He blinked. "I beg your pardon?"
"How much was I?"
"That is a grotesque question."
"You're a grotesque man." She leaned forward. "How. Much."
Her heart hammered hard against her ribs, her voice steady, a nurse's daughter asking for a number, nothing more.
Silence. A nurse's cart rattled past in the hallway. Then, very low: "The arrangement for the Whitmore infant was forty thousand dollars."
Eleanor made a sound like something tearing.
"And there were others," Maya said. Not a question.
Voss closed his eyes. "Two others."
"Names."
"I don't—"
"Names." Eleanor again, ice re-forming over the crack. "Or we walk out of here, Kowalski takes what he has to the district attorney, and the newspapers get everything else. Your choice, Doctor. Obscurity or infamy. You have about ten seconds."
He opened his eyes. "I kept records," he said. "Careful records. There's a storage unit. Unit 214, Highline Storage, off Alameda." His voice thinned. "A ledger. Names, dates, amounts. I told myself it was better than the alternative. Foster care, the system—"
"Stop." Maya stood. "Don't give me the speech. I lived the alternative to your speech." She looked down at him — this small frail man with his blanket and his blue eyes — and felt nothing she could name. Not triumph. Not pity. Something colder and cleaner. "I don't want to see you again."
She turned toward the door. Stopped.
"One more question."
Voss looked up.
"In twenty-five years," Maya said, "did you ever once wonder where we ended up?"
He didn't answer.
That was the answer.
In the lobby, Kowalski was already on his phone. He covered the mouthpiece when he saw them. "You did good, kid."
"I didn't do anything," Maya said.
"You asked the only question that mattered." He went back to his call. "Yeah, Ray Kowalski. I need a warrant packet started — no, listen—"
Eleanor stood very still beside Maya, her hand hovering near Maya's shoulder without quite landing. Eleanor stood very still beside Maya, her hand hovering near Maya's shoulder without quite landing.
"Unit 214," Eleanor said quietly. "Highline Storage."
"Yeah." Maya pushed through the glass doors into the thin March sunlight. "Let's go find them."
Chapter 14: Names in a Book
The key arrived by courier the next morning. No note. Kowalski held it up like it might bite.
"His lawyer coughed it up," he said. "Path of least resistance. Voss would rather hand us the unit than hand us a deposition."
Highline Storage sat off Alameda behind a car wash, a long gray building with roll-up doors like closed eyelids. Unit 214 smelled of dust and old paper. Boxes of clinic files, stacked to the ceiling. A wheelchair with a flat tire. A framed diploma with Voss's name on it, face-down on top of a box.
And on a metal shelf, alone, a black leather ledger.
Kowalski pulled on latex gloves. "Chain of custody starts now. Nobody touches anything until I photograph it."
Maya drifted to the boxes. Clinic files, twenty-five years of them. She lifted a folder at random — discharge slips, 2001. A notation in the margin caught her eye, in the same careful hand: fever ward — redirect.
"Ray," she said quietly.
Kowalski came over, looked, and exhaled through his nose. "The cover. Right there in the paperwork. He wasn't even hiding it — he just knew nobody would read it."
"Nobody did," Eleanor said from the doorway. "For twenty-five years, nobody did."
Eleanor stood in the doorway with her arms crossed. Susan Pruitt was already on her phone, murmuring to someone at the DA's office. Maya just stared at the ledger.
"Open it," she said.
Kowalski photographed the cover and the spine. Then he turned to the first written page, and Maya read over his shoulder.
It was worse than she'd imagined. Columns. Dates. Initials and names. Amounts in a careful hand. A businessman's bookkeeping.
L.W. — 12/14/2000 — $40,000. Placement complete.
"I was a line item," Maya said.
Dust hung in the air, thick and gray, and she tasted old paper and forgotten years settling around her.
Eleanor came up beside her and put a hand on her shoulder, and this time she let it land.
"Forty thousand dollars," Maya said. "That's the price tag."
"You are not a price," Eleanor said.
"Tell the ledger that." Maya's voice was steady. "Tell the man who wrote it."
"He'll hear it," Kowalski said without looking up. "From the DA. On the record."
Kowalski turned pages with the tip of a pen. Most of the book was ordinary clinic accounts. Then, near the back, a separate section. Three entries. Only three.
"D.K.," Kowalski read aloud. "Boy. Born March second, 1999. Placed June third, 1999. Thirty-five thousand."
"S.A.," Susan said, leaning in. "Girl. Born November thirtieth, 2001. Placed February eighteenth, 2002. Fifty thousand."
"And L.W.," Kowalski finished. "Three babies. Just like he said."
Susan pointed at a narrow column beside the entries. "There's a notes column. Read that."
Kowalski squinted. "'Maternal fever, one-oh-three. Ward C.'"