"He manages everything," I said, not quite to Cleo, not quite to myself. "Every room, every person, every variable."
"I know," she said. "That's what makes it interesting." She stood, gathered her things with the efficient movements of someone on a schedule. "That's the face of a man encountering something he can't manage." She slung her bag over one shoulder. "You should probably figure out what you want to do about that."
She said it without pressure, without implication, without the weight of advice. Just the observation, set down like a fact, available for whatever use I wanted to put it to.
She went toward the music building.
I sat on the bench in the November light and thought about the second, less than a second, of something that had moved through Dominic Moreau's face when he'd seen me at lunch on a Tuesday, not in his house or his car or the social events where he'd arranged for me to appear, but here. On a bench I hadn't chosen. With a person he hadn't accounted for.
The only problem he doesn't know how to solve.
I thought about that for a long time.
I thought about it through the afternoon lecture, and on the car ride back, and through dinner, which I ate alone because Henri said Dominic was out for the evening. I thought about it while I read, and while I made my notes for the next day'sseminar, and while I lay in the dark in the room with the empty bookshelf and the book with the dedication.
I thought about what it meant to be a problem that someone very competent could not solve.
Whether that was dangerous, or useful, or something else entirely.
Whether I wanted to stop being unsolvable or whether I wanted, for the first time in a very long time, to simply stay where I was and wait to find out what happened next.
I didn't have an answer.
I turned off the lamp. The house settled around me, quiet and certain of itself. I lay there thinking about what it meant to be a problem Dominic Moreau couldn't solve. Whether that was dangerous. Whether it was already too late for the answer to matter.
* * *
Chapter 11: The Story of Thomas Reyes
I had his name. I had a photograph. I had the sparse accounting of a newspaper that hadn't stayed interested long enough to follow up.
What I didn't have was the person.
This was a problem I'd encountered before, in economics, the gap between the data and the human behavior it was meant to represent. Numbers described systems. They didn't describe what it felt like to be inside them. The flash drive had given me a structure: a name, a witness, a payment, a chain of accountability. What it hadn't given me was Thomas Reyes as someone who had existed in the world in a way that went beyond his function in that chain.
I went to the library on Wednesday afternoon, after contract law, before the light was gone.
Harlow's library was the largest of the three Moreau-named buildings on campus, which was, I had decided, either ironic or appropriate, depending on how you felt about families that subsidized institutions as a form of civic laundering. The special collections room was on the third floor, accessible by request, staffed by a single archivist who looked at me with the neutrality of someone accustomed to students arriving without clear research questions and leaving with ones they hadn't expected.
I told him I was looking for material on New Orleans jazz musicians in the late 2000s. The missing persons case from 2009 involving Thomas Reyes, specifically, if anything had been archived.
He looked at me for a moment. "That's a specific name."
"It is."
"Are you working on something for a class?"
"Independent research," I said. "Urban economics. The relationship between informal creative economies and crime geography."
It was true enough to be useful and vague enough not to require elaboration. He nodded, accepted it, and led me to a terminal connected to the regional newspaper archive, the city's digitized public records, and a collection of jazz ephemera that had been donated to the library by a music historian in the 1990s.
I started with the newspapers.
* * *
The Times-Picayune had run four items connected to Thomas Reyes, across a span of eight months. I had seen the first two on the flash drive, the initial missing persons report, the follow-up noting the lack of leads. The third I hadn't seen: a short item in the arts section, published six weeks after his disappearance, headlined Community Mourns Missing Tremé Musician. The fourth was a paragraph buried in a roundup of cold cases, published at the year's end, which noted that his case had been reclassified as inactive.
I read the arts item carefully.