“All right, kid,” I say softly. “You ready?”
“Ready for what?”
I raise my eyebrows and she grins. She knows what I mean. We’ve got enough. More than enough. The anomaly of the missing days. The anomaly of the schedule. And that’s all before we even get to that damn novel, wrapped in its fake jacket, hiding in plain sight. The sort of thing a man like Crane has no business owning, the sort of thing that shouldn’t rightly exist in the first place. Ms. Paige, pain in the ass though she may be, has been right from the beginning, has been right all along: there is something in this, a crosshatch of anomalies that needs to be reconciled. Truth that needs to be found, and there is only one way to do it.
“Stop,” she tells the screen, and then turns fully to face me. “We’re going to speculate?”
“Well, I am,” I say, and I snag an extra chair from next to Bright’s desk and drag it over. “I don’t know what you’re going to do.”
I sit down. I close my eyes. I can’t see Ms. Paige but I know what she does: she settles back and closes her eyes beside me.
I shift in my chair, arch my back slightly, clench my teeth. This is the part I hate, the moment of descent, how it’s like a trap door opening, the world giving away beneath you, a lurch and a drop, down into dark below. I jerk and twitch. One forearm shoots out rigid, fingers clutching, my body instinctively seeking to keep a grip on the world, and then I let go but I hate how it feels: something grabbing at me, speculation clutching a foot and a leg and dragging me into its darkness—
Which is just what it is for me—a darkness: a cold room, cold and dark, a cave or a cavern, filled with shadow. I can’t see the edges of it, don’t know how far it goes. It’s only a dark room, lit by a single candle, a small, fierce orange glow, and now they float forward—stray postulates like tiny, shifting, orbiting stars, glinting in the hazy penumbra cast by the single light.
Crane was a burglar.
Simple. The closest fire.
“A burglar,” I say out loud, twitching in my chair, and Aysa says it back.
“A burglar.” And then, “A Peeping Tom.”
“A Peeping Tom,” I say, sending that spark out into my own darkness, watching it take up orbit.
“A burglar—a ring of burglars,” says Aysa beside me.
That’s what it is, that’s all we do, trading back and forth, dancing together toward and then away from possibilities, scattered sparks, the void pinpricked by glitters of speculation, the mind glowing and dimming, glowing and dimming, and you sit there with head turned, the body just a body, a hollow thing grimacing in a chair while inside—
A burglar—
One of a group of burglars—conspiracy—cabal—
Or… but…
Crane the pervert—monster—madman—
—a man of no family or station, a drifter, itinerant, man of missing days—
Or, or…
—depressive, isolated, lonesome, and alone—seeing the height of the house as a chance, a weapon—up on the precipice, wanting to do it, dying to die—
So, so…
It’s the house, the house, the house that wants him, not he that wants the house—
That’s Ms. Paige bringing the house into it, not just the man but the house itself, the place and the meaning of the place, sending a new bright spark into my field of vision, burning me awake and out of it.
I fly from the darkness, eyes wide open.
“Shit,” I say, standing up unsteady. “Shit.”
“What?” says Ms. Paige. “What is it? You have something?”
“No. Yes. I don’t fucking know.” I rub my knuckles into my eyes, clearing away stars. “I have something that I know I don’t have.”
Aysa studies me avidly, and I should take the time to explain, but I don’t feel like it. I get up, sighing, and smash my pinhole down onto my head. Damn it. The house. The stupid house.
“You watch your way through the relevant stretches, Ms. Paige. Okay? It’s gonna be boring, but that’s what you do. Go from stretch to stretch, and don’t skip the ins and outs. Anyone comes in, catch a still of the face. Anyone even comes into the frame.”
“Yes, sir. Where are you going?”
“Someone I gotta talk to.” And then, off her look—eager, curious—“Someone I gotta talk to alone.”
10.
“The past is a dangerous country.”
“Unknown and unknowable.”
“This is true.”
“And always shall be.”
“Well, well, Mr. Speculator. Twice in the same day.”
“Lucky you, right?”
“Yes, yes. Lucky me.”
Captain Elena Tester beckons me into her cluttered office, and we’re both smiling as she shakes my hand, but there’s displeasure in her smile, right behind the teeth. She doesn’t like me being here in her office this morning; she doesn’t like that I didn’t call first, doesn’t like what any of this implies. It’s one thing to run into each other at a crime scene, two law enforcement professionals crossing paths on the job; it’s another thing entirely for me to be darkening her doorway less than twenty-four hours later, unannounced but clearly on official business.
Nobody stopped me from coming in, by the way. Not outside, under the fluttering flag of the Bear and Stars. Not in the elevator or coming down the hall. The regular police and the Speculative Service have divergent jurisdictions, discrete but coterminous, but nobody’s going to stop a Spec on his rounds. The black clothes and the pinhole function like a passport, offering free movement within the Golden State. Stand back, stay clear.
So Captain Tester is surprised to see me, and she’s not happy, but this shouldn’t take long. I just need to clear this up.
I point to one of the three straight-backed chairs that form
