Chapter 3

Julian came in smiling, because Julian always came in smiling, and the smile did not touch anything behind his eyes.

He had his phone in his right hand. The silver chronograph sat on his left wrist where it had sat for nine years, and I looked at it now with the picture of a baby on a porch step sitting in my pocket over my heart.

"Sir." He shut the door behind him, gently. Tessa stayed planted at the jamb, which put her shoulder between him and the girl, and he noticed and filed it. "I don't know what she's told you, but I know who she is."

"Do you."

"For a fact." He held up the phone. "Three weeks ago the Halvorsen family's foundation hired a woman in Superior who runs a thing called a youth outreach program. That child is one of hers. There's paper. I have a call in already."

"What's her name?"

"Who?"

"Your outreach woman. In Superior."

He did not miss a beat. "Doucette."

"Mm." I sat down on the edge of my desk, which put me lower than him, and I have found over fifty years of business that a lower seat makes a man talk faster. "Julian, tell me something. County Road Twelve."

The smile held. Something under it did not.

"Where the ice palace road meets the county line," he said. "I know it. That's where Astrid-" and he stopped, well-timed, and let grief do the work. "That's where we lost her."

"Where they found the car."

"Where they found the car."

"How many times did you go out there?"

"What?"

"After." I took my reading glasses out of my pocket, and then, when I saw that Mabel's eyes had gone flat and fixed on the man in front of her, I put them back. "In those weeks. In that first year. How many times did you drive out to that curve, alone, and stand there?"

He was quiet for half a second. It was the longest half second I had spent in nine years.

"I couldn't," he said. "You know I couldn't. I had the funeral and the board and you in the hospital with your heart, and I-"

"You were at the curve." That was Mabel. Small voice, flat as slate, from the chair behind me.

Julian looked at her the way men look at a fire that has just spoken.

"Excuse me?"

"The man who came." Her hands were fists in the blanket. "He had a burn on his hand and a watch that goes bing. Ruth said don't look at him and I looked."

"Conrad," Julian said, still smiling. "She's rehearsed."

"In October," I said slowly, "you sent your watch out for service."

He glanced down at his wrist. A flicker - nothing anyone else in that room would have caught.

"The bracelet clasp," he said. "A screw backed out."

"Where?"

"Wexler's. On Superior."

"Thank you," I said.

Tessa moved. She stepped out into the corridor and came back inside with a manila folder she had not had four minutes ago, because Tessa Moreau had been out of the sheriff's office for six years and had never once stopped working like a deputy.

"Sir." She handed me a carbon copy of a repair intake slip, pink and curling at the corner. "Found in the kitchen trash at 211 West Second, apartment four, forty minutes ago. The landlord let me in when I showed him the foundation badge and told him a woman was missing. Place is wrecked, sir. Drawers out, mattress cut. And this was under the radiator."

Ruth Keller's apartment. It was three blocks from the arena.

I read the slip. Wexler's Watch Repair, Superior Street. Customer, "Kade, J." Item: silver chronograph, full service, chime movement repaired. And in the margin, in the old jeweler's fountain-pen hand, an engraving documented for insurance:

"For my life. - A."

Julian did not move. Julian did not blink. That was how I knew.

"Where did Ruth Keller get this slip?" I said.

Tessa answered, because she had already asked the questions I would have asked. "Ruth Keller went into Wexler's three days ago. She asked the owner to pull a service record from October and give her a copy. She paid four dollars for the copy. The owner remembered her because she was shaking."

Three days ago. When Ruth was taken.

Julian put his phone in his jacket pocket.

"Conrad," he said, and now the warmth was real, and so was the blade under it. "It is eight fifty-one. There are two hundred people out there waiting for a chairman to name a successor. If you walk out on that stage and don't, by breakfast the Pioneer Press has a story about a runaway child in your office and this company's stock does exactly what you'd expect. This is what she's for. Whoever sent her, this is exactly what she's for."

I looked at him for a moment. Nine years I had handed this man everything.

"Miss Moreau," I said. "Where's the girl going to sleep tonight?"

Julian's head turned. Fast.

"Sir-"

"She sleeps here until I say otherwise." I stood up, and my knees hurt, and I did not show it. "Julian, come out with me. You're going to stand at the podium while I speak. You're going to smile. And then you and I are going to have a longer conversation than we've ever had."

"There's nothing to-"

"Eight fifty-one," I said. "We have nine minutes."