Burton links Everly, Asche, and Exman

Detective Burton’s investigation links Herbert Everly, Kane Asche, and Hauck Exman through a shared business gathering, turning a set of separate murder inquiries into a possible chain. The link is suggestive rather than proved: the three men were in Washington at the same time, but Burton cannot establish that they met. Exman’s subsequent disappearance, troubled domestic life, and cache of guns deepen the suspicion without resolving it.

The earlier police encounters

Before Burton explains the connection, the narration has established how Burke Devore’s view of law enforcement has hardened. At the State Police barracks in Raskill, he sits in a green plastic chair in a small, pale-yellow office: three walls are shiny plastic, the fourth is rough concrete block, and the black floor and soundproof ceiling make the room seem designed for easy cleaning. The setting registers as more than institutional décor to him. He imagines how quickly something horrible could be hosed away, then recognizes that he has acquired a new, disturbing kind of professional skill: the ability to think in such terms.

That suspicion of official procedure intensifies during the case against Billy. The police have evidence of a planned store burglary, including an admission from Billy’s friend, eyewitnesses who saw the boys carrying stolen goods, and their attempted flight. What they still want is proof connecting the boys to three earlier burglaries. Burke intervenes to insist that this was Billy’s first offense, distinguishing his son from the other boy rather than allowing the investigation to fold them into one account. The detective’s sympathetic manner does not reassure him; he reads the effort to finish the paperwork as indifference to the family’s circumstances.

Burke consequently interprets the detective as an enemy and rejects the assumption that the police exist to safeguard his family and home. Marjorie recognizes his change in attitude and withdraws some of her earlier sympathy. When she asks whether Billy can come home, the answer is no: Billy must appear before a judge in the morning, when a lawyer can seek his release into his parents’ custody. This encounter forms the emotional background for Burke’s later conversation with Detective Burton: he is listening to an investigator while already primed to see official authority as self-serving.

The Treasury Department connection

In the later conversation, Detective Burton tells Burke that the investigation has finally linked Everly and Asche. The connecting episode occurred four or five years earlier, when the Treasury Department sought bids for a government contract involving special paper. The agencies and companies involved sent representatives to Washington to speak with Treasury officials. Burke remembers the matter as a contract concerning import forms, and recalls that the company he worked for did not bid: anti-counterfeit work was not quite its line, and it was not seeking additional business.

Burton supplies the crucial overlap. Among the representatives present in Washington at the same time were Everly, Asche, and Exman. Burke immediately infers that the men met. Burton qualifies that inference: the investigation has not proved a meeting, and he does not think proof of one is necessary. The evidence establishes shared presence at a business-related event, not a documented conversation or agreement. That distinction keeps the link consequential but incomplete. Their simultaneous attendance provides a common point in the men’s histories without establishing what, if anything, passed between them.

Exman under suspicion

Burton says that he had spoken to Exman a couple of weeks earlier, in the same manner that he had spoken to Burke. He did not like Exman’s conduct, but the interview had not given him evidence sufficient to make an arrest. Burke imagines the encounter from his own impression of Exman: a haughty man preoccupied with his problems and humiliated by working as a suit salesman, unlikely to respond well to an earnest detective. That is Burke’s interpretation of Exman’s attitude, not independent proof of guilt.

Burton now suspects that the visit frightened Exman into running away. On investigating, the police found that Exman was already facing upheaval at home. His wife had consulted a lawyer about divorce after catching him having an affair; she was his fourth wife. Burke compresses the pattern into the idea that Exman was making trouble in his own life, while Burton adds that the consequences reached beyond Exman himself. The domestic details help explain why he might have been ready to leave, but do not establish that the marital crisis caused his flight or connect it directly to the murders.

A search of Exman’s house found a large collection of firearms, perhaps a dozen weapons of different kinds. The police were testing them against the bullets recovered in the murder investigation. Burton’s own expectation was that Exman had probably disposed of the gun used in the killings. The weapons therefore supply a concrete investigative lead, but at this stage they remain untested evidence: the conversation reports neither a match nor a confirmed murder weapon.

An unresolved trail

Burke asks where Exman might be. Burton says investigators are speaking to both of Exman’s girlfriends, and that Singapore was the place Exman had most often talked about. It is a possible destination, not a confirmed location. The account ends with the investigation still open: the men’s overlap in Washington is established, their meeting is not; Exman has vanished, but no arrest follows from Burton’s interview; and the guns are undergoing comparison rather than yielding a conclusion. By arranging these facts together, the scene makes the business gathering a new investigative hinge while preserving the uncertainty around what bound the three men.