I found a jacket that remembers a missing girl, and it’s rewriting my body one day at a time. Now I have to solve that girl's murder before the coat finishes its work and I disappear into someone else’s life.

Chapter Eight - Chain of Custody
Thirty days is a long time.

I said that out loud on the morning of the twenty-fourth, in a fifty-four-degree kitchen, to nobody, and then I sat there and listened to how it had sounded.

It was Thanksgiving. Laura had asked on Monday, the way she asks, which is to mention that they always make too much and then change the subject before you have to answer. I said no, I'm good. I want it on the record that she left it open until Wednesday night and that I let it close.

Thirty days is a long time. Things stop. Most things stop. A rash runs for three weeks and then one morning it is not there and you never find out what it was. Bells in your ears. The thing my left hand did for two months in the second year and then quit doing. The overwhelming majority of what goes wrong with a body goes wrong for a while and then goes away, and nobody writes an article about it because there is nothing to write.

Under a quarter of an inch in eleven days. Say it holds. Say it does not even slow down. December 22 is a woman at a screen who has never seen my face and will not look up from the monitor for more than four seconds at a stretch.

I could get through December 22 with a jaw a half inch different. I could probably get through it with worse.

That is a true set of sentences and I built it the way you build a shelf, and I knew what it was for while I was building it, which is that it let me not think about January 17.

But I want to be fair to the man at that table, because he was not only lying to himself. He had also worked out, correctly, that there were now two problems in the apartment and only one of them had a door in it.

Problem one was a body doing something on a curve I could not draw with three points, on a deadline set by a state agency, with no doctor available at any price and nothing to gather.

Problem two was a coat with a tag on it.

And a coat with a tag on it is an errand. It has a street address and a business day. Somebody made a record and put a number on it, and the number is EC-7 and L-2214 and 07ยท31, and records are the one thing in this world I know how to handle. I have spent three years learning that a person who keeps his paper survives things that a person who does not keep his paper does not survive.

I got a clean page and copied the three items onto it in block capitals, big, so I would not have to hand anybody a notebook.

Then I sat and looked at it and had the small dishonest thought that is the reason I am writing any of this down, which was: if I can trace the coat, the body will make sense.

There is no reason to believe that. It is not an argument. It is the shape an argument makes when what you actually want is somewhere to go on a Friday.

I put the page in my shirt pocket and went to get the bus.

The donation side is around the corner from the shopping side, through a bay door they keep half up, and it is not the same operation at all. The shopping floor has music and a heater and a girl at the register. Back here it is concrete, and cold, and there are five folding tables and about nine hundred garbage bags.

There was a woman at the intake table in two cardigans and fingerless gloves with a marker in her hand, and a masking-tape badge on her chest that said DOTTIE in ballpoint.

I got about six feet in and stopped, because I had rehearsed the sentence on the bus eleven times and none of the eleven versions were any good.

That is the part nobody warns you about. It is not the answer you are afraid of. It is that there is no ordinary way to ask. Every version I had sounded like something. I'd like to find out who owned this sounds like a man returning something, and then they want to know what you found in the pocket. Can you tell me when this came in sounds like a complaint about the price. I'm trying to trace this coat sounds like exactly what it is, which is a person with a problem, and I have spent my whole life not being a person with a problem in a room with a stranger.

And under all of that: to ask about it I had to show it to her. I was wearing it. I would have to sit in the middle of a cold concrete room and let a woman look at a garment on my body and be interested in it, on purpose, with me still inside it.

Dottie looked up.

"You lost?"

"No, ma'am."

"Well, come in or go out, you're letting the whole street in."

So I came in. And what I said, after eleven rehearsals, was:

"Do your tags have a date on them?"

She put the marker down. Her whole face changed and I did not understand why yet.

"They do."

"This one says oh-seven, dot, thirty-one."

"Let's see it."

And here is what I had not accounted for, in eleven versions on a bus. She did not ask me why. She did not ask me one single thing about myself. She came around the table wiping her hands on her hip and got hold of my collar and turned it out the way you'd turn out a shirt to read a size, standing over me, close enough that I could smell coffee, and she read the tag with her chin up because her glasses were the kind you look through the bottom of.

"EC-7, that's us. Seven's us. There's a nine over on Federal and they use the same stamp, but that's a seven." She let go of the collar and patted it flat, which I had not asked for. "July thirty-first, that's a Sunday, so that's not the date it came in, that's the date it got worked."

"It's not the date it came in."

"Honey, no. That's the date it hit a table. Sunday's when we do the backlog." She was already going back around. "That's a lot number under it?"

"L-2214."

"Then we've got a book on it."

She said it the way a person says of course there's a book on it, and went to a shelf and started pulling.

I sat there in the cold with my hands on my rims and it took me a second to sort out what I was feeling, which was not relief. It was that a stranger had put both hands on the biggest problem in my life and treated it as a completely normal Tuesday piece of business, and it had cost me eleven rehearsals to get there, and it had cost her nothing.

The book is a receipt book, the duplicate kind, three to a page, yellow carbons bound in and the white originals torn out and gone to whoever brought the stuff. Not a database. A spiral book in a cardboard box with the year in marker on the side.

"Twenty-two hundreds. That's summer. Here we go."

She came back with a book swollen the way paper gets when a place is not heated and put it on the table, and I could not see it, because the table is a folding table and my eyes are at about the height of the edge of it.

So I said, "I can't see over that."

I want that in the record too, because I did not used to say that. For two years I said nothing and craned and got half of things. She said, "Well, hell," and picked the whole book up and came around and held it out flat in both hands at my level like a hymnal, and stood there while I read it.

Lot 2214 was the second entry on a page in the middle. The handwriting was not hers.

7/19 * 2214 * mens outerwear + hshld * 11 pc * recpt issued * PU

Eleven pieces.

I read that line maybe six times, and I got three things out of it, and they came in an order.

The first was that the date I had was wrong. Twelve days in a bag in the back of a store between a person letting go of it and a volunteer putting a number on it, and I had spent five days building a July thirty-first into my head. It is the first time in this business that a hard fact turned out to be a soft one.

The second was 11 pc.

Because eleven pieces is not a bag of things somebody was done with. Nobody cleans out a closet in July and takes exactly eleven pieces of men's outerwear and household goods to a donation door and asks for a receipt. Eleven pieces with a receipt is somebody standing in a room deciding what happens to what is left in it.

The third was PU.

"What's PU."

"Pickup. We run a truck Tuesdays and Fridays. If it says PU, somebody called and we went and got it."

"So somebody's address is in there."

And that is where it stopped, and she did not stop it unkindly, and I could see her decide.

"There's a name and an address on the receipt, because they wanted it for taxes." She closed the book on her thumb. "And I can't give you that, and if you go ask Marguerite on the floor she'll tell you the same and be short with you about it, because we get calls. People want to know who gave what. It's not always somebody nice asking."

"Okay."

"I'm not saying it to be a hard case."

"No, I know." And I did know. I have been on the other side of that exact sentence more times than I can count, and every time it has been the right rule and it has cost me something, and this was the first time in my life I heard it and thought good.

"What I'll tell you, because it's not anybody's private business, is that it came off the truck in one go, the whole lot at once. That's not people cleaning out a garage. That's a unit."

"A unit."

"An apartment, a house, wherever." She put the book back in the box. "You get so you know the difference by the bag."

I copied the line onto the back of my page, all of it, exactly as written, and she watched me do it and did not hurry me.

Then I said thank you and got four feet toward the bay door and turned around and asked one more, because I had gotten it into my head on the bus that I would get one and I had not used it yet.

"Do the books go back?"

"They go back to before I did."

"How far back is that?"

"Ninety-six." She had the marker again. "They're in the boxes. Nobody's ever asked me that in eleven years."

I went out through the bay door into the cold and got about a block and a half before I noticed I was going the wrong way.

I want to be accurate about the state I was in, because it does not reflect well on me. A dead woman's coat came out of an emptied apartment on a truck on the nineteenth of July with ten other things, and a name and an address for it exist on a piece of paper I am not allowed to see, and I was happy. Not relieved. Happy, the way you are when a thing you are good at works. I went into a room and asked a stranger a question and came out with more than I went in with, and I did it badly, and it worked anyway.

It was the best forty minutes I'd had in three years and it was about a homicide, and I did not know it was about a homicide, and I am not sure that would have changed the forty minutes.

I did the control on the twenty-ninth, and I did it properly, which is to say I wrote the time down.

11:52 p.m. Coat to closet. Door shut.

I had done the two days earlier in the month and I knew what that bought me: no fragments, both days, and then a landing in the rain four minutes after I put it back on. So the fragments track the coat. That was established, as much as anything is established with a sample of two.

What I had never done was take it off overnight and then measure in the morning before I did anything else. Not the fragments. The body.

I hung it in the closet with the door shut and got into bed at fifty-four degrees under everything I own, which was a genuinely bad night and which I mention only because I want it understood that this was not free.

No fragments. I slept badly and continuously, if that is a thing, and there was no stairwell and no kitchen and no radio with horns in it, and I woke up at ten past six with my jaw against the pillow.

I did the measurements before I got water, before the bathroom, before I looked in anything. That was the whole design. I did not want a face in a mirror in the argument. I wanted numbers taken by a man who had not yet seen himself.

Pin in the collar. Jaw, corner to point, right side.

It had gone. Same direction, and by about what the last four days had been going by, which is to say the change had not paused, or slowed, or noticed.

I did it again because you do it again. Same. I did the left. Same. I did the shoulders, which are bad measurements, and they had done what they had been doing.

Then I did the hand, wrist crease to fingertip, which had never once moved.

It had moved.

Not much. It is the one measurement I trust and it is the one I can take to within a sixteenth, and it was down a sixteenth, which is nothing, which is the tape, which is where I put my thumb.

I sat on the edge of the bed with the tape in my hand for a while.

Because up to that morning I had a thing I could say, and I had been saying it to myself for eight days without noticing I was saying it: whatever this is, it needs the coat. Take the coat off and it stops. Take the coat off before December 22, before January 17, take it off for good, be cold, be nothing, but stop.

That was the exit. It was the only one in the building and I had not walked through it yet because it was freezing and because some part of me was not ready to give up the fragments, and I had let myself keep it there, unused, the way you keep a twenty in a shoe.

I got up and went and opened the closet, and the coat was on the hanger where I had put it at 11:52, and it had not done anything, and it did not need to.

It was still going in the closet. It had gone all night with a door between us.

So there was no exit. There had never been an exit. There was a thing that had already happened, some time before I noticed it, and it was not being done to me by an object I could hang up. The coat was where it started. The coat was not where it lived.

I stood there, that is, sat there with me holding a closet door open at twenty past six in the morning, and the only thing in the whole world that still had a next step in it was a line in a spiral book that said PU, and a truck that runs Tuesdays and Fridays, and an address I was not allowed to have.

I took the coat off the hanger and put it on, because it was fifty-four degrees, and because there was no longer any reason not to.