But Vera was so new. Just yesterday he’d had to acquaint her with the oldest of saws. In Washington, he’d explained to her, there were pretty much two ways to find out things: people and paper. People, he warned, could fudge. Paper, made by government—courts, agencies, committees—was worse. You had to use both, flawed as they were, and find where they met, where there was some kind of coinciding about what might possibly have actually happened. But even that wasn’t enough. You had to be more than the young Don Grady—who was basically a busy scrambler. You had to take time to feel your way along the edges back to the center, and to wonder, past the point of patience, what it was you still couldn’t quite believe.

He climbed the steps of his wooden frame house, one of only a few left in this part of the city. It had finally cooled down, after a hot day for September. He heard the approaching wave of a car on the next street, then its braking near what he could now see was a late-model Impala speeding without stopping past the intersection’s blinking red light.

Inside, his old house cracked underfoot, planks reminding him of unseen others who’d tried to live here. It had a history before him of hosting more than a few kinds of runaways. He’d once spent quite some time researching the slave owners who’d chased runaways here and how some of the chased ended up owning a homestead a few doors down. It had been a busy conflux, this alley. Now, in its probably not even final quasi-gentrification, this piece of it was his. He opened a window to let in what he hoped was the first of the fall air, and with it came, just within the range of what he could hear, an airplane, gone almost as soon as he thought he heard it.

The pilot’s crash was still a National story. He would not be able to suggest Vera work it on the side, as Don had worked his break-in those many years past, until the Pentagon reporter on the National staff was done with any reporting Adam, the executive editor, and Martina, the National editor, deemed necessary. So far, the military had withheld the name of the pilot. The Pentagon reporter was too busy with Iraq and Afghanistan. So the Follow to the first story had been on the Metro cover. It got some residents of the Watergate who said they saw the crash. It was mostly heard-a-noise quotes. The after-the-boomboom talk was a hash. Each contradicted each. In Stanley’s estimation, they had seen something on television about the crash and mashed it into a memory they called their own. Time had taught him that eyewitnesses had bad eyes and made even worse witnesses.