He took the stairs to the third floor of Majid’s building. He always took the stairs, free exercise without going to a gym, feeling virtuous. The door to Sterling Wealth Management was unlocked. The reception area was empty.

“Majid?” Rafe called. The door to Majid’s office was shut. Rafe knocked. No answer.

“Majid?”

There was one other office, Majid’s partner’s, Ron something. Rafe rapped on that door and it swung open. There was nobody inside.

He didn’t see it at first. He had already started to turn to leave when his eye went to something flesh-colored on the dark gray carpet. If the carpet had been beige he mightn’t have noticed.

It was a hand, with a silver ring on the little finger. Stupidly, he thought that Ron something might be taking a nap, and he started to back away. But then—on the floor? It could be a heart attack. Rafe moved into the office. There was a phone on the desk. He could use it to call an ambulance.

And then he saw the rest of Ron. Sprawled on his back. Not moving. It could have been an oddly-placed nap, or a heart attack. Except for the blood pooling behind his head, a dark and blotchy puddle.

Questions

QUESTIONS

The police found Majid at Catherine’s apartment. They didn’t say how. Geolocation on his phone? They did say they had been to his apartment first. They treated him with the respect owed to a well-to-do Arab resident in Geneva, of which there were many—the diplomats, the tourists, the “Gulfies” who took over entire floors of the most expensive hotels with their wives and children and Malaysian nannies in the summer when their homelands were unbearable.

When Majid asked why they wanted to see him, they asked him to step into the bedroom, away from Catherine, so they could have a private conversation. There were two of them and they were very polite, a large man in his fifties with a gray crew cut and a small woman in her thirties who took lots of notes. But she looked up from her notebook so that both she and her partner could watch Majid’s reaction when they told him his partner was dead.

If Majid’s reaction—surprise, disbelief, perhaps a little lacking in visible sorrow—was to their minds incriminating, the detectives did not show it. They answered his first questions. Where? The office. When? Probably late last night. How? That was being examined. Why? They turned that question around. Did Sterling Wealth Management keep cash on its premises? No. Did Sterling Wealth Management have any clients who were mécontents? No. Did Ronald Mayfield have any personal enemies? None that Majid knew. Did he know anyone who might know? No. Where was he last night? Here, with Ms. Cole.