Three days inside and Kieran had the house. Eleven windows. Two doors that mattered. One back stair the Marshals had never costed out — because the Marshals costed everything. He wrote none of it down.

Pike called at 4:12 in the morning. Pike thought of nights as unbilled hours.

“Doyle.”

“Yes.”

“Running the board. You're in?”

“Three days.”

“Lovely.” Paper moved somewhere behind him. Pike always had paper. “Vale, Juno. Thirty-four. Client wants it closed before the trial date — and this is the part they underline, so I'll underline it — it can't read as murder.”

“I have the terms.”

“I know you do. I'm required to say them out loud. There's a form.”

Kieran watched the hallway. “Accident, illness, or nothing at all,” Pike said. “Their words. Nothing at all is my favorite. Very ambitious.”

“Understood.”

Pike had never once said kill. In nine years he had said resolve, close, tidy, and on one occasion finalize — which Kieran had turned over longer than he turned over most things.

“Ninety days is generous. I once scheduled a nineteen. Baltimore. Woman had a dog, and a dog complicates everything.” Kieran said nothing.

“Half's cleared to you. Second half on confirmation.” A keyboard, unhurried. “Payroll runs Thursdays, so if you can land it on a Tuesday, everyone downstream is happier.”

“Noted.”

“Do you need anything? We can do vehicles. We can do a second pair of hands, though the client would rather not.”

“No.”

“Good man.” Pike yawned into the receiver. “How's she sleeping?”

“Why.”

“Small talk, Doyle. People do it.” He hung up at 4:19.

He had already had one clean chance.

Night two. 2:14. She came out of the bedroom without shoes and didn't turn on the kitchen light, because she had spent thirty-four years being quiet in her own house. He was in the dark by the pantry. She didn't see him.

They never did.

Behind her, four steps down to the laundry landing. Old tile. Wet from the boots he had left there at eleven. A fall on that stair reads as a fall.

He had a clean fourteen seconds. He spent nine of them noticing that the lamp in her room was still burning, and that it had been burning the night before, and the night before that.

She filled a glass. She didn't drink it. She carried it back down the hall like it was something she had been asked to bring someone. The door shut. The lamp stayed on.

She slept on the left. He had known that before the Marshals ever hired him.

Six weeks of her — back when nobody was paying him to keep her breathing. Her route, her hours, the pharmacy on Delancey, the way she talked to the woman at the register like they were friends.

They weren't. He had checked.

Afterward he did the arithmetic properly, the way he had been trained to when a window closed. Ruiz's camera covered the hall at an angle that took in the landing. The deputy in the front room had been awake — his chair had moved twice in twenty minutes.

A death at two in the morning — eleven feet from a man with a radio — is a death somebody drives out to look at.

All of that was true. None of it took fourteen seconds to work out.

In the morning she came into the kitchen in yesterday's cardigan, saw him at the window, and informed him that rule two was unenforceable.

“Rule two is that you tell me where you're going,” he said.

“I'm going to the kitchen.”

“Then you've complied.”

She made coffee for two without asking whether he wanted any, and set the second cup down on the counter between them — closer to him than to her. He didn't touch it for six minutes.

He drank it cold, standing, watching the drive.

At the end of every day he wrote the day up for himself. He had done it for eleven years. Three lines, always the same three. Weather. Movement. Opening.

Under weather he wrote clear. Under movement he wrote none. Under opening he wrote: none available.

That was the first lie he told himself. He would tell eleven more.