In 1987, Salcedo handed Mara a supporting assignment with no interviews attached. Hair and saliva samples had been collected from Warren Danner. Mara was to help assemble the existing records requested for review, not handle the samples themselves. She read his name twice before turning the page. Suspicion had accumulated around it without becoming proof. Now there was something physical to preserve beside the material collected from victims in 1982. She wanted the two dates to mean that the distance between them could finally be crossed.
They finished the requested location list before lunch. When Mara asked what the collected samples could tell them, Salcedo said the comparison she wanted was beyond what the available technology could provide. There was no result to wait outside a laboratory for. An afternoon assignment took Mara and Ben back toward the river to check present access for a proposed visit. She took her old map. In the car she kept unfolding it, although Ben knew where to turn.
The footpath Mara remembered ended at a fence. Beyond it she could see the place she meant, close enough to make the detour seem ridiculous. Ben looked for the public approach while she followed the wire toward a corner. A sign faced the other way; she had to bend a branch to read it. Private property. She stood with one hand on the fence, annoyed by a boundary that had not existed on her penciled map. Ben called that the legal approach was farther down the road. She let the branch go.
By the time they reached the public bank, mud had filled the ridges of Mara's shoes. The distance they had covered was small on paper. On foot it had eaten the afternoon. Ben asked where she proposed to meet the people coming with them. She pointed toward the water, then imagined someone arriving in ordinary shoes and trying to follow her. She walked back to the pavement and chose a place they could actually reach. Ben timed the return. Their task yielded a practicable route and meeting point, no evidence about a killer.
At the car, Mara scraped her shoes against the curb. She had wanted the samples to shorten five years of waiting; she had wanted the map to shorten a walk. Neither had done what she asked. Ben offered her an old towel without comment. She spread it over the floor mat and changed the meeting instructions before driving away. The preserved material would have to wait for capabilities she could not supply. The people assigned to accompany them next week would at least have a route they could use.
That evening Daniel found her studying their kitchen calendar. She had promised Saturday morning, then begun calculating whether she could come home late enough on Friday to leave Saturday untouched. 'Are you changing it?' he asked. 'Not yet.' He set down his cup. 'Then tell me when you know. Not after I've waited.' She wanted to explain how close the work could feel even when nothing had changed. Instead she put a line through the extra work she had penciled into Saturday. Daniel did not thank her.
At a family-information session later that week, a woman asked whether investigators could give her a date for answers. Mara could not mention private investigative material, and she would not offer the weight of folders as evidence of progress. 'I can't give you that date,' she said. The woman kept her coat buttoned. 'Then give me a date when I don't have to call you.' Ben wrote down the request. Mara watched his pen and understood that this, unlike a scientific result, could become an assignment with an accountable end.
They took the request to Salcedo after the session. Ben proposed agreed intervals and a designated colleague when the usual contact was unavailable. Mara worried that families would hear a timetable for discoveries. Salcedo asked her to separate the two things. The records work had given her an uncomfortable example: they could make material findable; they could not make it answer. They drew up a contact arrangement with responsibilities beside names. An unanswered telephone would not count as a completed conversation.
At the next gathering, Mara offered the arrangement without calling it progress. People could choose their contact preferences or decline. 'A call may contain no news,' she said. She had completed the records assignment; the samples existed; suspicion remained suspicion. None of that gave her a date to offer. The woman in the buttoned coat studied the page Ben placed before her. Then she pushed it back with a telephone number written at the bottom. 'Call anyway,' she said.