Page 18 of Truth in the Treme

“That is the part I do not have. No suspect, no name, no manifesto in the mail. But for the first time this thing has a shape that points at a person and not just a method.” She sat back and looked at him. “I keep waiting for you to tell me I am chasing the wrong rabbit. You have not yet. That worries me a little.”

“You are not chasing the wrong rabbit,” he said, and meant it, and heard the strangeness of his own voice saying it. He leaned over the records and asked the questions that came to him, and not one of them had a thing to do with magic. Who fought the council on these votes. Who lost the most when the funding fell through. Who had been in the room each time a project died. He asked them plainly, one after another, the questions of a man hunting a person and not a spell, and he watched Maya start writing them down. He had crossed some line in himself without deciding to. He had begun, at last, to hunt a human being.

Back at the office he took the board apart and built it again.

He drew a line down the center of the cork with a length of red string. On the left he put the fires. The maps, the three origins, the pour patterns, the district boundary, the council minutes Maya had given him, the photographs of the burned. On the right he put the other thing. The theater. The green door. The flowers and the bench and the waltz. Delphine's drawing of the boarding house pinned beside his own. He labeled the left side and he labeled the right, and he stepped back from a board that now told two stories instead of one badly muddled one.

He did not believe they were strangers to each other. He had never been more sure that the fires and the memories were bound together somewhere he could not yet see. But he had spent days trying to read them as a single sentence, and the single sentence had made no sense, and tonight he let them be two. Two questions. Who was burning his city, and why had a dead life begun climbing back into the woman he loved. He would chase them down separate roads until the roads met. He was certain, now, that they met.

She was on the couch with a book when he came home, her feet under her, a lamp at her shoulder. She did not ask about the case. She had learned the shape of the days when he could not talk about it.

“Can I ask you something,” she said, after a while, not lifting her eyes from the page. “Before all of this started. Before the fires. Did you ever think about it? You and me, just... getting old. The boring version. Years and years of nothing happening.”

The question went through him without warning, straight past every guard he kept. He set his keys down very carefully.

“Every day,” he said.

She looked up then. Her face changed, tender and grieving at once. “I think I am beginning to remember wanting that too,” she said. “Not from now. From before. From the green door. I think I wanted the boring version more than anything in the world, once.” Her voice caught. “Funny thing to grieve. A boring life I never actually got.”

He did not trust himself to answer that. He crossed the room and sat down beside her and reached for her hand, and she let him take it, and they sat in the lamplight with a book open and unread between them and a hundred years of a wanted ordinary life rising slowly to the surface of her, and he held on to her hand and said nothing at all.

Late, after she slept, he stood alone in front of the board.

One side of it was covered in burned buildings, the work of a steady human hand with a grudge and a map. The other was filled with a life that had ended more than a century before she was born, climbing back into her morning by morning, a mug, a waltz, a green door. He stood between the red string and looked from one side to the other and back, the fires and the memories, the present crime and the past love, two stories laid out plain and refusing to touch.

They had met somewhere. He knew it with a certainty he granted almost nothing else. A century of a dead life and three fresh fires in his city had reached for the same woman in the same season, and that was no accident, no matter what Marcelline said about the comfort of single answers. Somewhere the two stories crossed. He stood in the dark in front of both halves of it and admitted the only honest thing he had. He had not found the place where they met. Not yet.

TWELVE

He spent the whole of the next day inside paper, and not once did he reach for the unseen.

It was a strange way to work, and he felt the strangeness of it in his hands. For two centuries his first instinct on any case had been to open his senses and let the world show him what hid underneath it. Today he sat in the basement archive at city hall with Maya and a cart of redevelopment files. The only tools in the room were patience and a highlighter, and he worked with nothing else from morning to dusk, the plain mortal labor of reading paper. He did not like how natural it had begun to feel.

“Nobody picks these by accident,” Maya said. She had a grant ledger open in front of her and her reading glasses pushed up into her hair. “I have been telling myself it could be random for a week now, and I am done telling myself that. Look at the spread. Different owners, different blocks, different years they went up. The only thing that gathers them is the trouble each one had with this city.”

“Show me.”

She walked him through it, file by file. The first house had been slated for a redevelopment grant and lost it the week before the money cleared. The second had spent four years in a lawsuit with the city over a denied permit, and lost. The third had burned through two insurers and a fraud investigation before it ever stood empty. Denied funding. Buried in court. Tangled in insurance. Three different miseries, and the city's hand somewhere in every one of them.

He bent over the council minutes and read them not for the decisions but for the rooms the decisions were made in. The same committee surfaced in two of the three. The same short list of signatures sat at the bottom of the votes that had killed these projects, year after year, one administration into the next. He did not have a name yet that meant anything to him. He had a shape. The city had not failed these three places by accident, and it had not failed them by ordinary incompetence. Somewhere inside it the same small set of hands had closed the same doors again and again, and someone on the outside had been keeping the count.

“That is not a man who likes fire,” Bastien said, half to himself. “That is a man with a list.”

“That is what I keep landing on too.” Maya rubbed her eyes. “This stopped being random the day it started. Somebody is working down a list of grudges, and the city is on the other end of every one. I just cannot see yet whether the grudge is his, or somebody's he is carrying it for.”

They had fallen into a way of working together without ever agreeing to it.

Maya took the evidence. She read ledgers and permits and the cold arithmetic of property, and she pulled order out of it that he could not have managed in a year. He took the people. He read the spaces between the records, the names that appeared too often, the votes that went one way when they should have gone another, the shape of a human grievance behind a column of numbers. She handed him facts and he handed her motives, and the two halves met in the middle and made more than either of them had alone. He had worked alone for most of two hundred years. He noticed, sorting permits across a table from a tired woman with a highlighter, that he did not mind the company.

“You have got that look,” Maya said, not lifting her eyes from the ledger. “The one where half of you is in the room and half of you is somewhere I am not invited. You have worn it all week.”

“It has been a long week.”

“For both of us. Mine is only fires.” She turned a page. “Whatever yours is, I hope it is worth the part of you it is taking. You used to be all the way here when we worked. Lately I get about sixty percent.”

He did not correct her arithmetic. She had been generous by twenty points.

He came home after dark to find that Delphine had made dinner.