We go in on a Saturday morning with a new warrant, full team, Fasano's office notified but told we're not waiting for their people.
Renee makes that call herself. Fasano pushes back. She holds the line.
The East End building is seven stories, older than the Narrows building, the kind of structure that's been here long enough to remember when the East End was something else. The ground floor has a locked commercial unit, empty. Above it: three floors of genuine residential occupancy, tenants who look at our badges and go back inside. Above that: two floors that aren't on the registered floor plan.
The hidden floors.
The stairwell access is behind a false wall in the sixth floor utility corridor. Renee finds it in four minutes. I don't ask how. I've watched her find things for two years and I still don't fully understand the method.
The access door opens on a space that is both what I expected and worse than I expected.
Operational. Still operational. Equipment in place, the full configuration, nothing removed. A holding room off the main space with the same cot and water fixture and external light switch. The monitoring station running, screens active, one of them showing vitals.
Renee has her weapon out. I have mine out. We move through the space the way training says to move.
The holding room is empty. Whoever was in it was moved recently, the bedding still holding the shape of occupation.
In the main space: Dulmacher's files again, more of them this time, the full record rather than the partial. And on the monitoring station, a live feed to somewhere else. A room I don't recognize. Dark. Empty.
He moved the subject before we arrived. He knew.
Renee is on the radio. I'm moving through the space, looking, reading.
I take the right glove off.
This is the freshest scene I've read in this case. Recent hours, not days. The fear is sharp and individual in the way it is when someone has been here very recently. The procedure registers as a present-tense condition rather than a residue. The interest is the strongest I've felt it, the texture of someone fully engaged, not finishing but mid-work.
And something new.
Urgency. Underneath the procedure and the interest, a frequency I hadn't caught at any previous scene. He'd known, or suspected, that we were closing in. The work had been accelerating. The urgency wasn't panic. It was the urgency of a person trying to finish something before the conditions changed.
He was close to done with whatever the subject was for.
I pull my hand back. Stand up. Glove on.
"He moved the subject within the last twelve hours," I say. "He was here this morning."
Renee looks at the monitoring station. The dark, empty room on the screen. "He has a fourth location. Or he handed off the subject and is running."
"He's not running." I know this from the interest register, from the urgency underneath it. He hadn't reached completion. He wouldn't walk away from an incomplete procedure. "He's finishing elsewhere. Tonight or tomorrow."
"We don't have the fourth location."
"No."
We look at each other.
"Batman," I say. "He's been ahead of us at every scene. If there's a fourth location he might have it."
Renee looks at me for a long moment. "You've had contact with him."
It's not a question. She's been filing things for weeks.
"Once," I say. "Briefly."
She's quiet. Not angry. Building.
"Can you reach him again," she says.
"I don't know."
She turns back to the room. "Find out."
I go to Crane Street that night. Not because I expect anything. Because it's the first place I read his signature and it's the geography of how I understand him, and I don't have another way to reach someone who doesn't have a number.
I stand at the alley mouth for twenty minutes. Nothing.
I go to the Tricorner access road. Ten minutes.
I'm driving back through the Narrows when I pull over without deciding to.
The street is quiet. Late, past midnight. The orange overcast. A streetlight out two doors down. I'm parked under a working one.
I take my right glove off and put my hand flat against the car door.
Nothing. Of course nothing.
I sit in the car and think about what I know: he's been at every scene. He found the survivors. He knew Dulmacher's name before I did. He's been tracking this operation from a direction I can't see. And he gave me information without asking for anything.
I open my window.
"I need the fourth location," I say. To the empty street.
Nothing. The Narrows doing what it does.
Then, from somewhere above me and to my left, on a roof or a fire escape, in the dark I can't parse from the shadow:
"East End. Falcone's property. The one registered to the environmental consulting company."
I go very still.
"The environmental consulting company that's registered at the Diamond District address," I say.
"Second building north of it. Basement access through the parking structure."
The parking structure. I know that parking structure. I've been in it.
"When," I say.
"He moved the subject three hours ago. He'll finish before morning."
I start the car. "Are you going in."
Nothing. He's already gone.
I drive. I'm already calling Renee.