I sleep three hours and wake up knowing it wasn't a dissociative episode.
I spent the cab ride home convincing myself it was. Stress response, some kind of fugue, the brain doing something strange when confronted with a dead man at eleven at night in a cold alley. It happens. I read about it somewhere. The brain filling in gaps with narrative when the actual input is too thin.
But I wake up at four in the morning with Joel Marrs' last twenty minutes still sitting in my chest like swallowed glass, and I know.
I lie there and look at the ceiling and think about the footsteps. The way they kept pace. The specific patience of them.
Then I get up and make coffee and don't touch anything I don't have to.
Major Crimes in the morning smells like burnt coffee and whatever someone microwaved the night before. I know every sound the building makes, the squeak of the third step on the back stairs, the way the heating vent above booking rattles when the temperature drops. Five years and I know this building the way you know a place you've decided not to trust.
I keep my gloves on coming in. Leather, fitted, the kind you can wear inside without looking insane in November. I went through my closet at six in the morning and found two pairs. I put one in my jacket pocket as backup without letting myself think too hard about why. The why is obvious and I'm not ready for it yet.
Renee is already at her desk. She has the Marrs file open, which means she hasn't filed it away as a probable mugging the way I did, which means she's still pulling at something.
I sit down across from her and don't say anything.
She looks up. "You look terrible."
"Didn't sleep."
She looks at me for a beat, the registering look she has, then back down at the file. "Marrs worked the loading dock at Bellhaven Freight. Six years, clean attendance. Nobody there knew him to have trouble with anyone."
"Mugging," I say.
She doesn't say maybe this time. Just turns a page.
I watch her hands on the file and think about what would happen if I took my gloves off and touched the same paper. Whether I'd get anything. Whether I want to.
I leave the gloves on.
For a while neither of us says anything. Renee turns pages. I pull up the morning's intake log and read the same entry three times without it landing.
"The heat's out again on the second floor," Renee says, without looking up.
"It was out last week."
"It was out last week and the week before. Facilities filed it as resolved both times."
"Resolved meaning someone looked at it."
"Resolved meaning someone walked past it and wrote something down." She turns another page. "There's a space heater in the supply closet. You have to unplug the coffee machine to use it. Delgado unplugged the coffee machine last February and there were consequences."
"What kind of consequences."
"The lasting kind." She doesn't elaborate. I don't ask.
Carver comes in around nine. Wide through the shoulders, easy walk, the ease of someone the building has reshaped itself around over a long time. He claps me on the shoulder on his way past.
Through the leather I get nothing. I don't know if that's the glove working or just the limits of whatever this is, and I don't know which answer I prefer.
"Voss." He says it the way he always does, like my name is a small joke we share. He calls everyone by their last name. "Heard you and Montoya caught the Marrs call last night."
"Probable mugging."
"Yeah." He pours coffee without looking at me. "Narrows'll do that. You file it?"
"Last night."
He nods, satisfied, and moves on. Renee doesn't look up from the file.
At lunch I go to the parking structure two blocks over because it's mostly empty and I need to think without people nearby.
I take my right glove off.
My hand looks the same as it always has. I don't know what I expected. Some kind of visible change. A new scar. Something external to match what happened internally. There's nothing.
I put my bare hand flat against the concrete wall.
Nothing. Cold concrete, rough texture, nothing underneath it.
I move to a support pillar. A painted divider stripe. The door handle of an empty car, which I feel immediately bad about and pull away from fast. Nothing from any of it, just the physical sensation of surfaces.
I don't know if that means it only works on people, or only on recent trauma, or only when I'm not trying. I need more data and I have no clean way to get it.
I put my glove back on and eat half my sandwich and think about Joel Marrs walking faster and the footsteps keeping pace. About the boot print on the second rung of the fire escape, the wrong tread and the wrong angle, facing out. Someone else had been in that alley before we arrived. Someone who moved carefully enough to leave one mark and nothing else.
I finish the sandwich and go back to the precinct.
Renee is on the phone when I sit down. Getting-nothing quiet: she hangs up, writes something, crosses it out.
I watch her.
She looks up. Finds me watching her.
"What," she says.
"Nothing." I look at my screen. "Marrs file still open?"
A pause. "Yeah."
"You pulling anything?"
She considers whether to answer. "His building super says he'd been jumpy the last couple weeks. Checking the street before he left. Super thought he owed money to someone."
"That fits a mugging."
"Sure." She turns a page. "Except nothing was taken."
I look at my screen and don't say anything.
After a moment she adds, without looking up: "Two other muggings in the Narrows this week. Both reported as interrupted, perpetrators fled before the unit arrived, victims unharmed, nothing taken from either." She sets a printed sheet on the corner of her desk. "Probably unrelated."
I look at the sheet. Different blocks, different times, same pattern. She's already noted it and decided it's noise. She might be right. The Narrows generates a lot of noise.
"Probably," I say.
She files the sheet in a folder that isn't the Marrs file. I note that she doesn't throw it away.
I pull Marrs' background that afternoon. Standard, start to finish, everything we'd run eventually anyway.
Employment: Bellhaven Freight, loading dock, six years. Before that: a series of short stints, warehouse work, cash jobs, the kind of employment history that says someone spent their twenties not finding their footing and their thirties finally keeping it. One prior from eleven years ago, disorderly conduct, pled down, nothing since.
Previous addresses: four in eleven years, all Narrows or East End. The last one, three years ago, in a building on Sutter Street two blocks from a Wayne Enterprises logistics facility that closed eight years back. The facility closure displaced forty families from the surrounding blocks, according to a city planning document I find attached to a zoning appeal from the same period. Marrs' name isn't in the appeal. He was probably just someone who lived nearby and moved when the neighborhood shifted.
I note the address and move on.
Associates: thin. A few names that appear in the same incident reports, nothing that points anywhere. No known gang affiliation.
I lean back and look at what I have, which is a man who kept his head down and his record clean for eleven years and ended up dead in an alley on a Tuesday night with his wallet missing and a very specific set of footsteps behind him.
The patience of those footsteps is still sitting in my chest. Not the fear, the fear has faded. Just that. The weight of someone who had already decided.
I pick up my pen and write known associates on my notepad and stare at it for a while.
Then I write what did they do underneath it and look at that instead.
Carver's name is at the bottom of a different file on my desk, a noise complaint, admin, nothing. I look at it and think about his hand on my shoulder and the nothing I felt through the leather and wonder if the nothing means he's clean or just that I don't know how any of this works yet.
"Voss."
I look up.
Renee is watching me with the expression that means she has a question she's not going to ask. She's just making sure I know it's there.
"I'm fine," I say.
She nods once, slowly, and goes back to the file.
Outside the window Gotham makes its usual noises, a siren four blocks over, someone's horn, the general low machinery of a city that doesn't stop. The parking structure wall gave me nothing. Joel Marrs' wrist gave me everything.
The difference between a wall and a person is still the only rule I have.
I put my hand in my lap under the desk and flex my fingers inside the glove, feeling the leather. I need to know what this can do and what it can't and where the edges are, because right now I'm working in a building full of people I've been shaking hands with for five years and every single one of them is a possible flood.
I need to know if I can control it.
I'm going to have to touch something to find out.