A DECORATED SEAL BROKE MY RIBS IN A FULL MESS HALL — THEN MY DEAD MOTHER’S VOICE CAME THROUGH THE PHONE

Chapter 24

The county records annex sits at the end of a gravel spur off Old Mill Road, in a building that has been a school, a granary, and a volunteer fire station in its lifetime.

I had been inside it exactly once, when I was nine and my father took me to look up the deed on a piece of land he was thinking about buying. I remember a long room with bad lighting and a smell like old paper and dust, and a woman behind a counter who gave me a peppermint.

At two in the morning, with the wind coming across the fields, it looked like any of that except worse.

There were two vehicles in the lot. A gray government sedan with no markings. And a white panel van backed up to the loading door.

“Case is in the van,” Okafor murmured from the passenger seat. “He’s inside pulling the rest.”

I had left my mother and my father at the house with a phone and a locked door and instructions to call nobody. I had brought Okafor, because Okafor knew the building from his mother’s old files, and I had brought Thorne, because Thorne had arrived from the Chesapeake residence forty minutes earlier with a garbage bag of receipts and a look on his face like a man who had found religion.

He was crouched behind the woodpile with a sidearm he wasn’t supposed to have and no rank insignia on his collar.

“Rear exit’s propped,” he said quietly. “Someone’s been smoking out there. I counted six butts and one still warm.”

“How long has he been inside?”

“Fired up the van’s engine at one-forty to run the air. That’s a man who plans to load heavy.”

I looked at the building. “Where’s the front?”

“North side. Glass doors. Lights on in the reading room.”

“And the records room?”

“West. No windows on the west wall. Old fire code.”

I made the decision the way I make all of them, which is quickly and with a count.

“Count to sixty,” I said. “Then put the van’s driver’s side tires out and go through the rear exit. Not before sixty.”

“Commander—”

“Sixty, Chief.”

Thorne looked at me for a second. Then he nodded, and something almost like a smile moved across the bottom of his face.

“You’re going in the front door.”

“I’m going in the front door.”

“That’s insane.”

“I know.”

“Good.” He checked his weapon. “That’s the first thing you’ve said all day that made me feel like this might work.”

I walked across the gravel lot with my hands at my sides, past the gray sedan, past the van, up to the glass doors of the county records annex.

Through the glass I could see the reading room: long tables, bad lighting, a smell I could feel from out here. And at the far end, in the doorway of the records room, a man in his seventies with a gray mustache and a windbreaker, holding a cardboard box against his hip.

Dean Halloway.

He saw me through the glass.

He did not run. He did not reach for anything. He set the box down on the nearest table, put his hands on his hips, and looked at me the way a man looks at weather he has been expecting for thirty years.

I pushed the door open.

“Senior Chief.”

“Commander Vance.” His voice was calm and pleasant and completely ordinary — the voice of a man who has spent a career being the person nobody remembers. “You’re early.”