Patrick Lemke was the executive director of the Procurement and Construction Board, which meant he oversaw the daily operations and prepared the board for its meetings every other week. Lemke was tall and out of shape, with half a head of unpredictable hair and thick glasses and no shortage of nervous energy. He generally avoided eye contact but, every now and then, those beady pupils shot glances in my direction. His forehead was glossy with sweat, even though I found it rather frigid in this office. I hoped it couldn't be chalked up to nerves, but after listening to him ramble for a few minutes, I concluded that his natural equilibrium was hot-nervous.

A few minutes turned into ninety, as Lemke gave me an overview that was essentially a repeat of what I'd already read in a thick manual. The state gives out hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts annually, and they can give them out all sorts of ways. They can do the traditional "blind" bid-everyone makes their best offer, under seal, and the lowest bidder gets the bid, regardless of who they are or whom they know. That was the easy part; the rub was all the different exceptions to that rule, where it was impractical, impossible, or unnecessary to go through the sealed bidding process.

Only one of us grew tired during this lecture. This guy was like the Energizer bunny, and I was getting a headache. Finally, after offering to answer any questions several times, and appearing disappointed that I had none, he told me that he was "very busy" and "really had to go," as if I were clinging to him to stay, and rushed out of my office.

It was my office but I was sharing it, or at least it was big enough to share. There were two desks and five file cabinets and a small window that looked into another building and a radiator with peeling yellow paint that appeared to cough and hiss more often than it provided heat.

"Oh, and one more thing," Lemke said, bouncing back into the room and startling the bejeezus out of me with that high-pitched voice. "Nothing leaves this office. You can't take any of the documents out of here. And no emails."

"No emails? Isn't this the twenty-first century?"

Patrick didn't seem to be one for humor. He stared the wall and said, "Don't email documents or say anything sensitive over email. It can get hacked. Okay, I really gotta go now. Oh, and you have your ID? You have to have an ID to get in and out-"

"I have my ID"

"You have your ID, okay, good. I'm going to be late now-"

Out he went. I'd been given five contracts to review for next week's meeting. I calculated the amount of time it would take to pore over these specifications, multiplied by how boring it would be, and came up with multiple headaches and many cups of coffee. I had a purpose for this gig, and it wasn't driven by money, but as I thought about it, I was taking a real flier that any of this would even result in anything that would give me a hint as to who killed Ernesto Ramirez. Well, at a minimum I would do some legal work and make a few bucks- "Oh, and do you play music loud?"

"God, Patrick." I turned away from the box I was emptying and looked toward the door. This guy moved around so quickly, his footsteps didn't even make noise. "Do I-"

"They don't like it when you play music too loud. If you have a stereo or whatever." He was staring at the carpet.

"I won't play music at all."

"No, you can play it, just don't play it loud."

"I'll just hum to myself."

"Okay, so, I should go."

I waited patiently, hands folded, humming to myself quietly, for Patrick to return. It took three minutes.

"Oh, so this is the last thing, unless you have any questions."

"I do have a question," I said, startling him. His face lit up. He even looked at me for a brief second. A question!

"How far back do the files go for the PCB?" I asked.

"Okay. The governor just started this board when he took office a year ago. I mean, he had it in the lieutenant governor's office, but he transferred the PCB-"

"Patrick. I was just wondering, if I needed to refer to past practices, if I would be able to access prior documents. Maybe even back to when the PCB was under the lieutenant governor's office."

"Oh, sure you can. I can show you where to look. It's in one of these cabinets, the hard copies I mean, but it's also online, and I really have to go."

"Sure. We can talk about it later."

"Okay, good."

I couldn't be sure if Patrick was gone for good, but I had the sense that I would never know that in this job. I considered closing the door for some privacy, but it was my first day, and the other offices had their doors open, so it didn't seem like a good idea.

After giving Patrick ten minutes to pop back in, I started looking through the files for the contract Adalbert Wozniak's company, ABW Hospitality, bid on in 2005. I looked through all of the file cabinets and even made a passing attempt at finding things on the computer, but I was out of luck. I'd have to wait for Patrick to scare the shit out of me again and show me where to look.

I had to prepare memoranda on the five contracts by the day's end. If you had looked up "bureaucratic hell" in the dictionary, you would have found my assignment, which included these thrilling topics: "Asbestos Abatement Materials" for the Department of Corrections; "Collection Cups for Random Drug Testing" for the Department of Corrections; "HIV-1 Oral Fluid Transmucosal Exudate Collection Devices" for the Department of Public Health; "Asphalt Crack and Joint Filler" for the Department of Transportation; and "Passenger School Buses and Wheelchair Lift Buses" for the State Board of Education. I would've had more fun watching water freeze. The Internal Revenue Code was a coloring book by comparison.

Just as I'd finished the final memorandum for Patrick, he popped back into my office. "One more thing, Jason, okay? Mr. Cimino might call for you sometimes. He likes you to go to his office."

"He has some official position here?"

That one stumped Patrick. He stared at the carpet for a long time before saying, "He'll give you instructions sometime."

"At his office."

"Yeah, you have to see him in person. He doesn't like phones."

"A man of mystery," I said.

His eyes shot up, briefly, to meet mine. "Okay, I have to go."

He vanished. I'd have to wait to access the ABW file I was seeking. I gathered my stuff together, including the memoranda I had drafted, calculating a full day's work at three hundred an hour-a nice pocket of twenty-four hundred dollars, which rivaled what I was making in a month thus far in my erstwhile law practice.

As I was gearing up to leave, my phone rang. I hadn't even noticed the archaic black contraption in the corner of my desk.

"Mr. Kolarich?" A woman's voice. "Mr. Cimino would like to see you tomorrow at ten A.M."

20.

I MADE IT INTO THE LOBBY OF CHARLIE CIMINO'S building at the appointed hour, 10:00 A.M. I picked up a pack of gum and looked over a newspaper for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. Then I took the elevator up to his office.

Don't ask me why I do some of the things I do. After all, my whole reason for doing this job with the PCB was to get inside and see what I could discover about Adalbert Wozniak's and Ernesto Ramirez's murders. You'd think, with that mission, I'd be looking to get along with people like Cimino. But I didn't like the guy, and I didn't like being summoned to his office, so I decided that a little tardiness was in order.

At least I got to follow the swimsuit model down the hallway again to his office, which made the whole trip worthwhile.

"You're late." Cimino was wearing that headset again and standing at the opposite end of his airplane hangar of an office. He started talking again into his headset, something about a general contractor running behind schedule. I helped myself to a chair and waited for this asshole to finish trying to impress me, himself, and the guy on the other end of the phone call.

"The bus contract," Cimino said. "Hey, the bus contract." It took me a moment before I realized he was talking to me. "The bus contract? The Board of Ed? Hang on, Henry." He snapped his fingers at me. "Kolarich-"

"The bus contract, right." One of the contracts I'd reviewed was the State Board of Education's contract for passenger school buses and wheelchair lift buses.

"That's a sole-source," he said, before spinning back toward the window. "I don't give a fuck about a letter of intent, Henry. If I have Citibank as a tenant, the price goes up. So get me out of it." Then he looked back at me. "Okay, kid? A sole-source."

"Sole-source" bidding meant that the contract was asking for something so unique that only one company was capable of performing it, so going through the rigmarole of sealed bidding was a waste of time. But we were talking about providing school buses. There were probably hundreds of companies in this state that could do that.

I shook my head. "The bus contract has to go through sealed bidding."

"Hold on, Henry." Cimino yanked off his earpiece and stared me down. "What the fuck did I just say?"

"You said it's a sole-source."

"Right."

"And I said it's a competitive bid."

"Yeah, and you're a lawyer, right? You argue. Okay, so I see you know how to do that. Now argue my side, kid. Give Patrick a memo by the end of the day. Sole-source." He fit the earpiece back on. "Henry, I don't give a shit if they're gonna sue. It's a negotiation. What the fuck is a letter of intent, anyway? I mean, what does that even mean? Tell them my intent is to fuck them in the ass if they fight me on this."

He went on for a while, and it seemed to me that I had been excused. I wanted to have a few more carefully selected, four-letter words with Mr. Cimino, but I forced myself to stay true to what I was doing. If I'd acted in character, I'd be off this job after less than a week, and none of my questions would be answered.

"Wait, kid, there's something else." Cimino rifled through some papers on his desk. "Right. Here. This was a contract that Corrections put out for sanitation. I don't have the details but Patrick will. The two lowest bidders on the job-I think there are questions about their qualifications. Okay?"

I wasn't sure how to answer that.

"I need a memo discussing whether they're responsible bidders, okay?" he said, as if I were trying his patience. "Make one of those arguments Hector says you're so good at. That's all." He waved at me like I was a peasant and turned back to the window.

On my way back out, I passed an office where a woman was talking on the phone while she typed on a computer keyboard. Something struck a chord, but I couldn't place her, on the cloudy periphery of my memory. She didn't notice me, providing me a moment to stare at her. Nothing particularly remarkable about her-late twenties, light-brown skin, pretty features, typical work attire. Something told me not to linger, to avoid a face-to-face with this woman, which made me even more curious-my subconscious was signaling me but I didn't know why.

I stepped past the doorway and approached the front desk, with the beauty queen. She was on the phone and ignoring me, providing me a moment to linger. I did my best impression of someone waiting patiently to ask a question, while my eyes scanned the desk around her until I found a list of phone extensions on a white piece of paper taped to her desk. I ran down the twenty-some list of last names opposite the extensions. Before I'd reached the bottom, my eyes popped back to a familiar name.

Espinoza.

Right. The woman in the office was Lorena Espinoza, wife of Joey Espinoza, the principal witness against Hector Almundo. She was in court every day that Joey was on the stand, always wearing a defiant expression and ready with a scowl for any lawyer.

We'd looked hard at Joey as we prepared for trial, and looking hard at someone includes looking at his family. Lorena, if memory served, was a stay-at-home mother of three whose education was limited to high school. As far as we could tell-and we looked closely at Joey Espinoza's finances for evidence of bribes-Lorena had not worked or contributed any income to her family for a decade.

But now here she was, sitting in an expansive, elaborately appointed office, hired by one Ciriaco Cimino.

Life, it seemed, was full of coincidences.

21.

THE NEXT DAY, AT THE STATE OFFICE, I WAS LOOKING over the Department of Corrections contract Charlie Cimino had mentioned when Patrick Lemke jumped through my doorway.

"You're looking at the DOC sanitation contract," he said. "The top two bidders." He dropped a couple of big files on my desk. "This is the background information. Looks like each of them has had some problems on jobs in the past. It probably won't be hard to find them not responsible."

Another term of art in this world. All bidders who won contracts had to be found "responsible." Otherwise, anyone could put in a lowball bid and win a lucrative contract, and then have no idea how to perform it.

I looked up at Lemke, though he was staring at the wall, that eye-contact problem he had. "Who said I was going to find them not responsible?"

"Well . . ." Patrick shifted his feet, stuffed his hands into his pockets. "I mean, why else would Mr. Cimino want you to-"

"So let me see if I have this right," I said. "Cimino wants to eighty-six the two lowest bidders. I take it, then, that Cimino has some reason that he wants the third lowest bidder to get the contract?" I flipped through some papers. "Higgins Sanitation is the third lowest. So Charlie wants to fix it so that Higgins gets the contract, and he wants me to make it happen?"

Patrick didn't seem to like my framing matters so on-the-nose. But it was clear that my summary was accurate.

"Patrick, what's with this guy, Cimino? I mean, how's he in charge of this?"

Patrick stood still and said, "He's an adviser to the governor. Unofficially. He offers guidance. Our direction is to follow it."

It felt like he'd said this before, like it came right after name, rank, and serial number.

Patrick pranced to the door again but put on the brakes so abruptly that I thought he might pull a muscle. "Jason?" he said to the wall, though I think he was talking to me.

"Yes, Patrick?"

"You should do what Mr. Cimino says," he advised me, before disappearing.

22.

DURING HECTOR ALMUNDO'S TRIAL, WHICH CENTERED around contributions to Hector's campaign fund, I became acquainted with the website administered by the State Board of Elections. Through its searchable database, you could track campaign contributions made by any particular person, as well as receipts by any particular campaign fund.

I did a search for the company Charlie Cimino was trying to help, Higgins Sanitation.

The database showed that, prior to this calendar year, Higgins had made a grand total of zero campaign contributions. Not a dime.

But in the past year, Higgins had become more generous in opening its wallet. In the last nine months, Higgins Sanitation had made two contributions to our new governor, Carlton Snow, to the tune of thirty thousand dollars.

Another coincidence, I'm sure.

Next I turned to the other fix that Charlie wanted from me-the school bus contract, which I was supposed to say was so unique that only a single company in the entire state could perform it. The company Charlie wanted for the job was Swift Transportation.

I searched the database and got no hits for Swift Transportation. No political contributions from that company.

But then I searched the campaign fund of Governor Carlton Snow. When I searched for "Swift," I didn't get that company, of course, but there were contributions from "Swift, Leonard J."

Turned out that Leonard J. Swift had also contributed thirty thousand dollars to Governor Snow. And it only took two minutes on Google to confirm that Leonard J. Swift was the founder and CEO of Swift Transportation.

Yet another coincidence. Companies contributing thirty thousand dollars to Governor Snow's campaign fund were becoming remarkably proficient at obtaining lucrative state contracts.

"Enough," I said aloud, though I was alone. I got the picture.

I thought again about Jon Soliday's words: Cover yourself.