The conference room had no windows. It never did. Adrienne Vasquez ran her unit out of the kind of rooms where light was a security risk, where the recessed bulbs hummed at a frequency you only noticed after thirty minutes, and by then you had usually said something you wouldn't have said in daylight.

I sat down across from her and looked at the folder on the table. One folder. Three photographs already laid out beside it, face up, in the order she wanted me to read them.

"Don't pick them up yet," she said. "Just look."

I looked.

Three women. Two white, one Indian. All between twenty-seven and thirty-four. All photographed in their homes, post-mortem, by department photographers who had been instructed to be careful with the staging because the staging was the case.

I let my eyes do the inventory the way she'd trained me. Hands. Wrists. Mouths. The angle of necks. The texture of the bedding under each one. The lighting in each room — not the photographer's lighting, the lamps the killer had chosen to leave on. He liked low warmth. He liked one lamp in each room, on the side away from the bed, casting the body in long shadow.

"Solo play accidents," I said.

"That's what they want us to call them."

"Three in a row?"

"Three so far."

"And you're showing me because?"

Adrienne looked at me. Adrienne had a face that did almost nothing, deliberately. She was forty-eight, Black and Latina and entirely her own jurisdiction within the LAPD. She had built The Vault — our unit that wasn't a unit — from a series of favors and a short list of people who could do the work without filing the paperwork. She had recruited me into it at thirty-three. She had also, four years later, signed off on a report that wasn't strictly true.

"Because of the third one," she said. She tapped the photograph closest to her without looking down at it. "Priya Mehta. Hancock Park. Coroner found a fiber under her index fingernail. White leather. The bedding in her apartment was all gray cotton. The robe she was wearing — also cotton. She didn't get that fiber from her own house."

"Where does white leather appear?"

"It appears," she said, "in a very small number of homes in Los Angeles."

"You have a name."

She didn't answer that. She turned the folder around and slid it toward me. I opened it. The first page was a single sheet of letterhead from a law firm I recognized — old money, old discretion. The kind of letterhead that meant the man whose name was on the next page was insulated by exactly the kind of armor that the LAPD found indigestible.

I read the name.

Then I sat very still for a moment, because the name was familiar, and the familiarity was not pleasant, and Adrienne was watching me to confirm what she already knew about me — that I'd been close enough to this scene three years ago that names like this one would still light up.

"Dominic Vayne," I said.

"Yes."

"He was at the periphery of Mercer's network."

"He was. We never had anything on him then. We don't have enough on him now. What we have is a fiber, four dead women, and an event calendar that overlaps the death timelines too precisely to call a coincidence."

I closed the folder.

"You need someone inside."

"I need someone he doesn't know. Mercer's people would have made you on sight. Vayne never met you face to face — you were too far down the chain. You can be reintroduced as someone new. Someone new with credibility."

I waited.

"I want to give you a partner," she said. "A rookie. Someone the scene has never seen, no fingerprints in the community, no possibility of cross-recognition. You build a cover dynamic with him, you go in as a couple, you work your way up to Vayne's circle. The interview process at his estate — that's where he selects them. We need eyes on it from inside the dynamic he's reading."

"A rookie."

"Yes."

"How rookie."

"He's been on the job two years. Came in late. He was a high school teacher before."

I let one small, dry laugh out, almost involuntarily. "Adrienne."

"He's the right one, Candi."

"You're going to ask a man who taught AP Lit two years ago to convincingly play a Dominant in front of Dominic Vayne."

"I'm going to ask you," she said, "to make him convincing."

The hum of the lights changed pitch slightly, the way it always did when the building's power load shifted. I stared at the closed folder and thought about exactly what she was asking and exactly what would have to happen in a hotel room somewhere in this city for a man who had never set foot in a kink club to be able to walk into one of Vayne's events with the kind of authority Vayne would believe.

I thought about Mercer, briefly, and then I put it away.

"What's his name?" I asked.

She handed me a second folder.

The photograph clipped to the inside cover was a face I had not seen before. Sandy brown hair, hazel eyes, a face that was, in the most simple and unembroidered way, kind. The notes underneath were standard issue. Detective Jace Carter. Twenty-eight. Top fifteen percent of his academy class. Excellent communication, excellent rapport with witnesses, no close calls in the field. One commendation from a domestic violence call where he had de-escalated a man with a gun by sitting on the floor and asking him about his daughter.

I read the file twice.

"He's never going to survive this," I said.

"He's going to survive this," Adrienne said, "because you're going to make sure of it."

I looked at her. She looked back. We had been having versions of this conversation for fifteen years and they always ended the same way.

"When do you need me to start?"

"Tomorrow morning. Conference room B. He'll be there at nine. He doesn't know what the assignment is yet — only that he's been seconded to a specialized unit for the duration of an active investigation. I'll do the introductions. You take the meeting from there."

I nodded.

I took both folders with me when I left.

In the parking garage I sat in my car for ten minutes before I started the engine, and I did not look at either folder, and I did not think about Mercer, and I did not think about the woman I had been three years ago when I came home from the last op and sat on my own kitchen floor for an hour because every surface in my apartment felt foreign.

I thought, instead, very carefully, about logistics.

I would need a hotel suite. A specific one. The Meridian, probably — the corporate suite was already on a long-term lease through one of our shells, and the soundproofing had been arranged the year before for a different op that hadn't materialized. I would need a wardrobe budget for both of us, a cover legend, and a social-mapping document that would let me build out his persona faster than the timeline would otherwise allow.

I would need to teach him.

I sat in the dark of the garage and cataloged what teaching him would require, and I did the math on it the way I did the math on everything, and the answer came back operational. Not safe. Not advisable. Operational.

I started the car.

The drive home took forty minutes in light traffic. I didn't put on music. I didn't call anyone. When I got to my apartment I poured a single short glass of bourbon and stood at the window with it and watched the city for a long time without drinking it, and then I put it down on the counter untouched and went to bed at ten p.m., which was earlier than I had gone to bed in a year.

I slept for six hours and dreamed about white leather furniture in rooms I had never been in.