The Strand was worse than it had been three years ago.
The marquee was half-collapsed on the Washington Street side. The front doors had been chained but the chain was hanging loose where somebody had cut it. Pigeons going in and out of the upper windows. The smell of mouse and mildew so thick you could taste it.
I went in alone.
Aaron's rule. No wire, no kit, no partner.
What Ortiz had given me wasn't a wire. It was a sentence.
Get him to admit Laura Mendes.
If he admitted it, she had what she needed to reopen the case and tie tonight to a pattern. If he didn't, I was a cleaner with a grudge who'd brought a confession agenda into a kidnapping.
A single work light was on, on the stage.
Reese was tied to a wooden chair stage right. Mouth taped. Tear tracks. Eyes huge. There was a black plastic case under the chair, with wires running into the legs.
I'd stepped past the orchestra rail when a voice came down from the box seats.
"Stop."
Aaron was up there. I could just make out the line of his shoulders against the velvet drape. He was holding what looked like a key fob.
"Don't be dramatic," he said. "It's not a bomb. It's a noisemaker. I just need you not to move too quick."
I looked at him. "I brought it."
I held up the USB-C drive.
He came down a side staircase, easy, deliberate, white cuffs catching the work light at every step. His suit was clean. He'd come dressed like he was going to a dinner at the Country Club at Brookline. There was even a fresh shirt under the jacket.
"You disappointed me, Maren."
I laughed once. "You disgust me."
His foot paused on the second-to-last step.
Aaron didn't mind being filthy in private. What he could not tolerate was being called filthy. The whole architecture of his life was the gap between the two.
He took the last step.
"You think you're cleaner than I am."
"No," I said. "I'm filth all the way through. That's why I'm here to confess."
His mouth opened a quarter inch and then closed.
I took a step forward, between him and Reese.
"I'm going to turn myself in," I said. "But you, Aaron. You went after how many. You faked Laura Mendes into a single-car accident on Morrissey. How much longer do you think you can wear the suit."
His face changed.
He said, "Don't say her name."
I took another step. "Why can't I say her name. Because she almost had you."
He stared at me. The work light made his eyes look like nothing.
"She was clever," he said. "And she didn't listen."
My heart went down a flight of stairs.
He had said it.
He didn't get the next sentence out.
Something hummed overhead.
Aaron's eyes went up sharp. A drone went past one of the broken skylights, low, propellers loud, and gone.
It wasn't BPD's.
It was his.
He was more careful than we'd given him credit for.
He smiled.
"Maren," he said. "Did you think I didn't know your detective was outside."
I felt the color leave my face.
He lifted the fob. "You people love being clever."
Two men in dark jackets came out of the side door on the mezzanine.
Gunshots.
The work light exploded above us. Glass came down. I went over Reese, covered her head with my chest, and waited for him to press the fob.
He didn't.
I looked up. He was watching us. He looked almost amused.
"You still save her," he said.
I had my body between him and the chair. I had my hands behind Reese's back. The wrist ties were nylon zip, doubled. I couldn't get them with my fingers.
Reese had a piece of brass in her right hand. She'd worked it free from the broken corner of the chair seat while we'd been talking. It had a sharp edge.
I'd taught her, the year before, what to do if she was ever tied up. Don't cry until you can't see. Pick a point on the floor. Keep your hands moving where they can't be seen.
She was sobbing.
Her hands had not stopped moving.
I pulled the tape off her mouth. "I've got you."
Aaron took a step toward us and put his hand out for the USB.
I lobbed the USB drive over my shoulder, underhand, into the dust drift under the front row of the orchestra.
Forty years of pigeon droppings and velvet rot.
He flinched.
It was a small flinch. A half-second eye-shift toward the dust where the data had landed. He could not help it.
Reese came up out of the chair with her right hand free, swung the brass shard low and hard across the back of his outstretched wrist, and dragged it.
The white cuff opened.
Blood came up onto the monogram in a thin clean line.
Aaron's face stopped working.
It wasn't pain.
It was dirt.
I drove my shoulder into his hip, took Reese by the elbow, and ran her toward the wings.
Behind us I heard him, low and strangled.
"Maren."
"Neither of you is walking out of here."
The stage-right door opened. Ortiz came through it with three uniforms behind her, weapons up.
"BPD! Drop it!"
Aaron laughed.
He pressed the fob.
Nothing exploded.
The rolling steel security shutters at every exit of the Strand came down at once, four big banging slams, and we were all inside together.
The theater fell into mostly-dark.
Aaron's two men and three of Ortiz's uniforms were trading shots from the mezzanine to the orchestra pit. Muzzle flashes lit up the broken plaster on the ceiling and went out again.
I pulled Reese down between row F and row G in the orchestra and put her under the iron base of a seat.
"Stay."
She grabbed my sleeve. "Maren. Come with me."
I shook my head.
Aaron was not going to lose interest in me. As long as I was the loud thing in his line of sight, he wouldn't pivot to her.
I stood up and broke for the other side of the stage.
Aaron came after me, exactly as I'd hoped.
His right hand hung at his side and blood was dropping off the cuff onto the carpet in a steady tick. He looked at every drop like it was being taken off his body with a knife.
"You ruined the cuff."
I was breathing hard. "You're lucky she didn't take your face."
"I should never have kept you on."
I had my back to the wall under the stage-right exit sign. I laughed at him.
"You kept me because I was cheap and useful and scared of dying. And because you knew I'd eat your charge for you."
He came forward.
"You were going to eat it anyway."
I said, "Is that what you told Laura Mendes. Take the fall."
His feet stopped.
I went on. "She got close, and you wouldn't kill her face to face. You did it from a hundred yards with a brake line. That's not perfect, Aaron. That's scared."
He came across the carpet in two fast steps and his left hand was around my throat against the wall.
His face was an inch from mine. The skin around his mouth was white.
"She said the same thing."
I couldn't breathe. I kept my eyes on his.
Something in him opened.
"She sat across the conference table at my office," he said, "and she told me my whole way of living was a sickness. She told me one day somebody would dig me up out of the one place I couldn't wipe."
He laughed. It came out wrong.
"So I made her the kind of person nobody could dig up."
From behind him, on the other side of the orchestra rail, Ortiz's voice.
"Pryce-Hollister."
"That last sentence is on tape."
Aaron snapped his head around.
The black button on my collar, the one he'd been tracking for three years, fell out of my Carhartt and landed on the carpet next to my boot.
His eyes followed it down and back up.
That button was never the wire.
The wire was the medical bandage on my throat.
The one I'd been wearing when I walked in. The one with the small visible stain from "a bleach splash on a job," which I'd put on in the back of Ortiz's car twenty minutes ago.
Aaron lost his face for a second.
It was about a second. Then his hand left my throat and he was moving — backwards, past the curtain leg, into the wings.
Ortiz vaulted the orchestra rail.
I went down on my hands and knees coughing. Reese was suddenly under my arm.
"Maren."
I pushed her. "Go with the cops."
"I'm not leaving you."
I took her by both shoulders and yelled at her for the first time in our lives.
"Listen."
She froze.
A young uniform took her by the elbow and got her down the aisle toward the lobby shutters where they were already prying the access panel open.
I dragged myself up against the wall and went after Aaron.
He knew the backstage corridor. He'd used it three years ago, the night he'd stood me on the stage and put the manila envelope in my hand. Same corridor, same stage door at the back, same alley behind it that came out onto Hammond Street.
The corridor was narrow. The plaster on one wall had gone, and you could see the lath.
At the far end, Vivian Ortiz was on her side on the concrete, holding her left arm. Her service weapon was eight feet from her hand on the floor. Aaron was standing in front of the old stage door with a folding knife open in his right hand and his left arm trembling.
He saw me come around the corner. He smiled.
"Maren. You really want to die."
I didn't look at him. I looked at Ortiz. "Can you move."
She had her teeth set. "Yes."
Aaron lowered the knife to her throat. "Move again and she joins Laura."
Ortiz's pupils contracted.
I said, "You won't."
He raised an eyebrow.
I started walking. Slow.
"You don't like a scene this messy. There's plaster in the air. There's pigeon mess in the corridor. There's blood off your hand on the floor. There are three civilians inside the perimeter and one of them is a teenager. This isn't your work. This is somebody else's work and you walked into it."
His eyes flicked sideways.
I shrugged my Carhartt off my shoulders and dropped it in the dust at my feet.
"There. We've already dirtied you up."
His breathing changed.
I took one more step. The sole of my boot came down in the line of blood he'd dripped off his cuff onto the concrete. I twisted my heel. The blood smeared sideways into the dust.
He stared at the smear.
I said, "You killed Laura because she saw through you. You killed Sloane because she knew too much. You're trying to kill me because you're afraid of me."
"Shut up."
"You aren't a god."
"Shut up!"
"You're just a man who's afraid of dirt."
He came at me.
A half-second later Ortiz rolled, caught the grip of her service weapon with her good hand, and fired.
The shot was loud against the concrete.
Aaron went down on his knees. The knife dropped and rang once on the floor.