Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
The storeroom stood at the end of a row of shuttered units behind a hardware yard on the edge of the city. Corrugated steel, unit after unit, all of them dark. A single bare bulb burned on a wire above the door, and a slow congregation of moths worked at the light.
Logan crouched over the padlock and went at it by the beam of his phone flashlight, swearing at it softly and steadily under his breath.
"Tell me you actually have the key," Rosa said. She had her back to the two of them and her eyes on the empty length of the street.
"I have the key. The key has opinions about the lock." The steel shackle scraped and caught. "Almost. Almost. Come on."
A dog started up barking somewhere behind the hardware yard, three sharp reports, and then thought better of it and stopped. Rosa didn't turn around toward the sound. "Hurry it up, Logan."
Elena laid her open hand flat against the warm metal of the rolling door and made herself take one full breath, and then another.
Two years. The last time she had stood in front of a closed door with her heart going exactly like this, hard and high and quick, the thing waiting on the other side of it had ended her career and most of the rest of her life along with it.
She knew that. She had carried that knowledge two thousand miles and up a flight of stairs and out to the edge of a strange city in the dark, and it hadn't stopped her, and it wasn't going to stop her now.
The lock finally gave with a dull clack. Logan rolled the door up a meter on its track and ducked under it, and a moment later a worklamp came on inside, throwing a hard yellow wedge of light out across the concrete apron at their feet.
"Elena." His voice had dropped, gone quiet and stripped of all the joking, the same voice she'd heard on the voicemail two nights ago in her kitchen a lifetime north of here. "Come in here and stand over it."
She ducked under the door.
The slab lay on a rough packing crate in the middle of the otherwise bare room, black and enormous under the lamp, its incised face turned up toward the light as though it had been waiting for someone to bring the light.
A pair of cotton gloves lay folded beside it.
A folding ruler lay next to the gloves, ordinary and yellow and entirely out of place.
Elena crossed the concrete floor. She lowered herself into a crouch beside the crate. And for the first time in two years she took the loupe out of her pocket, and raised it to her eye, and bent over something that might, this time, be true.