“Farrow.”
He looked at me with a glint in his eye. “Relax. I won't announce this to the house.”
We came back down the stairs into the foyer and the front hall. Reed glanced over once at me and then turned back to watching the street.
The parlor was unchanged.
Cabot was still asleep on the sofa, head turned now toward the back of the cushions. The legal pad was still on his chest, lifting and settling with his breathing.
I crossed over to him and pulled the pad free. He didn’t wake up .
His handwriting was small, even, and slightly slanted to the right. He arranged the list in two columns. Names on the left, with relationships to the Harcourt family on the right. It was forty-three names, and he’d worked on it for hours.
Three names had stars beside them.
The first two names were familiar. The third stopped me.
Patterson, Helen — Harcourt Foundation board, 2018–2021. Memorial fund est. 2022.
I assumed it was a late wife of the editor. Cabot wrote her name down among all the other people who would either be guests or staff at the Harcourt wedding.
The Patterson meeting was just over twelve hours away. We were going to sit down across a table from a man whose dead wife had just shown up on a list of people explicitly connectedwith the Harcourt family. He was deeper in the family’s orbit than any of us, except for Cabot, knew.
He’d asked for the meeting. He’d told Eamon he had information that he needed to share.
A man whose late wife sat on a Harcourt foundation board was not a neutral source bringing us information.
I set the pad back on Cabot’s chest, in the same alignment. He didn’t stir.
Farrow had been watching me. He didn’t ask. He raised one finger almost imperceptibly. I read it as a question:Bad?
I nodded.
I crossed to the small console table where I’d left my rotation chart. It was a grid of the next seventy-two hours, names down the side and hours across the top. A pencil lay beside it.
My name ran from eighteen hundred to midnight. Farrow’s ran from midnight to oh-six hundred.
I picked up the pencil and moved myself forward to midnight to oh-six hundred.
If anyone asked, I would explain it as coverage logic. I was putting myself, a slightly more experienced operative, on the deeper part of the night when watchers might try to test the perimeter.
It wasn’t coverage logic.
I was giving Farrow the gift of more sleep.
Above us, on the second floor, Wiley’s door opened.
When he appeared in the parlor, he looked at Cabot on the sofa and then focused on the legal pad on his chest. He looked at me.
“You saw.”
“I saw.”
“Then we’re not having the conversation tomorrow that I thought we were having,” he said.
Chapter ten
Farrow