The invitation arrived on the Tuesday, engraved on stiff cream card, delivered by a uniformed courier who had been instructed to wait for a signature.

Elias read it standing in the corridor outside the lab, with the courier shifting his weight at his elbow. It was a handsome piece of work. The paper was thick and slightly rough, and the type was a dark old-fashioned serif, and across the top, in a small elegant crest, ran the words OFFICE OF THE STATE SENATOR. Beneath it, in a clean line, the particulars. A press conference. The rotunda of City Hall, at five o'clock on Thursday, the twenty-ninth. The announcement of the Aldridge Public Safety Initiative, a forty-million-dollar program to modernize the forensic and medical examiner facilities of the city of Blackwood.

At the foot, in blue ink, in a hand that he knew from a hundred memoranda, someone had added a line.

Dr. Mercer: your attendance is requested. F.R.

He turned it over. The back was blank.

"Anything else?" said the courier.

"No."

"Have a good one, Doc."

He stood there for some time after the man had gone. The card lay flat in his palm, and it seemed to him to weigh a great deal more than its few grams. Aldridge. He had known the name for two weeks, as one knows the name of a place one has been told never to visit. It had come to him on a wet pier, spoken in the voice of a dying man. Not spoken, in fact. Never spoken aloud. But there had been six around a table, and a bottle of old brandy, and a man who had said in a low pleasant voice that the thing was handled.

"You do not have to go," said Luke.

He had come up behind him. Elias had not heard him, and stood for a moment with his back very straight, feeling the warmth of the man's presence at his shoulder like a hand not quite laid on.

"The deputy commissioner has requested it."

"He has requested it. He cannot require it. It is not within his authority." A pause. "I could speak to him."

"No."

"I would be glad to."

"I know." Elias folded the card in half, and in half again, and put it in his pocket. "I will go."

"Then I will go with you," said Luke.

City Hall stood at the top of Marlowe Square, a great pale marble pile with a copper dome gone green and a portico of eight tall columns. It had been built in the year of the city's centenary by an architect who had visited Rome. In the late afternoon light it looked like a wedding cake that had been left in the rain.

Elias stood on the pavement with his coat collar turned up and looked at it.

"It is a very large sign," he said.

"Aldridge likes a large sign." Luke had come around the car. He wore a charcoal suit, and a white shirt, and a dark tie knotted tight, and over it all his long gray coat, and with his hair combed back and his jaw freshly shaved he looked like a photograph of himself. "He believes that a thing that cannot be read from the back of a hall is not worth saying."

"You know him well."

"Everyone knows him well." The corner of his mouth moved. "He has been in the city's life for thirty years. He is on every board, at every dinner. There is a wing at St. Jude's with his name on it. My mother keeps his photograph in a drawer."

"Your mother?"

"She voted for him in every election. She says he has a kind face."

He said it quite lightly. But there was something in the voice, a faint thin dryness, like paper being folded very small, and Elias, who was looking at the side of the man's face, saw a muscle move in his jaw and go still.

"Do you?" said Elias.

"Do I what?"

"Think that he has a kind face."

Luke was silent for a moment.

"I think," he said at last, "that it is a face that has been very carefully looked after."

They went up the steps together.

The rotunda was a vast circular hall under a dome, floored in black and white marble and ringed with pillars. It was lit from above by a great glass oculus, through which the last of the daylight fell in a cold clear shaft onto a podium at the center of the floor. Around the podium a crowd had gathered, perhaps four hundred people, in dark coats and good shoes. A phalanx of cameras stood on risers at the back. A string quartet was playing something soft and meaningless in an alcove. Waiters in white jackets moved through the throng with trays of champagne.

It smelled of floor polish and cold marble and expensive perfume.

Elias took up a place at the very edge of the crowd, behind a pillar, with his back to the wall. It was the best that could be done. He had considered refusing to stand at all. But Rourke's assistant had met them at the door and handed him a badge on a blue lanyard, DR. E. MERCER, CHIEF EXAMINER, and a printed card with a diagram of the seating, and he had found that he lacked the strength to explain why a man who could not bear to be touched should not be placed in a crowd.

A door had opened at the far side of the hall.

It was a tall double door of carved oak, with brass fittings, and through it, in a slow and orderly procession, came a small party of dark-coated men. The crowd hushed. A ripple went through it, like wind through grass. The cameras swung. The quartet, as though at a signal, fell silent in the middle of a bar.

At the head of the party walked a very tall man.

He was sixty-four years old, and carried it as a good suit carries a few years. His hair was silver and thick and brushed back from a high brow. His skin was tanned. His features, large and regular and handsome in a heavy, finished way, were composed in an expression of warm, grave, benevolent attention. He had very fine eyes, a clear pale gray, that moved from face to face with an air of unforced interest, as though each person in the crowd were an old friend he was delighted to see. He wore a charcoal suit, and a plain dark tie, and a small gold pin in the shape of a flag.

Elias had never seen him in his life.

He knew him at once. He knew him as one knows a thing in a dream, not by the features but by their weight. There was something in the way the man walked, an unhurried, effortless, faintly sleepy ease, the stride of someone for whom doors have always opened. There was something in the smile. It was a beautiful smile. It was the smile of a man who has never in his life been refused.

It was the smile, he thought, of a man who has stood in a paneled room with gold curtains and said, in a pleasant low voice, that it was handled.

His hands had gone cold.

He did not know what he had expected. A monster. A demon. Something with a visible stain upon it. But the man who came across the black-and-white marble in the shaft of falling light was only a tall, kind-faced, gray-haired gentleman, shaking hands, touching elbows, bending to murmur something in a woman's ear. Someone laughed. Someone clapped. The whole great hall seemed to lean toward him, like a field of sunflowers toward the sun.

And behind him, at the end of the line, a pace to the right of the Senator's shoulder, walked a tall figure in a long gray coat.

Luke.

He had gone ahead, at the door, with a murmured word to Elias, and Elias had lost him in the crowd. He had not known that he would walk with the party. It had not occurred to him. But there he was, among the commissioner's staff and the mayor's aides, a head taller than most of them, with his dark hair combed and his hands loosely clasped before him. He moved with great composure. His face was calm, courteous, faintly attentive. He looked like any senior officer in attendance on a dignitary. He looked, in fact, exactly like a man doing his duty.

But he was too still.

Elias saw it from forty feet away, across a crowded floor, through the shifting shoulders of four hundred people. It was in the carriage of the head. It was in the way the hands were folded, the left lying over the right, with the thumbs aligned. It was in the eyes. They were fixed straight ahead, on a point somewhere in the middle of the Senator's back, and they did not move.

They did not blink.

It was the stillness of a man who was looking at the end of something.

Elias stood with his back against the cold marble and understood, suddenly, and with total clarity, what Luke had meant when he said, it is a face that has been very carefully looked after.

The Senator reached the podium.

He did not speak at once. He stood with his large hands resting on either side of the lectern, and let the silence gather. He looked out over the crowd with those clear gray eyes, slowly, from left to right, as a man looks over a harvest. Then he smiled, and the smile went through the room like warmth through a house.

"Friends," he said.

The voice was a deep, soft baritone, unhurried, faintly burred at the edges. It carried to the back of the hall without effort. "Friends. Thank you for coming. I know that it is cold, and I know that you have better things to do on a Thursday afternoon than listen to an old man talk. So I will promise you, right at the start, that I will be brief." A ripple of laughter. "That is a lie. But I will try."

He spoke for twenty minutes.

He heard, in the middle of it, the figure.

"Forty million dollars," said the Senator. "Over five years. For new laboratories. For modern equipment. For the trained, patient, selfless people who work in the basement of this city, where the light is poor and the thanks are few, and who do the work that none of us wishes to think about." He lifted a hand toward the crowd, palm out, and the cameras clicked. "I see some of them here today. Dr. Mercer?"

Every head in the hall turned.

Elias did not move. His whole body had gone rigid. He felt the eyes of four hundred people settle on the pillar, and the man in front of it, and he thought: there is nowhere to go.

"Dr. Mercer," said the Senator again, warmly, and found him with his eyes across the width of the floor, and smiled. "Our new chief medical examiner. I am told you are the best we have ever had. Will you stand?"

There was a faint ripple of applause.

He stood. He did not know what else to do. He stood quite straight beside the pillar with his black-gloved hands at his sides and a face as blank as a plate, and the applause rose, polite and thin, and the cameras flashed, and from the far side of the floor a pair of pale gray eyes rested on his own and did not look away.

They held him for perhaps two seconds.

The Senator turned back to the crowd.

"I mention Dr. Mercer," he said, "because it is a name that I have had cause to think of often. And I would like to say a few words, now, about another man of that name."

Elias stopped breathing.

"Twelve years ago this month," said the Senator, and his voice dropped, grave and tender, and the whole room hung upon it, "this city lost one of its finest sons. A prosecutor. A husband. A father. A man who gave his life, in the end, to the cause of justice in this state, and who was taken from us, along with his family, in an hour of the most terrible and senseless tragedy."

There was a silence. It was very deep.

"Thomas Mercer was my friend," said Edmund Aldridge. "He was my dear friend. And I have spent twelve years asking myself what I might have done to keep him with us." He bowed his head, and a hush fell across the marble floor. "I could not save him. I could only try to see that his name was not forgotten. And so today, with the permission of his surviving family, I am proud to announce the establishment of the Thomas Mercer Memorial Scholarship, to be awarded each year to a promising young student of the law."

The applause began, soft and slow, and swelled.

Elias stood against the pillar, in the cold, and felt the floor tilt under him.

He felt sick.

It rose in him from somewhere deep, a slow black wave, climbing the back of his throat. He heard his father's name, spoken in that pleasant, rounded, beautiful voice, and heard it wrapped in applause like a gift. He saw the smile. He saw the great crowd leaning toward it. He saw a man who had stood in a room with a glass in his hand and given an order, now standing in the light of a dome and taking credit for the grief.

My dear friend.

It was the most obscene thing he had ever heard.

And through the gray, across forty feet of marble, he saw a man in a long coat turn his head.

Luke was looking at him.

He had not moved from his place behind the Senator. He stood with his hands folded, and his back straight, and his face turned a quarter inch toward the pillar. But his eyes had left their fixed point. They had come across the whole width of the hall, through the crowd and the light and the applause, and found Elias as a hand finds a light switch in the dark.

They held him.

It was the plainest gaze that he had ever received. There was nothing in it. There was no signal, no message, no warning. It was only a steady, level, unwavering look, like a hand extended in a gale, and it said: I am here. I see you. Look at me.

Elias looked.

Then Luke turned away.

The reception began at six.

It was held in the long gallery along the east side of the rotunda, under a coffered ceiling and a row of crystal chandeliers. Along the north wall, in the warm glow of electric candlelight, hung large framed photographs captioned in gold: The Senator at the Opening of the St. Jude Pediatric Wing. The Senator with the Police Athletic League.

Elias walked along them slowly, with a glass of water in his hand that he did not drink.

He stopped in front of the last.

It stood on an easel at the end of the row, larger than the others, in a heavy frame. It had been enlarged and tinted. It showed a bright cold morning, with a pale sky, and a muddy open lot, and the long gray line of a river behind. It showed a row of men in dark overcoats standing shoulder to shoulder, each of them holding a shovel with a ribbon tied around the haft. Behind them, on a wooden board, a hand-painted sign, BLACKWOOD WATERFRONT TRUST. GROUNDBREAKING. And below, a smaller line, in a neat white serif, giving the date.

Twelve years ago. September.

Elias looked at the faces.

He had not expected it. He stood with the glass of water in his hand and felt the cold go all through him, in a long slow wave, from his scalp to his heels. He knew them. He knew every one. He had seen them all, at one time or another, in a file, on a table, with a single red line drawn across the throat.

The man on the far left was a lean and sharp-faced fellow with an attorney's mouth and a cold, wary eye. Martin Osgood. Beside him, plump and sandy and smiling, a man he knew from a parking structure. Raymond Teague. Then a tall, narrow, white-haired figure with a face like a sheet of paper, a judge, he thought, in his prime. Harlan Pruitt. Then a stocky, ruddy man with a hard hat tipped back on his head and a grin of simple greed. Gerald Brandt.

And beside Brandt, with his arms folded across his chest and his tie slightly crooked, a younger and thinner Warren Kray.

Five.

He counted them, silently, and then he counted them again. He let his eyes travel on, to the very end of the line, to the last man on the right. And there, with a silver shovel held over his shoulder like a rifle, tall, tanned, smiling, in a good charcoal overcoat, with a face lit by the pale September sun, stood a man who was twelve years younger and already perfectly at ease.

Six.

There were six of them.

Five of them were dead.

There was the sixth. He was standing at the end of the row with a shovel on his shoulder, and he was alive.

"Doctor."

The voice was close behind him, warm and unhurried, a deep and mellow baritone. Elias did not turn at once. He stood with his eyes on the end of the photograph and felt the whole room go very quiet, like a pool in which a stone has just been dropped.

"I am told," said Edmund Aldridge, "that you have been admiring our little monument."

He turned.

He was very near. The Senator stood barely an arm's length away, a head taller than Elias, with his great silver head bent a little to one side and a glass of sparkling water held easily in his hand. His eyes were gray and pale and shining. His smile was warm. Behind him, at a respectful distance, hovered Rourke, and a young aide with a clipboard, and a broad-necked man in a dark suit who watched Elias with an alert and impersonal stare.

"It is a fine photograph," said Elias.

His voice came out perfectly steady. He was astonished.

"It is a good morning's work. We were all very young. Or younger." The Senator laughed. "It is difficult to remember, now, how much we believed that the thing would work." He lifted the glass slightly, toward the photograph. "Some of the finest men I ever knew."

"Some of them are dead."

It was out before he could stop it. He heard it fall into the air between them, flat and cold, and felt the faintest thinning of the silence.

"Yes." The Senator's face did not change. But his eyes softened, very slightly, and he sighed. "Yes, I am afraid that is so. It has been a most terrible year. I have lost five dear friends. I cannot tell you how heavily it weighs." He shook his great head. "The very worst of it is that nobody has the faintest idea why."

"No," said Elias.

"But I have the greatest faith in the department. And in you, Doctor." He held out his hand. "May I?"

Elias looked at it.

It was a large hand, well kept, with a heavy gold ring on the third finger and a faint dusting of silver hair across the back. It was held out courteously, palm sideways, in the universal gesture of a gentleman who is accustomed to being met. A hand that had signed a great many documents. A hand that, twelve years ago, had perhaps lifted a glass and said the word handled.

He did not take it.

"I do not shake hands," he said.

The silence lasted perhaps a second.

Then the Senator laughed.

It was a low, easy, delightful sound, with no offense in it at all. He drew the hand back, and brought the glass up to his lips, and shook his head with a rueful, indulgent smile. "Of course. Of course. Forgive me. I should have known. A man in your line of work." His eyes twinkled. "I am told that you wear the gloves all day. I think that is admirable. We could all do with a little more caution." He nodded, kindly, at the lanyard. "Mercer."

He read it slowly. It seemed to Elias that the name hung in the air.

"E. Mercer."

The pale eyes lifted.

"It is not a common name," said Edmund Aldridge.

"I knew a family of that name, once," said the Senator softly. "Years ago. You will understand, of course, that I could not help but think of them." He smiled. "I wonder whether you might be a relation?"

Elias could not speak.

He felt it close over him. The gray tunnel. The ringing at the edges of the world. He stood quite straight, with his mouth open, and nothing in it. He could not find a single word. He saw the Senator's eyes on his face, and the faint curiosity in them, and below the curiosity a cold, bright, patient attention like the gaze of a heron at the edge of a stream.

"Dr. Mercer is from Springfield, Senator."

The voice came from his left. It was low, pleasant, and unhurried, with the faintest touch of dry humor.

"A very common name out there," said Luke. "I believe there are a dozen in the telephone directory. I have had occasion to look."

He had stepped out of the crowd. He stood a pace away, in his long gray coat, with his hands in his pockets and a faint smile on his face, quite at ease, and Elias had not seen him come. He had not heard a footstep. He only knew that a warm solid presence had appeared at his shoulder, and that the air around him had changed.

"Springfield," said Aldridge.

"Illinois. His father was a pharmacist. Isn't that so, Doctor?"

It was the most beautiful lie that Elias had ever heard. It came out easily, without a quiver, with a small charming shrug at the end, and it was so perfectly made that it seemed to him for a moment that it must be true.

"Yes," he said, hoarsely. "A pharmacist."

"How very nice." The Senator's face cleared. A faint amused light came back into his eyes, and the cold bright attention in them went out like a lamp. "Springfield. A lovely town. I spoke there once, in the nineties." He laughed. "Well. Mercer. I suppose I have been thinking of the dead rather more than is wise. I beg your pardon, Doctor. An old man's fancy."

"It is nothing."

"You are very kind." He touched Luke lightly on the arm. "Captain. A pleasure, as always. You have a remarkable colleague." He turned away. "Frederick! A word."

He moved off across the gallery, tall and silver and unhurried, with a hand on Rourke's shoulder and the aide and the broad-necked man falling in behind. A woman in green stopped him with a cry of delight. He bent his head to her. The crowd closed round him like water.

Elias stood where he was.

The cold had gone out of his legs, and he found that they would not hold him. He swayed. He put out a hand toward the easel, and then thought better of it, and let it fall, and stood there with his heart pounding and his ears roaring and the white floor tilting very slowly beneath his feet.

And then he felt it.

It was very light. It was nothing. It was a faint, delicate pressure on his arm, just above the elbow, on the outside of his sleeve. It came and settled there, like a bird alighting, and a warmth spread out from it through the cloth, slowly, steadily, in a small bright circle that reached the skin beneath and went on.

A hand. A hand, resting on his sleeve.

It did not grip him. It did not press. It lay there with the barest weight, as one rests a hand on a frightened horse, and the whole of his body seemed to turn and fasten upon it, as a plant turns toward the light.

"Do not look at him like that," said Luke.

It was a whisper. It was so low that it could not have carried a yard. It came from just beside his ear, warm and close, and the breath of it stirred the short hairs at the nape of his neck.

"He is a clever man. He sees a great deal. Look at me instead."

Elias turned his head.

Luke was very near. His face was a few inches from his own, grave and pale and utterly calm, and his eyes in the golden light of the chandelier were dark as wells. He was not smiling. He looked, Elias thought, quite older. There were fine lines at the corners of his mouth that he had not noticed before.

"He does not know," said Luke, very softly. "If he knew, he would not have smiled."

"He read my name."

"He read a name. It means nothing to him. He has no idea what became of the boy." The hand on his sleeve tightened a fraction, and loosened again. "He was told that the son had gone away. That he was never heard of. I do not believe it has crossed his mind in ten years."

"You lied to him."

"Yes."

"You did it so well."

"I have had a great deal of practice," said Luke, and there was a very faint, very bitter humor in the words. "Are you all right?"

"No."

"Good." The corner of his mouth moved. "I would be worried if you were."

But Elias felt it.

He felt the warmth of it, coming through the cloth. It went up his arm, and into his shoulder, and down into the center of his chest, where something had been clenched so tight and so long that he had forgotten it was there. It was only a hand. It was only a light small pressure on a coat sleeve. But it undid him. It undid him so thoroughly that he thought, for an instant, that he might weep, there in front of the whole city and the cameras and the dead.

He did not understand it.

"Come," said Luke. "I will take you out."

"The Senator..."

"The Senator will survive without us."

He did not take his arm. He only inclined his head toward the door, and stepped back a pace, so that Elias might go before him. And Elias went, with the cold marble ringing under his shoes and the whole sound and shine of the gallery receding at his back. He did not look behind him. He did not look at the great pale-eyed man who stood in the middle of the room with a hand on a deputy commissioner's shoulder.

But he stopped at the door.

He stopped, and turned, because he could not help it, and looked back across the gallery and down the long wall of photographs. The easel stood at the end of the row. The light fell on it softly from a lamp, and the six men on the frame stood shoulder to shoulder in the cold white morning, each with a ribbon on his shovel. He looked at the faces. He looked at the one at the end.

It was smiling.

It was a warm, easy, delighted smile, the smile of a man who has never been refused. It had been twelve years. In twelve years, five of the six men in that photograph had been turned into numerals. And here, on the last night of October, the sixth stood in a golden room, laughing, with a glass of sparkling water in his hand, and did not know.

But somebody knew.

Somebody had known for twelve years. Somebody had stood at the end of a row of photographs, in the light of a dome, with his hands clasped and his face composed, and looked at the back of that silver head for forty minutes without blinking. Somebody had been waiting, with an infinite, patient, terrible tenderness, for the end of the line.

Elias thought: he has been waiting for this man all his life.

He thought of a hand on his sleeve.

And, quite suddenly, he found that he understood a thing that he had not understood before. It was not that Luke had been preparing a murder. It was that he had been standing at a long table for twelve years, with the same patient face, and that every day of that waiting had been a kind of vigil. A vigil for a family that had burned. A vigil, perhaps, for a boy who had been away at school.

He went out into the cold.

Behind him the doors swung closed, and the music dwindled, and the whole bright golden room, with its glasses and its ribbons and its great pale smiling man, sank away into the dark.