It was only six months old, from late the year before. The buyer was a company called New Bourbon Investments LP, which Donny had never heard of. But the seller was AMR. And what they were selling was a majority stake in the company. With all of its assets, and all of its liabilities.

The most interesting thing was, when you flipped to the back, to where they always put the address to mail notices and lawsuits, the address for the buyer was the same as the address of Lecker’s office.

Donny kept digging, looking for more AMR material, but everything else was what he had meant to pull—material on Promethean Resources. And none of that seemed worth his time anymore. Or didn’t, until he found a file containing a five-year-old demand letter from Miles, asserting a different claim than the one Donny had been chasing in the case Miles bequeathed him. It was addressed to both Promethean and Tripto Labs, as affiliated companies. It accused them of violating the labor laws and the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibitions on involuntary servitude. His clients, Miles said, were John and Jane Doe detainees who had been prohibited from organizing their fellow farm laborers. The letter referenced a draft of a lawsuit that was attached, but the attachment wasn’t in the file. And it was dated just a couple of weeks before his death.

Donny copied the text of the letter longhand, on a separate page from his notes about the stock-purchase agreement. And then he tried to think of the fastest way to get back to his office after the hearing.

The engineers were still partying in the lobby when Donny got up from his work, and he decided to join them, thinking maybe a little bit of Bacchus would help him process it all. It was a good while and no small quantity of absinthe later that Donny was singing the vocals to the song he had persuaded the Croatian civil engineer named Dr. Elena to play on her guitar: “Thirteen Tortuga Suite,” from the second solo album by Electric Hephaestus bass player Rodney Jobson. Donny wasn’t sure exactly what the song was about, especially since it was in three totally different parts, but it was something like being a homeless stowaway who finds paradise only to get evicted in the most brutal way. One of those eccentric hits with some staying power, enough that three of the crew knew the song and Donny had them joining in. Who knew absinthe could make you ebullient. But then Donny found himself crying, in the part where it’s hard to tell but it seems the narrator of the song is dead, and then Donny started laughing as he remembered how much Miles hated folk music by white people, especially Rodney Jobson.

That’s when Donny spied Marianne Abboud standing there in the hallway, watching them and smiling.

39

“Hello, Mr. Kimoe,” she said.

“Chief Inspector Abboud,” said Donny.