Eamon was gone.
Upstairs, Köhler’s footsteps moved from the bedroom to the bathroom and stopped. Water ran in the pipes.
I tapped the comm. “Dane, Eamon told me about Marc Voss.”
“He told me at four-fifteen.”
I closed my hand around the mug. “Stay sharp.”
“Always.”
“Köhler’s coming down,” Vega said.
I heard the footsteps. He was wearing the same charcoal sweater he’d worn into the field office a week ago. Samuel had washed it twice.
“Good morning, Dietrich,” I said.
“Good morning.”
Vega stood. “I’ll be in the hall.”
She took her mug. Köhler poured himself coffee and sat in the chair she’d left warm.
He looked at me. “Blaise, may I ask you something?”
“Yes.”
“What were Henry’s last words?”
I set my mug down.
The clean answer wasI don’t know, and it was true. Henry had folded theTimes, dropped a napkin beside Cabot’s water glass, walked to the front door, and ended up at the Park Plaza with two rounds in him. What he’d said in the eighth-floor hallway before the man came out of room eight-twenty was not in any report I’d been allowed to read.
“I don’t know, Dietrich. Federal has the transcript. I haven’t seen it.”
“Will they tell me?”
“Eventually. The case has to close first.”
He nodded. “Then I will tell you what I think they were.”
“Okay.”
He looked up. His eyes were the pale grey I’d noticed in the field office.
“He thanked someone.”
I waited.
“It was what he always did when someone did something for him. There would have been the barista or someone at a gas station. He could be in the middle of a phone call he was about to end badly, and he would stop to thank a server for refilling his water glass. He did it the morning his mother died, and he did it the morning we moved into the apartment in Stamford, when the man who’d brought up the last box had already been paid.”
He took a breath.
“He thanked someone before he died. I don’t know who. I don’t need to know who. I only need to remember that he did.”
Köhler left.
I heard the front door open and close. Vega said, “Coffee’s hot.”