In an office on the bright sharp edge of New York, glass tower, Alexandra Broden was listening to a telephone conversation. The recording lasted no longer than ten seconds, but she listened to it five or six times before she took off her headphones. It was five thirty in the afternoon, and she had been working since seven a.m. She closed her eyes for a moment, pressed her fingertips to her forehead, and realized that she could still hear the conversation in her head. The recording began with a click: the sound of a woman picking up her telephone, which had been tapped the day before the call came in. A man's voice: It's done. There is a sound on the tape here—the woman's sharp intake of breath—but all she says in reply is Thank you. We'll speak again soon. He disconnects and she hangs up three seconds later. The woman's name was Aria Waker, and the call had taken place fifteen days earlier. The incoming call came from an Italian cell phone but proved otherwise untraceable. Police were at Aria's apartment forty minutes after the call went through, but she was already gone and she never came back again.
Broden walked down the hall for a coffee, talked about the baseball season with a colleague for a few minutes, returned to her office and listened to the recording one last time before she made the call. "Is that it?" she asked when the detective answered. "That's it, Al." "Please don't call me that. And you think they're talking about Anton Waker?"
"If you'd seen what his parents were like the morning after that call came through, you wouldn't ask me that question," the detective said. "How's the investigation going?" "Horribly. No one knows anything. No one even knows the dead girl's name." The detective sighed. "At least it's not as bad as the last shipping container we dealt with," he said. "I suppose I should be grateful that only one girl died this time. Listen, I'm going to talk to the parents." "I tried that two weeks ago. They're useless," said the detective, "but be my guest."
On the drive over the Williamsburg Bridge, Broden kept the radio off. She called her six-year-old daughter from the car. Tova was home from school, baking cookies with her nanny, and she wanted to know what time her mother would be home. "Before bedtime," Broden said, hoping this was true. On the far side of the river she drove down into Brooklyn, graffiti-tagged warehouses rising up around her as the offramp lowered her into the streets, and she circled for a while before she found the store: an old brick warehouse on a corner near the river, almost under the bridge, with WAKER ARCHITECTURAL SALVAGE in rusted-out letters above the doors. She parked at the side of the building and went around to the front, where a woman was sitting on the edge of the loading dock. The woman was looking out at the river, at Manhattan on the other side. She turned her head slowly when Broden said her name. "Miriam Waker?" "Yes," the woman said. "Mrs. Waker, I'm Alexandra Broden. I work with the State Department, Diplomatic Security Service division." Broden walked up the steel steps to the loading dock.