But as the train rattled through the dark under the river, he allowed himself one small, fierce thought, the kind Adrian Whitmore hadn't allowed himself in years:
They had fired the wrong people. And they had overlooked the wrong janitor.
* * *
Chapter 9: Megan and Theo
The envelope from Anna Kowalski weighed almost nothing, and it sat in Eddie's coat pocket like a stone.
Eddie folded the envelope back into the pocket and pressed it flat against his thigh. On Monday morning the security chief had taken her badge in the lobby while a line of junior staff watched. He remembered the exact look on Victor Haines's face. It had not been anger. It had been appetite.
It was Sunday, the fifth day, and the gate was behind him. He had left his post at dawn with the address of a temp agency folded into his shoe, in Grace's handwriting from the night before, when he had asked, too casually, whether any of the fired people had been heard from.
"Just Megan," Grace had said. "She cried at the bus stop. Theo never came back. Nobody heard from Anna."
The temp agency occupied the second floor of a narrow building above a laundromat. The receptionist told Eddie that Megan Ellis was out on assignment—a four-day data entry placement at an insurance firm, half an hour by train—and gave him the address without looking up, the way people give directions to anyone who seems harmless and poor.
The insurance firm was glass and polished concrete. Eddie waited in the lobby behind the planters for forty minutes, cap pulled low. Megan came down the escalator at noon with a plastic tub of leftovers and stopped when she saw him, the way you stop for a figure that does not quite belong in the picture.
Eddie found Megan Ellis temping and two weeks behind on rent. They ate her leftovers on a bench in the wind, and he did not ask her to explain. She told him anyway, in the flat voice of someone who has rehearsed the story too many times. The misplaced file. It had been misfiled, not misplaced—she had found it herself, in the wrong drawer, an hour after they walked her out.
"Temp work pays half," she said. "I'm two weeks behind on rent. My landlord's nice about it the way a shark is nice about it—very polite, very patient, definitely coming."
Eddie said little. When she went back inside, he walked three blocks to a corner store and bought an envelope and a money order and took out the thin roll of bills he had withdrawn—in the beggar's name, in cash, untraceable—on the second day, when he had first begun to plan this part. He wrote nothing inside. He wrote her name on the outside in block letters, and he left it with the insurance firm's front desk with a story about a settlement from the staffing agency—back pay, a clerical correction. The receptionist believed it. It was easier to believe than charity.
He walked to the bus stop feeling the old satisfaction of a deal closed and discovered, with genuine surprise, that it did not feel like a deal at all.
* * *
Theo Barnes was harder to find.
There was no temp agency, no forwarding address. Eddie sat on a bench in the rain outside the laundromat building and thought about the man—fifty-one, thirty-one years with the company, a report twelve minutes late because the printer on his floor had jammed at four in the morning and he had carried it, page by page, to the one on nineteen. Twelve minutes. Victor Haines had made the announcement before the coffee had cooled.
He found Theo at a hardware store on the edge of the district, stacking paint cans in a back aisle, wearing a vest that said ASK ME in letters too cheerful for his face. When Eddie called his name, Theo looked up and squinted and then, slowly, smiled the way men smile when they have decided not to be surprised by anything anymore.
They talked between the paint cans. Theo did not volunteer what the job had carried until Eddie asked, plain and quiet, what had been the worst of it. Then it came out all at once, the way water comes out of a broken pipe.
"Leukemia," Theo said. "She's nine. The insurance carried the treatment. The new job's insurance—hardware store insurance—covers her as a dependent, but there's a waiting period. Ninety days." He looked at the paint cans as if they were the only honest thing in the room. "Ninety days is a long time when you're nine."
Eddie's hands went still in his coat pockets. Twelve minutes. A jammed printer. Ninety days.
"What did you do before Whitmore?" Eddie asked, and Theo said he had run compliance reporting for a logistics firm, and Eddie nodded, and asked the name of his old supervisor, and Theo gave it, and Eddie took out the cheap prepaid phone he had bought on day two and walked to the end of the aisle and made a call in the voice he had not used all week—his own voice, clipped and exact, the voice that had ended careers before lunch.
"My name is unimportant," he said to the hiring manager, who had answered on the third ring. "What matters is that I am calling about Theo Barnes. He is the most careful man I know with a spreadsheet. If you interview him, you will not regret it."
He gave a callback number that would ring the phone in his pocket for exactly six more days.
When he walked back, Theo was crying without making a sound, stacking paint cans with perfect corners.
"You don't have to—" Theo started.
"I know," Eddie said.
* * *