Chapter 14: Twenty-Third Floor

The twenty-third floor of the Bureau's Great Lakes office had carpet, which the fourteenth floor did not.

Reiss rode up beside me in silence and stopped at the reception desk, because the invitation said Dr. Mroz and not Inspector Reiss.

A man held the inner door open for me, and I knew his face before I knew why.

It was flat, about forty, with a gray windbreaker and a white card on a lanyard.

I had looked up at that face from a steel cot at 1:18 that morning.

"Doctor," he said.

His left hand held the door, and across the back of it ran three parallel scratches under a square of gauze taped at the corners.

[Reading confirmed: the scratches on the back of his hand. +100 XP.]

I walked past him with my face doing nothing, which I had practiced at the intake desk.

If I accused him, I would be a woman who had seen him in a dead man's eyes.

The Director would be kind to me about it.

The office was bright, with a window onto the lake and a tea tray on a low table.

The Regional Director was fifty-five, with a silver bob and a cardigan over her lanyard, and a reasonable voice.

"Halina," she said. "Sit. I would rather you call me by my title, and I would rather call you by your name."

"Director."

"I read the inquest transcript twice," she said, "and you did exactly what the State of Illinois permits you to do."

"I want that on the record between us."

Behind her desk the whole wall was a lit map of Illinois.

White dots covered it, thousands, and each one was fading to gray at its own speed.

A red ring sat over Kankakee County and a smaller one over the south suburbs.

At 9:03 a new white dot blinked on, north of Rockford, and nobody in the room looked at it.

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