For a long moment, neither of them spoke.

The study was very small, and very still. The lamp burned on the oak desk in its green shade, and the light lay in a yellow pool on the blotter and the two open files and the pale hands of the man who sat behind them. Beyond the pool, the room went back into a soft gray dusk. The wall of photographs hung in it like the face of a quiet crowd.

Luke did not come in.

He stood on the threshold with the snow melting on his shoulders, and his hand resting on the edge of the steel door, and looked at Elias in the leather chair. He did not seem to be in any hurry. He let the silence be what it was. After a time, quite gently, as one might say good evening to a stranger on a train, he said, "May I come in?"

It was so ordinary that Elias could not answer.

"It is my study," said Luke. "I am aware of the irony. But I should like to be asked."

"Come in."

"Thank you."

He stepped across the sill. He did it slowly, and when he was in he turned and took the heavy door by its edge, and drew it shut behind him. He did not lock it. Elias heard the soft solid sound of the latch, and no more. The man bent, and took up his case, and set it against the wall. He began to unwind his scarf.

He did all of it with a great plain care, like a man putting a house in order before a guest. The scarf was folded in three and laid across the case. The coat came off his shoulders, wet and heavy, and he shook the snow from it with a little flick, and hung it on a peg behind the door that Elias had not noticed. He pushed back his damp hair with his palm. He looked, in the lamplight, quite worn out. There were violet smudges under his eyes, and a faint shadow on his jaw, and the skin of his face had the dull, thin, waxy look of a man who has not slept in a day.

"The keypad sends a message to my telephone," he said.

He had come around the end of the desk, and was standing a few feet from the chair. He spoke in the mild flat voice of a man delivering a report.

"When the door is opened. It is a small device, in the frame. I had it fitted in the summer. It is not a thing that I am proud of, but I thought it prudent." He glanced at the lamp. "It went off at twelve minutes past nine. I was in the bar of the hotel, with a glass of water, listening to a man from Ohio explain the benefits of shared databases. My telephone lit up on the table."

Elias said nothing.

"I did not say anything. I put down the glass. I excused myself, and went up to my room, and sat on the bed for some time." His mouth moved. "I thought, I will wait. I will give him until the morning. If he has opened it, it is because he wishes to know, and he is entitled to a night with it, alone. I thought that it would be monstrous to come at once."

"You came."

"At a quarter to eleven. I could not sit." He passed a hand over his eyes. "There was a last flight, a little regional thing, with propellers. It came down through the snow like a leaf. I took a car from the airfield. I did not hurry. I had the driver go slowly. I thought that you would need the hours."

He let the hand fall.

"I did not tell him to hurry," he said again. "I want you to know that."

Elias looked at him.

It was a strange, bright, sleepless clarity that had come over him in the last hour, and he held it carefully, as one holds a full glass. He had read, in the lamp, for four hours, with a heart that went by turns very fast and very slow. He had sat with a dead man's face in his hand. And now the living one stood before him in his shirtsleeves, with the snow drying on his collar, and he found that he was not afraid at all.

"Sit down," he said.

Luke blinked.

"Please." He heard his own voice, level and dry. "You have been traveling for five hours. You are swaying."

"I am perfectly..."

"You are not."

The faint smile came, and went. Luke drew out the second chair, a plain wooden thing with a worn rush seat, and set it across the desk, and lowered himself into it with a sigh. He put his hands on his knees. He sat very straight. He looked, thought Elias, like a schoolboy outside a headmaster's study.

"I shall not ask you to forgive the door," he said. "I left it open. I will not pretend otherwise."

"You reset the lock."

"Yes."

"You left the light burning, for twenty-five nights. And on Saturday you cleared it."

"Yes."

"You chose my birthday."

For an instant, the whole face changed. It was only an instant. It went white, and then very faintly pink, as a man's face does who has been touched on a place that he thought was hidden, and he lowered his eyes to the blotter.

"It was the first date that I could think of," he said, "that nobody else would."

"It was not the first. You chose it very carefully."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I wished to be unable to forget it." He said it simply, to the desk. "A lock should be something that one cannot get wrong. I have a bad memory for numbers. I have never been able to hold a telephone number. But I have never once in three years had to look at that panel and think."

Elias did not speak.

It was a small plain answer, and he held it in his hands like a stone. He thought of a cup of coffee on a counter, in the dark, on the sixth of October. He did not say so. He had no need. It sat between them in the lamplight, unspoken, and the man across the desk knew it was there.

"I am going to tell you," said Luke.

He raised his head.

"I will tell you what is on that wall. I will tell you plainly, in the order that it happened. I will not soften it, or color it, or leave anything out, if I can help it. And when I have finished, you may do whatever you wish." His voice was quite steady. "I only ask that you let me say it all, without stopping. I do not think that I could begin again."

"Begin."

Luke drew a breath.

He did not look at the wall. He did not look at the files. He sat with his eyes fixed on a point just to the right of Elias's shoulder, and began to speak in a low, flat, patient voice, as a man recites a thing that he has gone over so many times that it has worn smooth.

"There were six of them," he said.

He lifted a hand and pointed, without turning his head, at the row on the board.

"Martin Osgood. Attorney. He held the accounts. Raymond Teague. Investments. He moved the money. Harlan Pruitt. A judge of the superior court. He made certain that nothing was ever looked at too closely. Gerald Brandt, who poured the concrete. Warren Kray, who signed the permits." The hand fell. "And Edmund Aldridge, who sat at the head of the table, and made it respectable."

"The Waterfront Trust."

"It was a charity. A development fund, for the old harbor. It raised a great deal of public money, in the first year, and spent a great deal of it on works. And a good deal more of it went somewhere else." He paused. "I do not know the sum. Your father did. He was working it out."

Elias felt the floor of his stomach drop.

"Thomas Mercer was the Chief Prosecutor of the county. He had held the office for eleven years. He was not a clever man, I think, in the ordinary way. He was a very stubborn one." The ghost of a smile. "He had noticed a thing that others had not. A series of payments, very small, going out of the Trust to a dozen firms that did not exist. He followed them. He followed them for three years, on his own time, with a notebook, and a lot of patience. And in the spring of that year he found where they went."

The lamp hummed.

"He kept a ledger," said Luke. "Every payment, every date, every name. In his own hand, in a plain black book. It was the only complete record in existence. And in September, he took it to a grand jury."

"I did not know."

"No."

"I was away. I was at school. He did not, he never told me, he did not talk about his work." Elias's voice was a thread. "He used to say that it was dull."

"He was being kind." Luke's eyes dropped. "The grand jury met on the fourteenth of October. A Wednesday. He was to testify on the Friday. He had told his clerk that he would be taking the book home for the weekend, to go over it once more. The clerk told someone. I do not know who."

He stopped.

"On the night of the fifteenth," he said, "a Thursday, at twenty minutes past eleven, the house caught fire."

It was very quiet. The brass clock ticked on the desk, small and dry. Elias sat in the leather chair with his hands clasped hard in his lap, and did not move.

"By morning there was nothing left. By Tuesday, the fire marshal had signed it off. A faulty gas line, in the kitchen. It was said that he had been working late, and had fallen asleep. It was said that nobody could have suffered. By Wednesday the autopsy was sealed, by an order signed that morning by a judge of the superior court." He lifted his eyes to the board. "The ledger was not in the ashes. No one looked for it. By the following week, the grand jury had been adjourned sine die, for want of a witness. And the six of them went to a very good dinner."

Elias heard it.

He heard every word. He had known it, he thought, for some time, in the way that one knows a thing in the body. He had stood in a gallery with a glass of water in his hand and read it in a photograph. But he had never heard it said. He had never had the plain bare shape of it set down in order, in a quiet low voice, as a fact. It fell upon him like a roof.

"They killed him," he said.

"Yes."

"They killed all of them."

"Yes."

"My mother." He could not breathe. "And the housekeeper. They told me that there were three." He pressed his hand against his mouth. "I have never known whether it was true."

"It was true. The housekeeper's name was Mrs. Wyndham. She had been with the family for twenty years." Luke's voice was gentle. "Your mother was Eleanor. She was forty-six. She taught music."

"I know who she was."

"Of course."

"I know." He was crying. He had not noticed. The tears ran down quite silently, over his cheeks, and into the corners of his mouth, and he did not wipe them. "I know. I only. It is a very long time since anyone said her name."

Luke did not move.

He sat with his hands on his knees, and the lamplight on his face, and looked at Elias as he wept. He did not rise. He did not reach out. He did not say, there, or, it is all right. He only sat in the plain wooden chair and watched, with the grave and wide-open steadiness of a man who has resolved to bear witness to a thing and not to turn away, and his own cheeks were wet.

"I am sorry," he said, at last.

"You said that on Tuesday."

"I shall say it again. I do not think that I can say it enough."

Elias drew a long shuddering breath.

He wiped his face with the heel of his gloved hand. It was a poor, rough, childish gesture, and he did not care. He sat up. He put his hands flat on the blotter, on either side of the thin gray file, and looked across the pool of light at the man in the chair.

"You killed them," he said.

"Yes."

There was no pause. There was no wavering of the eye. The word fell into the room like a plain stone, set down on a table, and the face that said it did not alter at all.

"Osgood."

"Yes."

"Teague."

"Yes."

"The judge."

"Yes."

"And Brandt. And Kray."

"Yes. All five."

"I stood over them." His voice cracked. "I put my hands on them. I read the cuts. I wrote a report. I sat in your car, and you drove me, you brought me tea." He drew breath. "You gave a speech, at a gala, on the night that one of them died, and you, I don't, how did you, you were on a stage."

"I will tell you that."

"You will tell me."

"I will tell you everything. I said so." The dark eyes were very steady. "But you have asked me a plain question, and I will give you the plain answer first. I killed five men, Elias. I did it with a scalpel, in each case, in a single stroke, as quickly as I knew how. I did not enjoy it. I did not do it in anger. I did it as one does a thing that has been waiting to be done."

"And the sixth."

"The sixth."

"Aldridge."

"Yes."

"You mean to kill him."

"Yes," said Luke. "I do."

He said it gently. He said it as he had said it was a very sensible instruction, in the cold light of a doorway, with the same courteous regret. And Elias, who had known it for weeks, who had read it in a row of photographs and a circle of red, felt it go through him all the same, a slow cold blade of knowledge, that left him very still.

Luke moved.

He did it without haste. He leaned forward in the chair, and opened the shallow drawer of the desk, on the side that was nearest to himself. His hand went in. Elias watched it go. He saw, in the shadow of the drawer, the dull gleam of black metal, and he did not flinch. He sat quite still, and watched the man draw it out, in his open palm, and lay it on the blotter.

It was a pistol. It was a black, short, plain thing, a service weapon of the Blackwood Police Department, with a worn grip and a scuffed muzzle. It lay on the green leather between the two files like a paperweight. It made no sound.

"Take it," said Luke.

"No."

"Please."

He rose.

He came round the desk. He did it slowly, unhurried, with his hands open and his head a little bowed, and stopped before Elias's chair. He knelt. He took the weapon from the blotter, with great care, and held it a moment in his two palms, as a man holds a bird. Then he took Elias's hand.

He did not ask. He drew it out, gently, from where it lay in Elias's lap, and laid the thing upon it. The leather glove closed over it, by reflex. It was cold. It was very heavy, heavier than he had ever imagined. It lay in his palm like a stone from a riverbed, and his whole arm was filled with its weight.

"Luke," he said. "Do not."

"I must." The voice was low and quite calm. "I will not have you say that I hid it. I will not have you say that I told you the truth, and kept the means in a drawer. It is not a thing that I can do."

He lifted the hand.

He did it very slowly, and Elias, helpless, with every nerve in his body screaming, let him. The muzzle came up, between them, in the lamplight. It moved a little to one side, and a little higher, past the edge of the desk, and came to rest against the front of a gray shirt, on the left side, over the heart.

"There," said Luke.

It pressed against the cloth.

He could feel it. He could feel, through the weight of the steel and the thickness of the leather, a faint steady pulse, small and rapid, beating against the end of the barrel. It was a thing that he knew very well. It was the first rhythm that any doctor learns. It was going rather fast.

He tried to pull away.

"No." A warm hand closed over his, and held it, quite gently. "Look at me."

He looked.

The face before him was very close. It was white, and wet, and utterly calm. The eyes in the lamplight were dark as pools. There was a muscle jumping at the corner of the mouth, and the skin of the throat was moving, up and down, as he swallowed. But the voice, when it came, was low, and even, and almost tender.

"You may fire it," he said. "Here. Now. I will not stop you."

"Luke..."

"It would be a just thing. I do not say that for show. I have killed five men, and I mean to kill a sixth, and I have lied to you every day for two months. I have put you in a position that I had no right to put you in. I have made you an accessory to every murder in the city." He drew a short breath. "You would be within your rights. You would be doing what any honest man would do. And you would be safe. You would walk out of this room, tonight, with your hands clean, in your white coat, and you would be the pathologist who found the killer. Nobody would ever suspect that you had known."

"Stop."

"I want you to know that it is possible."

"I will not."

"Or." The voice dropped, a little, and for the first time it shook. "Or you may put it down. And read what is on this desk. All of it. And decide."

Elias stared at him.

The weapon weighed upon his arm. His whole body was trembling. He felt the cold sweat start on his back, and run down between his shoulder blades, and the breath come hard in his chest. A man knelt before him, in the lamp, and held a gun to his own heart, and looked at him with eyes that held no fear at all.

He understood, slowly, that it was true.

He could do it. It would take no strength. A small movement of the finger. It would be done in a moment, and the whole of the long coiling horror of the last two months would end in a flash, and a crash, and a falling body. He would have the truth, and the justice, and the clean hands. No one would be left to hang. No one would be left to lie.

And he would sit in a small room, with the thing in his lap, and a warm dark stain spreading on a gray shirt, and know that the last person on the earth who had said to him I will not decide this for you was dead.

"Luke," he said. It was a whisper. "Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why would you give me this?"

"Because it is yours." The voice was soft. "Because it has always been yours. You are the only one in the world with the right. It is your father on that wall. It is your mother. I have been doing it for you, I think, though you did not ask. I have been standing in your place." A small bitter smile. "I should like you to be able to take it back."

The room was very quiet.

"There is one more thing," said Luke.

He lifted his eyes, past Elias's shoulder, to the shelf above the filing cabinet. To the small gray box on its board.

"That is your father."

Elias did not turn.

"Not the whole of him. A part. A little piece of his heart, in wax. I took it from the cabinet, in the basement of the medical examiner's office, on the night of the nineteenth of October, twelve years ago, with a flashlight in my teeth. Nobody has seen it since." His voice was quite level. "I have kept it ever since. I have never opened it. I have never looked."

"Why not?"

"Because it is not mine to look at."

The words fell like water into a well.

"But it is yours." The hand around Elias's tightened, very slightly. "You have used those hands for three years to touch the death of hundreds of strangers. I have watched you do it. I have seen what it costs you. And I have asked myself, over and over, in the dark, whether you have ever once dared to put them on the death of your own father, and see what happened to him."

Elias could not breathe.

"I do not ask it now," said Luke. "I would not. I only ask that you know that it is there. That it was kept for you. And that when you wish it, it is yours."

He let go.

He took his hand away, and rested it on his knee. He knelt quite still, in the lamplight, with the muzzle at his chest, held there only by the pressure of the other's palm. He did not speak. He did not look away. He waited, with his whole face open, like a man standing at the bottom of a well in the dark, for whatever would fall.

It was a very long time.

Elias looked at the thing in his hand. It was a plain black shape. He looked at the wall of photographs, and the six dead cards, and the smiling face at the end. He looked at the small gray box. He thought of a cold white morning on a step, and a man with a briefcase, looking at something outside the frame.

He thought of a woman who taught music, and a lamp in a window.

He thought: this is the place at which it all turns.

He had come to it as a man comes to a river, after a long walk. He saw it plainly. He could go this way, or that. He could do the thing that was right, and end it, and be clean. He could do the thing that was easy, and let the man go. There was no third road. There never had been. And on the far bank of the one, he saw a small clean white room and a life of careful quiet. And on the far bank of the other, he saw nothing at all. A dark. A long dark road, with a man at the end of it who would not be spared.

He drew the weapon back.

It was only an inch. The muzzle slid across the gray cloth, and came away from the heart, and he felt, in the cold arm that held it, the small muscles give. The weight sank into his lap. He laid it down, with enormous slowness, on the blotter, between the files. He turned it, with one gloved finger, until the black barrel pointed at the wall.

He took his hand away.

It lay on the green leather, small and quiet and dull. Nobody moved. Luke knelt on the floor with his hands on his knees, and his head had dropped, and his shoulders were shaking. He made no sound. A tear fell from his chin, and darkened the front of his shirt, and another.

"Not because I forgive you," said Elias.

He heard his own voice. It was low, and cracked, and very clear.

"I want you to understand that. I do not. I do not know if I ever shall. I think that it is quite possible that I never will." He drew a long breath. "I put it down because I want to know. All of it. I want to know what happened to them. I do not think that I could bear it if I did not." He swallowed. "And you are the only one who can tell me."

Luke lifted his head.

"Yes," he said.

"Not tonight." Elias looked at the box. "I cannot. Not tonight."

"No."

"But I will."

"I know." The ghost of a smile, wet and unsteady. "I know that you will."

He rose.

It was a slow, stiff movement, like an old man's. He stood for a moment, with his hand on the edge of the desk, and then he reached across, and took the two files from the green leather, and squared them. He took them up, in both hands. He held them out.

"Then read," he said. "Please. Every page. Do not trust anything that I have said. Check it. Take it apart, as you would a body." His voice shook. "You are the only person in the world that I trust to read it properly. I have been waiting three years for someone who could."

Elias looked at the files.

He looked at the thin gray one, with its soft brown edges and its schoolboy pencil. He put out his hand. It was steady. It had not been steady for two months, and it was steady now. He took the file, and laid it open on his knee, and turned to the first page.

"Sit," he said.

Luke sat.

He lowered himself into the rush-bottomed chair, with the thick file on his knees, and put both hands over it. He bent his head. For a while there was no sound in the study but the whisper of turning pages, and the small dry tick of the clock, and the faint far hush of the snow.