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Two agents reach Whitlock together, and Knox lets go of his arm the moment they have him. They take Whitlock to the floor. One puts a knee in his back, and the other wrenches his right arm behind him and cuffs it to the hand I broke. Whitlock moans into the stone.

Knox steps back from all of it. He holds his open hands out from his body, away from Whitlock and away from me.

He beat Dutch bloody in the hall downstairs tonight, so by his own rule he won't hold me before morning.

His chest heaves, and he stares down at Whitlock like he wants to haul him back up off the floor and start over. His boots stay planted.

I want his hands on me so badly it aches. I want them anyway, after what they put their initials on.

Torres holsters her pistol and comes around the bench. She steps over the cooling iron and stops in front of me with her jaw tight.

"Whitlock swung a branding iron at your face," she says, low and hard. "I told you to hold, and you walked into the one spot in this room my people couldn't reach. If Hollister had been half a step slower, I'd be calling for a medevac and writing up how I let my witness get burned on my scene."

"He was burning it, Torres."

"I know what he was doing." She holds out a gloved hand. "Give me that before you set yourself on fire."

I don't want to let it go. I burned my hand pulling it out of that fire.

The leather is hot and smells like scorched hair. My left fingertips have gone white and shiny, with blisters rising across them.

I hand the book to her anyway.

"Get water on her hand," Knox says to the nearest agent, not to me.

The agent unscrews a bottle and pours it over my fingers. When the cold water hits the burns, I suck air through my teeth, and I keep my hand under it until the bottle's empty. Then he wraps my fingers in wet gauze from the kit on his vest.

Torres lays the book open on the cooper's bench, and an agent aims the light on his rifle at the pages.

The back of the book is gone, charred into a black block that flakes when she touches it. The edges of every page that's left are brown and crumbling.

The front pages survived. Each one has a man's name written across the top in fountain-pen ink, in a small, careful hand. Under each name, a column of dates runs down the left side, with dollar amounts beside them.

Torres turns the pages with a gloved finger, and another agent photographs each one.

W. Ochs.

C. Lindner.

H. Fenske.

S. Rusk.

Tonight I said three of those names to the men's own faces in the cigar room, with Torres's wire taped under my shirt. The fourth name I've only heard from Knox and Audrey.

"Stanley Rusk," I say. "He's the lawyer who hired Audrey Treadmore to find me."

"His name's in the text Dutch sent Audrey," Torres says. "He's already on my list."

"Audrey told me Rusk put a copy of Daddy's marker in the file he gave her on me," I say. "He wanted her to think I ran from that debt. With Knox's initials on the back of it, anybody hunting me would look hard at Knox and never think to look at Whitlock's hill." I look at the name on the page. "I'd bet my life Rusk sat in that fourth chair."

"Can you swear he was the man in it?"

"No." I make myself say it plain. "The man in that chair wore a mask, and he hardly ever talked. I couldn't swear to his voice."

"Then you don't swear to it." Torres turns back a page. "His name in this book doesn't prove he sat in that room. But it's the book Whitlock carried up from his cigar room and tried to burn, with Rusk's name on a page beside three men you identified. A handwriting examiner will tell me whose hand wrote it. That's enough for me to ask a judge for Rusk's bank records."

Something stiff is tucked between Rusk's page and the next one. Torres slides it out with two fingers.