Four days after the canvass, Renee gets a call from the Bellhaven Freight supervisor.
He'd been thinking about it, he says. There's something he hadn't mentioned because he wasn't sure it mattered, but it's been sitting with him.
I'm writing up a noise complaint on the other side of our facing desks and not trying to listen. The bullpen has the acoustics of a parking garage.
"Can you describe her?" Renee says. She writes something. "Mid-thirties. Okay." More writing. "And how long did you speak with her?" A pause. "Right. Thank you for calling."
She hangs up and looks at what she's written.
"Woman came to the dock asking for Marrs about a month before he died. Said she was an old friend."
"Description."
"Mid-thirties. Slight, quiet. The supervisor said he didn't get a great look. She wasn't there long and it was a busy morning." She caps her pen. "He said something else."
I look up.
"He said she moved like she knew where the cameras were." Renee says it the way the supervisor must have said it, without knowing why he was saying it. "He didn't file it at the time. It just stuck."
I write it down. Renee writes it down. Neither of us says anything for a moment.
I think about a woman at a loading dock at seven in the morning, cataloguing exit routes and camera angles without looking like that's what she's doing. I think about the dark jacket walking east at two in the morning.
"Worth keeping," I say.
"Worth keeping," Renee agrees.
The calibration test happens by accident, which feels appropriate.
I'm getting coffee in the break room when Delgado leaves and we pass each other in the doorway at the same time. He grabs the frame on his way out and my bare hand (right glove off, mug in the other hand) catches the back of his wrist.
I get something.
Not deep. A surface impression: low-grade irritation, the specific tired stress of someone who'd been on shift too long and wanted to go home. Nothing underneath it.
I know Delgado. He's been on a double since yesterday and had been vocal about it all morning. The reading matches exactly what I already knew.
I stand in the doorway for a moment after he leaves.
The gloves work. Full block. Every handshake, every shoulder-clap, everything in this building has been clean.
There's something else. At the very edge of the impression from Delgado, not from him but from the doorframe itself when his hand hit it, old and faint, something that happened in this doorway a long time ago. A fragment of feeling, nothing I can read clearly, just residue. The building has been here a long time. Things accumulate.
I pour my coffee and put the glove back on.
The name surfaces that afternoon.
I'd run Coury's background after the canvass and gotten nothing on the automatic search. But I'd pulled a wider net too, associates, anyone appearing in the same incident reports going back a decade, and that list had been sitting in my drawer because it had forty-seven names and no obvious starting point.
I go through it slowly, with Marrs' equivalent list open next to it, running them by hand.
Forty minutes in, I find it.
Daniel Rowe. Forty-seven years old. One shared incident report from nine years ago, a noise complaint at an address in the Narrows where Marrs, Coury, and Rowe are all listed as present. Nothing came of it. Filed and closed the same night.
I run Rowe on his own.
Assault, two counts. Possession. Eighteen months at Blackgate, out six years ago. Currently doing demolition work, cash jobs, address in the Narrows.
And then, six months ago: a verbal altercation at Bellhaven Freight. Rowe had shown up at Marrs' workplace. Raised his voice loud enough that two dock workers filed a report. One of them is quoted directly: he said he'd make him pay for it one way or another.
Money. Marrs owed Rowe.
I read it twice. Then I go back through the Coury background and find what I should have looked for the first time.
Phone records. Coury's outgoing calls. The night after Marrs turned up dead, Coury made two calls in quick succession, both to prepaid numbers, unregistered. Neither was answered.
I write the numbers down and walk the Rowe file to Renee's desk.
She reads it. Turns to the incident report. Looks up. "How long have you had this."
"Since the background check. It didn't surface on the automatic overlap. I ran the lists by hand today." I sit down. "Coury also called two prepaid numbers the night after Marrs died. Neither answered. Numbers are unregistered."
Renee looks at the file, then at my notepad. "He was warning someone."
"Or trying to."
She's quiet. Around us the bullpen runs its usual sounds.
"We need to find Danny Rowe," she says.
The cold, patient quality under two dead men's fear had nothing in common with a man who showed up at someone's workplace in the middle of the day and made threats loud enough for witnesses.
"Yeah," I say.
I just wasn't sure Rowe was going to be what we were looking for.