would ever be arrested, tried, or convicted for that crime. If you’re going to kill someone, Walter knew, the best place to do it was somewhere they don’t have any murders, because that means they don’t have anybody who knows how to solve them. Boston and Houston were not, of course, the same as rural Tennessee. But if Boston cops needed information available only in Houston, which they undoubtedly did, or vise versa, Walter knew they could forget about it. If your suspect list contained hundreds of names, living in hundreds of places, he knew you would need the cooperation of hundreds of police departments. Not a chance in hell, he wagered. Left to their own devices, the police might never identify this killer, and the FBI would only gum up the works. No one in the know was any longer unaware that the FBI hadn’t caught anyone important in decades.
Isobel, or someone like her, was the only way. She had answered many of the most important questions, all by herself, long before any law enforcement agency could or would. It impressed Walter that she even knew the questions, no less was able to get so many of the answers. What Walter also knew was that she didn’t know how to take the answers she had, the data, and spin them into a single, definitive, correct identification. He was confident he could.
Her descriptions were concise and detailed. And they were interesting. She spoke of these people as if she knew them; treated their stories like her own; tried, with great success Walter thought, to get behind their eyes. From time to time he asked questions. She nearly always answered “I don’t know.” They quit at eleven and ordered Chinese food.
“What was the point,” asked Isobel, chewing Mu Shu pork, “of asking me questions you knew I could not answer?”
Walter looked at her carefully. She’d gone through the process for hours, never suggesting the slightest awareness of what he was up to. But she’d sniffed some purpose in him all the while.
“It’s been my experience,” Walter said, “that when people are telling you everything, you can ask them a question, any question, and if they don’t have the answer, they will say so. They’ll say ‘I don’t know.’ But if they are holding back, they will not do that. They won’t say ‘I don’t know.’ They’ll always give you something, true or not, just to be sure that you don’t suspect them of covering up or trying to mislead you.”
“F-fuck you. You were testing me all day and night.”
Walter winced. “That’s not the way to look at it. I have no reason to think you’re holding back. I didn’t. That’s not why.”
“Then, w-w-why?” That was the first time all day he’d heard her stutter. He felt a sharp pang of regret. It startled him because he hadn’t felt anything quite like it for a long, long time. At that point Walter became aware of a growing attachment, the nature of which was anything but clear.
“Everyone forgets important details,” he said. “You think you’ve said it all and then someone asks a question and another detail comes back. Talk to a doctor. Patients leave out all kinds of things when they talk about their symptoms. A cardiologist I know says patients with pacemakers often forget to tell him they have one. He doesn’t know till he listens to the chest. If you want to know every relevant thing, you have to ask. You must be persistent. It’s the question that brings it all back. That’s all.”
“You are an old shit,” she said. And the hint of hurt in her voice, and the certainty in Walter’s mind that she knew he was still not being completely honest, put a painful edge on that feeling of regret. He leaned forward and put his hand, very delicately, on hers.
“Listen, I test people as a matter of reflex. It’s what I’ve been doing for thirty years. I knew I didn’t have to do it with you, and I tried to stop several times.”
She stared at him with a blank expression.
Walter smiled sadly. “I really did.”
“I can live with that,” she said, doing her best to conceal her delight in the sorrowful look on his face and the soft, tightened sound of his voice.
During the next day and a half, while Isobel was at work, Walter taxied from the Mayflower and worked in her flat. He sat in her kitchen reading the hundreds of pages of printouts she’d left him. Then he read them again. He focused on where the “A-group” survivors lived, how their lives had been changed, who’d moved, who’d quit jobs or been fired, gotten in trouble, divorced, found a new sweetheart or spouse. Who sued and what was known about how much they got? One by one he wanted to know: Where were they at this moment?
He knew how loss creates fresh separations: between survivors and friends, neighbors, relatives, each other. When a hamburger’s killed one of your children, how do you ever send the others to McDonalds? How do you explain why they can’t go? What do they tell their friends? Survivors are reminders. How many parents protect their kids by keeping them apart from the ones who lost parents or brothers or sisters? Men sometimes moved, like divorced men sometimes do, away from their old neighborhoods, away from the couples they knew when they were a couple too. Many people changed jobs, suddenly strangers with people at work. Amid the routines of devastation, Walter searched patiently for the abnormal. He made calls, discovered employers and co-workers, neighbors and friends, turned up new girlfriends, old flames, estranged family members. Most were easy to talk to. It was no surprise to Walter. This was what he’d been doing for years. He knew how to approach people, how to help them tell him what it was he needed to learn.
When Isobel returned in the evening she told him about the magical note: “I killed Floyd Ochs.”
“ Who killed Floyd Ochs?” she asked Walter. She told him some called it a fraud or a very bad joke. She suspected that some considered her to be the note’s author. She told him it was a blessing because it confirmed what she thought she knew. Walter said he was glad it made her feel better, but it didn’t change very much for him, except for what it told him about the killer. They had a drink and walked up to Broadway and found a place to talk about survivors.
When Walter was ready to leave New York, he kissed Isobel on the forehead and told her, “I have what I need for now. I do my thinking better at home. Come visit me. You’ll like it.” He promised to call in a day or two.
Clara gave him a message from Tom Maloney. He’d called while Walter was in New York. Walter called back on Tom’s twenty-four-hour number. He said he was making progress but had nothing to report. Then he said, “I don’t work this way, Tom. I tried to make it clear before. If I need to talk to you, I’ll call. Otherwise, back off and let me do what I’m doing.” Maloney said he would. Walter knew he wouldn’t, not for a while anyway. Years ago, Walter had rejected the notion of being supervised. Making it stick wasn’t always easy. The people he worked for supervised whom they pleased. He quit one job and sent back most of the money. But that was the only time it came to that. Otherwise, he delivered a real conclusion, happy or not.
Two days later, Walter identified Leonard Martin.
When he did, he found it odd that he had been hired to find this guy, or that this guy went where he did. Walter knew the Caribbean as only a resident could. Isobel had a Jamaican address for Leonard Martin, and something about it rang a bell with Walter. Leonard moved from Atlanta, retired from his law firm, and set up housekeeping in the Bahamas. He ran from his loss like so many others. He just had more money than they did. Checking out Leonard Martin’s address was easy and confusing. Walter knew the Jamaica slum where Leonard bought his house. People with money didn’t live there. No white tourists or exiles, certainly. They avoided places like that for very good reason. And there was no marina for miles around. A boat in that neighborhood had oars. Red flags started waving.
Unless he’d gone Rasta, nuts on weed, or both, Leonard Martin was nowhere near Jamaica. Walter called bars, restaurants, even local stores. No one knew a white man named Leonard Martin. The only fat, troubled American Walter heard mentioned was a priest named Ryan who drank heavily for a year or so until he met a local woman named Claudia. Now they fished together on their boat and apparently lived a happy life.
The deeper and wider his search for Leonard Martin, the more he discovered about him, the less he knew where to find him. Walter called people in Atlanta. He put together a detailed version of Leonard’s life and downward spiral. He learned about his family, his law firm, his habits and tastes, even the Community Players and Barbara Coffino. He quickly got past the Bahamas dodge, but stymied in Jamaica. Did Leonard ever get there? If not, where did he go? Where was he now? What had he done? As a matter of very intense professional interest, what would he do next? Finding people was an art, a practiced and disciplined activity Walter Sherman had developed to its highest degree. It seemed simple, but no element of the process was more important than knowing when your goal was reached. A journey of a thousand miles always began with the first step-everyone knew that- but how many could spot the finish line with equal precision? The authorities couldn’t. Walter was sure of that. Leonard Martin was a big target. No one’s loss had been greater. But as soon as the cops began investigating him,
