“Mr. Alvaro.”
“Right, to find the appropriate venue and time for us to provide our Expertise.”
“Right. That’s not going to work.”
She blinks. “And why is that?”
“We’re not here to take advantage of your Expertise.”
Petras’s brow furrows. She steeples her manicured fingers on the desk in front of her. I’m standing with my hands behind my back, with Aysa at my side in the same posture. I think I’ve cleaned all the blood off my face. I swapped my jacket for the backup I keep in the trunk of the car, but there wasn’t much I could do about my shirt.
“Oh no?” says Petras finally, tilting her head.
“No. The anomaly we are investigating—anomalies at this point, actually—intersects with this office.” She waits, her expression placid and indecipherable. “You might have relevant information, is what I mean.”
“Me, personally?”
“Yes. You or your office.”
The staffer, in his corner, continues writing. His desk is a slightly smaller version of his boss’s, angled upward like a drafting table. There are four notebooks open on the desk, one at each corner, and he writes constantly, shifting from book to book according to some system known only to him.
“You are here for a point of information,” says Petras.
“Possibly several,” I say.
She looks again to her staffer in his suit and he writes something in one of his notebooks and tears it free and walks it swiftly over to her. The wall behind them is lined with metal cabinets, arranged in stacks from floor to ceiling, an archive of documents and filings and transcripts. The Provisional Record of her department’s work. Directly behind Petras is a tall shelf weighted with volumes of procedure: the protocols of the court systems, the rules regulating the regular police and the Speculative Service. Statistical manuals, sentencing guidelines, treatises on ballistics and recidivism and forensics. All the areas of her Expertise.
Petras unfolds the slip of paper that her assistant has handed her. “Very good,” she says to him, and turns to us. “We are able to grant you three and a half minutes.” There is a clock behind her on the wall, above the filing cabinets, and another clock behind us, on the facing wall. “That time begins right now.”
I nod. “Thank you, ma’am. We’re here to ask about a judge.”
She frowns. “Mr. Speculator, this office is responsible for the conduct and caseloads of just over three hundred and fifty sitting judges, on a wide variety of courts, from the Court of Small Infelicities to Grave Assaults on the Objectively So. That is in addition to our oversight of the regular courts, meaning everything from traffic infractions—”
“Sampson,” says Ms. Paige. I give her a look, which she ignores. “Judge Barney Sampson. Does that sound familiar?”
“It—yes,” says Petras, and a swift-moving cloud of anxiety passes across her brow. I think it does. I watch it come and go, I see it, but as soon as it is gone I cannot be sure I saw it at all. Something has opened up in me that will not close. I shake my head to clear it, clench my teeth, and focus. The staffer in the corner, meanwhile, rises silently and brings the Expert a new scrap of paper, which she unfolds and reads.
“His court is in Aberrant Neural Phenomena, on Grand Avenue? Is that correct?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“Earlier today—” says Ms. Paige, but I hold up my hand and she stops. If Petras has not yet heard about Sampson’s death, we don’t need to be the ones to fill her in. Not yet, anyway.
“Mr. Doonan?” Petras turns her head slightly toward the man in the corner. “Would you draw the judge’s file, please?”
“Of course.” Mr. Doonan rises and moves along the back wall of the office, brisk and efficient.
“Our line of inquiry,” I add warningly, “may touch on very sensitive matters. You may feel most comfortable speaking alone.”
Petras shakes her head tightly. “Mr. Doonan is my executive assistant.” He has found the file, and he hands it to her without looking at us or otherwise acknowledging that he is being discussed. “I cannot imagine there is anything you need to ask me to which he could not or should not be privy. Do you know the idiom ‘He is my right hand’?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“He is my right hand.”
Mr. Doonan sits again, his expression unchanged. His eyes are gray like his suit, giving him a kind of hazy, indistinctly distinguished look. He resumes writing in his notebooks.
I watch the clock over Petras’s head. I talk as quickly as I can. “In the course of pursuing a seemingly unrelated anomaly, we discovered that Judge Sampson was involved in an extramarital affair. Our speculation led us to believe that an individual had gained knowledge of this affair and was interested in blackmailing the judge regarding this affair. Or—” I stumble, not certain how to frame it. Not certain even of what I know. As Petras’s eyes remain on me, cool and evaluating, I am treading out onto thinner and thinner ice. “Or potentially over other improprieties.”
“You need to know if we know anything.”
“Yes.”
“About any improprieties.”
“That’s right.”
She regards me quietly, weighing my heft with her Expert’s eyes. Doonan, in his corner, stays busy with his papers, clipping and unclipping his binders. Making a performance of not paying attention, making of himself a capture, inconspicuous but active, noiseless in his gray suit, gathering every word.
“Mr. Doonan?” Petras says. “Would you come here for just a moment?” He walks quickly over, waits for the half instant it takes Petras to write something on a piece of paper, reads it and tucks it away in a pocket while he returns to his corner.
Petras looks at me. The clock behind her has swallowed up half our time.
“It strikes me that you’ve done an awful lot of speculation, based on an awfully small number of facts.”
“I’m—excuse me, ma’am?”
Doonan at his desk switches from one notebook to another. I fold my arms.
“I am not here to have my work evaluated, ma’am.”
“And neither will I be instructed in how to entertain your presence. You are here. Here you are.” Her tone is elevated now; she has brought her authority into her voice. “And my position requires me to observe that I am not convinced this investigation is carefully built on the facts as they exist.”
“Listen. Look.” I take a step toward her, feeling a new sheen of sweat at my hairline, a new consciousness of my great bulk in the polished interior of this office. “All I need to know is what that judge was up to.”
“Then you would have to ask him.”
“Well, see, I can’t do that. He’s dead.”
There it is again: a flutter of emotion at her brow, a fleeting grief of awareness. This time I am sure I see it, long enough to know it for what it is, and to wonder what it means. Ms. Petras looks at me accusingly across the desk. “You might have begun with that information.”
I shrug, conceding the point. I’m waiting for the obvious next question, and when she doesn’t ask I tell her anyway.
“He did it himself. Drank poison.”
“When?”
“Today. Earlier today.”
I see it again, like it’s happening now, in front of me. Blood leaping from his throat like a living thing, his arms flailing forward, body spinning. Doonan closes one of his notebooks and slides it off his desk. For an instant I see a red cover on the notebook, an unfamiliar gold logo. He has the book under his arm as he rises.