Page 41 of If She Sensed

“But, Kate.Rizzo is dead.”

“I know.And that makes it stickier.I sent a man to prison for eleven years while the man thatshouldbe there is already dead.And it makes me wonder if whoever killed Rizzo also framed Ryan.”

Neither of them said anything for a moment after that.Kate looked at her coffee and Sloane looked at hers as they tried to settle on what, exactly, they had just stepped into.Sloane's expression did not change, but something behind it went very still.

"Would you mind walking me though the moving pieces of it all?”

Kate nodded, thinking of how it had felt to revisit all of this when she had been going through the material for her memoirs.

"Ryan was convicted of the murder of Dennis Coyle.The case was considered straightforward at the time.Ryan had a financial dispute with Coyle that had turned bitter, there was circumstantial evidence placing him near the scene, and a timeline the defense never managed to break convincingly.The jury convicted in under four hours.He's maintained his innocence at every appeal since.

“Then, when you told me about Rizzo a few weeks ago, something about it sounded familiar.So, I went back to the Coyle crime scene photographs.The signature was there.Not identical, but close enough that I couldn't explain it away.The Coyle murder happened four years before your operation.Four years before anyone had formally identified Rizzo or catalogued his method.Which means nobody at the time would have known what they were looking at."

"What about the alibi?You said it was sort of worked around?”

"It was never broken, exactly.It was characterized as partial.He said he was at his brother's house in Roanoke the entire weekend.His brother confirmed it, his sister-in-law confirmed it, there were gas station receipts and security camera footage.The jury looked past all of it.And the case has been sealed ever since."

"Why did you feel the need to go see him?”

"I needed to look at him before I brought it to anyone."She paused and wondered if there was some better way to phrase that but decided to leave it be for now."He didn't perform innocence, Sloane.He was just tired.Twelve years of tired."

She watched Sloane sit with the full weight of it, and she could see the younger agent fitting each piece against the others and testing the joints.After a few seconds, her expression had settled into a focused, inward quality that Kate recognized because she had seen it several times now, always at the moment when something that had seemed complicated became suddenly, irreversibly clear.

"If you ask me," Sloane said, “it’s sort of cool that these two bits of our history are linked up like this.I hate that you’re struggling with the possibility of Ryan being imprisoned wrongly, but… you know what I mean.”

Kate nodded and said, “Yes, I know what you mean.”

"What does moving forward actually look like?"Sloane said."Formally, I mean.This isn't our case.Ryan isn't our case.There's no active federal nexus yet."

"Not yet," Kate said."But Rizzo's signature connecting to the Coyle murder gives us a predicate, if we can build it properly.Ryan has been filing appeals for twelve years with nothing new to give anyone.This would be something new."She looked at Sloane, feeling almost guilty that she was now dragging this promising young agent into what could very well be a very dark patch of her past."It's not fast and it isn't simple and there is a very real chance it goes nowhere.I want you to know that going in."

Sloane looked at her across the table, smiling."I'm in," she said."All of it.However long it takes."

She said it without decoration, and Kate’s heart warmed even more to her in that moment.No hesitation, no doubts.She’d simply asked several questions as she would about any other case and now, despite the years between this conversation and the initial case, Sloane wanted to be a part of it.

Neither of them said anything for a moment after that.Kate looked at her coffee and Sloane looked at hers, but when their eyes finally met again, they were both reflecting the other’s mood: excitement and a bit of fear.

Yet somehow, they both smiled through it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The dinner was chicken, roasted simply with salt and a little olive oil, with rice and a green salad from ingredients he had bought that morning.He cooked the same way he did most things in his life: without waste, without excess, and attending to each step in its proper order.The kitchen was small and clean—to the point of being bland.He knew this, and he was fine with it.He had lived in the apartment for three years and it still looked as though he had moved in recently… not because he lacked permanence but because he had long ago stopped accumulating things he didn't need.

He ate at the small table by the window with the television off.Outside, people lived their lives and soaked in the sun and complained and watched the news.The same old song and dance as the world kept spinning, oblivious to just how gross and annoying the little specks on its surface could be.He watched it go by through his window without particular interest.He had always found it useful to observe the rhythms of a neighborhood, the patterns people fell into without knowing they had fallen into them.It made them easy to predict.

And sometimes, it was entertaining.But tonight he was simply watching because the alternative was silence.And silence, after a certain number of years living alone, stopped being uncomfortable.It became expected and warm.It became the only real thing to look forward to anymore.

He was not a man who drew attention.He was aware of this and had cultivated it deliberately for so long that it was no longer cultivation but fact.He was average in height, average in build, and had a face that people looked at and immediately began to forget.He had worked in proximity to people who projected big personalities.People who filled rooms and left impressions.And people with those big personalities always fizzled out.The very traits that made them stand out usually resulted in pain and suffering in some form or another.

He finished eating and sat for a moment with his water glass, looking out at the street.A delivery driver was jogging from his truck to a porch across the way.A couple walking a dog strolled along, hand in hand around the corner.

He had been careful for a long time.That was the correct word for it, he thought:careful.Not cautious, because caution implied fear and he didn’t operate from fear.He operated from an understanding that the work required a specific kind of discipline, and that the discipline was not difficult to maintain if you respected what happened when you let it slip.He had seen what happened when people let it slip.

He had, on two occasions,been responsiblefor what happened, and in both cases the problem had resolved cleanly and without consequence.Because he was not ruled by fear.Because he had moved quickly and without emotion once the situation became clear.

The only real danger, he had decided years ago, was impatience.Impatience made people sloppy.It made them act before the conditions were right, before the timing made sense, before they had accounted for every variable.He had never been an impatient man.It was possibly his most useful quality.And he supposed it was why he enjoyed silence so much.

Despite his craving for silence, he also enjoyed chaos.But it was the quiet, orderly chaos—a chaos that he could control and set in motion when it pleased him.And though he had caused quite a bit of chaos over the years, no one was looking for him.He had been thorough and he had been quiet, giving no one a reason to look in his direction.The years had passed in an orderly way, each one much like the last, and he had gone unnoticed.