The grant comes through for a second Narrows site.
Pamela texts me the afternoon it's confirmed: site two. crane street adjacent. remediation order pending. Three days later she texts again: panel approved. two down.
I text back: good. I mean it.
On a Tuesday in late November I go to Sycamore and she's at her table with the spreadsheet open and the plate forgotten at her elbow and she's working on site three submission. She looks up when I sit down and I can see she's been at this for hours, the particular quality of someone deep inside a problem they've been inside for a long time.
"You look like you've been here since morning," I say.
"Since one," she says. It's eight in the evening.
The counter guy puts my cup down without asking.
She shows me the site three data. A playground in the East End, two blocks from a school. The iron content is worse than Mooney Street. The certification on the remediation is signed by the same inspector who signed Mooney Street's. She's been cross-referencing and she has him on five sites now, same signature, same window, same contractor.
"Five," I say.
"Five I can prove. I think there are more." She's already scrolling. "The inspector retired four years ago. He's not reachable for comment. But I have his signature on file and I have the contamination data and I have the certification dates that don't match the work timeline." She looks up. "The review panel for site three is in three weeks."
I drink my coffee. She goes back to the spreadsheet.
After a while she says, without looking up: "The Tricorner cluster. The properties I was mapping."
I wait.
"I haven't touched them." She turns a page. "I want you to know that."
"I know."
"But I keep finding the contractor name in adjacent records. Not those properties specifically. Work in the same area, different years. It keeps appearing." She sets the pen down. "I want you to know I'm not pulling the thread. I'm just writing down what appears and it keeps appearing and I thought you should know that."
I look at her. The spreadsheet on the screen. Fifteen sites mapped, two remediated, one in progress. A contractor name that keeps appearing in the same geography as an active investigation into a man who has been operating in the city's negative space for eleven years.
The threads are converging and I can see them and she can't see all of them and that gap is going to close on its own whether I manage it or not.
"When the case is resolved," I say, "I'll tell you what the contractor name connects to."
She looks at me. Full attention. "How close is resolved."
"Getting closer."
She nods once and goes back to the spreadsheet.
I watch her work and think about the distance between getting closer and close enough.
The southern Narrows building comes back with a clean ownership record on its face. Three companies in the chain, the standard construction, the last one registered to an address in the East End that traces to a residential property.
The residential property is registered to a woman named Clare Munn.
I run the name.
Clare Munn. Sixty-three years old. Current address, the same East End property. One previous address: a rooming house on the east side of the Narrows.
The same rooming house as Gerald Munn.
I look at that for a long time.
Gerald Munn, sixty-two years old, last known address the same Narrows rooming house as a woman named Clare Munn. The manager had said he moved out. Nobody had asked whether he had family.
I pick up the phone and call the rooming house manager.
He's surprised to hear from me again. He says he didn't know Gerald well but he knew he had a sister. They weren't in contact much. He didn't know her name offhand.
I thank him and hang up.
Gerald Munn's sister owns, at two degrees of remove through a shell company, the building at the southern edge of the Narrows where Dulmacher's holding entity is registered.
She doesn't know. She can't know. Someone used her name, or her address, or found her in the same thin paper trail her brother lived in and used her the same way they used him. Just differently. Not as a subject. As a cover.
I write it down.
I write: Clare Munn. sister. used as registration address. doesn't know.
I write: Dulmacher chose Munn because he had family he could use.
I sit with that for a while. The specific coldness of it. Not cruelty exactly. Just procedure. The way you'd choose a tool.
Then I go find Renee.