The Dace Case

The call came at 4:40 on a Tuesday in October, and by six Nora was standing in the rain on the far side of a police line.

Congressman Warren Dace had been walking home from a reception at the yacht club. He had been beaten to death on the waterfront path with something long and heavy, and the something had not come apart, which meant it was metal, which meant it was expensive. A titanium cane lay in the evidence tent, tagged and bagged, and by the end of the day a detective would tell her that it had been traced in four hours to a bespoke order placed eighteen months earlier and paid for from a personal account at a bank Nora knew. It still had a band of gray tape around the handle. Nora had seen that cane in March, in a restaurant, in Adrian Voss's hand.

The eyewitness was a night nanny named Marisol Vega, who had been sitting up with a colicky infant at a window on the fourth floor of the building opposite. She gave her statement twice, and the second time her hands were still shaking. She had seen the cars, then the two men, then the conversation that was not a conversation, then the beating, which she described as a man methodically taking apart a piece of furniture. The attacker had stopped in the middle of it, looked up at the light, and laughed — a young man, she said, tall, well-dressed, with a face that seemed to be enjoying the weather.

And then, she said, he had looked straight across the road, at her, at the fourth-floor window, and raised the cane, not in threat, in greeting, the way a man waves to a neighbor.

"No, ma'am," the detective said. "Nobody waves at a witness."

"He did," Marisol said. "He knew my name. Not the name on the lease, the name I give the delivery service, the one the building keeps on the intercom list. Nobody has that name except the people who print it."

That was the sentence that stayed with Nora. She carried it through the rest of the morning — through three hours on the far side of the tape, through a shower she did not remember taking — and it was still with her at nine-thirty, in the Cascade lobby, where two federal agents and a company security director had asked her to sit down. Dace had been a congressman; that was the whole of the answer to why it was federal agents. The security director did the talking, and he read from a script. A badge issued to Dexter Rourke had swiped into the fourth floor at 1:12 a.m. It had not swiped out until 5:03. The badge had been issued, countersigned, and personally approved by Adrian Voss.

Voss was in the lobby when she came out, in his coat, on his way somewhere, and he stopped when he saw her face. She asked him who had countersigned the badge. He looked at her the way he had looked at her across a restaurant table — warm, unhurried, entirely at ease — and the ease was the thing that frightened her, because a man with nothing to hide does not cross a lobby at nine-forty in the morning to say nothing. "It's being handled," he said. "Go home, Miss Bellamy."

She went home. She did not sleep. Somewhere around three in the morning she got up and wrote, in the back of the second page she had not filed, one line: Nobody hands a key to a stranger. Somebody gave him that door, and somebody is still holding it open.