Hearts of Sand(61)

“He’s got my cell number, yes,” Gregor said. “Have him call me. It would help.”

The agent fluttered and apologized and thanked until Gregor’s eardrums felt as if they had been coated in goo. He hung up and called the Alwych Police Department.

Jason Battlesea was in his office, and apparently busy.

“What I need you to do,” Gregor said, “is to make sure your people get all the fingerprints, every single one, in the Waring house. Send somebody back out there and go over the place with tweezers and microscopes. Get fibers. Get prints. Get anything and everything, even if it looks utterly irrelevant. Then I need you to find any DNA you can get off those, and any fingerprints, through every database in existence.”

“We got everything,” Jason Battlesea said.

“I don’t mean at the crime scene, and I don’t mean around the door where somebody got in,” Gregor said. “I mean the whole house, upstairs and down. The attic. The basement. Every single inch of flooring and carpet and furniture. Everything.”

“My God,” Jason Battlesea said. “That will take months. And what for? We looked through the house both times. Nothing had been disturbed—”

“Nothing had been noticeably disturbed,” Gregor said. “And it shouldn’t take more than twenty-four to forty-eight hours if you put everybody you’ve got on it and start now.”

“But it’s the weekend of the Fourth! We’ve got ordinary policing to do—”

“Not with forensics people, you don’t. Call the state police in to help if you have to. Oh, and one more thing. Look through drawers. We need to find photograph albums, or loose photographs, or wherever it is the Warings put their snapshots of things like family outings. My guess is that there will be formal photograph albums all done up with those little corner holders. We need to find those, and we need to start going through them. And be very careful. If we’re going to find fingerprints or DNA, those are going to be the most likely places.”

“In the photograph albums,” Jason Battlesea said.

“In the photograph albums,” Gregor said. “Just get it done, and I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

“Where are you?” Jason Battlesea asked.

“I’m in New York,” Gregor said. “And don’t ask why now. I think I’m running out of cell phone battery.”





SIX

1

It was the third of July and in spite of the legendary work ethic of Wall Street lawyers, men and women were clearing out of the office as fast as they could go. Kyle Westervan was sitting at his desk, wondering if there was something wrong with him. His briefcase was on the desk in front of him, locked. He had been staring at it for fifteen minutes. He had not been able to move.

“Cheesecake,” he had said into the phone just fifteen minutes ago, after he listened to the usual opening.

“Cohen’s Kosher Deli,” was the way the phone had been answered when he called.

“It all sounds ridiculous,” they’d told him when they started this.

At the time, he hadn’t agreed. Cloak-and-dagger was cloak-and-dagger. You went with it or you didn’t. It had taken all this time to feel that the entire situation was just stupid. At this point, looking out his open office door at the empty corridor, it didn’t even seem real.

“No, I’ll come down and pick it up,” he’d told them.

That was standard, too. They asked if he wanted his food delivered. He told them he’d come down and pick it up.

He forced himself to his feet. He took the briefcase off the desk. It felt unbelievably heavy.

He went out into the corridor. There was nobody there. He looked into the few offices with their doors open. They were all shut down for the night. He went through what the assistants called CubicleLand, where the paralegals worked. The cubicles were all empty, too. Even the receptionist at the front desk was gone, her little clutch of photographs in silver frames all put away in a locked desk drawer for the night.

He went through the lobby and into the foyer. He went down in the elevator to the first floor. Kyle said good evening to the night guard and went out into the street. The street instantly made him feel better. It was not so empty, and it was very much the real world. Maybe he had begun to feel he no longer lived in the real world.

Maybe he had felt that way from the moment he started working on Wall Street.

Cohen’s Kosher Deli was half deserted, which was good. Kyle went in through the front door and asked the woman at the register about his cheesecake. She found it in a little pile of bags behind the counter and handed it to him. He paid for it and looked around. The man he had never known as anything but “Andy” was sitting in the last booth but one against the back, the ones without the windows.