Two hours later, we were no closer to finding details of the hit Koslov had witnessed. Evelyn had put Maggie and Frances on it, to see whether their Nikolaev contacts knew anything.

“What about Little Joe?” Jack said as we ate dinner.

“The same Little Joe who laid a marker on my head? Oh, yeah, there’s the guy you want to chat up about Nikolaev history.”

“He’ll talk.”

“After excusing himself to go call the next name on his list? Or will he try a new tactic this time?”

“Nah. Not that creative. He’ll stick to hitmen.”

“That’s comforting.”

“We can handle it.”

“We?”

“Yeah. Need your help. It’ll be okay. Safe.” When I didn’t respond, he added, “No miniskirts.”

“I’ll think about it.”

I saw the note the moment I walked into my room. It wasn’t obvious, a small square of paper partly tucked under the bedside lamp. But when I stepped in, I automatically did a visual sweep. And so I saw the note—something that had not been there before.

I unfolded it. A newspaper article on white copy paper, printed from the Internet. I knew it came from Evelyn. Anything Jack wanted to convey to me, he’d say. Language might not be his forte, but I couldn’t imagine him communicating any other way—certainly not through clandestine notes in my bedroom.

My gaze went first to the headline: “Accused Pedophile Freed.”

I sat on the edge of the bed and read the rest of the article. It was taken from a Wisconsin paper and detailed the sort of crime that, while it makes headline news locally, rarely goes further, not because it is insignificant but because, quite simply, it happens too often to qualify as news.

A middle-aged man, leader of some youth organization, had been accused of molesting boys on camping trips in a list of crimes stretching back a decade, resulting—the prosecution had claimed—in two victim suicides. He was also believed to own a lucrative online child pornography business, and the police had found boxes of evidence in his home.

Unable to prove the business allegations, they’d settled for possession of child pornography, plus the molestation charges. Nothing stuck. His lawyer claimed the porn had been illegally seized, and a judge had agreed. That then excluded all photographic evidence of his molestation crimes from the trial. Left with only victim testimony—from boys who’d gone on to have their own run-ins with the police, psychiatric problems and substance abuse issues—a jury had decided this fine, upstanding citizen was being railroaded by ungrateful juvenile delinquents. Case closed.

Not an unusual story, though that didn’t keep my hands from clenching on the paper as I read it. Then I read the small yellow paper attached to the bottom. A sticky note with numbers on it. A figure: $100,000.

I understood what I was holding. A job offer.