Chapter 1

The hand landed flat on Wil Thibodeaux's chest at 8:10 p.m., and behind him the auctioneer's voice came through the speakers warm and unhurried, reading a card.

"Anonymous - W.T."

The words went out over two hundred heads in the main gallery of Le Moyne & Sons on Royal Street. Chandeliers. Gilt mirrors. Champagne sweating on trays carried by kids in white coats. The red SOLD tag taped to the corner of Lot 12's vitrine glass shivered when the speakers pushed.

Colby Reinhardt did not move his hand.

"Sir." He said it the way a man says a word he has already decided is useless. Navy suit, silk pocket square, dark hair slicked back wet. "You don't have a ticket."

Wil looked past him, through the glass, at the console. Cypress. Twelve feet of it, grain like river bottom, and the fifth pipe sitting a half inch proud of its neighbors the way it had since he set it there in the spring of 1974.

He knew that room's light. He knew how the polish went amber along the swell lid when the chandeliers were up.

"I need to see the accession card," Wil said.

"The auction is in progress."

"I need to see the card."

Reinhardt's hand pressed a little harder. He was careful about it - no shove, nothing a witness could call a shove. Just weight, delivered. Wil's work shoes stayed planted on the herringbone floor, dark where the night's rain had come in on other people's soles. Ivory paint flecked the toe of his right shoe, dried hard, from a spinet he'd finished Tuesday in Gretna.

No invitation. No catalog in his hand. No black tie at his throat. He had a corduroy jacket gone soft at the cuffs, a pocket comb, and a fan of pink paper folded against his ribs.

"Walk-ins don't get in on gala night," Reinhardt said, loud enough for the front two rows. "And you're tracking that floor."

A woman in pearls turned to look. So did a dealer in a bolo tie, halfway out of his chair.

Wil's right hand had already gone inside his work shirt, under the jacket, and found the edge of the top carbon. Thirty years of them, soft as cloth from handling. His thumb rested there.

He did not pull them out.

Not yet.

"Anonymous - W.T.," Marisol Beaudry said again at the podium, and Wil heard the small hitch in it - a professional who had read that line five times tonight and had never once been asked what it meant.

Reinhardt's palm stayed where it was, flat over Wil's heart.

Behind the auctioneer, on the clerk's console at the left wall, a phone line lit up red.