Jac stared at the phone on her nightstand like it might bite her. The digital clock beside it glowed 6:11 a.m. in blocky green numbers, the only light in the room besides the thin gray seep of a Billings winter morning through the blinds. She lay on her back on top of the covers, still in the T-shirt she’d collapsed in a few hours earlier, hair twisted into the same knot she’d worn on duty the day before. She hadn’t bothered with pajamas. She hadn’t really slept.

  Her pager sat next to the phone, silent for once. No 911. No all-caps CALL IN. Just her and the stillness and the echo of work running on a loop in her head. Two men. One name.

  Bruce’s voice had followed her home last night, that low, worn drawl of his repeating the same phrase until it lodged behind her eyes. Two Stalls. But only one real one.

  Jac rubbed a palm over her face and turned on her side, facing the phone fully. The little slip of paper with Melody’s number was tucked under it, the corner just visible. She’d put it there deliberately, like a dare. Two days.

  Two days since she’d stood at the bar trying not to shake while Melody poured her a beer and tried to make her laugh. Two days since she’d said, “I’m on the case,” like it was something to be proud of and not something that made her wake up sweating. Two days since she’d promised—promised herself, not anyone else—that she’d call. She hadn’t.

  Cops didn’t get nervous calling a bartender. That was ridiculous. She’d kicked down doors. Tackled suspects. Shot at paper silhouettes until her shoulder ached. She could run a mile in under seven minutes and bench her own weight. But she couldn’t pick up a phone.

  Her hand slid toward it anyway, fingers curling around the receiver. She lifted it slowly, just enough that the coiled cord pulled taut. Her thumb hovered over the row of buttons on the answering machine: PLAY, STOP, ERASE.

  She pressed PLAY. The tape whirred, clicked. Her own voice came through in a tinny echo from a few days ago, leaving a message for her mother about Sunday dinner. A telemarketer offering long-distance. A wrong number. Nothing that mattered. No Melody.

  Of course not, she thought. Why would she call? You never called her. Didn’t even leave your number. Rookie.

  The machine beeped once, signaling the end of messages. Jac hung up and let her hand rest on the receiver, tempted—just for a second—to dial. She could picture it perfectly: Melody’s voice, roughened a little from smoke and late nights, picked up on the second ring. Jac would say something clever. Or at least coherent. Maybe apologize for disappearing. Maybe joke about working homicide and having terrible timing. Or she’d freeze up, say nothing, and make an idiot of herself.

  Coward, a small voice inside her said. You’ll chase men with guns down alleys, but you won’t call a woman?

  She sighed, pushed herself upright, and swung her legs over the side of the bed. The floor was cold on her bare feet. She sat there a moment, elbows on her knees, head in her hands, until the weight of the day settled into place.

  Whatever else was happening in her personal life—or not happening—two men were dead. One had been torn apart like meat. One had died alone in the cold. Both of them had their lives tangled up in ways she didn’t understand, and their names were sitting in every headline like a challenge.

  She couldn’t afford to be the kind of person who left things hanging. Not on a case. Not on anything.

  The phone rang. She jumped, heart in her throat, before she caught herself. The sound cut through the apartment’s quiet like a siren. She snatched up the receiver so fast she almost dropped it.

  “Hello?”

  “Jac.” Bruce’s voice. Low. Rough. Too awake for this hour. “You up?”

  She exhaled, tension bleeding off with the breath. “Yeah. I’m up.”

  “You’re on the schedule at eight, but I’m headed in early. You want a ride or you good?”

  “I’ll meet you there,” she said automatically. Then, because it felt like the thing a partner should say, added, “You sleep at all?”

  “Some.” He didn’t sound like it. “We’re going to see Mick again today.”

  Third time. Jac glanced at the little slip of paper under the phone, the neat loops of Melody’s handwriting. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll be there.”

  “Bring coffee,” Bruce said, and hung up.

  Jac looked at the dead receiver a moment longer, then set it back in the cradle. She picked up the scrap with Melody’s number, folded it once, twice, until it was a small square, and slid it into her wallet behind her badge.

  Not today, she told herself. Today, you work. She stood and headed for the shower.

  By 7:25 a.m., the homicide bullpen hummed with the low murmur of early activity. Phones rang sporadically. Chairs creaked. A radio chattered somewhere down the hall with a dispatcher’s voice calling out units and addresses. The smell of burnt coffee and old paper hung in the air.

  Jac stepped in carrying a cardboard tray with two Styrofoam cups, her hair still damp but pulled back into a tight bun. Her shirt was crisp. Her stomach was a knot.

  Bruce sat at his desk, hunched over a file, the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up, tie loosened. He looked like he hadn’t gone home at all. There were fresh circles under his eyes, a shadow of stubble on his jaw, and a Styrofoam cup already sitting half-empty near his hand. It didn’t look like the first.

  She set the tray down on his desk and slid one of the new cups toward him. “You look like shit,” she said.

  He glanced up, a faint smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Morning to you too, Vincent.” He eyed the coffee, then her. “I already got one.”

  “That’s from the break room,” she said. “This one’s drinkable.”

  He didn’t hesitate, sliding his cup to the side for the new.

  “I think the pot in there predates the building.”

  “The coffee in it, for sure does.”

  He gave a low, noncommittal grunt and took the cup she’d brought. Steam curled up between his fingers as he pried off the lid and took a cautious sip. His shoulders loosened a fraction. “All right,” he conceded. “You might’ve just saved my life.”

  “I thought that was your job,” she said. “Saving lives.”

  He snorted. “Not mine. I just annoy killers until they give up.”

  She dropped her own bag beside her desk and sat, flipping open her notebook. Photos of yesterday’s Dry Creek scene lay on the desk between them, edges curling slightly. Real Stall. Noodle. Whatever she called him in her head, she saw only the same thing when she closed her eyes: a man who’d been worn down to nothing by the world, holding the same name as another dead man who didn’t belong in his skin.

  “ME’s report came in late last night,” Bruce said. He tapped the file he’d been reading. “Confirming what we already knew. Our guy under the bridge? Hypothermia and withdrawal. He froze to death after his body gave up on him.”

  Jac swallowed. “And the other one?”

  “Still a mess.” He flipped another page, eyes scanning. “They can’t line up his body with Stall’s records. Age, build, dental—they’re calling him a John Doe with Stall’s fingerprints.”

  “Which we now know aren’t actually Stall’s,” Jac said.

  “Yep.” Bruce took another drink of coffee. “Guy stole the life of a kid nobody was watching, walked away from prison like it was a revolving door, and spent the next decade pretending to be someone he wasn’t.”

  “And then ended up scattered in a storage unit.” She studied one of the photos—carefully, clinically, refusing to let herself flinch. If she treated it like anatomy, like the cadaver work she’d seen in training, it was easier. She could turn it into a pattern instead of a face.

  “He made somebody mad,” Bruce said. “Maybe more than one somebody, to end up like that.”

  “Whistleblowers,” Jac murmured. “MentaTech. The leak. How many people do you think’s involved with that?”

  Bruce nodded.

  “And Mick’s in the middle of it.” Jac glanced at the map on the wall, the red circles Bruce had drawn the night before: storage lockup, Dry Creek, Mick’s garage. A triangle of trouble.

  Bruce followed her gaze. “Mick’s either the unluckiest landlord in Montana,” he said, “or he’s lying through his teeth.”

  “Third time’s the charm?” she asked.

  His mouth twitched. “Let’s hope so.”

  He closed the folder and stood, shrugging into his jacket. “Come on. Before he gets wind we’re coming.”

  They walked out together, the bullpen’s hum fading behind them. Outside, the air bit at Jac’s cheeks the second they stepped into it. The sky over Billings was a flat, washed-out white, the kind that meant the sun was up there somewhere but had no interest in being seen. The breath of their words ghosted in front of them as they crossed the lot.

  Bruce’s unmarked sedan sat where he’d left it. Jac slid into the passenger seat, the vinyl cold even through her slacks. As he pulled out onto the street, the city unfolded around them: low buildings, old brick, patches of snow clinging stubbornly in gutters and along the shadowed edges of sidewalks.

  Her pager buzzed once against her hip. Reflex made her reach for it, thumb flicking over the tiny screen. Not a callout—just the precinct number with a 911 cleared below it, resolving to a generic reminder from the watch commander about a staff meeting later in the week. Nothing urgent. Nothing to distract from the case.

  Good, she told herself. One nightmare at a time.

  Bruce drove with one hand on the wheel, the other wrapped around his coffee cup, glancing at her occasionally. “You sleep?” he asked.

  “Some,” she lied. “You?”

  “About an hour on my couch,” he said. “Woke up with a crick in my neck and my wife’s voice on the other side of the wall telling me I love my job more than I love her.”

  Jac looked out the window, giving him the courtesy of not staring. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”

  They fell into silence for a few blocks. Traffic was light. A school bus lurched around a corner, kids pressing their faces to fogged-up windows. A man in a heavy coat scraped ice off his windshield with a credit card, breath puffing in white bursts.

  “Lieutenant?” Jac said finally.

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you ever get used to it?”

  He glanced at her. “To what? Dead bodies? No. You just get better at pretending you are.”

  “I don’t mean that.” She hesitated, searching for the words that matched the hollow feeling in her chest. “I mean… knowing that someone did it. Chose to do it. Woke up one morning and decided they could tear somebody apart and go home and eat dinner like nothing happened.”

  Bruce let out a long breath. “You don’t get used to that either,” he said. “You just stop being surprised.”

  That wasn’t the comfort she’d been hoping for.

  He gave her a sidelong look, softer now. “You handled yourself well yesterday,” he said. “With Noodle. And with the orphanage. The questions you asked were good.”

  She swallowed down a rush of ridiculous warmth at the praise. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t let it eat you alive,” he added. “That’s life’s job. This job ain’t living, that’s for sure.”

  They turned onto a familiar stretch of road. Mick’s garage came into view a moment later, hunkered at the end of a row of tired storefronts like an old dog guarding its corner. The same lopsided hand-painted sign. The same half-raised bay door. The same sense that the building was watching them as much as they were watching it.

  Jac felt her shoulders tense as Bruce pulled in and killed the engine.

  “Third time,” she said.

  “Yup,” he agreed. “This time you lead.”

  She blinked at him. “Me?”

  “You want to be a detective or not?”

  “I do, I just—”

  “Then you take point. You noticed things yesterday I didn’t. Use it.”

  Her mouth went dry. She glanced at the garage. “What if I screw it up?”

  He shrugged. “Then we come back a fourth time. But my money’s on you, kid.”

  He got out of the car without waiting for her answer.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  Jac stayed where she was for half a breath, her pulse drumming in her ears, then forced herself to open the door. The cold slapped the indecision right out of her. She tugged her jacket tighter, squared her shoulders, and followed him toward the garage.

  Mick appeared as they approached, as if an invisible alarm at the edge of his territory had been tripped. He stepped out from behind the open hood of an old pickup, wiping his hands on the same filthy rag as yesterday. His eyes flicked from Bruce to Jac, lingering a fraction longer on her.

  “Well, shit,” he said. “Morning to you too. You two ever think about calling ahead?”

  “We like the element of surprise,” Bruce said. “Keeps us young.”

  Mick snorted. “You ain’t young.”

  “I bring the average down,” Jac said.

  Both men looked at her. She felt a flush creep up her neck, but she held Mick’s stare. If she was going to lead this, she couldn’t flinch.

  “We’ve got more questions,” she said.

  “Of course you do.” Mick folded his arms. “I already told you what I know. Twice.”

  “And we appreciate that,” she said. “But things have… developed.”

  Mick’s gaze sharpened. “Developed how?”

  Bruce stepped back half a pace, a quiet signal that this was her show. Jac swallowed, then pulled the small envelope from her pocket. Inside was a photocopy of Noodle’s old orphanage photo on top of a recent shot of his body, and beside it, the same for the man found with ‘Stall’s’ MentaTech badge.

  She held up the images of Noodle first. “This is George Stall,” she said. “The real one. You knew him as Noodle.”

  Mick’s jaw tightened. He didn’t deny it.

  She flipped to the other picture. “This man,” she said. “The one from the storage unit. He wasn’t Stall. Not really. He stole Stall’s identity fifteen years ago. Used his name. His records. But he was someone else.”

  Mick’s eyes slid away, toward the dark interior of the garage, the oil-slick floor, the dangling chains. He licked his lower lip, a nervous tic she hadn’t seen yesterday.

  “We know you rented to him,” she continued. “We know he used more than one of your properties.”

  “I rent to a lot of people,” Mick said, his voice flat.

  “You rented to both of them,” she said. “To Noodle when he needed a place to crash. To the other man when he needed a way to stay off the grid.”

  Mick’s fingers worked the rag harder, twisting it. “You’re going to arrest me for renting, now? Didn’t know that was illegal.”

  “It’s not,” she said. “But two of your tenants are dead. Two men with the same name. And you’re standing in the middle.”

  He looked back at her, something like anger flickering across his features. “You think I did that? You think I could do that to a man?” His voice rose on the last word, then dropped again, brittle. “I’ve seen some shit. I’ve hosted some shit. But I don’t cut people up and rearrange ’em or any shit like… that.”

  Jac didn’t look away. “We’re not saying you did,” she said. “We’re saying you’re the only one who can tell us how they lived before they died.”

  Mick stared at her for a long moment. It was different from how he looked at Bruce—less combative, more… measuring. Like he was deciding whether or not she was safe to trust.

  “You’re new,” he said finally, a slight gleam in his eyes.

  “Cut the bullshit,” she said.

  “You’ve got that academy shine,” he muttered. “All polished up. Think the world’s going to make sense if you just put the right words in the right boxes.”

  Bruce started to step in, but Jac raised a hand, not taking her eyes off Mick. “I think the world doesn’t make sense most days,” she said. “That’s why we ask questions.”

  Mick huffed through his nose, something that almost, almost resembled a laugh. “All right, Officer Vincent. You want the truth?”

  “That’d be nice.”

  He jerked his head toward the small office at the back of the garage. “Not out here.”

  They followed him inside. The office was worse than the main bay—smaller, more crowded, paper and grime layered onto every surface. A faint, stale cigarette haze clung to the air, as if the walls themselves smoked.

  Mick shut the door behind them and leaned against it. For the first time since they’d met him, he looked tired.

  “Noodle was a stray,” he said. “Neighborhood kid, kind of. Grew up around here after the home spit him out. He’d show up every few months, clean my toilets, sweep the lot, sleep in the back when it was really cold. I let him. Cheaper than hiring.”

  “He owes you money?” Bruce asked.

  “Not enough to carve him up over,” Mick snapped. He caught himself, glanced at Jac, and his tone softened half a notch. “He was a pain in the ass sometimes. Drank what he shouldn’t, shot what he shouldn’t. But he didn’t hurt anybody. Nobody worth mentioning.”

  “And the other Stall?” Jac asked.

  Mick’s mouth flattened. “He was different.”

  “How?”

  “He came in one day in ’84 or so.” Mick scratched his neck, eyes flicking to the corkboard on the wall where keys and rental slips hung. “Said his name was George, had cash, wanted something cheap, no questions. I don’t ask, so I didn’t.”

  “Sounds about right.” Bruce remarked.

  “I ain’t the cops,” Mick said. “I don’t ask questions. Guy had money. That’s all that matters in my line of work.”

  “Did Noodle and him ever cross paths?” Jac asked. “Either one of them ever mention the other? Any mutual friends? Business associates?”

  “Probably not,” Mick said. “By the time he came back around, fake-Stall had moved on to better accommodations.”

  “Better?” Jac repeated.

  Mick gestured vaguely. “He started in a basement room behind a laundromat I own. Nothing fancy. Then he wanted a bigger space. Then a cleaner one. Then one with a view of the river. Always cash. Always on time. No friends. No girls. No TV noise. Just him and his… work.” He said the last word like it tasted wrong.

  “When did that change?” Jac asked.

  Mick hesitated. The dirty window behind him threw a weak rectangle of light across his face, cutting his eyes into shadow. “A couple of weeks back,” he said. “After that story about the tech company hit the news. I don’t watch that business crap, but it was everywhere for a few days. Corporate secrets, stolen designs, some bullshit like that.” He shrugged. “Looked up one evening and saw his name rolling across the bottom of the screen. George Stall. Big shot brainiac on the hook for a leak.”

  “And?” Jac prompted.

  “And he came in the next day looking like he’d seen a ghost.” Mick’s gaze dropped to the floor. “Kept glancing over his shoulder. Asked about month-to-month instead of six. Wanted to know if anybody’d been asking about him—as if I’d remember every face that walks through here.” He shook his head. “He was spooked. The kind of spooked you don’t get just from a pissed-off boss.”

  “You think someone was actually after him,” Jac said quietly.

  “I think he thought so,” Mick said. “And in my experience, people like that don’t think that way for no reason.”

  “Did he say who?” Bruce asked.

  “No,” Mick said. “Wouldn’t. The more nervous he got, the less he talked. Just paced. Smoked. Paid in advance.”

  “Did he move?” Jac asked. “Again?”

  “Yeah.” Mick sighed. “Last I knew, he was juggling two different places. Storage unit out by where you found the… pieces.” His mouth twisted. “And a small room over on 12th. Said he wanted options.”

  Jac felt something click into place in her head. “He was creating exits,” she said. “Alternate routes. If someone came looking at one place, he could vanish through another.”

  Mick’s eyes flicked up to her, like he hadn’t expected her to say it out loud. “You ever been hunted, Officer Vincent?” he asked softly.

  The question landed heavier than it should have. She thought of her father’s badge in the small shrine on her wall, the folded flag in her mother’s closet, the stories of how he’d died—chasing a suspect into a dark house, not knowing who or what waited inside.

  “No,” she said.

  “Man moves like that,” Mick said, “he ain’t living. He’s just delaying the inevitable.”

  Jac shifted her weight, the floor creaking under her boot. “Why didn’t you tell us this before?” she asked.

  “You think I like being in the middle of this?” Mick shot back. “First time you came, you just had your mess in the storage unit. That’s on my books, sure, but I didn’t know they were tied together. Second time, you show me Noodle under the bridge, suddenly that’s two bodies on my property. You look at me like I’m the one putting them there.”

  Bruce opened his mouth, but Jac spoke first. “We’re looking at you because you’re connected,” she said. “Not because we want you to be guilty.”

  “Doesn’t make a difference from where I’m standing,” he said. “I talk too much, maybe whoever did this decides I’m next. You cops go home to your nice little houses. I stay here. I live in the middle of these people.”

  “We don’t all go home to nice houses,” Bruce muttered.

  Mick glanced at him, something wry and bitter passing between two men who understood more about each other than either of them liked. Then he looked back at Jac.

  “You want addresses?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He shook his head. “Not today.”

  Her jaw tightened. “Mick—”

  “I’ve given you more than I should already,” he said. “If I’m right—if someone’s working a list—then they already know Stall’s dead, and maybe they know about Noodle too. Maybe they know who he talked to. Maybe they know about me.” He tapped his chest with the hand holding the rag. “I talk too much, maybe the next body you find with my name on a lease is mine.”

  “You’re obstructing,” Bruce said.

  “File the paperwork,” Mick said. “See if a judge wants to force a man to sign his own death warrant.”

  He wasn’t wrong, and they all knew it.

  Jac took a breath. “Mick,” she said, forcing her voice gentler. “You said you don’t hurt people. Right now, the person you’re protecting—whoever they are—has killed at least two men. Maybe more. And they’re not done. You know that.”

  His eyes met hers and held. There was a lot in them—fear, stubbornness, a lifetime’s worth of bad decisions. And something else too. Shame.

  “I rent to criminals,” he said quietly. “I know that. I live in that world. I let them stash their shit where the cops don’t look. But there’s a line.” His gaze dropped to the floor again. “This? This is beyond it.”

  “Then help us stop it,” she said.

  For a moment, she thought he might. Something like resolve flickered across his face. His mouth opened.

  Then he shut it again and shook his head. “Come back tomorrow,” he said. “Or the next day. Maybe I’ll feel braver.”

  Jac felt a flare of frustration. “People might die between now and then.”

  “People might die if I talk,” he replied.

  There wasn’t an easy argument to that.

  Bruce stepped in, his patience thinning. “We can drag you in,” he said. “Hold you. Make your life uncomfortable until you remember how much better it is to cooperate.”

  Mick looked at him, some of his old sarcasm returning. “You could try,” he said. “But then who’s going to answer when your killer comes knocking on my door and I’m not here to tell you about it?”

  They stared at each other over the cluttered little office. Jac could feel the stalemate solidifying in the air.

  She broke it by stepping back. “We’ll be in touch,” she said.

  Mick exhaled, shoulders sagging with something like relief. “Yeah,” he said. “You always are.”

  Outside, the cold air hit her like a slap again. This time, it felt… clarifying. She walked toward the car in silence, boots crunching on gravel. Bruce followed, hands shoved in his pockets, jaw working.

  “Well,” he said as they reached the sedan. “That was a whole lot of something and nothing.”

  “He’s scared,” she said.

  “Of us,” Bruce said.

  “Of whoever killed them,” she corrected. She looked back at the garage, at the grimy windows reflecting a pale sky. “He’s protecting himself, not them.”

  Bruce unlocked the car, slid behind the wheel, and waited for her to get in. He didn’t start the engine right away.

  “You think he knows who did it?” he asked.

  “I think he knows the kind of people who could,” she said. “And I think he’s spent his whole life pretending that if he looks the other way, none of it will touch him.”

  Bruce drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “That’s a luxury we don’t have.”

  She watched Mick’s figure move in the shadows of the garage, a silhouette against the dim interior as he went back to work. “No,” she said. “We don’t.”

  He turned the key. The engine coughed, then settled into a low rumble. As they pulled out of the lot, Jac felt a prickle at the back of her neck, like someone had just stepped up behind her. She checked the side mirror, the rearview, scanning.

  Just the usual morning traffic. A pickup. A sedan. A delivery truck. Nothing that screamed danger. Nothing that made sense of the feeling.

  “You see something?” Bruce asked.

  She shook her head. “No. Just… got that sense again.”

  “What sense?”

  “Like we’re being watched,” she said.

  He glanced at the mirror too, then shrugged. “We’re cops. We’re always being watched.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  He didn’t push it. Maybe he didn’t want to validate something he couldn’t explain.

  Back at the precinct, the day unfolded in a series of small frustrations. Phone calls that went nowhere. Messages from MentaTech’s legal department insisting their cooperation had limits. A brief from the captain about keeping details out of the press. The news talking heads were already worrying the story like a dog with a bone—Two Dead in Billings Mystery—and every time Jac caught it flicker on a breakroom television, her stomach tightened.

  She and Bruce spent an hour at the whiteboard, moving photos and notes around, drawing potential lines between Stall, Noodle, Mick, MentaTech, and the whistleblowers. Every configuration they tried left gaps.

  “This man was hunted,” she said finally, tapping the picture of John Doe with the marker. “He moved like it. Mick saw it. His landlord saw it. His coworkers saw it. He saw it. If he was running, he wasn’t running from some petty corporate dispute.”

  Bruce nodded slowly. “You think it started before the leak?” he asked.

  “I think it started fifteen years ago,” she said. “The day he walked out of prison with someone else’s name.”

  Bruce looked at her, something like reluctant respect settling into his expression. “Where’d you come from again?” he asked. “Patrol?”

  “Two years,” she said.

  “You missed your calling,” he muttered.

  She smiled, small and humorless. “I’m here now.”

  It was late afternoon by the time she finally made it back to her own desk. A pile of reports waited for her. She slid into her chair, flexed her fingers, and started typing.

  Every so often, her gaze drifted to the phone. She imagined dialing the bar. Asking for Melody. Trying to explain—without breaking any confidentiality rules—that the case that had shaken her two nights ago had turned into something larger, stranger. That she wasn’t sleeping. That she kept hearing the sound of her mother’s voice saying she was proud and the whisper of the ME’s words about Stall’s corpse in the same breath. What would she even say?

  Hi, it’s Jac, from the other night. I’m the cop who left early. I’m the cop who didn’t call. Want to hear about the way a man looks when he’s been dragged apart by something no human hand should be able to do? No. She couldn’t put that on anyone.

  Her pager buzzed once on her hip, making her jump. She pulled it free. A four-digit number flashed: 1212. Internal extension. The homicide line.

  She picked up the phone, dialed. “Vincent.”

  “Hey, Jac.” The watch commander’s voice. “ME’s got some follow-up he wants to go over with you and Morrow. He tried his line, no answer.”

  She glanced at Bruce’s empty chair. He’d gone down to records half an hour ago. “We’ll swing by,” she said. “Tell him to give us ten.”

  She hung up, grabbed her notebook, and stood. As she stepped away from her desk, her hand brushed her wallet. She thought of the folded scrap inside. Later, she promised herself again.

  She and Bruce spent the next hour in the tiled, bleach-smelling basement of the ME’s office, listening to Sanford walk through the contradictions in the two men’s bodies in more detail than she’d wanted. Hypothermia. Withdrawal. Physical trauma that didn’t line up with any tool he recognized. The phrase “compression beyond expected human force” lodged in her brain like a splinter.

  By the time they climbed the stairs back up to the main floor, her head throbbed.

  “Tell me again that the second guy was human,” she said.

  “He was,” Bruce said. “Whatever happened to him, he was just a man before it.”

  Just a man had bled across the floor of a storage unit and seeped into concrete. Just a man had tried to outrun something that could fold his body in on itself like wet cardboard.

  They walked out into the fading light. The sky had turned the color of a bruise, purple and gray clouds hanging low. Streetlights flickered on in staggered succession.

  “You’re off in an hour,” Bruce said. “Go home after that.”

  “And you?” she asked.

  He gave a half-smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “We’ll see.”

  She wanted to tell him to go home too. To his wife. To his kitchen. To the life that still had just enough warmth to save if he’d stop letting the job bleed it dry.

  But she didn’t. He outranked her, by years and scars and cases. It wasn’t her place.

  Instead, she said, “We’ll figure it out.”

  He nodded once, slowly. “Hope so, kid.”

  She made it home a little after eight. The apartment felt emptier than usual when she opened the door, the dark swallowing her as she stepped in. She flipped on the light, shrugged off her jacket, and tossed her keys into the ceramic bowl by the door.

  Her answering machine blinked a small red 1. Her heart jumped stupidly. She crossed the room in three strides, hit PLAY.

  “Hi, sweetheart.” Her mother’s voice, cheery and soft. “Just checking in. Haven’t heard from you today. I know you’re busy with your big case. Call your mother when you remember you have one.” Beep.

  Jac exhaled, tension sliding out on the sigh. She felt guilty and relieved and foolish all at once.

  She picked up the phone, dialed the familiar number. Her mother answered on the second ring, the conversation easy and short—she was fine, the case was complicated, yes, she was eating, yes, she was sleeping. Mostly lies, but ones her mother wanted to hear.

  When she hung up, the apartment was quiet again.

  She stood there with the phone in her hand and Melody’s number in her head.

  Her thumb hovered over the keypad. She could see the bar in her mind—the dim light, the clink of glass, Melody’s tattooed forearm as she wiped down the counter. The little smile when she’d said, “You gonna call, or are you one of those ‘numbers look good on the fridge’ types?” Jac dialed the first three numbers. Stopped.

  Her hand trembled. Not from fear of rejection, she told herself. Fear of… what, then? Of being seen? Of wanting something that had nothing to do with badges and procedure and living up to the ghost of a man in uniform?

  She hung up gently and set the receiver down.

  Tomorrow, she thought.

  Then she went to the fridge, pulled out a plate of leftovers her mother had insisted she take home from the memorial dinner, heated it, and sat at the small table by the window.

  Outside, a siren wailed faintly somewhere in the city, rising and falling, the sound threading its way through the glass like a reminder: the world kept moving. People lived, died, hurt each other. And she’d signed up to stand in the path of all of it.

  As she took the first bite, the savory-richness felt like a foreign thing in her mouth, out of place in a day full of morgue reports and men who’d died alone.

  Tomorrow, she told herself again. Tomorrow she’d call Melody, they’d go back to see Mick, they might even get closer to the truth.

  Tonight, she finished her plate, turned off the lights, and lay in bed staring at the ceiling until sleep finally came, thin and restless and full of broken faces and a pair of deep-set eyes watching her from behind dirty glass.