"Do you?" she said. "Tell me what you said. When you came over. Tell me the exact words."
He thought. He was a police officer; he was trained to remember exact words. It came back easily. "I said, I'm going to ask you once. Who are you with, and what are you doing at—"
"I'm going to ask you once," she said, along with him, so that they said the first five words together, like a response at Mass.
He stopped.
She did not look away from him. "You said that to me before," she said. "You don't remember. I know you don't remember. I watched you not remember, standing right there with my license in your hand. I've been watching you not remember me for twenty-two years, Sergeant Dwyer. I've been watching you not remember me since the morning of October the nineteenth, two thousand and four, on the third floor of the Warren Avenue Apartments in Brockton, apartment 3C, at six-fifteen in the morning, when you came through my door with a ram and five other officers and stood in my hallway with that same badge out and said to me, I'm going to ask you once, Antoinette. Where is he."
The coffee was burning his fingers. He did not move them.
"My name was Jessup then," she said. "Antoinette Jessup. It changed when I married. It's been Reddick for sixteen years. I wouldn't expect you to know that."
Jessup.
It was there, somewhere. That was the terrible part. It was not gone; it had only been filed. Warren Avenue. Third floor. He had done, by his own rough count, something over four hundred search warrants in his years on the drug unit, and they ran together in his memory like the stations on a line he had ridden too many times, so that he could not have said which one had the dog and which one had the grandmother with the oxygen tank and which one had the kid who jumped from the second-floor window into the snow. But it was there. He reached for it and it came up slowly, like something through dark water.
A man named Sykes. Antwan Sykes, out of Boston, moving weight down 24 into Brockton and Taunton, a real target, a target with a file. A confidential informant who said Sykes was keeping product at a girlfriend's on Warren Avenue. A shoebox. A closet.