Chapter 20: Wanda Maximoff Was Not the Murderer

The roof garden smelled of rain that hadn't fallen yet. I arrived at two minutes past the hour I'd requested, which made me six minutes early by the timeline the person on the phone had offered, and I stood for a moment at the garden's edge with my hands in my jacket pockets and looked out at the city, which was doing what cities do at this hour: existing, without any particular interest in what was happening on the forty-ninth floor above it.

The calibration cycle meant the sensors were recording white noise instead of data. What it did not mean was privacy — privacy in Stark Tower is a conceptual exercise rather than a practical one — but it meant that anything said here in the next hour would arrive in FRIDAY's logs as atmospheric interference, which is the closest approximation available.

I had not told Wanda Maximoff any of this. I had sent her a message at six-forty AM asking if she was available. She had replied, within ninety seconds, with a single word: Where.