James Whitmore’s office was on the 14th floor of a building downtown that smelled like carpet cleaner and institutional coffee. The particular smell of places where serious quiet things get done. I had called ahead. His assistant, a young woman named Priya, met me at the elevator with a visitor’s badge and an expression of professional calm that I found immediately reassuring.
James himself had aged since Roland’s estate. He was thinner with more white in his hair, but his eyes were the same. Sharp, steady, and entirely free of the impulse to reassure people with things that weren’t true, which I had always considered his finest professional quality. We shook hands. He gestured to the chair across from his desk, the good one, upholstered in dark green leather. I sat.
‘Tell me everything from the beginning,’ he said. ‘Leave nothing out. I told him everything. Not just the morning with the suitcase, but the weeks before, the whispered conversations, the subtle shift in how Cynthia had begun speaking about the house, Derek’s manner of pacing that I had noticed 3 days after the ticket disappeared.