LISA'S APARTMENT — 8:22 P.M.
The number appeared on the third spreadsheet, buried in a column of outgoing transfers dated fourteen months ago. A nine-digit account reference that, unlike the others, carried no corresponding company name. Every other transaction in the file was meticulously labelled, each destination had some sort of legitimacy: consulting fees, service agreements, vendor payments. Whoever had constructed this ledger had been careful. Systematic. But here, just once, the careful hand had slipped. Or chosen not to bother. A single, small omission, a moment of not caring enough to cover a track that they were certain no one would ever follow.
Lisa leaned closer to the screen. The transfer amount was not remarkable. It was just $50,000, modest by the standards of the surrounding entries. But the date stopped her cold.
It was three days before the first Hanley killing.
She sat back in her chair and pressed her fingers together in front of her mouth, elbows on the table, staring at the number. Her mind moved the way it always did when something clicked into place.
A payment, she thought. Not to a company. To a person. Or to something that traces back to a person.
She opened a new window on her laptop and pulled up the financial crimes database she had access to through the precinct. She typed in the account number. The search took eleven seconds and returned a single result: a dormant personal account registered to a man named Daniel Brian, deceased, three years prior. Natural causes. No surviving family listed.
Lisa stared at the name.
A dead man's account, reactivated. Used once. Then dormant again.
"Who are you using?" she said quietly to the screen.
She wrote the account number on the notepad beside her laptop. Underlined it twice. Then she drew a line from it to a name she had written at the top of the page three days ago, when she had first begun to suspect that the Hanley killings were not three separate events but a single coordinated action: Chairman John Clinton, the CEO of Hanley Plc.
She had no evidence connecting him. Not yet.
She closed the laptop. Sat in the dark for a moment with only the streetlight coming through the gap in the curtains, a thin line of amber across the floor, and thought about Zen Larsson walking away along the riverside, his too-thin coat, his hands in his pockets.
She picked up her phone and called James.
He answered on the second ring, the way he always did, as though he had been awake and waiting, as though he always expected her calls no matter the hour. "Lisa."
"I need you to run a trace for me. Off the books for now."
A brief pause. She could hear the television in his apartment, some late news program, low volume. Then he turned it off. "Tell me."
"A bank account registered to Daniel Brian. He's deceased, death certificate on file, three years ago. The account was used once, fourteen months back. I need to know who touched it. Who authorized the reactivation, where the funds went after, and whether there's any digital fingerprint on the access."
Another pause. Longer this time. "Lisa, if this connects where I think it connects—"
"It does," she said. "I think it does."
"Then we need to be careful. If someone at Hanley has the kind of reach you're suggesting…"
"I know."
"We bring this to Chief Long, we do it properly. We don't go off…"
"Jaaaames." She said his name the way she said it when she needed him to stop being procedural and start being her partner. "I'm not going off anything. I'm asking you to run a trace. That's all."
Silence. Then the sound of him shifting. She imagined him sitting forward in his armchair, the way he did when he committed to something. "Give me the account number."
She read it out. He repeated it back. She thanked him, and they said good night.
Lisa set the phone down on the table and looked at the closed laptop and the notepad with the underlined number.
Four deaths, she thought. And a fifth coming. And somewhere in this city, right now, the hand that was doing the killing.
She sat with that for a long moment. Then she got up, went to the window, and looked out at Los Angeles. The compressed millions of lives stacked in their towers.
Somewhere out there.
DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — HUNTER'S APARTMENT — 3:31 A.M.
The apartment was on the fourth floor of a building that was neither expensive nor cheap. It deliberately unremarkable, chosen for exactly that quality. The lobby had no doorman. The hallways had no cameras that hadn't been carefully assessed and found inadequate. The neighbors, in the months Hunter had lived here, had demonstrated a thorough lack of curiosity about one another, which was the only neighborly quality he required.
He came through the door, locked it behind him, set the bag down by the entrance, and stood for a moment in the dark of the hallway without turning on a light. This was a habit, not caution. A few seconds of standing in the dark and silence of his own space, letting the night's work settle and recede to whatever interior place he kept it.
Then he moved to the bathroom, turned on the shower, and undressed with the same methodical attention he brought to everything. The clothes went into a specific bag, not the laundry, not yet, to be dealt with separately in the morning. He stepped under the water, which he kept cold. The cold helped him think clearly, or perhaps more accurately, helped him stop thinking, which was the same thing as far as he was concerned.
He stood under the water for a long time.
MEMORY — FOURTEEN YEARS PRIOR
A room. Concrete walls. The smell of industrial cleaner filled the air. A boy of perhaps seventeen sitting on a metal chair, wrists bound, head down. Not crying, he had already understood by then that crying served no useful function in this particular room. A man standing over him.
"You survived," the man said. "That tells me something about you."
The boy looked up. His face was badly bruised, one eye swollen shut, and his remaining eye was barely open. But watching. Already learning the room, the man, the math of the situation.
"What does it tell you?" the boy asked. His voice was hoarse but controlled.
The man studied him for a long moment. Then something moved in his expression, not warmth exactly. Recognition, perhaps. The way a craftsman looks at raw material and sees in it the thing it could become.
"That you're going to be useful," the man said. "Whether you want to be or not."
BACK TO THE PRESENT
Hunter turned off the shower.
He stood in the steam for a moment with his hands braced on either side of the basin, looking at the fogged mirror, at the blurred outline of himself within it, featureless, anonymous. Then he straightened, towelled off, and walked to the kitchen.
The kitchen was the only room in the apartment that showed any evidence of genuine habitation. The refrigerator was well-stocked: vegetables, protein, the ingredients for several specific meals he prepared with the same precision he brought to everything else. On the counter, a small succulent in a terracotta pot, leaves plump and dark green. On the wall, a single framed photograph of a coastal landscape: grey water, grey sky, black rocks, somewhere that may or may not have been real or remembered or imagined.
He made rice. He made soup from stock he had prepared two days earlier. He ate standing at the counter. He ate efficiently, tasting without much attention to the tasting, and when he was done he washed the bowl and set it to dry.
He sat down then, finally, at the small desk beneath the window. On the desk was a laptop, different from the ones used for work, this one personal, registered to nothing sensitive, and beside it, a slim manila folder. He opened the folder.
Inside were photocopies. Old ones, the paper of the originals had yellowed, and even the copies carried that quality of age. They were documents from a children's home. It was the kind of paperwork that reduced human beings to categories and dates.
He did not read them. He had read them many times. He simply looked at them the way he looked at the mirror, searching, finding only surfaces, the thing he needed remaining stubbornly out of reach behind the glass.
There was one name in the documents that mattered. One name that he had been carrying for most of his life.
His father's name.
Or the name of the man who might be his father. All that mattered to him was finding him.
He closed the folder. He turned off the desk lamp. He lay down on his bed, fully clothed, on top of the covers, which was how he always slept, and which he had long since stopped noticing as unusual, and looked at the ceiling while the city moved outside his window in its quiet, insomniac way.
Sleep came for him slowly, the way it always did. He let it come without fighting or welcoming it.
And in the last fragment of consciousness before it took him completely, a single image surfaced: a child's hand. Small fingers. Reaching.
Whose hand it was, he could not say.
He slept.