CHAPTER TWO
She wrapped her hands at the bench by the door, left hand first then right, threading between the fingers and laying the wrap flat across the knuckles.
She had been doing this long enough that the process required no thought.
She pulled on her gloves, rolled her neck once in each direction, and stood in front of the bag.
She started slow. Jab, cross, hook, a short right to the body. Reset. She kept the combinations tight and controlled in the first round, just finding the rhythm of it at first. It helped to loosen the shoulders, getting the breath moving and even. The bag barely swung.
By the second round she had picked up the pace and by the third she had stopped thinking about structure entirely.
She was working the body more, dropping her level and coming back up, moving her feet.
The combinations got less clean as her arms tired and her form began to slip, which was precisely the point.
Clean form on a fresh body was training.
Sloppy form on an exhausted one was something closer to honesty and she felt there was more growth in it.
She had been coming to this gym three mornings a week for two years.
She had started because the job required a standard of physical conditioning and she had always preferred this to running.
She’d kept at it because she had discovered that standing in front of a heavy bag and hitting it until her arms went hollow was cathartic and almost relieving in an odd way.
It was also one of the more reliable ways she had found to move things through her head and out the other side.
It did not always work. This morning she was not entirely sure it was working. But she kept going anyway.
Because the Rizzo thing was back.
It came and went, and she had learned over time to accept the pattern of it.
She could go weeks without it surfacing in any way that cost her anything, and then something would shift and there it was again: the meet location, the light in the room when she pushed the door open, the quality of the silence that had told her what she was about to see before she actually saw it.
Rizzo on his back with his arms crossed over his chest. The cuts across both hands and up his forearms where he had tried to defend himself against someone.
She could see his hands even now, even in the middle of a round on a heavy bag at 5:45 in the morning.
She had told Kate about it. She knew that was what had stirred it back up, and she did not regret telling her.
Kate had needed the information. Rizzo's killer had a method, and that method had a shape.
Of course, by the time law enforcement understood what they were looking at, Rizzo had already been dead for years.
Kate had needed to hear all of that because of what she found in the old case files—the troubling overlap between that documented signature and a murder that had happened four years before anyone in law enforcement had formally identified or named Rizzo at all.
A man named Harold Ryan had been convicted of that murder and had been incarcerated ever since.
And if the overlap meant what it appeared to mean, then the wrong person had been sitting in a correctional facility for twelve years.
Sloane had told the story clearly, keeping her voice level, watching Kate process it in the passenger seat of a bureau sedan.
She had not anticipated how much it would cost her afterward.
She had told the story before, in post-operation debriefings and internal reviews.
She’d even told it once in the office of a therapist she’d gone to four times before concluding she was managing fine on her own.
She’d believed that for longer than she probably should have.
She drove her right hand into the bag hard enough that it swung back and caught her on the return. She sidestepped and reset her feet.
She finished the round and stepped back.
Her shoulders were burning and her knuckles were aching inside the gloves.
She went two more rounds, taking the last one down deliberately in pace, and then she was done.
She stood with her hands on her hips and let her breathing settle and looked at nothing in particular on the wall behind the bag.
The locker room was still mostly empty when she got there. She showered, dressed, and stood at the mirror running a hand through her damp hair. She looked tired, but functional. That was a reasonable baseline for a Tuesday, she supposed.
The drive to the field office took twenty minutes; the morning traffic had not yet built up properly on the approach into the city.
She parked in the structure, badged through the lobby, and took the interior stairs up to the third floor where her cubicle waited.
The office had the quiet, concentrated quality it always had before 8:30.
A handful of agents were already at their desks, the overhead lights at their full brightness but the general volume of the place still low.
She dropped her bag at her desk, checked her phone, and opened her email.
She had a scheduled check-in with DeMarco at 8:00… just nine minutes from now.
She used the time to go through the overnight messages.
She flagged two that needed responses, cleared the rest, and checked her phone once more out of habit before heading down the corridor.
She found DeMarco's door half open, which usually indicated she was available and expecting someone. She pushed it wider and stopped.
DeMarco was on the phone, standing at the window with her back to Sloane.
She had not heard her come in yet. Her posture looked tightened through the shoulders and the back of the neck, and her free hand was at her side with the fingers slightly spread.
Sloane had been checking in with DeMarco for several months now and she had learned her tells.
That hand position meant the conversation was not going the way she wanted it to go. She was tense… upset about something.
She turned from the window and registered Sloane in the doorway.
She held up one finger, to which Sloane nodded and waited.
DeMarco looked at her for a moment over whatever the person on the other end was saying, and something passed across her face that Sloane didn't fully have a name for, somewhere between concern and the careful blankness.
Her eyes held Sloane’s for a second longer than necessary and then she mouthed two words.
Call Kate.
Sloane looked at her for a moment, reading what she could from her expression, then stepped back into the corridor and pulled out her phone.