The venue was a room that had been designed to remind people of their own success and was very good at its job. High ceilings and the kind of lighting that was technically dim but made everyone look better than they deserved, two hundred people in formal wear moving through it with the practiced ease of a social class that had attended enough of these to have made the performance automatic.
Roman arrived with Dylan at eight and spent the first forty minutes doing what he did at these things, handshakes and three minutes per conversation and the correct balance of warmth and authority, the reading of a room that twenty years had made as natural as breathing. He was in a black tuxedo with a white shirt and no tie, the version of formal wear that said I know the rules well enough not to need all of them.
"Holmes is on the guest list," Dylan said, appearing at his left elbow around nine. "He came as Whitfield's plus-one. Whitfield doesn't know who he is."
"Where is he?"
