Morning arrived gray and businesslike, stripped of the tenderness of the night before, and by the time the sun had fully cleared the tree line above the lake, Ezra had already made four phone calls and Lucien had made two, both of them moving with the particular, focused efficiency of people who understood that today's success depended less on courage than on logistics.

"Elaine Marsh," Ezra said, reading the name off a contact list he'd clearly kept memorized rather than written down anywhere traceable. "Financial investigative reporter, previously with the Tribune, now freelance and considerably more willing to run something her old editors would have killed before it reached print....