Confidential

Carter could hear the ruckus in the precinct lobby all the way upstairs at her desk.

Snatches of sleep during another fitful night had left her edgy and irritated with the world. The two bottles of beer she had self-prescribed as a sleep tonic had given her a minor headache, a dry mouth, and no real rest.

Worry married to inaction was a toxic combination for her system.

Maybe this was a summer cold coming on. Or maybe this ten day silence was way too long for the reasons to be anything but grim.

This morning, she felt tired and dispirited and just didn't want to investigate the bellowing that echoed up the tile staircase to the squad room. She assumed that the shouting didn't concern her.

She was wrong.

Fusco ambled to her desk with a smile quirking his lips.

"Carter, you gotta take better care of your C.I.s. There's one of them downstairs now giving hell to the desk sarge. And asking for you. "

"Who is it?"

"How the hell would I know who the bums are you got on a string?"

Carter pushed aside her paperwork, powered down her computer as she always did now when she left her desk, and descended to the dingy front lobby. There she saw one of her long-time confidential informants engaged in a vigorous shouting match with the young desk sergeant. The woman was tall, rangy, with matted hair knotted into dreadlocks that trailed half-way down her back. Her mahogany skin was smoothly stretched across her sharply angled cheekbones and high forehead. Despite the layers of dust colored fabric draped over her form, her skin glistened liked an oiled wooden sculpture in the morning sun.

When she saw Carter approach, the woman clapped her mouth shut and ran for the glass doors, clouds of clothing flapping around her as she escaped. Carter sprinted outside and paused at the top of the steps to survey the street.

She watched her informant push a shopping cart rapidly toward the corner, the vehicle stuffed to overflowing with brightly colored fabrics. Not bothering to wait for the light to change, the woman crossed against several irate drivers and with long strides headed to the park opposite the precinct building.

Carter caught up with the woman in front of Sammy's hot dog stand, a permanent fixture on the block.

"Odette, why're you running away from me?"

"I don't want to see you."

"What do you mean? You came to my office to see me, didn't you?"

"Oh, yeah. I guess I did."

Odette tossed her locks across her shoulders in imperious fashion and looked down at Carter.

"Well, forget it. I don't want to see you now."

Carter sighed at the woman's skewed logic and tried again. After years of frustrating interactions, Carter knew that a roundabout style worked best with this one.

"Odette, can I buy you a hot dog? You know you like Sammy's dogs better than any other in the whole city."

"Yeah, his are definitely the best. O.K. Get me two, with mustard, extra onions and sauerkraut. And a large Coke. And large fries too, with ketchup and vinegar on 'em like before."

This was going to take a long time, Carter could see.

In her heyday, Odette had been the most sought-after fitting model on Seventh Avenue. Her perfectly proportioned size six body had been the figure upon which apparel empires had been launched.

After a decade of adulation, the revolving whims of the business and the ravages of a ferocious cocaine habit had relegated Odette to the streets.

Her current full-time occupation was collecting discarded haute couture which she pulled from the rubbish bins of the rich and famous. Odette still had a discriminating eye for cut and texture. So the colorful pile in her grocery cart was a rolling encyclopedia of fashion's past glories and boldest experiments.

Odette was well into her second hot dog before Carter tried again to broach the subject of her visit to the station house.

"So, Odette, I haven't seen you in a long time. Where you been keeping yourself?"

"I've been around, Joss, just around, like usual. Uptown, Downtown, all around the town. Isn't that a song? Or is it East Side, West Side, all around the town? How does it go?"

Odette began humming merrily to herself.

Carter wanted her C.I. to start tracking this conversation. She was sure that Odette had not come by to see her on an idle whim, no matter how addled her mind was. In the past, the older woman's tips had been invaluable in locating runaway teens, forming leads on prostitution rings and murder suspects, even helping bust a bank heist before it happened.

"You got something new for me, Odette?"

Carter watched as the woman's dim brown eyes focused on a tree to the left of the bench where they sat. She could see Odette trying to put together what she had seen with what Carter might need.

"You remember how you asked me to look out for a woman for you, a woman as tall as me but with a face just like yours?"

Her sister. Carter nodded and braced in anticipation of bad news, but the response was worse.

"Well, I didn't see her yet. I'm still trying for you, honey, so keep the faith. I'll find her for you, you can count on me."

Carter let go of a sigh she didn't know she was holding. Now Odette was coming to the point, she was sure.

"And then later, I don't remember how much later, you told me to look out for a white man. You said he was taller than me, skinny, with long salt and pepper hair and strange blue eyes. You remember that, do you?"

"Yes, Odette, I do. But you don't have to look for that guy any more. I found him."

Odette carefully folded the silver foil from her two hot dogs into neat squares and added them to the assemblage of textiles in her shopping cart.

Then she turned her eyes, focused and bright now, on Carter's face.

"You mean you know where he is right now, this second?"

"Well, no. Not really."

Could this disconnected, distracted woman read minds? How could she know Carter was looking for him? That Reese had been missing for over ten days. That he had dropped all contact with her. That just the night before Finch had asked for her help in locating his partner?

"Well, honey, I seen him. Today. I knew it was your man because of the eyes. His hair was cut short like a convict, but he had those crazy gorgeous silver eyes, just like you said."

Carter proceeded with caution, not wanting to spook Odette now that she was giving information that mattered.

"O.K., that's good, Odette, real good. Can you tell me where you saw him? I need to find him."

"No address for that place, ya know. But I can take you there."

The woman leaped up as if galvanized by her new mission. Off she loped with long swinging steps, down a winding road through the park, pushing her cart before her. Carter trotted behind, the headache, the tension, the uncertainty pounding an irregular tattoo in time to her footsteps.

Ten days earlier

Carter wanted the dinner to seem like a spur of the moment thing, like something she had invented on the spot. But she wasn't really spontaneous. Ever. And she was sure Reese would realize that the invitation to her apartment was a carefully planned maneuver when he saw what was on the menu.

She was not much of a cook. As the second daughter, younger by seven years, she had never had a chance to learn much from her mother whose talents in the kitchen were fabled. Inez Jr. was the golden child, the whiz bang cook, the perfect everything. Inez Jr. was the one who could effortlessly make amazing dishes from scratch as easily as she had picked up the skills from their mother, aunts, and grandmother.

As an adult, Joss had managed to master a single meal she could prepare from scratch: red rice with shrimp and smoked sausage, served with a side of mixed collard and mustard greens. She made the required cornbread from a box, even though her mother clucked and said the cornbread was the easiest part of the meal. The bakery down the street supplied the chocolate layer cake her aunt would have whipped up from scratch.

Carter could also fix a pretty good plate of fried chicken if pressed, but that seemed too cliché for a first dinner at home.

So she asked Reese to stop by her apartment on Saturday night to give her all day to prepare the meal. She didn't exactly tell Taylor her plans, but she did encourage him to see The Avengers again that evening with his friends. She gave him extra money so that he could buy a large bucket of popcorn for that girl, Araceli, if he wanted to.

Carter knew that Reese had been to her apartment before. Without an invitation. She had seen the signs of his presence in her home: magazines re-arranged, pillows plumped up, pictures straightened and dusted off. These indications were so blatant, she assumed he wanted her to know he had been there. Surveillance as some kind of backwards sign of his interest in her, she supposed.

The fact that she knew he had been in her bedroom gave her a strange erotic charge. She imagined his weight on her bed, wondered if he had turned on the lamp on the side table, guessed he had inspected her collection of antique fragrance bottles.

She found that she didn't mind these domestic images of Reese flitting through her thoughts as she peeled and deveined the shrimp and grilled the smoked sausage for her dinner. She didn't mind them at all.

She was showered and through one glass of white wine by the time he arrived. She fumed that he was late. But she realized that she hadn't specified a start time, so she couldn't really complain about his setting his own schedule for the evening.

Especially when he showed up in that pale blue dress shirt, jeans and a worn brown leather jacket. The helmet he left on the hall table indicated he had come by motorcycle, which made her feel particularly warm inside.

Carter's hosting skills were rusty. She knew her grandfather would have drunk buttermilk with this country meal, her father preferred Pabst Blue Ribbon, and her mother sipped Champagne with everything, whether down home or haute cuisine.

So while she finished cooking, she offered Reese the Pabst, which he accepted like it was part of a sacred rite, leaning back against the counter in her tiny kitchen with a solemn gaze and sparkling eyes. He filled up her kitchen with his size and his intensity. While she sautéed the shrimp, he stared steadily at her with what she hoped was blue-eyed awe, but which she suspected was amusement.

If he said anything in mockery, anything at all, she was going to throw a plate at him, she vowed. He wisely said nothing.

When he finished the first bottle of beer, he excused himself from the overheated kitchen. She could hear him puttering around the apartment, first in the living room, then the dining room, then back to the entrance hall in a seemingly random pattern.

Returning to the kitchen, he went directly to a lower cabinet and retrieved a box of plastic zip-lock bags. Turning his jeans' pockets inside out, he dumped a collection of listening devices onto the butcher block countertop. He filled one sandwich-sized bag with the bugs and took a second bag with him on another excursion around the apartment.

Carter was not nearly as shocked as she should have been.

For some time, she had assumed that the vigilante partners had placed bugs in her apartment. To spy on her movements, to protect her, to make sure she didn't rat on them to the cops or CIA or FBI or whatever other agency they had antagonized. She was sure the combination of motives and excuses for this invasion of privacy shifted in their minds on a daily basis. She prayed that Reese had stopped short of installing actual surveillance cameras, but she couldn't be one hundred percent sure of that.

When he didn't return to the kitchen after ten minutes, she went to inspect. He couldn't possibly have placed that many bugs in the bedrooms, could he?

She found him sitting on her bed, the drawer of the side table overturned on the floor.

She knew what he had found.

The picture of him with Jessica.

He didn't raise his head at her entrance. Only kept staring at the photo in his hands. The picture of him with Jessica.

Laughing, beautiful, dead Jessica.

"How long have you had this?"

"About six weeks."

"You kept a picture of me for six weeks and never mentioned it?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I didn't know how to give it to you. Or what to say."

"Because you knew it was an invasion of my privacy."

"I thought you might see it that way."

"I see it that way because it is that way."

"I don't know what to say, John."

"Where did you get this?"

"Jessica's mother let me look through some boxes of her things. I found this in her jewelry box."

"Why did she let you do that?"

"I don't know. Maybe she wanted to talk about her daughter, keep the memories alive, share her with someone."

She saw his shoulders roll forward and his back shudder with a suppressed sob.

"John, talk to me."

"Nothing to say."

Clutching the picture in his hand, he stalked to the front hall. She followed him down the stairs and out into the street. He was buckling the chin strap on his helmet, already astride the bike, when he finally looked directly at her.

His eyes blazed with unshed tears, the lines around his mouth deepened into ridges of anger or disgust.

"Ironic, isn't it?"

He spat out the bitter observation and plunged into the inky night without waiting for a reply.

When Finch called her a week and a half later, Carter could hear the panic pinging in his voice. He asked to meet in their usual spot, a trucker bar whose dubious clientele gave a wide berth to the bookish man and his cop friend.

Finch said he had not seen or heard from Reese in ten days. He had checked Reese's usual haunts, his old place, the new apartment too, but they revealed nothing. The cell phone was dead.

"When you find him, Detective, please give him this."

Finch pushed a long white envelope across the table to her. The handwritten address on the front indicated an apartment in a street bordering Chinatown. She felt the hard lumpy contents of the envelope as she folded and stuffed it into her pants' pocket.

Carter struggled for several blocks to keep up with the swift Odette. High-heel pumps and short strides, no matter how practical or athletic, were no match for the other woman's long legs and flat sandals.

"Look, I'll pay for the taxi. We can't walk all the way there."

"How can you say that, when you don't know where we're going?"

Odette waved her long arms to indicate her precious cart and its contents.

"Anyway, you don't expect me to leave my stuff here unprotected, do you? Somebody might steal it."

After two more blocks, however, the confidential informant suddenly stopped and turned on her handler.

"You can't go where we are going dressed like that. You look like a cop pretending to be a stripper pretending to be a cop. Come here, let me fix you up."

Carter didn't know if Odette was motivated by pity or self-protection, but she was grateful for the intervention.

After rummaging in her cart for a few moments, Odette produced several items and gestured at Carter to put them on.

So, without ceremony and in broad daylight on a Manhattan street corner, Carter took off her navy blazer and her pumps and put on the things Odette had selected: the featherweight linen tunic fell almost to her knees. It was matched to a longer duster in mouse-gray tones with an ombre pattern shading to deep slate toward the hem; the brown leather men's tennis shoes had orange laces and were exactly her size. Wound twice around her neck, a long scarf striped in taupe and turquoise with a lemon yellow accent completed the outfit.

Odette surveyed her work and abruptly pulled the elastic band from Carter's ponytail and ran her hands over the crown to rough up the strands.

"Now, you look fine, honey."

The two bag ladies ambled on in companionable silence for many more blocks, unnoticed by the noontime crowd. The jangling cart they pushed in front of them, its gaudy contents teetering precariously, was the only remarkable thing about the pair.

When her guide stopped at last in front of an abandoned warehouse, Carter was taken by surprise. She had been so lulled by the rhythm of their silent ramble and the weight of her exhaustion and worry that she had lost track of the surroundings. She didn't know how much time had passed or what street they were now entering. They were still somewhere in her city, but in a section and a setting she had never explored.

Odette parked her cart just inside the doorless entrance among a grove of stray oak saplings and led the way up a flight of shaky stairs. Carter pressed her hand to the brick wall to steady her ascent.

When she walked through the door frame at the second floor landing, she paused to take in the expansive floor of bleached wooden planks stretching almost a city block in front of her. Wind gusted through the high arches that lined both sides of the broad space. There were no panes in the immense windows and the unfiltered sunlight cast bold yellow buttresses that seemed to prop up the double height walls. The dust, humidity and above all the stillness of the place reminded Carter of the majestic cathedral she visited from time to time on Fifth Avenue.

Figures clustered at regular intervals along both walls. The distances separating the huddled groups seemed designed to uphold a kind of rudimentary privacy. Mattresses, barrels, folding chairs, wooden crates served as furniture.

Odette led her charge toward a motley clutch of men and women gathered half way down the room's great length.

Carter saw Reese before he spotted her.

He was crouched low, balancing on the balls of his feet in apparent ease, nodding at a woman's animated conversation. She was seated on a mattress before him, her legs straight out in front of her. His eyes tracked the movements of the woman's face with keen interest and the wrinkles around them contracted in open amusement.

He was happy.

Her heart clenched to see him again. It seemed like it had been forever. When had ten days separation become forever in her world?

As she always did now when she met him, Carter quickly surveyed his body for signs of injury. No gashes or bruises at the brow, cheekbones, or chin. No cuts or swelling along the lips. No abrasions on the knuckles. His eyes seemed clear and his balance was steady. His winter pallor had been burnished by the summer sun.

He was alright.

"That's your man, isn't it? With the crazy gorgeous eyes, right? I did it, hunh? I found him for you."

Odette seemed anxious to be right. Her prize was more than a cash reward, it was the satisfaction of a job well done, accomplishment acknowledged, promises kept.

"Yeah, you did it, Odette. That's him."

At this last exchange, Reese had looked up and recognized her.

He stood and approached her with an easy stride. She cringed, invisibly she hoped, but he didn't seem angry or distressed or even greatly surprised to see her.

She wanted to speak first, before he got off a quip or an accusation or something else to throw her from her purpose.

When he stood in front of her at last, she spoke.

"I am sorry. You know that, don't you?"

"I know."

She couldn't think of anything else to say so she remained quiet with her head bowed.

He lifted the end of the scarf from her breast and rubbed its frayed strings between his long fingers.

"That's quite an outfit you've got there."

"My stylist hooked me up."

She smiled toward Odette, who executed an elaborate curtsey which ended with her dreadlocks and gauzy robes sweeping the floor.

The woman Reese had been talking with approached them and stood at his right shoulder. She wore the long black overcoat he had used all winter, its hem puddling on the floor around her. Her hair retained a hint of its original red and her pale flaking cheeks framed blue eyes that Carter found disconcertingly frank and critical.

"This the girl, John?"

"Yes. Joan, this is Joss. Joss, Joan."

Before he could complete the hand gesture between them, Odette mimicked the introduction in a lilting singsong:

"Joss/Joan. Joan/Joss, Joss/Joan. Joan/Joss/John."

"That's enough, Odette." Joan had the natural authority of a veteran commander.

She focused her attention again on Carter and stared with renewed intensity.

"I've seen you before."

"Joan, that's not possible." Reese spoke with a tenderness Carter had never heard him use. "Joss has never been here before. You know that."

"I have seen her. And she is dead."

Reese frowned at this declaration, but Odette moved swiftly into action. She stepped in front of Joan, inserting her tall frame between the two women. Without touching Joan, she carefully crowded the older woman's personal space, forcing her to back up. With Odette pressing forward and Joan inching backwards, the pair moved crab-like toward their mattress.

When they were out of earshot, Reese turned to Carter.

"Don't pay her any mind. Joan has good days and bad days."

"I think I know what she is talking about."

He waited for her to explain.

"But I'm not going to go there today, John. I just can't."

To divert his attention, she reached into her pocket and retrieved the envelope Finch had handed her.

"Harold asked me to give this to you."

Reese took the envelope and slit it open with a single stroke.

He removed a crumpled half-sheet of lined paper. After reading it, he passed the paper to her. It was a receipt from an upholstery company acknowledging payment in full of $8, 626 for the purchase of fabric, sewing, and installation of residential window curtains. The Chinatown address for the work was the same as she had seen on the front of the envelope.

Across the bottom of the receipt was a signature in Finch's tight handwriting: Harold Wren.

Reese held the envelope by one corner and shook it. Out fell a dozen small electronic listening devices. They made a sound like fingernails clicking on a wooden desk as they scattered across the floor. He made no attempt to pick up the bugs or examine them further.

Another shake of the envelope yielded its final contents. The carcasses of three cockroaches, medium sized by New York standards, tumbled to the floor. They lay, shiny and brown, among their relatives from the apartment.

"Ironic, isn't it?" Reese repeated his observation of the other night, whether to her or to himself, Carter wasn't sure.

They turned to watch Joan and Odette, their two confidential informants, continuing a lively conversation as they sat on the mattress they called home.

"What did you do with the photo?" The question had been pounding in her brain for almost two weeks.

"I showed it to Joan." He nodded toward a blackened steel drum at the far end of the cavernous room.

"Then we burned it. Private stays private."

Lost in thoughts shared or divergent, the two waited for a few beats in silence. Then, taking Carter's arm at the elbow, Reese steered her down the brick staircase and out into the fading daylight of their city.