CHAPTER TWENTY
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MARCUS
Victoria had put it in Luca’s box herself after the gate went cold. Salt kept the lid quiet. It did not bring back the posts.
“Mr. Iyer — there’s a van been sitting outside my—”
“It’s Marcus. Corinne, start that again.”
A scrape of plastic against a palm. The phone changing hands.
Then a man breathing. Slow. Unhurried. He let me hear that he was not a hollow thing. He wanted me to know a human had come through every precaution we had put around that house.
“Corinne.”
The line died.
I was on my feet before the receiver hit the cradle.
“Bex. Fell Street. Get Karim’s team moving.”
She had the other phone up before I finished.
The two men watching Corinne were not answering. I called them again. Then Prine. Four rings and voicemail. Bell, two rings and a hang-up.
Somebody had outbid me. Most nights I could fix that with a number. I called Prine once more and offered him a number I had never offered anybody for being a cop.
He let it ring.
Bex came back to the office with the shotgun broken open over her forearm.
“Karim’s there. Front room empty. School bag gone. Both watchers in the alley, alive. One awake enough to talk. A utility crew showed them a shutoff order.”
“Human.”
“Both. One had a city badge. Our men went around to check the meter.”
No ward on earth stops a man with a work order. I had said that at church. I had heard myself say it and still spent the next week trying to buy every door around a woman instead of admitting there were more doors than I had money.
“Tell them to keep somebody in the house. Search the neighbors. Cameras first. Nobody waits for Prine.”
“Already doing it.”
“Good.”
She stayed.
“Say it,” I told her.
“Teddy’s not there either.”
I sat down long enough to get their school route out of the folder. Every door, every turn, all the information Crane already had.
Victoria had brought back two butterscotch candies on Sunday. One wrapper lay folded on the corner of my desk. She had flattened it while she told me what Corinne had done to her.
She had been angry. She had wanted Corinne safe anyway.
I called every driver I knew who worked the water after dark. I sent the plate, not the story. A story makes men ask what they will owe for hearing it. A plate is work.
Two answered. Then four. No sightings. We were moving by then, too late but moving, and I refused to turn being late into standing still.
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Adrian was at the long table with the watch list. Luca had a bag of salt on one shoulder. His new names had gone dull along with the old ones when the book crossed our iron. He had been checking the forge’s heart every hour since.
“They took Corinne and the boy,” I said. “Our watchers are alive. They used a work order to draw them off the porch.”
Adrian’s hand closed on the pencil. It broke in the middle.
“Routes,” he said.
I laid mine beside his. We divided the harbor exits, the depot yards, the private garages Crane paid for. No argument over who ran it. That would have been a luxury somebody else’s child was paying for.
Luca looked at the file under my arm.
“What else?”
“The cage transfer was accepted at fifteen-oh-five on Tuesday. Same time as the tower receipt. It couldn’t have been the return shipment. She hadn’t delivered it yet.”
“Backdated,” Adrian said.
“Maybe. Or a different thing was being received.”
His eyes went to the charter case through the church doorway.
I watched him do it.
“You know something about that guarantee.”
“I know our founders signed custody to the book’s lawful keeper. I don’t know what Crane thinks he bought.”
“Then we find out together. No more pieces held back.”
“No more.”
Luca set the salt down between us. “Say that in front of her too.”
Adrian nodded.
I had wanted a fight. I had wanted somebody close enough to hurt because Corinne was not close enough to help. The wolf gave me a usable answer instead, and I had to pick that up and do something with it.
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Victoria was waiting on the stairs. Boots on, jacket in one hand. She had heard enough to know I was coming and not enough to know what to do with her hands.
I did not make her sit before I told her.
“Corinne and Teddy are missing. A man took the phone from her while she was talking to me. We have men at the house and on the harbor roads.”
She went still.
“Alive?”
“We don’t know.”
“Don’t say that kindly.”
“I don’t know a kind way.”
She put the jacket on. Wrong sleeve first. Then she fixed it, furious at the coat for costing her two seconds.
“I’m coming.”
“If there’s a place to go, you come with us. Right now there are six cars looking and no destination. I need the routes she didn’t put in our file.”
For a moment she looked at me as if I had put a tool into her hand instead of taking something out of it.
“The back way from school,” she said. “She uses Fleet when Fell’s dug up. Teddy hates the long light at the bridge.”
I wrote it down.
“The laundromat on Mondays. The pharmacy by the red awning. She uses the one with a delivery hatch because her knee—”
The sentence failed there.
I set the pen down. Not to stop her. So she could see both hands empty.
“Vic.”
“She sent me to him.”
“I know.”
“I said things in the car. I wanted her to know what it felt like.”
“Wanting her sorry isn’t wanting this.”
She shook her head, hard, like I was trying to give her an answer she had not earned.
I stepped close enough for her to take my coat. She did. One fist, at the lapel, pulling until her forehead was against my chest.
That was all she asked of me. I put an arm around her and kept the other hand free for the phone.
I could not fix the whole night. I could be the man who did not leave while it was broken.
Below us Luca called a street name. Adrian answered. Bex ran the plate to another driver. The building kept working around us.
After a minute Victoria lifted her head.
“Don’t stop telling me things because they’re bad.”
“I won’t.”
“And don’t decide which of them I can carry.”
I wanted to promise there would be nothing left for her to carry. I had sold better lies than that. I did not sell her this one.
“You get the whole list.”
She let go of the lapel. The crease stayed.
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By one in the morning we had the van leaving Fell Street. By two we had lost it under a covered loading bay with three exits and no working camera at the far end.
Mara arrived just before three, called down from Frederick to treat the injured watchers and stay with us until the search was over. Adrian handed her the kit space in the loft without making a speech about his sister coming home.
At three, gunfire drove the house team out of the alley. Prine’s cruiser blocked Fell Street before they could work their way back. Karim held the next corner, watching the officers bring a van through. He would not fire into a house where the boy might be. Neither would I.
Victoria listened to every call beside me at the desk. She wrote times in the margin of my map. Not counting to get through the fear. Counting because a missing interval could be where they were.
“Why take them and not call?” Bex asked.
“He wants a trade she offers first,” Victoria said. “He doesn’t want to name the price. He wants me to.”
I looked at her. There was anger in her now, underneath the shaking, beginning to hold it steady.
“We aren’t giving him you.”
“I didn’t offer.” She tapped the blank between two times. “Find out what he can fit in twenty minutes.”
Adrian took the map and went to the yard. He did not tell her to go upstairs.
At six twenty-six my phone lit. No number. An image filled the screen.
A boy asleep on his side, one arm flung out. Green dinosaur under his cheek. Beside the bed, on the wall, a strip of peeling wallpaper I had seen on Fell Street.
Victoria leaned over my shoulder.
“That’s his room.”
The image had been taken four minutes ago.
We had been looking for a van. Whoever held them had brought them home.