The Tideflats King Claimed the Surveyor Who Trusts No One, and My Signature Was His Brother's Alibi novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Six Terms

In his penthouse over the freezers Lena sets six terms and Niko agrees before he has decided to; then he shows her the report she signed and asks how she tested for accelerant.

He was in my lobby at ten to nine.

I watched him from the mezzanine stairs for four minutes before I went down.

He stood in the middle of the marble with his hands in his coat pockets and his back to nothing, facing the door, the elevator and the doorman's desk at once.

He had understood the terms.

The doorman kept glancing at him and away.

"Mr. Matkovic," I said from the bottom stair.

"Ms. Rautio."

"Your paper said six things," he said.

He took the page out of his pocket.

I had written it in a hurry, and he had smoothed it flat.

"Daylight only," he read.

"Your boat.

"Your back to the wall.

"No one behind you.

"No touch unless you say.

"No question about your life you have not offered to answer."

He folded it.

"I agree to all six."

"You didn't think about it."

"I thought about it for the length of the drive," he said.

"I have not been refused in six years, Ms. Rautio.

"I find I would like to hear it again."

I did not smile.

It was a near thing.

"You don't sit in that lobby chair," I said.

"I don't sit in any chair," he said.

"Then you're not as stupid as the paper says."

His mouth moved.

He put it away again.

"My warehouse has a window," he said.

"Four stories of glass over the freezer floor.

"You can put your back to the wall of it and watch the stair.

"You can have a key to the private elevator.

"I will not be in the room unless you tell me to be."

I weighed it.

I had never taken a client's key.

I had never taken a client's anything.

"I'll look at it," I said.

"Then I'll tell you what I'll do."

His building stood at the end of the Tideflats, in the shadow of the container cranes.

It was a cold-storage warehouse, windowless brick for three floors, with the freezer hum coming up through the soles of my boots.

The penthouse office sat on top of it in a glass box.

He took me up in a steel elevator that smelled of cold and diesel.

He stood by the buttons, and I stood against the back wall, and neither of us said anything.

When the doors opened I walked out first.

I did not like it.

I walked the whole room before I looked at him.

Glass on three sides.

The bay laid out gray and flat below, with the tug yard at the far end and a ship coming in.

A long steel desk.

A kitchen counter behind it.

One door to the stairs, which I checked, and one door to a bedroom, which I did not open.

"The back wall," I said.

I put my palm on the one solid wall, behind the desk.

"That's mine.

"Nobody stands there but me."

"Done," he said.

He did not move from the elevator.

He had stood there since the doors opened, his hands in his pockets, giving me the whole room.

I hated that I liked it.

"Show me what you've got," I said.

He crossed to the desk, slowly, keeping his hands where I could see them, and opened the bottom drawer.

He took out a manila folder.

"Six years ago I was in Shelton on a Tuesday," he said.

"I sat in a room with a lawyer, and he told me my brother's survey said no accelerant."

He put the folder on the steel and turned it toward me.

"I did not understand why that was bad."

I opened it.

It was my own report.

A dozen pages in my twenty-three-year-old hand, with the Rautio & Sons letterhead across the top, and at the bottom, in blue ink, my signature.

I had not seen it in six years.

I had written it in a motel in Gig Harbor in October, with a gas station coffee, and my uncle had read it over my shoulder and said, "That's tidy, Lena.

"That's very tidy."

I felt the floor tilt.

I put my hand flat on the desk.

"The insurer's expert said accelerant meant arson," Niko said.

"Arson meant a person.

"The only person aboard was Davor."

"No accelerant doesn't mean arson," I said.

"It means exactly what it says."

"Then I would like to know what you did," he said.

"With your hands.

"Where you tested."

I stood there in his glass room with my own signature under my fingers.

I had a case at my feet, the old brown canvas survey case my uncle had given me when I turned twenty-one.

He had told me he had bought it new.

My mother Aino had carried a case like it on the boat at Westport, but that one had burned.

I had carried it on three hundred vessels.

I put it on the desk, slowly, and did not open it.

"Tell me how you tested for it," Niko said.

It was the second time he had asked me, and the first time he had waited.

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