He and Morley had been a study in contrasts. Ben was a statesman and a gentleman, tall, elegant, and dignified, while Morley was the rumpled, overweight jack-of-all-trades who generally flew by the seat of his pants. Morley relied on intuitive leaps, where Ben operated by the methodical accretion of detail. Morley was quick off the mark and insights came to him intact. At the outset, he couldn’t always justify his position, but nine times out of ten he was right. Ben might come to the same conclusion, but his was a carefully rendered composition, where Morley’s was a quick sketch.

In one expandable file folder, I found a stack of annotated index cards, wrapped with a rubber band that broke the minute I lifted the packet from the depths; Ben Byrd’s bold blue cursive again. He was the one who’d taught me the art of the interview without the use of a notebook or tape recorder. Didn’t matter to him if he was dealing with a client or a culprit, an adversary or a confidential informant. His policy was to listen with his whole being, mind open, judgment held in reserve. He absorbed tone and body language, trusting his memory as the conversation went on. After each exchange, he converted facts and impressions into written form as soon as possible, using index cards to record the bits and pieces regardless of how unimportant they might have seemed in the moment. He was also an advocate of shuffling and reshuffling his makeshift deck of cards, convinced that even a random rearrangement would sometimes suggest a startling new view. Until that moment, I wasn’t even aware how thoroughly I’d absorbed the lesson. I’d forgotten his habit of dating his index cards and decided it might be a smart idea to adopt the practice myself. I could see the virtue of keeping track of the order in which information was acquired along with the content itself.

After that brief detour, I worked quickly, doing a spot check here and there, still hopeful I might find pertinent financial statements. That Pete might slip personal business papers in among agency documents made no particular sense, but I didn’t want to rule out the possibility. The folders themselves were shopworn, tabs ragged and bent, a consequence of the box’s being too shallow for the contents. Since banker’s boxes are designed to accommodate standard-size files, I was perplexed by the poor fit.

I studied the bottom of the empty box, noting that the cardboard “floor” was uneven along the edge. I’d constructed many identical cartons, which arrived in flat packages for assembling in place. There were always tricky diagrams labeled Flap A and Flap B with arrows pointing this way and that. I thought of it as an IQ test for office employees whose job was to pack up documents for long-term storage. The puzzler was that the final flap should have fit seamlessly, and here it did not. I retrieved a letter opener from my pencil drawer and wedged it into the gap, using it as leverage. I cringed at the harsh shriek of cardboard on cardboard, but did succeed in popping out the makeshift rectangle that had been cut to fit.