Preston McAvoy.
Not Mark or Mike—but maybe Mac. He’d given her his real name, and she’d just heard it wrong. There was a photo, his hair cut short and neatly combed. Collar, tie. No shades. But the jawline was the same, the nose was just the same. I checked and double checked. A half hour more, and I had scans of thirty-something pages from his file, including psych assessments, managers’ reports, a stream of correspondence. He was forty-five. Princeton grad. Married once, a long time back, now divorced. Joined the Registry age twenty-five. Worked R&D, east coast, then . . . then I saw it: GH9. The Indiana facility. The place that Silverman once told me he knew all about.
Except he didn’t, bar the few small nuggets I’d allowed him.
It was starting to make sense then, but no sense I liked.
I’d promised Angel a night out.
That wasn’t going to happen.
By evening, I was looking through his bank account. Long fingers, like I say. Activity was rare, sporadic, and the money would be topped up within days of each withdrawal, though only by the same sums he’d paid out. The real cash would be elsewhere—several places, if he’d any sense. As I saw it, this account was kept for one reason: because some things are much easier to buy under your own name.
Plane tickets, for instance.
One-way, Boston to Vegas, stopover in Philly.
Three days back.
So neat, so simple, and it would have wrapped the whole thing up just wonderfully well, except for one small snag.
I saw it on the first page of his file, and read the details in a brief addendum to his résumé, which came on page 3, following the contact information. It even had a big, blue stamp across it, just to make it all official.
Preston McAvoy was dead.
Chapter 47
Night Music
I garaged the SUV, put a chit in with the Registry for somebody to pick it up. We stripped down the equipment, reduced it all to luggage-size—cables, flasks, control box—and filed the necessary forms to take it on the plane with us. The Registry booked tickets, flight, and hotel. We had a drink with Silverman to say goodbye, though he was all enthusiasm; told us that he’d raise the cash and join us in a day or two. I told him not to bother: we’d be done by then. And I was hoping that we would, as well.
Around the third beer, I went back to work. The file came with a page of contacts, most likely long-since obsolete. But I still had to be sure.
“Let’s have this,” said Silverman, and picked his camera up. I tried to look like Bogart while I keyed the numbers in. I tugged my earlobe, the way he does in The Big Sleep, put my head down, tough, unsmiling, serious.
The landline “could not be completed as dialed.”
The mobile got a Spanish woman who spoke no English, so I apologized in French (since I don’t speak Spanish) and hung up.
The next of kin was long gone.
The work phone got an out-of-office for a man named Kolowoski.
I looked into the camera lens. “Of all the bars in all the world . . .”
Angel laughed at me.
That left e-mail. She helped me with the message there, made it nice and neutral. I told him I was Copeland from the Registry, I’d like to get in touch with him. I made it sound like we were old pals.
Almost.
His personal account was closed. It bounced straight back. But the Registry address . . .
That one stuck.
Three years, and they still hadn’t deleted it. I love the inefficiency of big firms.
“Use a ouija board,” said Angel. “Guy’s dead, right?”
Once we’d left Silverman we stopped for ice cream at Graeter’s, and ate it in our hotel room, watching a movie neither of us liked but, equally, couldn’t be bothered to switch off. Then we dozed to the lullaby of traffic in the street outside, which, if you were really sleepy, you could half imagine sounded like the sea . . .
We slept for maybe three, four hours.
And then the music started up.
I heard it, long before I woke, twisting through my dreams: a sound of brass and woodwind, sinuous and melancholy, dwindling as I rose up towards consciousness, fading at last into a single, breathy whisper, that seemed to trace the notes with difficulty, one to the next. I lay there listening, my eyes closed, my body sunk into the bedding, feeling dreamy still. It was a while before I recognized the voice. It was Angel’s, naturally, but it didn’t sound like her. I knew her sound: precise, clear, classically trained, every note spot on. Now she sounded tentative, uncertain, surprised by each new utterance. I lay there, trying to place the tune. For moments it seemed half-familiar, yet as each sequence approached a resolution, it would shift, and metamorphosize into a new theme. This wasn’t music I had ever heard her listen to. Even its form and genre seemed to waver, sometimes complex, sometimes simple as a nursery rhyme.
I rolled over. Opened my eyes.