Ruth Calloway lived in a ground-floor apartment on the east side of the city, the kind of building with a buzzer panel where half the names had been replaced with tape and handwriting.

Sophie pressed the button.

They waited.

"Who is it?" The voice through the intercom was alert for eleven o'clock at night.

"Ruth.

It's Sophie.

Sophie Cross."

A long pause.

The door buzzed open.

Ruth was in her sixties, small and sharp-eyed, with the posture of someone who had spent decades sitting at a desk and had decided somewhere along the way to stop apologizing for it.

She looked at Sophie for a moment, then at Daniel, then back at Sophie.

"You're alive," she said.

"I am."

"I wondered." Ruth stepped back.

"Come in.

Don't stand in the hall."

The apartment was small and orderly.

A tabby cat observed them from the top of a bookshelf and decided they weren't interesting.

Ruth put the kettle on without asking and sat at the kitchen table, gesturing for them to do the same.

"I was let go eight months after I flagged the Aldren transfer," Ruth said, before either of them had spoken.

"They called it a restructuring.

It wasn't."

"We know," Sophie said.

"I kept copies of everything.

I want you to know that upfront." Ruth looked at Daniel.

"I don't know you."

"Daniel Cross.

Sophie's husband."

"The widower." Ruth's mouth pressed flat.

"Interesting word for a living woman's husband." She turned back to Sophie.

"Why now?

What changed?"

"We found each other four days ago," Sophie said.

"And Marcus knows we've spoken.

We have maybe"—she glanced at Daniel—"eighteen hours before he does something with what he has."

Ruth nodded slowly.

"What do you need from me?"

"A statement.

On record.

Describing what you found, when you found it, and what happened after you reported it internally."

"I can do that." Ruth folded her hands on the table.

"I'll tell you something else for free.

When I was let go, the man who delivered the news — the deputy director — he was nervous.

Not the normal kind of nervous.

The kind where someone has told you what to say and you're afraid of getting it wrong." She paused.

"Two weeks later I saw him at a charity dinner.

He was seated at Marcus Cross's table."

Daniel's jaw tightened.

"How far does this go?" he said.

"I don't know," Ruth said.

"But I know the Aldren transfer wasn't the only irregular filing I saw that year.

There were two others.

Different names.

Same pattern." She stood and moved to the bookshelf, pulling a flat storage box from behind a row of binders.

She set it on the table.

"I've had three years to organize this."

Sophie put her hand on the box.

"Ruth," she said quietly.

"You kept all of this.

For three years.

Why?"

Ruth looked at her steadily.

"Because someone l*cked you in a burning house and nobody was held accountable for it." She sat back down.

"I'm sixty-three years old.

I've watched a lot of things get buried.

I decided this one wouldn't be."

The kettle clicked off.

None of them moved to pour it.

Daniel looked at the box, then at Sophie, then at Ruth.

"We need to contact a lawyer tonight," he said.

"And we need to decide whether we go to the police or the DA's office first."

"DA," Ruth said immediately.

"The detective who handled the original f*re investigation — his name is Greer.

He closed the case in six days.

Six days for a residential f*re with a fatality." She tapped the box.

"His name is in here too."

Sophie's hand was still on the box.

"Then we go above Greer," she said.

"Yes," Ruth said.

Outside, a car turned slowly into the street.

Its headlights swept across the curtained window and kept moving.

Sophie watched the light cross the ceiling and disappear.

"He's already watching," she said.