He did not answer her question in the car.He chose not to respond at the registrar's office either, because he was on the phone for forty minutes with people whose names she had never heard, undoing whatever Victor had set in motion before five o'clock that he couldn't do anymore. She sat in the lobby the whole time with her coat on, watching him work with a focus that frightened her a little not because it was unkind, but because it was so completely unlike anything she'd expected from a man she'd first mistaken for harmless.They also did not chat in the car on the way to her place. She let him go in because she had no mental capacity left to even contemplate the question and he stood in her kitchen like a man who had arrived at a verdict he already knew to be undesirable."You can sit down," she said finally, the first thing either of them had said in an hour. "I'm not going to yell at you standing in my kitchen like you're about to get fired.""I don't know what I'm about to get.

Marcus was surprised by how quickly the number traced back, and slower than either of them wanted it to. At eight the following morning, Marcus read from his screen, "It's registered to a residential address in Pasadena," his voice still rough from lack of sleep. "Gerald Whitfield is the owner. However, the address is a home that has been rented out to short-term tenants for the past six years, and Gerald Whitfield has been dead for eleven years. Gerald Whitfield is not the person using this number. His name is being used because it leads nowhere.""Someone careful.""Someone very careful. Marcus rubbed his eyes. But there was one thing I did discover. In the past month, the number has only made two calls. My office. Three days prior to that, a landline registered to Nathaniel Vale's estate."Ethan stilled. our Nathaniel Vale.""Yes, your decoy. Marcus's voice had gone careful in the particular way it did when he was about to hand Ethan something he wasn't going to like. This indicat