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he’d opened the window.”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œAnd nothing. Nothing. Not one print. The window, the doorknobs, the banisters all the way down the whole damn seven flights. The whole place was wiped clean.”

    
7
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    F rom several hundred feet away, another man was watching.
    He’d watched all morning as people came and went through the great swinging doors of Eliot House. He’d watched the television crews jostle for a shot, and the cops try to shoo them away.
    He clenched and unclenched his fingers and then wrapped them tight around the paper cup of tea he’d bought, now cold. His hands would not stop shaking.
    It was done, wasn’t it? Not a perfect plan, admittedly. Such a scramble. But it was done. The boy was dead. He felt reasonably sure thatThomas Carlyle had not had time to tell anyone what he’d heard, not even had time to suspect much.
    But the man couldn’t have taken the risk, could he? Not after all the planning, the years of training and patience and work. One stupid mistake, and it could have unraveled everything.
    Two nights ago the man had tossed and turned in his bed, realizing the gravity of his error. By dawn he had decided: Carlyle must be silenced. And there was only one way to make absolutely certain of that. The man had never killed before. That was not his role in the network. But he could not see a way around it, and there had been no time. He tried to make it look like an accident. Perhaps he had succeeded; it would be some days yet before the autopsy report was finished.
    The turn of events had shaken him. He had committed murder. The man looked down and made another effort to steady his hands. He should not be here, he knew. But he wanted to know what the people investigating the scene looked like. In case they found something. In case they came after him. As, in fact, one of them did.
    But it took her a while.
    He wouldn’t meet her face-to-face until nine days later.

    
8
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    T he third and final time I sneaked into Eliot House was that evening.
    I’d wasted a couple of hours on an awkward and not particularly fruitful attempt to speak to the Carlyle family. They own one of those mansions set back off Brattle Street. Glossy white paint, wide front steps, gas lanterns framing the door. I’d walked the twenty-five minutes from Eliot House and then cringed as I rang the doorbell. I’m not known for timidity when chasing a story, but it seemed in unspeakably poor taste to impose on a grieving family the day after their son had died, to ask . . . What? What could I possibly ask?
    How do you feel?
    Or:
    Why might he have been drinking alone on the roof of his old college dorm last night?
    Or, worse still:
    Do you know of any reason why your son might have wanted to kill himself?
    Awful. Hideous. They didn’t pay me enough to do this.
    I was rehearsing an opening along the lines of How would you like people to remember your son? when the door opened. To my relief, it was not Mr. or Mrs. Carlyle, but a younger man. Perhaps a friend of Thomas’s. Or a family friend. He stepped onto the porch, half-closed the door behind him, and politely informed me that the Carlyles had no comment, no statement, would not be speaking to the press.
    I nodded, tried again. “I understand. I would rather not be troubling you, really. And I’m so sorry for the family’s loss. But I have to do my job, which is to write a story on what happened, and I want to get it right.”
    I was talking fast, hoping he wouldn’t shut the door in my face. “The statement the university put out said he’d just finished a year abroad in England. Was he back living here, at home?”
    The man stood still for a moment, then shook his head. “No. I mean, he hadn’t had time yet. He’d only just landed. He’d been back in the States for all of three hours, we think. His