Chapter 3: Vance & Sterling
I slept three hours and woke at five-thirty with the photograph still on the dining table where I had left it. The boy — Noah — was asleep on the guest room bed, fully clothed, on top of the covers, one dirt-caked hand curled around the edge of the Harvard sweatshirt Thomas had given him. I stood in the doorway and watched him for eleven seconds. Then I closed the door, quietly, the way you close a door on something you are not prepared to inventory.
By seven I was armored. Charcoal suit, the one with the structured shoulder. Hair pulled back. Makeup applied with the precision of someone signing an affidavit. The woman in the mirror was Evelyn Vance, senior partner, and she had never thrown a drink down a sink at midnight and never stood in a doorway watching a child sleep. I locked the photograph in my briefcase — not in the interior pocket, the locked document sleeve — and told myself it was evidence. Everything is evidence if you frame it correctly.
The thirty-eighth floor smelled of coffee and ambition. My assistant, Dana, had the Halden brief on my desk and a message from Richard Gane's office requesting a "brief alignment conversation," which was Gane-speak for a knife fight with pastries.
Richard Gane, fifty-five, silver at the temples in a way that photographed well for the firm's website, had been campaigning for managing partner for six months. He played squash with the board. He remembered the names of people's children. He had once, in a partners' meeting, described my appellate record as "admirably narrow," and I had smiled at him the way a shark smiles at a seal.
The managing-partner vote was in nine days. The firm was splitting along predictable fault lines: the litigators wanted me, the rainmakers wanted Gane, and everyone wanted to see who would blink first.
I did not blink. I had not blinked since 2007.
"Ms. Vance." Dana appeared in the doorway. "Mr. Gane's office confirmed nine o'clock. Also — there's a child in your office."
I looked up. "There's a what."
Noah was standing by my window, looking out at the Hudson, wearing the Harvard sweatshirt over his torn jeans. His hair was still damp. He turned when I entered and said, without preamble, "Thomas brought me. He said you'd want me where he could see me."
Thomas had disobeyed me for the first time in nine years. I made a note to give him a raise.
"He gave me toast," Noah added. "With the crusts cut off. He said you don't eat breakfast."
"He's right. I don't."
My office is forty square feet of curated intimidation: the diplomas, the framed verdicts, the single orchid I water on a schedule. Noah looked at none of it with interest. He looked like a boy who had been in nicer waiting rooms and worse ones.
"You can't stay here," I said. "I have a nine o'clock."
"Then I'll sit here."
"That's not how this works."
"It's how it's working." He sat in my client chair, the big leather one, and folded his arms. He was ten years old and negotiating like he'd been to law school.
I studied him the way I study opposing counsel — looking for the tell. The dirt under his nails, the too-big shirt, the photograph he'd kept folded in his pocket for God knew how long. But it was the stillness that unsettled me. Homeless ten-year-olds are not still. Stillness is the posture of someone who has decided, finally, that running is over.
"I have rules," I said. "You break them, you leave."
"Okay."
"You don't know the rules yet."
"Then tell me." He leaned back in the chair, which squeaked under a weight it was not designed to notice. "I'll follow them. I'm good at rules. Foster homes have a lot of rules."
I should have called security. I should have called the police, or child services, or someone with a form and a clipboard. Instead I picked up my phone and called a number I had not dialed in four years.
Ray Delgado answered on the third ring. "Vance. To what do I owe."
"Ray." I turned toward the window so Noah couldn't read my face. "I need a quiet investigation. A minor. Homeless, ran away, possibly in the system. I need everything — background, placements, how he ended up on the street. No paper trail. Cash."
Silence. Ray Delgado had been NYPD for twenty-two years before he went private, and his silences had subpoenas in them.
"Evelyn," he said. "Are you in trouble."
"No. I'm in possession of a child and an unanswered question."
"That's the same thing, counselor."
"I'll pay double your rate. Today. Can you start today?"
Another silence. Then: "Send me what you've got. I'll start today."
I hung up and looked at Noah. He was watching me with those dark eyes, the ancient recognition, and I realized he had heard every word.
"You hired a detective to investigate me," he said. It wasn't an accusation. It was almost amusement.
"I hire investigators for everything I don't understand."