Fasano runs the Resk investigation like a man who already knows the answer and is gathering evidence to confirm it.
His theory is a rival operation moving on Maroni's book. Maroni had been in Blackgate for eight months, put there by Falcone, who had used his GCPD connections to hand his rival to the DA on a clean plate and absorb the territory. Falcone ran the Narrows now, in the way he ran everything: through holding companies, through inspectors who signed where they were told to sign, through the gap between what was on paper and what was actually happening. Fasano had been watching that territory for months, waiting for the first sign of someone testing the new arrangement. Resk running numbers for what remained of Maroni's book looked like the first thing moving. It was the kind of theory that had been correct before in Gotham, which was exactly the problem: it fit the shape of things that had happened, not the shape of this one.
Renee and I attend briefings, contribute what we have on Marrs and Coury, and watch Fasano's people pursue a direction we both know is wrong.
On the third day Fasano arranges interviews. I take two, Renee takes two. The first man I interview is named Cutler, fifty-one, so completely confused about why anyone thought he'd ordered a hit on a numbers runner from a rival's book that his confusion is more convincing than any alibi.
"Resk ran for Maroni," he says, for the third time. "That's Maroni's thing. Why would I touch Maroni's thing?"
"You tell me," I say.
"I wouldn't. It's not worth it. A numbers runner." He shakes his head. "If I wanted to send Maroni a message I'd send him a message."
The second man is younger and more careful and also has nothing to do with it.
A third man, nervous, younger still, says something as I'm closing my notebook. "There's something moving in the Narrows at night that isn't one of ours and isn't one of theirs." He says it quickly, like getting it out before he changes his mind. "I don't know what it is. I'm not the only one who's noticed."
I write it down verbatim. He won't add anything to it and I don't push.
On the same day I review the Coury file more carefully and find, on the header of a declined prosecution from six months back, a name: Dent, Harvey, ADA. I don't know him. I close it and keep going. The name also appears in a Wayne Foundation civic initiative grant from two years prior. I find this when I pull the DA's office contact Fasano has arranged, the same contact whose number is apparently on that header. The name appears twice. I write it down without knowing why.
In the hallway after the interviews Renee finds me. She has the compressed look she gets when she's been patient for a long time and is reaching the outer edge of it.
"Cutler," she says.
"Nothing. Confused. Legitimately confused."
"Mine too." She leans against the wall. "Fasano's going to keep pulling this thread."
"The thread doesn't go anywhere."
"I know that."
"Renee." I keep my voice level. "We have three connected murders and we are spending time interviewing people who don't know what we're talking about. Every day this goes on is a day the actual case goes cold."
"I know."
"So let's tell Fasano it's not a gang hit."
"On what basis."
"The staging. The method. The fact that everyone we've interviewed in this investigation doesn't know what we're talking about."
"Not knowing what you're talking about isn't evidence."
"It's something."
"It's not enough." Not dismissive, just the fact of it. "Fasano has a mandate from people above him. I can't walk in there and tell him his theory is wrong without something that moves the line."
"Then what is enough."
"Something concrete." She pushes off the wall. "We keep looking."
I watch her go back toward the interview rooms. The right answer is in my hands. No legitimate path to it.
"Three days," I say.
She stops.
"If we don't have something concrete in three days, we push Fasano toward alternative theories."
She turns. The compressed expression holds for a moment. Then something in it releases slightly.
"Three days," she says. "Find me something concrete."
The something concrete comes from an enforcer named Basso on the second day.
"I know what a hit looks like," he says, with the authority of someone who has professional opinions. "That's not what that was."
"What did it look like to you," Renee says.
"Personal. The way it was done." He taps the table. "You do a hit, you do it clean and fast. You don't spend time making it look like something else. Whoever did that took their time."
"How do you know they took their time."
"The positioning. Where he was found. If you're moving fast you leave a body where it falls. Someone moved that body. Turned it. Set it up." He shakes his head. "That's personal."
Outside in the hallway Renee stands with her notebook open and doesn't write anything.
"It's a criminal's assessment of crime scene staging," she says. "Inadmissible."
"But he said it."
"He said it." She closes the notebook. "It's something."
She goes in to see Fasano with three things: the ME comparative report, the phone record linking Coury to Resk, and Basso's assessment. When she comes out forty minutes later the investigation had shifted slightly, not changed course, but changed enough that the original destination was no longer guaranteed.
The ME report came back two days later. Identical fracture pattern across all three victims. Same force, same angle, consistent with the same instrument or technique. The ME flagged it herself.
That same afternoon Renee cross-references the prepaid phone purchase locations and finds that one of the numbers from Coury's phone records had been bought at a corner store three blocks from an address associated with Tommy Resk.
She puts that piece of paper on my desk without a word.
Coury had called Resk the night after Marrs died. Resk hadn't answered.
Now Resk was dead too. Which meant it wasn't a gang message. And it meant there was a fourth number, one prepaid call Coury made that we still can't place, to someone still out there, who also hadn't picked up.
Pamela sends me a message that night asking if I'm coming to the coffee place. I go because I haven't in a week and because I need to be somewhere that isn't this.
She's at her usual table, spreadsheet open, a plate pushed to one side that she's forgotten about.
"You look like you've been somewhere unpleasant," she says.
"Parking structure."
"Which one."
"Mooney Street."
She looks up. "The drainage failure one. I've been trying to get the city to issue a structural notice on that building for eighteen months." She circles something on her grant application. "The concrete on the second level is compromised. They keep filing it as compliant."
I look at my coffee.
"The contractor who handled the original demolition," she says, not looking up. "I pulled his holding company filings last week. There's an address in the Diamond District that appears in three different registration documents. I can't tell yet what it connects to but it's the same address every time."
I don't say anything. I don't know yet that the address is also in Falcone's active property network, one of the shell company chains that runs his holdings through the Narrows, clean on paper, nothing tracing back to a name anyone could use in a report. She doesn't know either. She's just pulling threads.
"Also," she says, turning a page, "one of the dock workers near Bellhaven mentioned something. Said there'd been an incident near his building a few nights ago, someone breaking up a mugging and gone before anyone looked." She says it with the same weight she gives everything, which is even, undifferentiated. "He seemed unsettled by it. Said whoever it was moved fast."
I put my cup down. "Did he say anything else about it."
"No. Why?" She looks at me.
"Just writing things down," I say.
She looks at me for a moment in the way she looks at things she's decided not to pursue right now. Then she goes back to her grant application.
I sit there for a while longer. Not talking. Just present.
The Narrows at night is doing what it does outside the window.