“Think you could pull me some clips?”

“Unless Air Force One crashes, I’ll have plenty of time on my hands,” she said. “What do you need?”

“I’m not really sure,” he said. “I mean I don’t know if the story’s even real, but it kind of rings a bell.” How much did he really have to go on? He rubbed his forehead with his free hand. “Something right after the war. A blue-blood family, name of Hesse. American soldiers looting the family silver. Everything backfired. Something like that.” It was just a jumble of ideas, a tangled junk drawer of memories he hadn’t, for some reason, discarded. “Think that’s enough to go on?”

“Actually, it does sound familiar,” Judy said after a beat. He could hear pencil scribbling on paper. “Might have been around the time I got hired on. Let me see what I can dig up. You still have the same numbers?”

“You have my home and office,” he said. “Let me give you my mom’s cottage. If you don’t find me at the other two, try me there.”

THE BUZZ OF the intercom plucked Keegan from a nervy, shallow dream about being in a barber’s chair. Marilyn had been giving him a manicure while he got his hair cut. She had prattled on and on about her plans for Christmas, but he’d sat there knowing he’d once again spend that day alone in his apartment.

He lifted his head from the desktop, and the room seemed to spin around him.

“Phone call,” Mrs. Dodd’s voice crackled over the intercom’s speaker.

The inner office door was closed, but rather than push the intercom button, he just shouted to her. “I said to hold my calls.”

Mrs. Dodd’s voice came over the intercom again. “You’re going to want this one, boss.”

She put the call through.

“We shouldn’t be talking on the phone,” Keegan told Eve when he heard her small voice on the other end.

“Don’t worry,” she told him. “I’m calling from a booth.” She was telling the truth. Keegan could hear the hum of a crowd and an echoing loudspeaker in the background—some kind of announcement. Was she at Union Station?

“You didn’t go home,” he told her. The room was still slowly pivoting around him, so he let his head fall back against his leather chair and looked up at the ceiling tiles. There was nothing he found more disorienting than being plucked from a deep sleep. “Where did you go after you left my place?”

“I couldn’t go home,” she said. “I couldn’t just leave things the way they were, with you thinking—” She sighed into the mouthpiece and once again didn’t finish her thought. The tone of her voice changed. “My aunt is probably frantic, wondering where I am,” she said.