Slowly he creaked up the staircase, rising higher toward his father’s old office. And as he did, he began to feel anxious and deprived, as though he were trespassing on his father’s oh-so-important life. He felt like an afterthought, like a mistake. It was as if with each rising step the years were peeling away. Until finally, almost at the top of the steps, when he had devolved into the twelve-year-old he had been at his father’s funeral, he stopped, dead.

“Whoa,” said Skitch. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” said Kyle. “I feel weird.”

“Just don’t hurl on the floor, bro. Bad form.”

Skitch climbed past him up the stairs, turned the corner into the office, and flicked on the light switch. A painful brightness poured down the stairs.

“What the hell are you doing?” said Kyle.

“I’m trying to see.”

“We’re breaking in, you idiot.”

“No, we’ve broken in, and we’ve entered. Those were the crimes. Now we’re just here. If the lights are on, it looks like we’re working late. If the lights are off, we’ll be banging into things like the blind Barko sisters.”

“The blind Barko sisters?”

“Don’t ask, but trust me when I tell you they are loads of fun. Are you coming up?”

Kyle took a deep breath and then climbed the rest of the stairs, until he was there, in his father’s old law office, the suite of Byrne & Toth. Not much to see, actually, and quite the disappointment. He didn’t know exactly what he’d expected, something closer to Kat’s opulent offices, maybe, someplace where it made sense for Liam Byrne to want to spend his life rather than with his son. But it wasn’t luxurious or grand, it didn’t echo with great import. It was just a shabby set of offices with old furniture and dingy walls. A pile of white boxes with the name of a document-storage company leaned against one of the walls.

“This is where that old Toth guy got it, right?” said Skitch.

“That’s right,” said Kyle. “In one of these offices.”

“Yowza.”

“Probably that one over there,” said Kyle. “My mother mentioned once that my dad had the corner office. She worked here as a secretary until they hooked up. Then, after my father died, Toth took it over until . . .”

“Yeah, okay. Bang-bang. Now what?”

“Now I guess we look around,” said Kyle. “We’re looking for an old file, the O’Malley file.”

“What’s in it?”

“I don’t know, but this O’Malley guy is looking for it, and he promised if he got it, he had something to tell me about my father. Why don’t you check the boxes, and I’ll go through the offices checking out the desks and file cabinets.”

While Skitch rummaged through the boxes as noiselessly as a raccoon in a metal trash can, Kyle went office to office, opening small file cabinets, desk drawers, seeking something, anything, bearing the name O’Malley. Nothing. But with each drawer he looked in, each file name he skimmed past, he felt a strange deflation. As if some vault within him were being emptied out. This sad, dust-ridden office was so different from what he had imagined for so long, it was as if whole swaths of his childhood landscape were being altered.

He stepped into the corner office, Toth’s office, and stood there for a moment, trying to imagine what it might have been like fourteen years ago when his father had held court in that same space. He closed his eyes, spun around slowly, tried to feel his father’s presence. The white hair, the rough voice, the cigarette smoke and spicy cologne that always enveloped him like a fog. Dad, where are you, Dad?

“I finished with the boxes,” said Skitch from the doorway to the office, “and look what I found.”

Kyle snapped open his eyes, saw Skitch holding a file. “O’Malley?”

“Nah. Sorrentino.”

“Sorrentino?”

“Anthony Sorrentino. ‘Tiny Tony’ Sorrentino? Bookmaker extraordinaire. Half the city has placed bets with Tiny Tony, me included. Every time the Eagles lose, he buys another Buick. And this, this here is his last will and testament.”

“So?”

“So it’s interesting, is all. The last will and testament of Tiny Tony Sorrentino. Probably leaves a load to Kotite. And look, in the file with the will is a bunch of betting slips. Old stuff.”

“Let me see.” Kyle took hold of the file, looked through it. The will was dated just months before his father died, and it had his father’s signature on it, along with the John Hancock of this Anthony Sorrentino. The betting slips were also old, old enough to be anyone’s. So who was betting? His father? Toth? Did that have anything to do with what had happened to Toth? Or his father?

“Anything else with Sorrentino’s name on it?”

“No, but the will was in the middle of a batch of files about some company.”

“What was the name?”

“Double Eye, I think it was. Double Eye Investments.”

“Keep that file for me,” said Kyle. “You find anything else?”

“There’s a storage room around the corner with some old metal file cabinets. I looked through what I could. No O’Malley.”

“What do you mean you looked through what you could?”

“There was one file cabinet, and then a gap with some boxes, and then a couple more. From the case numbers on the drawers, it looks like one cabinet is missing.”

“Okay, I’ll be there in a sec. Let me finish looking through here first.”

Kyle did a quick search of Toth’s office, the drawers, the low wooden file cabinets. He glanced out the window, and a flash of dim light caught his gaze. But when he realized it was just a gleam of a streetlight on a metal sign, he was strangely disappointed. What had he expected to see on the Locust Street sidewalk, a mop of gray hair?

In the storage room, it was the old file cabinets that drew Kyle’s interest. They were metal and brown, with fake wood grain, and seemed designed solely to hold documents of great import. He walked up to one. The lock in the upper right corner was sticking out, with a key inside. He opened a drawer filled with old, tightly packed files. He thumbed through them rapidly. No O’Malley. He closed the drawer and stepped back and stared.

“See,” said Skitch, pointing to a gap.

“Yeah, I see,” said Kyle. “So one is missing.”

Kyle thought for a moment. Where would his father have put a file cabinet? He was trying to think it through when he heard something faint, and then not so faint.