Chapter 2: Mandatory Partnership

The Commander's office smelled like recycled air and old ambition, the particular combination you get when a man has occupied the same room for eleven years and stopped noticing either. Tarvik kept his desk clear because he believed a clear desk communicated authority, and he kept the overhead panels at full brightness because he believed a brightly lit room communicated confidence, and he kept a framed photograph of the Governor behind his left shoulder because some beliefs don't require justification. I had sat across from that desk forty-seven times in six years. I had never once counted the photograph as furniture.

It was six-forty in the morning. I had not slept. I had written fourteen pages of notes in Tower Nine, watched Isara's team bag Elias Strand with the professional tenderness of people who've learned to stop reading faces, and driven myself back across the outer ring with the recycled-air smell of a condemned building in my jacket and the amber dark still printed somewhere behind my eyes. I had stopped twice at the same corner vending unit, drank one cup of something marketed as coffee, discarded the second when the first proved instructive, and arrived at the Bureau with six minutes to spare.

Tarvik waited until I was seated to look up from whatever he had been studying on his desk panel, which meant he had been watching my approach in his peripheral display and had timed the gesture to feel deliberate. I had watched him do this to other detectives for six years. I had stopped finding it interesting by the third.