4338.209 · July 28, 2018 AD
Since 1874
Detective Sarah Lahey finally unfolds the scrap of paper she stole from Sergeant Charlie Claiborne's desk earlier that day and finds only two words written on it. A brief search produces a California construction company with an unbroken dynastic line stretching back to 1874 and a corporate profile too clean to be accidental. The name refuses to settle in her head as she closes the laptop and leaves the house to keep a dinner promise with her grandmother Jane at Vaucluse.
Sarah Lahey unfolded the note on her dining table and found two words on it.
She had carried the scrap in her coat pocket all afternoon like a thing that might burn her. She had turned it over in her mind between phone calls and file stacks and the slow collapse of her patience. She had imagined it as coordinates. As a confession. As a name that would break the investigation open. What it actually said was Killerton Enterprises.
The kitchen behind her held its familiar archaeology of unwashed dishes and unironed laundry. The water glass she had poured herself on the way in sat beside the scrap on the one cleared patch of table. Outside the window, the Hobart evening was already cold and already dark.
Two words. That was the entire content of the thing she had risked her career to steal from the desk of her sergeant.
Her disappointment arrived dry as the dust on the case notes by her elbow. Underneath the disappointment, an unease she had not invited began very slowly to take its place.
She opened the laptop.
A sleek corporate homepage resolved beneath the confident capitalised banner of KILLERTON ENTERPRISES — the kind of website whose design budget exceeded Sarah's annual salary. Excellence in Construction Since 1874, said the tagline. Head office San Francisco. Founder Francis Killerton, whose portrait on the history page looked out over nine decades of an America that still ran on gaslight. Current chief executive a man called Bill Killerton, the latest in what the company's timeline presented as an unbroken dynastic line from father to son to son to son.
Sarah clicked through the history with the careful attention of a detective looking for the thing that was wrong. What she found instead was the thing that was impossibly clean. State buildings. Highway systems. Bridges and renewable energy and luxury condominiums. MIT graduates and Stanford MBAs on the leadership team. Scholarships. Philanthropic initiatives. No scandals. No regulatory rulings. No safety violations. None of the ordinary century-and-a-half mess any global construction empire accumulated in the course of actually constructing anything.
The website was the sort of clean that made a detective suspicious, because detectives learned early that real things were never that clean.
She sat back in her chair. The water stain on her ceiling that vaguely resembled Australia looked down at her with its usual quiet indifference. A glance at the wall clock registered, with a small guilty jolt, that she was late for dinner with Jane.
Before closing the laptop, Sarah scrolled once more through the homepage and looked at the capitalised name on the banner one more time. Killerton Enterprises. An ordinary construction company. A legitimate commercial entity half a world away from Hobart. A name that had no business being in the crumpled fist of her sergeant during an interview with a woman whose brother and son were missing.
She folded the scrap back into her coat pocket and stood. The name came with her across the kitchen as she collected her keys. The name came with her out the front door as she locked it behind her. The name came with her into the car as she started the engine and turned toward Vaucluse.
Two words. Nothing and everything at the same time.
