7. The Other Vane

The call came on a Tuesday evening, three days after Lucian had finished preparing the utility room at Glasswater Lake. He was sitting on his bunk at the reentry center, reviewing the photographs he had taken of Vane's filing cabinet, when his prepaid phone buzzed against his thigh. The number on the screen was one he did not recognize.

He answered with a careful, neutral voice. "Hello?"

"Mr. Ash." The voice on the other end was Kellogg's, dry and papery. "I have something you might want to see."

Lucian sat up straighter. "What kind of something?"

"Not on the phone. Come to the shop. Tonight, if you can. It's time-sensitive."

The line went dead. Lucian stared at the phone for a long moment, his mind sorting through possibilities. Kellogg was not the kind of man who made social calls. If he was reaching out, it meant something had changed. Something that could not wait.

He pulled on his jacket and walked out into the cold March night.

Kellogg's Exchange was dark when he arrived, the front windows shuttered and the neon sign switched off. But the back door was unlocked, and Kellogg was waiting in the cluttered office behind the sales floor. He was not alone.

A woman sat in the chair across from his desk. She was perhaps forty, with dark hair pulled back in a severe knot and eyes that were the color of old copper. She wore a charcoal pantsuit that was too well-tailored for the pawnshop's dusty environs, and she held a leather briefcase on her lap with both hands, as though it contained something dangerous.

"Mr. Ash," Kellogg said. "This is Mrs. Harker. She's a private investigator. She's been looking for you."

Lucian's hand moved instinctively toward the knife in his jacket pocket, but he stopped himself. If this was a trap, he was already in it. Running would only make things worse.

"Looking for me," he repeated. "Why?"

Mrs. Harker spoke for the first time. Her voice was low and precise, with an accent that Lucian could not quite place. "I was hired to find a man who disappeared three months ago. A man named Martin Ash." She paused, letting the name settle in the dusty air. "You can imagine my surprise when I discovered that Martin Ash died in 1983. A car accident. He was five years old."

Lucian said nothing. His heart was beating hard against his ribs, but his face remained still. He had learned, in twelve years of prison, that silence was a weapon.

"I've been tracing the identity for weeks," Mrs. Harker continued. "The birth certificate. The social security number. The driver's license. All of it leads back to this shop, and to Mr. Kellogg here. And Mr. Kellogg, after some persuasion, was kind enough to arrange this meeting."

Lucian turned to Kellogg. The old man shrugged, unapologetic. "She's got connections, Mr. Ash. The kind of connections that make my life difficult. I had no choice."

"Who hired you?" Lucian asked.

Mrs. Harker opened her briefcase and withdrew a photograph. She placed it on the desk and turned it so that Lucian could see. The photograph showed a man in his forties, dark-haired, with a trimmed beard and a leather jacket that Lucian recognized immediately.

Kostya Dragovic.

"I was hired by this man," Mrs. Harker said. "He goes by the name Kostya, but I suspect you already know that. He wanted me to find out who was using the Martin Ash identity. He noticed certain... irregularities in the financial records of a business associate, and he traced those irregularities to a bank account opened under that name. A bank account that has been receiving small deposits from an account controlled by a man named Augustus Vane."

The room seemed to tilt slightly. Lucian gripped the back of a chair to steady himself. Dragovic had noticed. The bank account. The deposits he had been making, the slow accumulation of a financial history for Martin Ash. Dragovic had seen it, and he had traced it, and now he was sending private investigators to find the man behind the name.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Lucian said.

Mrs. Harker smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. "Mr. Ash—or whatever your real name is—I've been doing this work for fifteen years. I can see the dye in your hair. I can see the way you hold yourself, the way you're holding yourself right now, like a man who's expecting a blow. You're not Martin Ash. You're not Augustus Vane. You're someone else entirely. And whatever game you're playing, Kostya wants to know about it."

"Then why isn't Kostya here himself?"

"Because Kostya is careful. He doesn't confront potential threats until he knows exactly what they are. He sent me to gather information. And I've gathered it." She reached into her briefcase again and withdrew a thin folder. "This is a copy of my report. I'm giving it to you as a courtesy. What you do with it is your business."

Lucian took the folder. His hands were steady now, the initial shock giving way to a cold, clear focus. "Why would you give this to me?"

"Because I don't like Kostya. I took his money because I needed it, but I don't like the man and I don't like what he does. And because whatever you're planning—whatever game you're playing with Augustus Vane's identity—it's none of my business. I'm a private investigator, not a police officer. My job is to find things out and report them. What happens after that is someone else's problem."

She stood up and closed her briefcase. "The report goes to Kostya tomorrow morning. You have until then to decide what you want to do."

She walked out of the office without looking back. The door closed behind her with a soft click, and Lucian was alone with Kellogg.

The old man was watching him with an expression that was part curiosity, part wariness. "I didn't know about the investigator when I sold you the documents," he said. "You have to believe that."

"I believe you." Lucian opened the folder and scanned its contents. The report was thorough. It detailed the Martin Ash identity, the bank account, the deposits from Vane's account. It noted the physical resemblance between Lucian and Augustus Vane, and it speculated—correctly—that someone was planning to impersonate the businessman. The only thing it did not contain was Lucian's real name. That, at least, was still hidden.

"You need to disappear," Kellogg said. "Tonight. Before Kostya gets that report."

"I can't."

"Why not?"

Lucian closed the folder. "Because disappearing won't solve anything. Kostya knows someone is trying to take Vane's identity. If I disappear now, he'll keep looking. He'll find me eventually. The only way to stop him is to finish what I started."

Kellogg stared at him for a long moment. Then he shook his head slowly. "You're either very brave or very stupid. I can't decide which."

"Neither can I," Lucian said. He tucked the folder under his arm and walked out into the night.

The streets of Talbott were empty, the shops dark, the streetlights casting pools of yellow onto the wet pavement. Lucian walked without direction, his mind working through the implications of what had just happened.

Dragovic knew. Or he suspected enough that he had hired an investigator to confirm his suspicions. The report would reach him tomorrow morning, and when it did, he would know that someone was trying to steal Augustus Vane's identity. He might not know who, or why, but he would know enough to be dangerous.

And Lucian had less than twelve hours to act.

He found himself at the bus stop on Mill Street, the same stop he had used a hundred times during his surveillance of Vane. The Pennine Holdings building rose in the distance, its top floors lost in the low-hanging clouds. Somewhere inside that tower, or in the townhouse on Chalk Street, or in the apartment at the Strachan Tower, Augustus Vane was living the last night of his life.

Because the decision was made now. The variables had forced it. There was no more time for preparation, no more time for the careful accumulation of details. The moment had arrived, and Lucian would meet it or be destroyed by it.

He took the bus to the reentry center and packed his belongings in the darkness while Garvey slept. The duffel bag. The Martin Ash documents. Vane's suit, still wrapped in plastic. The knife and the gloves and the other tools he had accumulated over months of preparation. He moved quietly, efficiently, a ghost in his own life.

As he was leaving, Garvey stirred. "Croft?" His voice was thick with sleep. "That you?"

"Yes."

"Where you going?"

Lucian hesitated. He could lie, as he had lied so many times before. But something in him—some remnant of the man he used to be—wanted to tell the truth to someone, just once.

"I'm not coming back," he said.

Garvey was silent for a moment. Then he said, "Good."

"Good?"

"Whatever you been planning, whatever you been working toward all these months—I hope you get it. I hope you get out of this place and never look back." He rolled over in his bunk, pulling the blanket up to his chin. "Don't waste it, Croft. Whatever it is. Don't waste it."

Lucian stood in the doorway for a long moment. Then he said, "I won't."

He walked out of the reentry center and did not look back.

The drive to Glasswater Lake took two hours. The roads were empty, the darkness pressing against the windshield like a living thing. Lucian drove in silence, his mind empty of everything except the task ahead.

When he arrived, the lake house was dark. No car in the driveway. No smoke from the chimney. Empty, as he had known it would be. Vane was in the city, sleeping in his townhouse or his apartment, unaware that his death was already in motion.

Lucian let himself in through the basement door and descended into the utility room. The plastic container was where he had left it. The chemicals were arranged in their careful order. The gloves and the respirator waited on a shelf beside the drain.

He stood in the darkness for a long time, breathing the cold, cedar-scented air. Then he went upstairs and sat in Vane's living room, in Vane's chair, looking out at the black water of the lake.

He did not sleep. He did not try. He simply waited for the dawn.

Tomorrow, Augustus Vane would come to the lake house. Lucian knew this because he had studied Vane's routines for months. The man visited the lake house on the third Wednesday of every month, regardless of weather, regardless of season. It was a ritual, a private pilgrimage to the place where his wife had spent her last good summer. Tomorrow was the third Wednesday of March.

Tomorrow, Lucian would be waiting.

But as the hours passed and the darkness began to soften into gray, he found his thoughts turning not to the mechanics of murder but to the photograph he had seen in Vane's apartment and again in his townhouse. The dark-haired woman on the dock. Celia, July 2010. The last good summer.

He had been so focused on the life he was stealing that he had not thought about the life he was ending. Vane was not a hollow vessel. He was a man who had loved someone, and lost her, and spent the years since that loss retreating into solitude and silence. He was a criminal, yes. A drug trafficker. A man who had done terrible things. But he was also a man who had stood on a dock on a summer afternoon and looked at his wife with the unguarded joy of someone who believed that joy would last forever.

And Lucian was going to kill him.

The thought should have stopped him. It should have broken through the ice that had formed around his heart and reminded him that he was still human. But it did not. The ice was too thick. The years of incarceration, the months of preparation, the inexorable logic of his plan—all of it had hardened into something that was beyond feeling.

He was going to do this. He had already done it, in every way that mattered.

The sun rose over Glasswater Lake, painting the water in shades of rose and gold. Lucian watched it from Vane's window, sitting in Vane's chair, wearing Vane's suit.

And he waited.