I didn't go home.
I went to District B-2.
At 10:03 p.m. I was standing in the lobby of the Roxbury Homicide unit on Dudley Street, soaked through from the rain that had started up after I made the Red Line, holding the burner Nokia in one hand and my legitimate phone — battery pulled — in the other. The desk officer looked up. He took in the wet hair and the work jacket and the bleach stain on the cuff and his face arranged itself into the expression cops wear when they think they're about to be wasted.
I spoke first.
"I want to report a homicide."
He said, "What kind."
I said, "Seven."
The lobby went quiet for a second.
Someone took me into a room without windows.
The detective they put across from me was named Vivian Ortiz. Short hair, brown blazer over a department polo, eyes that didn't blink as much as a person's should. She put a steno pad on the table between us and clicked the pen.
"You're telling me you have information on seven open death investigations."
I nodded.
"Evidence."
I pushed the Nokia across the table. "Everything's on this."
She didn't pick it up.
"Maren Doyle," she said. "You know the penalty for filing a false report."
I almost smiled. "I know the penalty for covering for a killer."
There was a knock. A young cop opened the door, walked over to her, and said something close to her ear. I watched her face change.
She picked up her own phone, swiped, and turned the screen toward me. It was a live feed.
47 Auburndale Court. Apartment 4B. My door was open in the frame, the frame splintered around the deadbolt. Inside, on the linoleum just past the entry rug, a woman was facedown. Long dark hair fanned across her face. She was wearing a cream-colored thermal pajama set and white socks.
I owned that pajama set. I'd bought it at Marshalls.
"You want to tell me how that's not you," the young cop said.
I looked at the screen. My nails were going through my palm.
He had been faster than I thought.
He wasn't just trying to kill me. He was trying to make me into the body.
Ortiz paused the feed. "We haven't ID'd her yet. But the scene is laid out to read like you."
"So what does that make me," I said.
She watched my face. "A suspect. Or a ghost."
I put my hand into the side pocket of my Carhartt and brought out a clear evidence sleeve I'd printed off the internet last Christmas and kept in a drawer.
Inside the sleeve was a silver cufflink. Monogrammed. APH, in the deco font he used on his stationery. There was a fleck of dried blood in the catch-hinge.
I set the sleeve down on the table between us.
"He wears these every time," I said. "Before."
Ortiz looked at the cufflink. She didn't pick it up yet.
"So you might want to start with the ghost who likes things clean," I said.
Ortiz didn't believe me right away.
I hadn't expected her to. A cleaner walking in to flip on a client is a setup that, depending on which detective gets the room, reads as either gift or scam. Vivian Ortiz read it as scam first.
She put me in an observation cell. Concrete bench, no clock, fluorescents on a hum I could feel in my teeth.
At 1:00 a.m. she came back with a Tyvek folder.
"The body isn't you."
I leaned back against the wall and shut my eyes for one second.
She put a photograph on the table.
The face was bad. He had used something heavy on it, on purpose. But there was a small chickenpox scar behind the left ear, an old one, and a topaz stud in the lobe.
I knew her.
Sloane Reyes.
Aaron had brought her in four weeks ago. Said she was a new junior liaison. Said she'd be running my outside contacts to free up my schedule. The day he introduced her, she handed me a paper cup of tea from the lobby Keurig and smiled the smile a girl learns to do at a job interview.
Ms. Doyle, Aaron said you're really good at this.
I hadn't drunk the tea.
Now she was on my kitchen floor in my pajama set.
"You knew her," Ortiz said.
"Yes."
"Who did this."
"Aaron Pryce-Hollister."
She watched me.
"Motive."
I was quiet for a second. "She wasn't useful anymore."
She gave me a smile that wasn't a smile. "Like you."
"Yes."
She leaned forward. "Maren. Stop selling yourself as a victim. You worked seven of them."
My throat closed.
"I know."
"You know," she said. "And you still came in."
I looked at the badge clipped to her belt. Number 4471. Then I looked up at her face. The cheekbone. The mouth.
She had the same chin as the woman in the cigarette case.
"Detective," I said. "Did you know somebody named Laura Mendes."
The blood went out of her face.
She crossed the table in one motion and got a fistful of my jacket. "Where did you hear that name."
So her name was Laura Mendes.
The woman in the cigarette case. The graduation portrait Aaron Pryce-Hollister carried over his heart.
"Was she his," I said.
Ortiz's fist on my collar tightened. Her eyes shone for a single second and then the shine was gone again, swept under like everything else.
"Laura Mendes was my FTO. Three years ago she went off Morrissey Boulevard at two in the morning. The crash team ruled brakes."
I said, very quietly, "It wasn't brakes."
Aaron's first accident wasn't one of mine.
It was Laura Mendes.
Three years ago, while she was working a strange fall from a Back Bay walk-up — a Halsted & Pryce client who'd gone off a seventh-floor balcony in October, ruled accidental — her Crown Vic lost its brakes on Morrissey Boulevard at two in the morning and went into a guardrail at sixty. They closed it inside a week.
The photograph he kept in the silver cigarette case wasn't guilt.
It was a trophy.
Ortiz sat down on the bench across from me. She didn't speak for a long time.
I wrote down the passcode to the Nokia on the back of a card from her case file and slid it to her.
"There are seven folders. By date."
She opened the first one.
What was in those folders wasn't scene photographs. Aaron checked me. He checked my apartment, he checked my van, he listened in on my phone calls — I figured that one out the second month. So I didn't keep anything that looked like evidence.
What I kept was the seam of it. A four-minute audio clip of him giving an address, stripped of metadata. A money-order serial number cross-referenced against an obituary. A timestamp from his firm's parking-garage gate that contradicted his own alibi to the SPCA charity board that night. An e-mail he hadn't sent but had had a paralegal draft. The threat one of the dead women's husbands had texted her in May, screenshotted off her phone before I bagged it.
The actual material was in seven places.
The USB inside the Carhartt lining was one.
The old Nokia with the backup audio, taped to the underside of the lint trap in my dryer, was another.
A micro-SD card sliced into the spine of Reese's marble composition notebook, the one she used for history class. Three.
Photocopies of bank-routing notes folded into the back of my mother's hospital discharge paperwork, in the file box in the closet of the studio I never slept in. Four.
A handwritten password to a Dropbox link, written in Sharpie on the underside of the lid of a sharps container in my cleanup van. Five.
A spiral notebook of dates and payments, rubber-banded inside a roll of Brawny paper towels in my garage. Six.
A scrap of paper with a hash string on it, taped to the back of the seashell wind chime. Seven.
Every place a man with a phobia about dirt and a hatred for working-class objects would refuse to touch.
I am very small, and very poor, and a long way under his floor. The whole point of three years of his attention was that I couldn't be carrying any of this. He'd searched my apartment two dozen times.
He never searched my dryer's lint trap.
Ortiz scrolled through the second folder. Her face was getting flatter.
"Why now," she said.
"Because tonight he's going to kill me."
She didn't look up. "That's not the reason."
I said, "Because his people picked Reese up off the school steps at six forty-two this afternoon."
Her hand stopped.
I pulled the burner out and showed her the last text.
It was from Reese's number, sent at 6:42 p.m.
Maren, Aaron said something happened to you. He's taking me to see you.
After that, Reese's phone had gone dark.
Ortiz stood up. "Get me her phone's last ping."
Five minutes later the young cop came back in.
"We've got the car. It's at Conley Terminal. South Boston container side."
I was on my feet.
"Nobody in it," he said. "Just a JanSport."
Reese's JanSport.
Hooked through the steering wheel was a beaded friendship bracelet, blue and white pony beads, a plastic peace-sign charm. Reese had made it for me in seventh grade and given it back to me when she turned fifteen because, she said, she'd grown out of being a kid who made things.
Ortiz put her hand flat against my shoulder. "Breathe."
I knocked it off. "He'll kill her."
She held my eyes. "Then don't let him pick the time."
My phone rang.
Unknown number.
I answered.
Aaron was smiling. I could hear it.
"Maren," he said. "How's the coffee down at District B-2?"
"I have your sister," Aaron said.
In the background of the call I could hear wind, and a slow metallic clink that could have been a chain dragging on a concrete floor.
Reese was crying. "Maren. I'm scared."
I held the phone hard enough that my knuckles went white. Ortiz waved at the tech sitting in the corner, who started typing.
Aaron heard the click of someone joining the line. He laughed a little.
"Don't bother with the trace," he said. "You have ten minutes."
He said, "Bring what you brought the cops. Same place we started."
"Where," I said.
His voice softened. "The first room I ever asked you to clean."
The Strand.
Ortiz wrote the address down on a Post-it.
I said into the phone, "Let her go."
"Sure," Aaron said. "When you're here."
"How do I know you'll let her go."
He didn't answer.
The next thing through the earpiece was a sound from Reese that made my vision wash gray.
"Maren," Aaron said, after. "I don't haggle."
He hung up.
Ortiz had me by both shoulders. "You can't go."
"I have to."
"He'll process you both. He'll set it up so it reads as a murder-suicide. You're a cleaner with prior knowledge of seven open cases and a stash of fake-suicide blueprints in your van. He's the bereaved client of the deceased."
I laughed.
"So follow me in."
"He'll spot the wire."
"Don't put one on me."
I tugged at the inside collar of my Carhartt and pulled out a black button the size of a dime. Snap-clasp, magnetic. Aaron had given it to me my second year. For emergencies on a job, Maren. Just press it.
I'd never pressed it. I'd looked it up.
I set the button on the table.
"He's been tracking me with this for three years."
Ortiz looked at the button. Then she looked at me.
"You want this on someone else's body."
"Sloane Reyes is still at my apartment. He thinks she's me. He's watching the dot, but he's also watching District B-2 to see if it leaves. Put the button on Sloane. Put Sloane in the M.E.'s van. Have the van drive south on 93. He'll watch the dot run."
She looked at me for two seconds.
"You're a good liar, Doyle."
I looked at the floor. "Had to learn."
She turned to the room and started giving orders.
Ten minutes later I was in the back of an unmarked Crown Vic on the Mass Pike, headed for Roxbury.
Reese had been six when she'd had a fever bad enough they admitted her overnight at Boston Medical Center. Mom was at work. I sat next to the bed all night holding her hand. Around four in the morning she opened her eyes and squeezed my fingers and said, "When I'm big I'm gonna take care of you."
I hadn't taken care of her.
I wasn't going to miss it twice.