The PowWow

She picked up on the second ring.

"You have something," she said. Not a question. Rachel operated on the assumption that I didn't call without a reason, which was accurate, and that the reason was usually case-related, which was also accurate, and occasionally she was wrong about that last part, which was the part neither of us had found a clean way to discuss yet.

"I need to know what the department has on a missing person," I said. "Evelyn Marsh. Sixty-seven. Reported two days ago."

A pause. Keys. The particular sound of Rachel's workstation being consulted with the focused efficiency of someone who treated every database as a personal affront until it gave her what she needed.

"Where do you want to meet?" she said.

The walkway along the river was Rachel's choice, which meant it had always been Rachel's choice, which meant after four months it had become the choice — the geography we defaulted to without discussing it, the place that had accumulated enough of our conversations that it had started to feel like ours in the specific way that places feel like yours when you've said important things in them.

She was already there when I arrived. This was also her pattern. Rachel was constitutionally incapable of being the second person anywhere, which I had stopped mentioning because it made her do it more deliberately.

The evening was cool, the river moving steadily alongside the path, the lights of the city reflected in long broken lines across the surface. Downstream, maybe a quarter mile, an old boathouse sat at the edge of the bank — weathered timber, low roof, the kind of structure that had been there long enough to look like it had grown rather than been built. It was dark tonight. It was usually dark. It had the particular stillness of something forgotten that had decided to make peace with being forgotten.

Rachel walked with her hands in her jacket pockets, her professional posture slightly softened by the hour and the air and the fact that there was nobody here to perform competence for. This was the other thing about the river path. It was why she liked it, I thought — the dependable serenity of it. The river didn't care about cases or jurisdictions or what the department did or didn't have. It just moved. It had been moving here before any of this and would be moving here after, and something in Rachel seemed to find that stabilizing in a way she would never say out loud. Somewhere along the way, her hand found mine, which was always my favorite part of our walks.

"Evelyn Marsh," she said, without preamble. "Sixty-seven. Widow. Reported missing by her daughter forty-eight hours ago." She looked at the path ahead. "No card activity since the afternoon she left. Phone went dark around the same time — no pings, no location data, nothing. Last confirmed sighting is a neighbor who saw her leaving on foot." She paused. "We have almost nothing, Levi. She's a ghost."

"No leads at all?"

"One canvas. Nothing useful. She didn't tell anyone where she was going, didn't leave a note, didn't mention plans." Rachel's jaw tightened slightly — the particular tightening of someone who found incomplete pictures professionally offensive. "She just stopped."

I nodded. Let it sit for a moment.

"Why are you asking?" she said.

"Client came to us this morning. Daughter. Margaret Hollis."

Rachel looked at me then. The professional assessment running its sequence. "And?"

"Evelyn attended a taping of Beyond the Veil three days before she disappeared. Came back unsettled. Wouldn't tell her daughter what was said."

Rachel's face did the thing it did with things she found professionally inconvenient. Not dismissal — Rachel had stopped dismissing things that came through me a case and a half ago. More like the careful composure of a woman deciding how much professional distance to maintain between herself and information that was going to make her paperwork complicated.

"Elias Crane," I said.

"I know who Elias Crane is." She looked back at the river. "I've also got nothing that connects him to a missing person."

"I know."

"Which means I can't do anything with that."

"I know that too."

She glanced at me. Something in the glance acknowledged that she understood what I wasn't saying, and that she wasn't saying it either, and that this was the working arrangement we had arrived at through considerable negotiation neither of us had technically agreed to out loud.

I didn't push. There was nothing to push on. She had given me what she had, which was considerable given that she had no official reason to give me anything, and what she hadn't said was filed alongside what she had in the part of my mind that kept track of Rachel Stryker.

That part was getting full.

She called me last Tuesday. Not about a case. Just to talk — the particular kind of call that starts with something inconsequential and doesn't end there, the kind that runs forty minutes without either person noticing. She'd been doing that more lately. And I had been doing the same, if I was being honest, which I tried to be even when it was inconvenient.

I had told her I was falling for her, on a search during the Cross case, and she had said she was falling too. Which should have been the beginning of something. Probably was. But since then we had been existing in a particular kind of limbo that I didn't have a clean name for — still meeting, still talking, still the river path and the comfortable geography — which was the word for where we were, comfortable.

I wasn't going to push.

Progress was made by moving forward, not by looking directly at things that weren't ready to be looked at yet. And I had the distinct feeling that Rachel was not yet ready to look forward. Something in her was still working something out, the way she worked things out — carefully, privately, on her own schedule. She would get there. I believed that about her in the same way I believed things Jeremiah said — not because I could prove it, but because it had the quality of truth.

In the meantime, there was the river path. And the Tuesday calls. And the particular warmth of being someone Rachel Stryker called when she didn't need to.

That was not nothing.

We reached the bend in the path where it curved back toward the parking area. The boathouse sat behind us now, dark and quiet against the bank, the river moving past it with the same indifference it brought to everything.

"I'll let you know if anything changes on our end," Rachel said.

"I appreciate it."

She looked at me for a moment — just a moment, the professional composure present but muted. She was comfortable with me, which on one hand was exhilarating and on the other mildly maddening.

"Be careful with Crane," she said. Not official. Just that.

"Always," I said.

She nodded. Turned back toward the lot. I watched her go for a second — the straight-backed walk, the hands back in her jacket pockets, the particular self-possession of a woman who had decided something about the evening and was keeping it to herself.

I filed that too. Along with everything else.

Then I turned toward the Highlander and called Jacob.

"Crane," I said when he picked up.

"Yes," he said. He'd been waiting for it. Of course he had.

"We need tickets to a taping."

A pause. "Jeremiah," he said.

"That was my thought."

He hung up. I got in the car.

The river moved behind me, patient and indifferent and entirely reliable, the way it always was.

I understood why she liked it here.