Wexler is thirty-eight and has never done the work Ray did. He arrived a generation later, into a job that is mostly compliance: old programmes have residue, residue becomes disclosure, disclosure becomes a hearing. His function is to make sure 2006 stays a thing that did not happen, and for most of his career that has meant reviewing documents.

He is not a sadist and does not enjoy this. He is worse than that: he is a man doing a job competently within a structure that has already decided the answer, and he can explain, calmly and at length, why closing the file is the responsible thing. He has a wife and a commute and an opinion about his own decency that survives everything he does.

What he finds

A county sheriff's report, badly written, about a tow yard. A detail in it that means nothing to the sheriff and means one specific thing to anyone who has read the programme's old after-action formats: a particular way of leaving a scene, taught to eleven men in a building that no longer exists.

Eleven men, eleven death certificates, and now a twelfth event.

He does not sound an alarm. He requisitions. The people he sends are young, capable, thorough and nothing like Ray — they have never had to improvise because nothing has ever gone properly wrong for them. They are better trained and worse at this.

Against Ray

The confrontation the book is building to isn't physical. Wexler's actual weapon is that he can make Ray's whole eighteen years untrue with a phone call: the house, the job, the name on the mail, Casey's surname. He can offer Ray the deal that a man who spent eighteen years being nobody is least equipped to refuse — go back to being dead, properly this time, and everything you built stays standing for the people in it.

Ray's problem is that this is a genuinely good offer.