“He didn’t do the second job. My father did. After Bobby was murdered, my father couldn’t help himself. Donati had told him the details, and he was curious. So, one night, he went ahead. It wasn’t difficult. It wasn’t an art museum. But it was a museum, of sorts. In a house. The oldest one in Boston, in the North End. Nineteen North Square. The house is still there.”

Hailey had looked up for the first time from the eagle in her hands.

“Your father robbed Paul Revere’s house?”

Nick had thought the address had sounded familiar. Growing up in Boston, especially if you’d made it through middle school, some landmarks were hard to avoid.

“Not the whole house. Just a basement library.”

Gail had reached into the trunk and handed Nick the second object. When Nick had unwrapped the towel, he’d found himself holding a small book, the size of a child’s diary, bound in a leather cover.

Stranger still, when he’d opened the book, he’d discovered that the pages weren’t paper. Or not simply paper—each page was gilded in what appeared to be sheets of copper. As he’d leafed through the pages, he’d also found that they were all completely blank.

“Your father was commissioned to steal a book filled with blank pages?”

But Gail had already slammed the trunk shut, heading for the driver’s side door.

“You two are on your own,” she’d said, as she’d gotten into the car. “And don’t take this the wrong way, but I hope I never see either of you again.”

Now, forty minutes later, four subway cars and one crossed river away from that warehouse in South Boston, the two-hundred-year-old bronze eagle was under Hailey’s arm, and the strange book with blank copper pages was tucked in Nick’s back pocket. And they were standing at the front entrance to one of the top math-and-science-focused universities in the country, a veritable mecca for the types of people Nick had pretty much avoided all his life—and Nick had no idea why they were there. But from the moment Hailey had taken the eagle from Gail, and started to inspect it, wings to claws—she’d suddenly changed.

She’d seen something on that eagle that had made her eyes widen and made her breathing go a little funny. Something that had gotten that mind of hers churning and set them off on the six-mile sprint to this place. And no matter how hard Nick had tried, she hadn’t yet let him in on whatever it was.

Nick shifted his gaze back to the stone building.

“You don’t exactly fit the profile,” he finally said.

“What do you mean?”

“No offense, but you don’t scream MIT.”

Hailey smiled.

“Is it the hair?”

“Maybe the way you react to dead bodies.”