Chapter 3 The Candidate File

Marcus Cole did not knock, because in fourteen years he had never needed to. He opened the library door at a quarter past seven, stepped into the lamplight, and laid three manila folders on the leather-topped desk with the care of a man setting down something that might go off. Kingsley House was quiet around them, a limestone townhouse on East Seventieth Street with eleven rooms and, lately, only two people who used more than three. The fire was low. Beyond the tall windows, a thin rain was beginning to fall on the street. Alexander stood at the far side of the room with a glass of untouched whiskey, watching the rain. He had come straight from the office and had not yet taken off his jacket. "You said you wanted them tonight," Marcus said. "I did." "Then here they are." Marcus stepped back and folded his hands in front of him. He was forty-six, six-foot-three and heavy through the shoulders, with a shaved head and a salt-and-pepper beard clipped close to his jaw. He wore a dark suit, a plain earpiece he never removed, and the faint, permanent stiffness in his left knee that he refused to discuss. Nine years in the NYPD's Organized Crime Control Bureau and fourteen with the Kingsleys had given him a way of standing that made rooms feel guarded. "Three candidates, out of the two hundred and eleven that fit your criteria. I cut them myself. Everyone else had a reason to say no." "And these three?" "Have reasons to say yes. And no reason to talk." Alexander crossed the room slowly. He set down the whiskey, looked at the three folders for a moment without touching them, and then pulled the nearest one toward him, the thinnest, the one with a plain white tab. Marcus watched him open it. He had spent three weeks assembling the list, and he knew every page. There had been three months of rumor in the building before that, the quiet theory that the boss was shopping for a wife, and a hundred reasons Marcus himself had not liked it. But Alexander Kingsley did not ask for permission. He asked for results. The criteria had been precise: female, twenty-one to thirty-five, unmarried, no connection to anyone in Kingsley's social orbit, no press history, no family in finance or politics. Financial need, serious enough to make a one-year arrangement tempting. A clean record. And a certain kind of mind, the kind that reads before it signs. "Candidate one," Marcus said, since Alexander had not asked. "Lauren Pierce. Thirty-one. Analyst at a mid-sized hedge fund, Stamford office. Very bright. Divorced once. Her ex-husband's firm does business with a bank in our portfolio. It's a link. It's thin. But it's a link." "No." "I haven't finished." "You've finished." Alexander turned the page of the thin folder without looking at the other. "Go on to the third one." "The second is Simone Archer. Twenty-seven, gallery assistant in Chelsea. Family money, most of it spent. Charming and impulsive. A career in being useful to rich people. She'll do whatever's asked, and she'll tell her friends by Friday." "No." "Then there's the one you're holding." The file in Alexander's hand was perhaps twelve pages. On top, clipped to the first sheet, was a photograph: a woman at a bus stop in the rain, caught mid-turn by a long lens, her dark hair coming loose from its elastic and one hand lifted to hold a paper cup. She looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. She also looked, for an instant, as though she had just heard something funny. Alexander looked at the photograph for a long time. It was not a look Marcus had seen on him before. It was not appraisal, or interest, or attraction. It was the stillness of a man reading the first line of a letter he had been dreading, in a handwriting he knew. "Isabella Rose Carter," Marcus said quietly. "Twenty-four. Born and raised in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Bookkeeper for a restaurant group on Court Street. Waits tables four nights a week at a diner on Fourth Avenue. She was one semester from finishing an accounting degree at Baruch when she took a leave to care for her mother. Her mother has relapsed leukemia and has run out of insurance. There's a clinical trial, there's a deadline. The out-of-pocket figure is one point four million. She has sixty-one thousand dollars in medical debt and about three hundred in checking." He paused. "No criminal record. No social media worth the name. No contacts in your world at all. She spent her childhood in a one-bedroom on Ovington Avenue. Her father" He stopped. There was a single line in the file. He had read it on Friday, and again on Saturday, and again this afternoon in the back of the car with the window cracked open. He knew exactly where it was on the page. Father: Daniel M. Carter. Absent since 2011. Whereabouts unknown. "Her father left when she was nine," Marcus said, in a voice he kept very level. "He's not a factor." "No," Alexander said. "I don't suppose he is." He closed the folder. He did not open the other two. The fire popped. Outside, the rain ticked against the glass. "That's her," Alexander said. Marcus waited a full three seconds. "You haven't looked at the other files." "I didn't need to." "They're both stronger on paper. Pierce has a master's degree and two years of experience handling confidential financial data. Archer has the social polish to stand next to you at a gala without anyone asking where she came from. Carter has neither. She's a bookkeeper from Brooklyn who's never been to a black-tie event in her life." "I know what she is." "Then forgive me for asking." Marcus took a half step forward. He did not usually ask. In fourteen years, he had questioned Alexander Kingsley's decisions perhaps four times, and every time the answer had turned out to be one he'd regretted wanting. "Why her?" Alexander did not look away from the folder. "She fits the profile," he said. "So do the other two." "Then it's an easy decision." "Alexander." It was the tone he used rarely, the voice of a man who had once pulled a younger Alexander out of a flooded car on the Hutchinson River Parkway and had never since felt entirely off duty. For a long moment the room held its breath. Then Alexander lifted his eyes. They were steel-gray and perfectly composed, and Marcus, who had interrogated armed robbers and a crooked police captain and a man who had once confessed to three murders in a diner booth, found, to his own faint surprise, that he could not read them. "Marcus," Alexander said, "I asked you for someone who reads what she signs. Someone with no allies and no illusions. Someone who needs this badly enough to keep her word and is intelligent enough to know exactly what she's agreeing to. You told me you found three. I'm choosing one." A pause. "Please have Gideon approach her tonight." "Tonight." "Tonight. At the diner. He'll know what to say." "She hasn't been vetted beyond the surface. We haven't walked her block. We don't know who she talks to." "Then we'll learn. After." Alexander picked up the whiskey again, studied it, and set it down. "Sixty-eight days, Marcus. I'm not going to spend sixty of them being careful." Marcus held his gaze for another second. Then he nodded, once, and bent to retrieve the two rejected files. He did not take the third. "Leave it," Alexander said, without looking up. "I'll want to read it again." The black Mercedes had been parked on Fourth Avenue since six o'clock, engine idling, and by twenty past eleven the windows had fogged enough to need wiping. Marcus wiped them with his sleeve. He had relieved the man who'd had the first watch at half past ten, a former Marine named Reyes who did not talk and did not fall asleep, and he had told him to go home. Now Marcus sat alone at the wheel with a cold cup of coffee and an unobstructed view through Marlowe's front window. The diner glowed like a lit aquarium. Red booths, a pie case, a neon sign over the register with a burned-out E. There were two men at the counter and a table of college kids in the back. And in the corner booth, in a gray apron with a notepad tucked under her arm, was Isabella Carter, listening to a woman in hospital scrubs tell a story with both hands. She laughed. He saw it through the glass, silent, a bright, startled thing that transformed her whole face, and then it was gone and she was rubbing her eyes with the heel of her hand. She looked exactly like her photograph. She also looked, from this distance, remarkably like someone else. Marcus stared at her for a long time. Then he reached into his jacket pocket and took out a small white index card, the kind he had used for twenty years to jot down things he did not want to put in a phone. He clicked a pen, held the card against the steering wheel, and wrote six characters in square block letters that he could have written in his sleep. MP 11-0388. A missing-person report. A kitchen in Bay Ridge, fifteen years ago, and a woman with her coat still on, saying he wouldn't, he wouldn't, he would never. A captain, two weeks later, who had come to Marcus's desk with a friendly smile and a pat on the shoulder and said, drop it, Cole, the guy ran, it happens. A file closed in a drawer. A young detective who had let it close. He had told himself for fifteen years that it was a coincidence he'd ended up on Richard Kingsley's payroll a year after. He looked at the card once more. Then he slid it into his wallet, behind his driver's license, between a photograph of his daughter and a folded twenty, and tightened his hand on the wheel. Across the street, a silver-haired man in a charcoal overcoat had gotten out of a cab and was standing at the curb, adjusting his scarf. Marcus turned off the engine and watched.