CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Miles was awake before the alarm went off.
Across the room, Vic shifted under her covers, pulling the pillow over her head with the irritation of someone who had been roused too many times by other people's schedules.
Miles sat up, grabbed his phone from the nightstand, and headed for the bathroom, pulling the door most of the way closed behind him.
He ran the tap cold and bent over the sink, splashing water on his face. When he straightened up and looked at himself in the mirror, he looked more or less like he felt. He reached for his phone almost as a second nature.
The news coverage had not slowed down overnight.
If anything, it had amplified. There were new angles of the prison building, new analysis, interviews with guards and other employees from the prison.
He scrolled through the updates the way a person pokes at a sore tooth, knowing it will hurt but doing it anyway.
There was an op-ed from a former bureau analyst questioning whether Miles's capture of Kane had ever truly neutralized the threat.
There was a cable segment with two retired agents debating whether the FBI had been too relaxed about prison security.
He closed that one quickly. And then before he could let the worry of it all consume him, Miles opened his contacts and found the contact information he’d been given for the front desk at the prison—an email address that would skip standard filtered channels and go straight to those who would be happy to answer his requests.
He quickly typed out an email, asking about the availability of surveillance footage from the hours preceding the explosion, specifically the utility access corridors and visitor processing areas.
He hesitated for only a moment before sending it.
The email itself wasn’t in direct opposition of Hayes’ orders, but it was a far cry from obedience.
He set the phone on the edge of the sink and looked at himself again.
Kane had been out for more than eight hours now.
Every minute that passed widened the circle of possibility, the radius of where he could be, who he might have contacted, what he might already be setting in motion.
Miles knew Kane's methods well enough to understand that the escape itself was not a destination.
It was a starting point for something Kane had been planning since the day Miles put him in that courtroom.
And Miles was standing in a hotel bathroom in Midtown Manhattan with no direct role in the manhunt, no access to the Marshals' intelligence, and a meeting to conduct in a few hours with a woman who might help him identify a murderer.
He turned the problem around carefully in his mind, the way he'd learned to do in therapy when his first instinct was emotional rather than rational.
Hayes hadn't benched him out of spite or doubt.
Hayes had kept him exactly where the work was.
The platinum killer had already murdered two people, and the evidence was pointing sharply at someone associated with Ashford.
If Miles walked away from that now to chase Kane across whatever state the Marshals thought he might be heading toward, there would be a third victim.
Maybe a fourth. People who were alive right now, people who might be wearing a piece of platinum jewelry and going about their normal lives without any idea of what they were wearing.
That was the job in front of him. That was the thing he could actually control.
Kane was in every capable pair of hands the Marshal Service could put in the field.
Miles inserting himself, distracted and raw, would add noise to a search that needed precision.
He knew that. The part of him that wanted to be in on it, the part that felt sidelined and almost personally embarrassed by the escape, was not the part he should be listening to right now.
He thought briefly of Dr. Mitchell, of the conversations they'd been having over the past several months.
He'd been doing well. Better than well, actually.
He'd been sleeping, keeping perspective, not letting the work eat him the way it had in the worst periods.
One night of poor sleep was not a relapse.
Checking the news obsessively at 4 a.m. was not a crisis.
It was a bad night, and bad nights happened, and what mattered was what you did the morning after.
He splashed more water on his face and reached for a towel.
When he came out of the bathroom, Vic was sitting up in her bed, squinting at him with one eye. Her dark hair was loose around her shoulders and pushed to one side from the pillow. She looked roughly as rested as he did.
"How long were you in there?" she said.
"Not long. Sorry if the water woke you."
“No, that was your alarm,” she said as she reached for her own phone on the nightstand. Miles went to his bag and started pulling out fresh clothes. He'd packed light, a consequence of not knowing how long they'd be in Manhattan, and his options were limited. Clean shirt, same suit jacket.
"Bathroom's yours," he said.
"Thank you." She was already standing, wrapping herself in the hotel robe. They passed each other in the narrow space between the beds in a brief, slightly absurd shuffle, Miles stepping one way while she stepped the same direction, both of them catching themselves and pivoting.
"Sorry," he said.
"Move to the left."
"That is the left."
She pointed to his other left and moved around him.
He heard the bathroom door click shut. Miles found a small clear space in front of the television stand to finish dressing, moving quickly before she came back out.
He figured he had about five minutes before the choreography became complicated again.
He wasn’t wrong. Vic emerged while he was knotting his tie at the mirror inside the closet door, still in the robe, reaching past him to plug in her phone charger without saying a word.
He stepped back to give her room and bumped into the bed frame.
She had set her clothes on the chair by the window and was sorting through them with a focused efficiency that communicated clearly she did not want conversation.
He respected that.
By ten minutes to seven, they were both dressed and functional. Miles had his laptop bag slung over one shoulder and Vic was pulling her hair back into a low knot, checking it in the mirror by the door.
"Breakfast?" Miles said.
"God, yes. And coffee.”
The hotel had a small restaurant off the lobby, which they found easily. They took a corner table, away from the other guests, and ordered coffee and food from a server who left them largely alone. Miles wrapped both hands around the mug when it came and felt the warmth of it work into his palms.
"How are you doing?" Vic asked.
"Better," he said. "I think I needed to sleep on it.
Literally, even if the sleeping was lousy.
" He thought about telling her that he’d sent an email to the prison this morning but decided that might muddy the waters.
So, he kept that to himself for the time being.
"Hayes is right. You are right. The Marshals are resourced for this.
I'm not. The work we can actually do is right in front of us. "
Vic studied him for a moment. "Okay," she said, without making it into more than it was.
"So…Claudia Ashford," Miles said, setting down his mug. "I want to think through how we're handling this before we go in."
Vic pulled out her phone and opened the notes she'd made the night before. "It’ll be interesting. We're going to be essentially asking her to help us identify which of her former employees might be committing murders. That's a delicate conversation."
"She may also feel some guilt about it," Miles said. "Her company collapsed, she went to prison, and the people who worked for her scattered. If one of them turned into a killer, she's going to wonder whether she bears some responsibility."
"Or she'll get defensive. Protecting the legacy of the business, what's left of it."
Miles considered that. "Either way, we need her to focus.
Not on the past, not on the bankruptcy, but on specific people.
Specific skills, specific grievances." He wrapped his hands around the mug again.
"I want to concentrate on two things. First, who had the technical ability to do what the killer's doing.
Platinum electroplating is specialized work.
Not every jeweler would even know the process. "
"Hartley does."
"Hartley does. But I want her to confirm that, and I want to know who else from her staff would have had that knowledge." Miles paused. "Second, who left the job carrying real anger. Not just frustration. Something deep enough to fester."
Vic looked up from her notes. "You think she'll know that?"
"I think she ran that business for fifteen years. She knew those people. Whether she wants to tell us is a different question."
“And if she turns out to be the killer?” Vic ventured.
Miles shrugged and, with a hopeful smile, said: “Then hopefully this case will be closed by noon.”