Sharkey glanced at the paper in his hand as though he might find the answer on it. For a moment the name Stickney meant nothing to him, but Olive had said it earlier, and he knew it was connected to the documents on the table. His mind was not a blank; it pulsed with movement, a swirl of bubbles in water tumbling above him, twisting him deeper, the daylight dimming in the water as he was pressed beneath the wave, losing the ability to know which way to swim, buried alive in the turbulence.

Dazed by the vision, he said, “What was the question?”

Olive repeated it: Stickney. California. Max Mulgrave. The speeding ticket. Clocked at 142 miles per hour.

“That’s cranking,” Sharkey said.

“Remember? Stickney asked what kind of car goes that fast?”

“Muscle car.”

“Look at the ticket,” Olive said. “All these documents contain bare facts. But some facts are more telling than others.”

Sharkey was reading in his usual way, like a blind man, his fingers tracing the surface of the ticket, moving from line to line as though touching Braille dots.

“Ferrari. An ’84 Testarossa,” he finally said. “Where do you get a car like that?”

“The letterhead on the next page might offer a clue.”

Sharkey slipped the photocopy of the ticket aside. His fingers crept toward the bold print at the top of the page, Max Integer—but except for that name, the page was blank.

“Max Integer,” he said, touching the name. “Some kind of company?”

“An integer’s a number. His software company. See the address? Santa Clara. He was one of the pioneers in Silicon Valley. God knows what sort of stuff he made—some kind of software. He must have started the company sometime in the ’70s, after he graduated. The speeding ticket says a lot about his income. It gives his home address in Cupertino. Still there—I Googled it—a mansion behind a wall. And I looked up Max Integer. Symantec offered big money for the company in ’82, papers speculated the purchase price in the tens of millions.”

“He was rich,” Sharkey said, and saying so, he did not know him anymore. As a possible surfer he had a presence, a hard body; as a soldier, a uniform; as a student too he had a certain substance among books and was almost recognizable. But as a millionaire he was an elusive wisp camouflaged by expensive clothes, or sitting in a sports car, or hidden in a villa. That’s how the rich lived—they hid themselves, they were almost unknowable, they were their possessions, cars and clothes and real estate. You never saw one in Hawaii without humungous sunglasses, you never saw one on the North Shore. They hid in Kahala, surrounded by walls, and their gardeners chased you off the beach.

This man had no face, no physicality, he was not flesh; he was money, and money said nothing. Money was camo, it made him inaccessible.