that were a couple of hangups, and then a male voice came on, blues thumping behind it. “Patrick, it’s Da

The detectives looked at each other. Nolan pressed REWIND and then PLAY, and the voice came back, the captured blues riff repeating behind it. He listened carefully, trying to filter out the noise behind the voice, the distortion of the crummy answering machine. “Huh.”

“What?” Matthews asked.

“I think I know that guy.”

“Yeah?”

He nodded. It made sense – if he remembered right, Da

Maybe, just maybe, Da

It was thin. Way too thin for a warrant. But worth exploring.

“I think,” Nolan said, “we need to have a chat with a guy I know, claims he’s in construction.”

27

The walk from the fenced parking lot into the back corridor, past the stale-cigarette reek of the break room, through the double doors that separated the blue-collar portions of the office from the posh bleached-wood-and-stainless-steel lobby the clients saw, and up the hall to his office with its modular desk and narrow window took maybe thirty seconds. A brief enough time, but this morning, Da

He held his smile up like an ID, pointing it this way and that, nodding at Richard’s assistant, muttering something noncommittal in response to a question he hadn’t quite caught. His stomach felt buoyant, crowding upward into his chest.

Blue flecks dotted the gray carpet in his office. He’d never noticed that before.

Da

Good reason to kidnap his son, he thought to himself, then, immediately, Stop it.

After everything had gone down yesterday, he’d still had to make an appearance on the job sites, and it hadn’t been easy. He’d felt a fraud, moving through the buzz of honest labor, giving directions like he deserved to be there. The whole time knowing that he was poison, the worm in the apple. But somehow, it had been easier than sitting in his own office. He used to take great pride in it, the idea that Da

Now, all he could think about was a construction trailer, and Evan with a gun, and the teetering structure of lies that had become his life.

Stop. This will all be over soon. Tomorrow we make the second call, Thursday we get Tommy back to Richard, Friday everything goes back to the way it was.

He wasn’t sure that was true, not 100 percent convinced, but it was what he had. So he picked up his pencil, opened his papers, and started working.

The morning dragged by in a morass of paperwork and blank periods when he found himself staring at the wall. He had an embarrassing moment at his lunch meeting, when a client had to repeat a question three times before he heard it. “Jesus, Carter, where were you?” the man had asked, holding his gaze, then deciding to let it go, saying, “Must be better weather than here. Can I come next time?”

That had burned. Not the client’s smart-ass comment, but the idea that he couldn’t hold it together. That with his skills and experience and goddamnit, brains, he was simply not pulling through. The anger at himself surged quick and hot enough to keep his nerves humming through the rest of lunch.

As he walked back into the office, he held onto that glowing ember, fa

Jeff Teller, one of their foremen, was walking a guy Da

“Hey, welcome.” They shook hands, the guy’s grip firm.

“Da

“Hey, Teller, we already have you on contract. You can stop kissing up now.” The trash talk coming easy, a rhythm he knew.

Teller laughed. “Seriously. He’s a good guy,” making the two words into one. “One of the ones in management you can trust.” There was no trace of irony in his eyes, and Da

“Da

Da

Stay cool. You’re hitched to the whirlwind, and the only way to land safe is to keep your head.

“Sure. Let me just drop my things.”

His boss nodded and stepped back inside his office. No police officers boiled out to replace him. There must not be any in there; what kind of a cop would give him time to climb out the window? Though that didn’t mean that Richard didn’t suspect something himself. Da

Richard sat in his expensive chair, leaning forward to rest his forehead in his palms as he stared down at financial statements. The usually neat mahogany desk was crowded with paper, binders with the Merrill Lynch logo on them and a notebook covered in Richard’s neat, feminine handwriting. Da