Killers of a Certain Age(72)

Until now. I turned it over and over in my hand, but it just felt cold and heavy. There was no inspiration for how to find Vance, only the biting cold of the shed and the weight of the lump of silver in my hand. I flicked it, kindling the little flame. I passed my hand over it, warming it a bit but mostly killing time, bringing my palm closer and closer with each pass.

I flipped open the folder from Carapaz’s house and paged through it. Whatever instinct had prompted me to snatch it on the way out had paid off. It was our dossier, the one prepared for the board, alleging we were on the take. Like all material prepped for the board, it was almost clinical in its tone, laying out the evidence like a trail of bread crumbs for the directors to follow. There was a section on each of us, complete with murders we were supposed to have committed for pay. I skimmed my pages again, going over the lurid details. They were laughable—targets I had never even heard of, methods I rarely used. The whole thing smelled sloppy to me, like it had been assembled too fast or by somebody with no time to spare.

I lit another cigarette—it might have been nasty but I needed the nicotine—and blew out a mouthful of smoke slowly, making rings. Smoke and mirrors, that’s all the dossier was, a prop to keep on hand in case anybody asked questions about us. The file was the old-fashioned kind, pasteboard covers with a long metal bracket down one side. The arms of the bracket were threaded through holes punched in the pages inside, keeping everything neat and tidy, with little clasps to hold the bracket arms down and form a temporary binding. It meant the pages could be flipped through like a book, complete with a snug little gutter on the inside. I flicked the clasps off and straightened the bracket arms before I slid the front cover off. I pulled each page free until I saw it, a tiny set of coded characters running vertically along one of the inside margins. Every dossier came with a code like that, a series of letters and numbers that could be interpreted if you knew what you were looking at. Every person who had a hand in compiling it added their initials and the date to the code. By the time it got to a field agent, the code could take up the entire length of the page. This one was short—one set of initials and one date. One person had compiled the dossier.

I ran my finger over the initials, remembering my conversation with Naomi Ndiaye, searching for anything I might have missed. After a while, I put the dossier back together and clipped the cover into place. I had some answers, but there was only so much I could do without more information.

I pulled out the phone Minka had set up for me and dialed in Naomi’s number. There was a long moment of silence, then an automated voice.

“This number is no longer in service. If you believe you have reached this message in error, please hang up and dial again.”

I jabbed the “off” button and swore. The bitch had changed her number, no doubt to keep me from calling her again.

I figured it was a long shot, but I was running low of options. I punched in the number of the answering service I’d given Martin. When it picked up, I keyed in the pin, expecting to hear the usual snippy recording. “You have no new messages.” Instead, she perkily told me that I had a new message and asked if I’d like to hear it.

“Yes, you stupid bitch,” I muttered.

The recording didn’t like that. “I did not recognize that response,” she said, sounding offended as a recording can sound.

“Yes, please and thank you, with sugar on top and cream on Sundays,” I said.

“One moment, please.”

There was a long few seconds of staticky silence before Martin’s voice came through, sounding younger than I remembered and hushed, as if he were afraid of being overheard.

“Billie, it’s Martin. I think I heard something, or maybe I didn’t. I don’t know. But I had to bring some files to Vance and I went to the bathroom and when I came back, he was on the phone. He didn’t hear me, so I . . . shit, I eavesdropped, okay. I don’t know what it means, but he said the same phrase twice. Toll mash. I know it sounds stupid and I’m probably going to hate myself for even thinking it might help, but I feel bad. I mean, you were always nice to me, Billie. I—I have to go. Toll mash. I hope it helps.”

I pressed “end call” and stared at the phone, rolling the phrase over in my mind. Toll mash. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it might mean. It sounded like a wrestling move or something to do with a chocolate chip cookie.

“Toll mash.” I tried saying it out loud and that didn’t help. I closed my eyes and pictured the letters, but they didn’t look right. Instead of toll mash, I kept picturing something different.

tollemache.

The name was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t remember why. I clapped my hands together to get some warmth back into them, then plugged the word into the search bar of my phone. There were 775,000 results, but the first was what I wanted. Tollemache’s Auctions and Private Sales. Along with Christie’s and Sotheby’s, it was one of the big three auction houses in London, specializing in paintings and jewelry. I pulled up their website and the landing page featured an exquisite Boldini woman in pink satin and tulle. Tollemache’s was traditional, stuffy even. They’d sooner burn the house down than sell contemporary art. No stuffed taxidermy sharks or canvases streaked with menstrual blood for them. They were strictly old-school.

And they meant nothing to us. I’d never even set foot in the place, and to my knowledge neither had any of the others. Tollemache’s was old money, housed in a sagging Tudor building that made Liberty look postmodern. I clicked through the site for maybe a quarter of an hour before I found it.