The police records office on Bartolomějská Street opened at eight in the morning, and Kael was there at five past, which was early enough to be first in the queue but not so early as to suggest urgency to whoever was watching the queue. He had learned, in eight months of looking into Lena's death through official channels, that urgency was the single most reliable way to make doors close faster than they would have closed on their own.
He filled out the request form at the counter. Case reference number, he had it memorized, date range, category of record, stated purpose. For stated purpose, he wrote: Personal bereavement, spouse. Seeking clarification of circumstances for estate matters. The estate had been settled eighteen months ago, but no one at a records counter was going to check that, and estate matters had a bureaucratic weight that tended to move paper forward rather than sideways.
The clerk took the form without reading it and disappeared into the back.
Kael waited. The office had the smell of all government buildings, recycled air, institutional cleaning fluid, the faint paper-and-toner scent of a printer working somewhere out of sight. He looked at the counter, the forms in their wall-mounted plastic holders, the poster about data protection in Czech, English, German, and French. He looked at the clock. He had developed, in the last two years, a very precise relationship with waiting. He did not fill it. He simply held it, the way you hold a breath controlled, measured, aware of the exact moment when it would need to end.
The clerk came back with a different person. A supervisor, by the posture, a woman in her fifties with reading glasses on a chain, and the specific expression of someone who had been asked to deliver a decision they had not personally made.
"Mr. Morrow." She set the form on the counter between them without touching it further. "I'm afraid the file you've requested is currently restricted."
He had been told this before. Different words each time, same result. He kept his voice neutral. "On what grounds?"
"The file has been sealed under section forty-seven of the Cultural Heritage and Administrative Records Act."
He looked at her for a moment. "That's a heritage protection statute."
"Yes."
"Applied to a traffic accident investigation."
"The classification is not something I have discretion over. It was applied at a level above this office."
"When was it applied?"
A brief pause. "I'm not able to disclose the date of the classification."
"Can you tell me which department applied it?"
"No."
He picked up the form and folded it in half along the crease he had made, filling it in. He did this slowly, because it gave him something to do with his hands and because the pause it created sometimes made people fill the silence with something they had not planned to say. The supervisor watched the form being folded and said nothing further, which told him she had been briefed on this specific request and had been told specifically what not to say.
"Is there an appeals process?" he asked.
"There is. I can give you the form." She produced it from somewhere beneath the counter with a speed that suggested it had already been retrieved. He took it. She had highlighted the relevant section in yellow, which was either a standard courtesy or a message that she was sorry for the thing she had just done and could not say so.
He thought it was the second one.
He thanked her and left.
On the pavement outside, he stood for a moment in the November cold and ran through what he now knew. The file had been sealed under a statute that had no logical connection to a traffic accident. The classification had been applied above the level of the district records office, which meant a ministerial department at a minimum. The date of the classification was itself classified. He had been filling out request forms for this file for seven months, denied each time on different grounds, bureaucratic friction that could have been incompetence or could have been something more deliberate, and this was the first time the denial had come with a specific legal framework attached to it.
Someone had formalized the obstruction. That meant someone had decided the informal obstruction was no longer sufficient.
That meant something had changed.
He walked to a café on Národní and ordered coffee and sat with the appeal form on the table in front of him and thought about Tomáš Dvořák.
He had found the name three weeks ago in a forum thread about Prague cold case enthusiasts, the kind of amateur investigation community that existed in every city, people who spent evenings reviewing public records and building theories. One thread had touched on Lena's case before going quiet abruptly, the last post a single line from a user who had been active for two years and never posted again after it: The detective who closed this one is Dvořák. Retired now. If you find him, don't expect him to talk.
Kael had found Dvořák through the retired officers' association directory. An address in Holešovice, north of the river. He had sent a letter, an actual paper letter, because email left a different kind of trace two weeks ago. He had received a reply four days after sending it, three lines, handwritten on plain paper: I know who you are. I know what you want. We can meet once. Wednesday, Letenské sady park, 2 pm, the bench near the Metronome.
On Tuesday evening, a text message from a number he did not recognize: Wednesday not possible. Don't contact me again.
He had stared at that message for a long time. Then he had looked up Dvořák's home address and written it in his notebook.
He drank his coffee. He looked at the appeals form. He folded it in half the same way he had folded the request form, put it in his jacket pocket, and left a tip that was larger than necessary because the waitress had refilled his water glass without being asked, which was the kind of thing that deserved acknowledgment.
The tram to Holešovice took twenty minutes. He stood rather than sat, watching the city move past the windows, the river, the bridges, the pale November sky sitting low over the castle on its hill. Prague looked like itself in November. It looked the way old things look when the light is not flattering them: real, worn, imperfect, and more interesting for all of it.
Dvořák's building was on a quiet street two blocks from the tram stop, a pre-war apartment block with a clean facade and a door that required a code. Kael checked the mailboxes. Third floor, apartment seven. He pressed the general entry buzzer for the building and waited. No answer. He pressed it again. Still nothing. He stepped back and looked up at the windows on the third floor. No movement. Curtains open on the left side, closed on the right.
He waited on the pavement for fifteen minutes, hands in his pockets, watching the street the way he watched everything without appearing to watch it. A woman with a shopping bag came out of the building, and he caught the door without hurrying and went in, which was something he was not entirely comfortable doing, but it was not going to stop him.
Third floor. Apartment seven. The door was dark wood with a small brass number. He raised his hand to knock.
The door opened.
Not after he knocked. Before. The door opened while his hand was still raised, mid-motion, and Tomáš Dvořák stood in the gap looking at him with the expression of a man who had been standing on the other side of the door for some time, waiting for exactly this moment.
He was fifty-five, heavyset in the way of a large man who had been physically active for most of his life and had recently stopped. Gray at the temples. Eyes that had the particular tired alertness of someone who had not been sleeping well but had been thinking extremely hard during the hours when sleeping should have been happening. He was wearing a cardigan over a collared shirt, and he was holding a glass of something clear that was probably not water.
They looked at each other for a moment.
"I told you not to contact me," Dvořák said. His English was accented but direct.
"You told me not to contact you. I didn't contact you. I came to your door."
The retired detective looked at him for another long moment. Then he stepped back from the door. Not all the way, just enough to indicate, without enthusiasm, that entering was a possibility that had not been ruled out.
Kael stepped inside.
End of Chapter 3