Munroe sat in a chair in a commandeered conference room, hands behind her head and face toward the ceiling, thoughts unspooling, rage simmering.

Her passport and paperwork had been returned shortly before nine.

Effort and manipulation thereafter had gotten her furtive snippets from a security team who’d been afraid to speak. This much she knew: Dillman had been found in her office with his throat slit and burn marks on both arms.

She blew a long exhale of manufactured calm and gained another minute tethered to rational control. Dillman, for all his faults and quirks, hadn’t deserved to die any more than Bradford deserved to be sitting in jail.

The investigators had finally left at nine-thirty, and by then most of the employees, released individually after questioning, had been sent home.

There’d been no arrests.

One murder, with an easy scapegoat, had been easy to solve. By a fortunate circumstance she’d had a rock-solid alibi and so deprived them of another. Without her as the guilty party, this second murder changed everything, creating suspects out of any number of employees and turning the facility’s atmosphere, already thick with guardedness, into witch-hunt paranoia and suspicion.

A knock on the door interrupted the brooding.

The handle moved, then Okada’s head peered in. He slipped inside and shut the door. Munroe cut her eyes toward him. “The investigator,” she said. “Tadashi Ito. Was he the same one running things last time?”

“Yes,” Okada said.

Munroe went back to staring at the ceiling. Okada took a seat one over and they both sat in silence for a long, long time.

“It’s also the same as before,” Okada said. “The footage has been altered. There’s no evidence of what happened.”

Munroe closed her eyes. “Whose security pass was that done under?”

Okada whispered, “Yours.”

Anything less would have been too easy.

Munroe motioned for paper and a pen and Okada handed her both. She scribbled a note and a list of names and slid the page over.

Two trackers. Two sets of players. She’d given Dillman busywork to keep him out of her way. He’d wanted to discuss the files he was working on—names she’d culled from Bradford’s list of suspects—and died before he could.

Possibilities chased their tails in circles:

Dillman had been the intended target and she the patsy.

Or Dillman’s murder, mirroring the Chinese woman and Bradford, and like the incident of the car’s grille with its headlights pushing her toward manslaughter, was an attempt to remove her from the facility.

Or, perhaps two for the price of one, covering both options.

Munroe wanted the contents of Dillman’s files, suspected they’d been with him when he died—were possibly the reason he’d died—and needed new copies.

“It’s not a problem,” Okada said.

“Remember your concerns on the train yesterday?” she said. “The reason you made that phone call?”

“Yes,” he whispered.

“That’s the problem.”

“I understand,” Okada said. “I will find a way.”

She offered him another out. “I can get someone else to do it.”

“No,” he said. He stood and walked to the door and then remained there, hand on the hardware, unmoving. He turned back and made eye contact while seconds dragged on in silence. “The databases and log files have also been edited,” he said. “We don’t know who was here when that happened.”

In what was unspoken he’d told her he had her back, trusted no one but her, and expected her to guard his in kind. When he’d gone, Munroe closed her eyes again.

“Dillman,” she whispered. “Dillman, Dillman.”

She breathed the anger in and shut all emotion down.

Personal feelings had no place here.

This death was merely new data, meant to be sorted with the same clinical manipulation as everything else, but she had no cornerstone for it: that single piece of certainty upon which she could build. Every fact, every name on her web of connections had more than one fit, and Dillman’s death didn’t correspond to any of them.

This felt like a larger planet wobbling in the gravitational pull of a smaller neighbor.

Something she hadn’t seen yet, hadn’t found.

Frustration poked finger holes into the dike of logic and control, wiggled in and buried inside her brain, taunting her with the only facts she knew without doubt: Bradford was still behind bars, the prosecutor could formally charge him at any time, and she’d not yet found the lever for release.

She was running out of time, wasting resources, expending energy she didn’t have to stay free of the traps and machinations set against her by players she couldn’t see, all of whom knew who she was and where she was, while she was left groping in the dark.

Munroe stood. One foot in front of the other, she paced the few steps across the room, back and forth, animal in a cage. And then she stopped and slammed her forehead into the wall. The pain was instant and calming: partial relief to the addict’s need, methadone in place of heroin, pathway to clarity.