Mom, it’s me. Sorry, things have been just hectic, as you can imagine. It’s been a terrible week and I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m okay, though. I’m as well as can be expected. I’ll try you again later but there’s so much to do on my end, I don’t know when that will be. Okay. It’s Odessa. Okay. Bye.

And then she sat at her empty desk with nothing to do until it was time to leave.

The next day, they found something for her to do. She was dispatched to the Brooklyn-Queens FBI Resident Agency across the East River, in Kew Gardens. A retired agent had recently suffered a stroke, and her task was to clear out his office. Why a retired agent still had an office, she did not know, but she was certain that, as a rookie agent on desk duty currently under a cloud of investigation, questioning the assignment would not be a good look.

True to form, the office manager at Kew Gardens had no idea Odessa was coming, nor did she know anything about the office in question. She fished out a tray of thirty or so odd keys from a cabinet in the copying room and presented it to Odessa, pointing her to the hallway.

Odessa found the office at the end of a back corridor, kitty-cornered with an emergency exit to the stairs. The door was unmarked and indeed locked. Odessa shook the tray of keys and considered the time it would take to try each one—knowing that, by the Odessa Law of Averages, the correct key would be among the last ones selected. The office door was sufficiently hidden from view of the rest of the office wing, so instead she appropriated a paper clip from a vacant desk, removed a pizza delivery joint’s business-card-size magnet from the break room refrigerator, and used both to pick the simple lock.

The door opened on a room of stale air. There was no window. She flipped the light switch, and the ceiling fixture, a naked bulb, lit for a moment, then flickered and popped. This office hadn’t been used in quite some time.

A desk was empty but for a leatherette desk set; a bookshelf held a few empty three-ring binders, some standing on edge, others lying on their sides; and wall prints featured pale watercolors, which had probably been hanging on the wall when the former occupant moved in.

It looked, appropriately, like the office of a guy playing out his days until retirement. Odessa left the door open for light and moved to the desk, coated by a neat, even patina of soft gray dust. The drawers were mostly empty: paper clips, a tape roll, a letter opener. A nameplate that might have once adorned a similar desk or office door: EARL SOLOMON.