Iris scanned the appointments and notes etched in blurred ink on yellowed paper. They were mostly illegible. She moved another notebook so she could see the most important date of all. On December 29, the day the bank closed, it looked like Joseph was on vacation. The word “Bermuda” was circled—at least she thought that’s what it said. Poor Mr. Rothstein went to spend the holidays in the tropics and came home to find out he’d lost his job.

Iris suddenly felt like she was trespassing. She didn’t need to know the intimate details of the man’s life. She started to cover the calendar back up when small red letters caught her eye. “Det. McD---- --6.555.----” They’d been smeared in a coffee stain, but the letters directly below them still read “FBI” clear as day.

Did bankers often call the FBI? she wondered, staring up from the blotter. Opposite the desk an enormous bulletin board hung from the wall, covered in charts and graphs and financial gobbledygook. Then she spotted what was looming large in her own mind. It was a question mark. “Cleveland Real Estate Holdings Corp.?” was written on a little slip of paper. She’d seen the name before somewhere but couldn’t quite place it. There were other little notes tacked up on the board scattered between the graphs—“Cleveland Urban Growth Foundation?,” “New Cleveland League?,” “Cuyahoga Coalition?”

There had to be more to it. She searched each little day on Rothstein’s calendar for another clue, but between the smears and bad penmanship it was hopeless. The ink was all blurry shades of black and blue—all of it but the note about the FBI and something peeking out from the upper corner in red ink. She pulled the paper out of the black leather corner of the blotter. “Where is the money?” was written in blazing red. She read it again and still couldn’t make any sense of it.

Her watch reminded her she was actually supposed to be working. With an exasperated sigh, she grabbed her tape measure and took the room’s dimensions. Iris stepped out of Rothstein’s office and assessed the number of rooms she had left to measure. Even though it was a thousand times better than sitting at her desk back in the office, the survey work was getting monotonous. What she really wanted to do was to sit down and read Beatrice Baker’s notes.

Iris headed down the dusty green carpet to the next office. It looked wrong. Iris slowed her pace. The room had been turned upside down. Sheets of paper were strewn all over the floor as if someone had torn open a feather pillow. The drawers had been pulled out of the desk and upended. Most of the books had been thrown from the built-in mahogany shelves. Paper, books, pens, paper clips, and a few broken picture frames covered the marble floor tiles. Dust covered everything, and the papers had yellowed in the sunlight coming through the skewed blinds.

Iris bent down and picked up a shattered photograph. It was a family portrait. A stout middle-aged man grinned at her with his rail-thin wife and two pimple-faced daughters. Everyone was in printed polyester. The man reminded her of one of her father’s golf buddies. Whoever he was, he never got a chance to clean out his desk. Looking at the mess, she could almost hear the racket of slamming drawers and falling books. Someone had been pissed.

Iris waded through the wreckage to take her measurements. On her way out, she nearly rolled her ankle on a cracked coffee mug. It said “Best Dad on Earth,” with a little green alien giving a thumbs-up sign. She kicked it out of her way, sending it crashing against a bookcase.

The bronze plate on the door read “William S. Thompson, Director of Audits.” Iris felt a nagging twinge in the back of her head as though someone was watching her. It was becoming a familiar feeling, walking around by herself in the empty building, but every now and then she felt the urge to run as if someone were chasing her. Her imagination was getting the better of her. There was no one there.

Iris had wasted enough time. She marched back to Beatrice’s desk for her things. Her feet slowed to a crawl as she got closer. The contents of her field bag had been emptied onto the desk. Beatrice’s book was open.

She hadn’t left the things that way; she was sure of it. She spun around, certain someone was standing behind her. There was no one. But between her sitting at the desk and leaving Thompson’s office, someone else had been there and gone through her stuff. She barely breathed as she listened for footsteps, trying to remember what Ramone’s had sounded like. She heard nothing.

“Hello?” Iris called out loudly into the empty room. “Is somebody there? Ramone?”

No one answered. Maybe it was the intruder with a flashlight on the fifteenth floor. Ramone had said it was probably a homeless person. She scanned her pens, calculator, cigarettes, screwdriver, and box cutter. It was all there. Maybe she was going fucking crazy. She would have heard if someone were there, she told herself, but grabbed the box cutter anyway.

Beatrice’s book was lying open to the page where a man named Max had left a note. Iris snatched the book off the desk and threw it back into her bag with everything else—everything except the box cutter.

Brandishing the razor, she slowly stepped out into the hallway. There was no one there. All she could see were footprints in the dust. She grabbed the flashlight out of her bag and shined the light on them. All of the footprints looked like hers. Iris clicked off the flashlight. She must be fucking crazy. She must have emptied her own bag, too obsessed with Beatrice Baker and Mr. Rothstein to remember. She snapped the box cutter closed.

By the time Iris walked through her own front door, her nerves were fried. Every sound made her jump. She turned on all the lights before collapsing onto the couch. The hairs on the back of her neck didn’t settle down until she’d finished an entire beer and two cigarettes. Even then, the feeling that someone was following her kept twitching. She stood and double-locked the front door for good measure.

Anxious for a distraction, Iris pulled Beatrice’s stolen file from her field bag. She glanced over the weird writing again, then fished out the shorthand manual. She skimmed through a few pages of chapter one, but the instructions blurred together. There was no easy decoding chart. It was going to take some time to learn.

She set Beatrice’s personnel file down next to the manual. Each swirl looked like the next. The system seemed to depend on how they were arranged together. After twenty straight minutes, all she had was, “Fuck, city, bribes.” That couldn’t be right. Shit. Maybe she wasn’t cut out for all this decoding crap. She closed the book and tossed it onto the cluttered coffee table.

The image of her field bag emptied out on the desk kept creeping back into her head. Had she emptied the bag herself somehow? If not, what the hell had Ramone or whoever it was been looking for?

All of the items she had taken from the building looked up accusingly at her from the coffee table—the shorthand manual, Beatrice’s file, and Key 547. No one could possibly know she had taken them, and the odds were that no one would even care. She was going crazy. It was that simple. All of Suzanne’s loony talk about threats and investigations had wormed its way into her brain. Talking with that old bartender the other day certainly hadn’t helped either.

“There’s a saying where I come from,” Iris said in her best Italian accent, and lit a cigarette. “Never steal from a graveyard. You might disturb the ghosts.”

It wasn’t funny.

CHAPTER 34

Monday, December 4, 1978

Daylight pounded through Beatrice’s eyelids as the main lobby of University Hospitals began filling up with the sounds of people. Doctors were on their way to work. Patients in faded gowns were pushing their IV stands toward the cafeteria. She stretched painfully and blinked in the harsh sun. It was Monday. She bolted upright and searched the walls for a clock. It was only 7:00 a.m. She still had plenty of time to get to work.