Under different circumstances, and given her apparent hawkishness, he might have given a summary of his exit. Explained how he’d had some time on his hands during his convalescence, read part of that CIA torture report about Guantanamo. Followed it up with a lot of work by Noam Chomsky—all those books on the cruelty of foreign interventions—and started getting pretty angry. Maybe even tell her that for most of his career, ‘Navy man’ was just a cover, and he’d seen and done a lot of those things that were left off the record. But he figured concision would count as manners in this case, so for now he said, ‘Yeah. Until about eight months ago.’

She nodded again. ‘All right. Well, clearly I need security, and you’ve already proven you’re capable. I’ll retain you at whatever rate my father was paying. If you’re interested, obviously. And if you’re not, that’s absolutely fine.’

‘I’d be more than happy to stay on.’

She seemed to hesitate. Then she said, ‘I need to find who did this.’

‘The police are taking it seriously. The Marshals are involved, too.’

‘I know they are.’ She sat back down on the couch, pushed the sunglasses up on her head. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her lower lids were hung with black spikes of mascara. ‘But I want the answers first.’

He waited.

Erin said, ‘They mentioned what you told me about Freeman. About the thirty million. I didn’t tell this to the police, but when I arrived at the house, I heard him on the phone. I didn’t think about it at the time, but he sounded tense, and he was saying that he couldn’t do something by a given date. He couldn’t comply with some requirement. I only heard part of the conversation.’

Vincent said, ‘You should tell the police.’

‘They’ll pull his call records and find out eventually. I’d just like a head start.’ She paused and said, ‘When you were by the pool, talking to him, I went into his office and took his cell phone. Freeman’s.’

He said, ‘I’m not an investigator.’

‘I’m aware of that. But I get the impression you have a brain in your head.’

He smiled. ‘That’s good.’

She said, ‘I want to find this Gutierrez character, and I want to find everyone involved. And I need someone to keep me safe while I do it. So will you help me?’

All those weeks on the road, turning over in his head the ugly parts of his life, and thinking he had to change direction. And now here he was. But this was different, surely, like he told the Marshal. The ethics of response were clean. She’d been caught in something she had no part in, and now her father was dead and she wanted to know what happened. She needed to know what happened.