"There's more Oswald hasn't told you yet."
Charlie paused on the second step.
He turned back just enough to make eye contact — the precise angle of a man who has decided not to fully commit to reversing direction.
"It's late. Whatever it is can wait until tomorrow."
"Tomorrow works for me," Will said. He spread his hands and stepped back — genuine casualness, or a good simulation of it. "I thought you'd want the evidence on Maroni. But if the timing isn't right—"
He turned toward the stairs.
The word evidence had landed somewhere in Charlie's processing, and Will could feel the weight of the pause behind him. A professional con man knew the sensation of bait. The question was whether the prize outweighed the smell.
Charlie's reasoning, as Will reconstructed it later: Harvey Dent only arrived today. This street-level operator has no plausible way to have made contact with him already. Therefore the identification is impossible. Therefore I'm safe. Therefore the evidence question is real and worth pursuing.
The flaw in the logic was one meeting at a police precinct, forty minutes prior.
"What kind of evidence?"
Will started back up the stairs at a measured pace, not hurrying.
"About six months ago — Maroni sent us out to collect on a debt. The person who answered the door was a woman. Extraordinary-looking. White curly hair, red evening dress, pearl necklace — museum-quality, not costume. Voice like something that should come with a warning—"
"What does this have to do with—"
"I'm getting there. She had documents on her. Things Maroni gave her for safekeeping. The kind of arrangement powerful men make when they need somewhere that won't get searched." He kept the pace slow, syllable by syllable. "She had a quality to her — the way she said hello, like the word itself was doing something—"
Charlie had been walking alongside him, listening, constructing the picture.
He constructed it one detail further and stopped walking.
White curly hair. Red dress. Pearls. Voice like a hazard.
He assembled the description.
"That's Marilyn Monroe."
"She had a wonderful quality—"
"She's been dead for sixty years—"
"Timeless, really—"
"You've been stalling me this whole time."
He bolted.
Will had anticipated this by approximately two seconds, which was enough time to turn and not enough time to get a good grip. He caught Charlie at the doorway — one arm around the waist, the wrong angle, both of them going sideways. They hit the stairs together and went down four of them in a controlled disaster, rolling, losing the collision on the landing with enough force to rattle the wall.
Will got upright first and dropped onto Charlie before the larger man could use his size advantage.
"HELP—"
The light on the third floor came on.
Oswald appeared at the railing with a baseball bat and the specific expression of a man who has been woken up for unclear reasons and is prepared to address them at full intensity.
Below him: Will, blood from the stairfall, straddling a very large man who was fighting back with the increasingly effective leverage of someone who had spent years in an institution where physical authority mattered.
Oswald went over the railing.
He landed on the first-floor landing and didn't break stride, bat already swinging.
The first strike caught Charlie across the back of the skull and produced a sound that ended the fight immediately. Charlie went slack.
Oswald raised the bat again.
"He's done—"
The second strike landed anyway. And the third.
Will let go of Charlie and moved back. Oswald's breathing was the sound of a man emptying something that had been building for a while. He stopped when he ran out of it, standing over what had been Charlie, bat in both hands, chest heaving.
The landing was very quiet.
"I didn't know which one of you was wrong," Oswald said, after a moment. "So I picked you."
"That was fast."
"I didn't need more than a second." He looked at Will. "Why is he dressed like Harvey Dent?"
"He isn't Harvey Dent." Will crouched beside the body, working through the pockets methodically. "Maroni sent him. Testing who in his organization is talking — and testing whether I'm as careful as he's apparently heard." He turned the jacket inside out. "Which means there's—"
The voice recorder was in the inner breast pocket. Red light blinking.
Will held it up.
Oswald looked at it.
"Still running?"
"Still running." Will turned it over in his hands. The recording contained everything Charlie had gotten out of Oswald upstairs, plus the stalling conversation on the stairs, plus the last thirty seconds of authenticated chaos that would tell anyone who listened exactly what had happened here.
Maroni would check in with Charlie when Charlie failed to report. When Charlie didn't answer, Maroni would pull the backup recording. The file would tell him his operative was dead, killed by the people he'd been sent to test, in their home, in a way that left no ambiguity about allegiance.
"We can't use the body," Will said, more to himself than to Oswald. The original thought — present Charlie's corpse to Maroni as proof of loyalty, claim credit for killing a hostile DA — required the recording to not exist. It now existed.
He looked at the body. He looked at the recorder. He looked at the ceiling of the Senate's ground floor landing, which had seen things before and would see more.
"Two options," he said.
Oswald leaned against the wall, bat hanging loosely from one hand, and waited.
"Option one: we run. Tonight. Before Maroni's people come looking."
He gave this a moment.
"The Court's enforcers are trained. I've seen what they do to people. Running has a low success rate."
"Option two," Oswald said.
"We need a Harvey Dent. A live one, leaving this building, visible proof he walked out of here. Something on record that contradicts whatever Maroni pulls off that device." He paused. "Which means we need the actual Harvey Dent to come here, tonight, and walk out the front door."
Oswald's mouth opened.
"You're going to call—"
"I'm already calling."
Will snapped the battery back into his phone, wiped his hand on his jacket — it came away red — and dialed.
It rang twice.
The laugh that answered was genuine and immediate, the laugh of someone who had been awake and expecting exactly this sort of call.
"Ha! Let me guess — news, or trouble?"
"Don't celebrate yet," Will said. "You're going to find this funny. But not in the way you're thinking."