Protocol

I swallowed the word.

It is an odd sensation, swallowing a word you have already shaped. It goes down like a dry pill. For a moment I could feel it lodged somewhere behind my breastbone, small and hard and perfectly formed: homicide. Four syllables, if one is generous. A very little thing to carry. And I stood there in the lamplight of the dead woman's elevator with my mouth slightly open, and let it go.

"Procedure exists," I said, "to protect us from instinct."

I heard myself say it. I heard how reasonable it sounded. It had the lovely ring of a line from a lecture, one of those I had delivered a hundred times to undergraduates who nodded and wrote it down. Procedure protects us from instinct. It is true. It is one of the truest things I know. It is the reason that the justice system, for all its failings, has not yet hanged half the population on a hunch.

Hannah Frost's shoulders came down a full inch.

"Thank you," she said. "That's the first sensible thing anyone's said since I arrived."

"I'd hate to be thought a nuisance."

"No." The thin smile came back, and this time it was almost warm. "I don't think you're a nuisance, Dr. Vaughn. I think you're clever. It's not the same thing, and it's a great deal more dangerous to the clever."

She turned away to her kit, and I watched her work.

…

She was very good. I will not pretend otherwise. She moved around the cage with the economical, almost balletic precision of a woman who has performed the same tasks a thousand times and means to perform them a thousand more. Swabs from the handrail. Swabs from the buttons. A strip of tape lifted from the vinyl where Kaylee Rhodes had clawed it, and sealed in a clear bag, and initialed. She took air samples from the grille with a small hissing pump. She drew vitreous fluid from the dead woman's eye with a needle so fine that I looked away. Each vial was labeled, capped, and set in a numbered tray. Each tray was locked in a gray case with a seal that bore the seal of the Commonwealth.

By six o'clock the dawn was a gray smear against the windows of the lobby, and Kaylee Rhodes was gone.

They took her down in the service lift, under a white sheet, on a gurney with one wheel that squeaked. I walked beside her as far as the doors. I do not know why. It seemed the least one could do. The sheet had slipped a little at the foot, and I saw a small bare heel, dusty from the carpet, with a ring of tiny silver stars tattooed around the ankle, and I thought: someone chose that. Someone sat in a chair and chose a ring of tiny stars.

The doors closed.

"You sure about this?" said Leo.

He was standing at my elbow with his collar up and the unlit cigar finally in his mouth. His eyes were red-rimmed. I realized that he had been awake for twenty-six hours.

"About what?"

"Letting her have it. Waiting on the lab." He took the cigar out and looked at it. "You were pretty sure ten minutes ago."

I thought about the answer for rather longer than I should have.

There was a true thing I could have said, and it was this: No. I am not sure. I have never been less sure of anything in my life, and the reason I am not sure is that I am afraid. I could have said that I had been the clever outsider for fifteen years, and that I knew exactly what happens to the clever outsider who cries wolf. I could have said that I wanted, for once, to be the man who waited his turn.

Instead I said the other thing. It came out smooth and level and well-modulated, in the voice of a man who is perfectly at ease.

"I would rather be wrong slowly than wrong loudly."

Leo nodded.

It was a small nod. It was the kind of nod one gives a colleague who has said something sensible. But I watched his face while he did it, and I saw something go out of it, as a light goes out of a window when someone has quietly drawn the blind. He put the cigar back in his mouth. He said, "Yeah. Sure. That's fair." And he turned and walked away down the corridor, with his hands in his pockets and his head a little bowed, a heavy tired man in a wet coat, and he did not look back.

I did not like the sound of my own sentence.

I liked it less every time I heard it, in my head, for the next three days.

…

By eight o'clock in the morning the elevator was running again.

I know this because I stood in the lobby, in my damp overcoat, and watched it. A building engineer in a blue jumpsuit had been up the shaft with a flashlight and a clipboard for twenty minutes. He came down, wiped his hands on a rag, and ticked something off. He pressed a button on a panel. The third car, the one in which a woman had died, rose smoothly from the basement, glided past the lobby with a faint pleasant chime, and stopped.

The doors slid open.

It was empty and clean. Someone had mopped the floor. Someone had wiped the handrail and replaced the torn section of wall panel with a new piece of paper that was a half-shade too bright. The mirrored wood shone. The little speaker above the buttons played a soft instrumental version of something by the Beatles.

A couple stepped in, young, in running clothes, with a small dog under the man's arm. The woman pressed fifteen.

She did not hesitate. She did not glance at the walls, or the ceiling, or the floor. She was talking about brunch. The doors closed on her sentence, and the car rose, humming, and carried its passengers up to a floor that lay a few feet above the place where a thirty-three-year-old woman had broken ten fingernails on a wall.

I counted. Four seconds. From the moment the door closed to the moment the indicator light above it went from 1 to 2.

The building had got rid of her in four seconds.

…

"You were awfully sure back there," said a voice.

I had gone upstairs. I had gone back to the office in a taxi, since I do not drive in this country and have never forgiven it for the privilege, and was standing in the corridor outside the squad room with a paper cup of tea I did not want when Vera Castellano stepped out of an alcove and planted herself in front of me.

She had not slept either. She had changed her suit, but the new one was no less severe than the last: charcoal, with a white shirt buttoned to the throat. A small vertical crease had appeared between her brows.

"I beg your pardon?"

"At the scene. Mr. Cole from the night desk told me. 'The Brit was down on his knees in there sniffing the corpse like a truffle pig, and then he said it was a murder.' That's what he told me."

"I didn't say that."

"No," said Vera. "You didn't. That's what I'm asking. Because I've known you six weeks, and in that time I've heard you say 'I believe,' 'I suspect,' 'I would be inclined to think,' and 'I wouldn't be surprised if.' You haven't once said anything you didn't have a back door for. Except in a locked room with a man named Tuck, when you were sure as a nail. And you were sure again in that elevator. And now you're not." She looked at me. "What changed?"

I turned the paper cup in my fingers.

"Certainty," I said, "is a feeling, Detective. It isn't evidence."

"That's what I just said."

"Is it?"

"It's what I've been saying since the day you walked in." Her voice was flat. "I'm only a little surprised to hear it from you."

I do not know what she expected. I think she expected me to defend myself. Instead I said the thing that she had said to me in the bar, on the night of the Tuck interview, the thing I had thanked her for. The best guard against a confident man is a skeptic with a notebook. I said it back to her, quietly, and watched her face.

It did not move. But the tip of her right thumb went hard against the side of her forefinger, as it had in Mulligan's, and I knew that the speech had landed, and that it had not landed as I'd meant.

"You're welcome," she said at last, in a voice like a closed door, and went into the squad room.

…

I went back to my office and shut the door.

It was twenty past nine. Through the window the brick wall was streaked with rain, and the sky above it was the color of an old nickel. I sat down at my desk, which still held the pale ring left by yesterday's tea, and took out my phone. I looked at it for a long time.

Seventy-two hours.

It was the figure Hannah had given me. It was, as these things go, a perfectly acceptable figure: the ordinary lag of the ordinary laboratory. I knew that. I knew that three days is nothing in the life of a murder inquiry, a blink, a moment. I knew that every competent investigator in the history of the world had sat just where I was sitting, with just such a figure in his head, and had felt just such a small cold dread, and had gone home and kissed his wife.

I opened the timer.

I set it, slowly, with one thumb. 72:00:00. I pressed the green button.

The figures began to run.

71:59:59. 71:59:58. 71:59:57.

I put the phone on the blotter, face up, and sat back, and watched them go.

Outside the window the rain had thinned to a drizzle. Down the corridor a telephone rang and was answered. Someone laughed. A cart of files squeaked past the door. The building went about its Tuesday business, calm and warm and indifferent, like a great slow animal that has eaten and is not hungry.

I did not sleep that day. I did not sleep that night. And somewhere around three in the morning, when the figures on the phone had slid to 65:40, and the office was dark and the window had gone black and I was sitting with my hands flat on the blotter and my gold spectacles in my lap, I found that I was tapping the desk with my steel pen.

Two quick. One slow.

I stopped.

The silence afterward was enormous.

The phone said 65:39.