“So we’ll both work quickly,” Liz proposed. “There are still a few hours left in the day.”

“I don’t know about you, but my guys don’t move that fast. This is the government, don’t forget.”

“Try.”

“As if I have a choice,” he said, and acknowledged with a sly grin that Liz had won the first round.

FOUR

UNACCUSTOMED TO SUCH THINGS, LIZ suffered a bout of depression as she rode an elevator toward the fifth floor of the Public Safety Building and her husband’s office. Revisiting the Affair-capital A-was certain to disturb and disrupt Lou, was certain to strain and test their marriage, and just the thought of that made her skin clammy, her neck tense. She’d never once been called to the principal’s office, but now she knew how it felt.

Like this old public building, there had been an earlier time when their marriage had shone in all its glory. Now the place existed in a ponderous state of absolute cheerlessness. She hoped their relationship was not destined to suffer a similar fate.

Required to check in with an attendant outside of Crimes Against Persons, Liz indirectly alerted Lou to her arrival and he was waiting for her as she was buzzed through the door. To her relief, he looked neither troubled nor angry, and just seeing him made her feel better.

“Hey, you,” she said.

He said nothing, escorting her into his office and shutting the door. Seeing their children’s artwork taped and tacked to the walls and corkboard alongside crime scene photos and photocopied memos twisted Liz into a knot. She wanted-needed-to keep this businesslike yet personal, honest and yet not too specific, keeping in mind his feelings above her own. He was certain to take this as being as much of a shock as she had when she’d received that first call from David. She remembered her own reaction as breathless and frightened, and wanted to remember to give him a chance to recover, regardless of what his steeled exterior revealed. As a cop, Lou Boldt could hide anything going on inside him.

She sat down, and to her great relief Lou turned a chair to face her, forgoing his regular chair behind the desk. “Hey there yourself,” he finally said.

She kept in mind that he questioned people for a living. He turned them around on themselves to where they would confess to what they had no intention of revealing. Both a good listener and quick on his feet, Lou was not to be challenged. She schooled herself not to get competitive or defensive.

“We need to go back several years,” she began, “to the embezzlement.”

“Okay.” But it wasn’t okay and he knew that, for it also marked another event in their lives.

She plunged in. “In all this time, you’ve never asked me with whom I had the affair.”

“You’ve never told me,” he said, making a point of his impression of the proper order of things.

“I can’t tell you how much I respected you for that. Appreciated your leaving that choice to me. I know it can’t have been easy.”

“None of this has ever been easy,” Lou said, “for either of us. I wanted to know so I wouldn’t keep guessing every time we attended a bank function. I didn’t want to know because comparisons were inevitable, and I didn’t want to carry my own inadequacies around, didn’t want to face where I’d failed you, didn’t want to judge you for your taste in lovers and hate you for it. For the record, I’m over that stuff now. It’s history.”

He had a tendency to speak like this, adopting phrases from his work-“for the record”-and subjecting her to them.

“It’s David Hayes.”

She watched as the news hit him, actually glad to see he couldn’t carry this off with a stone face and calm exterior. He paled, nodded. “The embezzler. Danny Foreman’s stakeout.” He nodded again, pieces fitting together for him.

“He was with I.T. Back then. This is before I was promoted to oversee the department.”

“Did you know anything about it at the time? The embezzlement?”

The similarity of this question to that of Danny Foreman bothered her.

She rehashed for him the known facts of the embezzlement-the wire fraud, the missing seventeen million, the belief that the money still resided somewhere on the bank’s servers, and Danny Foreman’s determination to intercept any attempt to retrieve the stolen funds and the software responsible for hiding it, and to identify the people whose money it had been. Her husband stayed with her, never interrupting, his ear turned slightly toward her, his eyes fixed as if she’d winded him.

“David contacted me at the office yesterday, and I went to see him.”

Lou nodded. She wanted more from him than this, any expression of his internal emotions. Anything but talking to a robot.

She described the threats Hayes had received, the physical beating he’d taken, and her insistence he go to the authorities to make a deal. “I took all this to Danny Foreman today,” she described. “We made a deal that I’d try to get permission to release some of the classified bank information to him if he’d work on a deal to get David and his mother relocated.”

Boldt said calmly, “There’s a saying in witness protection: The difference between deal and dead is one letter.”

“Right, well… what I want to say is I’m embarrassed and ashamed by all of this, by everything that’s happened, back then, now, the fact he contacted me. But I can’t hide it, won’t hide it. And I won’t give anyone the chance to use that against me, against us.”

“I know how hard this must have been for you. Coming here. Explaining this. But if you expect me to thank you-”

“I don’t expect any such thing. Do I want you to thank me? No! But a reaction would be nice. Shout at me, scream at me, be angry with me. What are you feeling in there, and why won’t you show me?”

“I’m thinking you’re the one that needs protection.”

“Not thinking,” she complained. “Feeling. What are you feeling?”

Lou straightened up and waited for her eyes to meet his own. “I don’t feel in this office. This is not a place for that. I work here. I process facts. I process death. I occasionally allow myself to feel when I get into my car and head home, but even then I turn the radio up real loud, put the windows down, and stay quiet about it. You feel for about the first six months on this job. That would be a while ago for me. After that you try not to let emotion overcome reason. Not that you’re always successful. You’re not.

“What am I feeling now?” he continued. “Hurt. Trapped. Concerned for you. Worried about Danny Foreman being involved because he’s famous for what we call a Lone Ranger attitude and I don’t want you caught up in that. At the same time I’m grateful to be included, I do thank you for that, and while I’d like to be feeling more, at least for your sake, I find myself instead trying to jump ahead and get this thing contained, because you’re my wife and I don’t want you in the middle of this.”

“Trapped?”

“Did I say trapped?”

“You did.”

“I don’t know what I meant by that.”

Despite his outward façade of complacency, she recognized his fixed stare. He was lost to thought. She felt this kind of information was better doled out in doses than dumped all at once as she had done, but she’d had little choice.

“So what do we do?” she asked.

“I talk to Danny. We sort this out.”

“And me?”

“We handle it from here, Liz. If he contacts you again, then that’s where you’re involved again. But that’ll be by phone only. You’re not to make any kind of physical contact with him again.”

Any kind of physical contact; she resented him including that. “I wasn’t the one who made contact. I thought I explained that.”

“You went to see him,” Lou reminded. “You cooperated. That wouldn’t look good to a judge or jury.”