Chapter 4: Terry Ives Speaks in Coordinates

The whistleblower arrived at the police department records room at nine-fourteen, which told Holmes two things: he had been watching the building, and he was not quite as frightened as he wanted to appear.

Holmes had been there since nine, working through the coroner's files Hopper had left marked with a yellow adhesive note — a technology he had spent a silent, unhappy minute examining — that read *Hammond '79, Rollins '81, Torres '82* in block letters whose backward slant suggested a left-handed man writing quickly, under pressure, or both. He was deep into the Torres report when the door opened and the man entered sideways, with the specific shoulder-first motion of someone who has recently developed the habit of checking behind him before committing to rooms.

Forty-three, Holmes noted. Government employment of some variety — the badge lanyard still faintly visible as a pale stripe on the chest of a flannel shirt that was trying very hard not to look like a flannel shirt recently substituted for a button-down. Indiana plates on the car he had come in; the wrong shoes for the weather; the specific kind of four-day beard that was not a style choice but a recent abandonment of routine. A man who had stopped doing something he had done every morning for years. The cessation of a habit indicated disruption of schedule, which indicated either illness or fear, and he moved like a man in good health.