CHAPTER 9: FACE TO FACE
[Meat Cute Charcuterie — Early April 2015, 1:45 PM]
Don E had the front counter spotless by one-thirty. I hadn't asked. He'd seen me reorganize the display case twice before noon and drawn his own conclusions.
"You're nervous," he said.
"I'm thorough."
"You rearranged the cold cuts by color. That's nervous."
He wasn't wrong. The Italian meats formed a gradient from the pale mortadella on the left through the mottled salami to the deep burgundy bresaola on the right, and if that wasn't evidence of anxiety filtered through professional food presentation, nothing was.
"Cops are coming at two," I said. "Cold case. Routine questions about the neighborhood. If they ask you anything, you answer honestly about the shop — business hours, customers, foot traffic. Nothing else."
"What's 'nothing else'?"
"Everything that isn't business hours, customers, and foot traffic."
Don E processed this. "Cool. So I'll be restocking the back when they get here."
"Good man."
He disappeared into the walk-in. I adjusted the bresaola one more time — a quarter-inch to the right — and then forced my hands away from the glass.
At 1:55, a plain sedan parked in front of the shop. Two people. The driver was a Black man in his mid-thirties — tall, solid build, the posture of someone who carried a badge on instinct rather than habit. Detective Clive Babineaux. I'd watched him work for five seasons. Smart, methodical, patient. The kind of cop who built cases brick by brick and didn't charge until the wall was complete.
His passenger was a woman. Platinum hair — Liv's dye job, distinctive even from behind the windshield — and a studied casualness to the way she stepped out of the car. She wore a jacket that was slightly too large for her frame, the way someone wears clothes they've stopped caring about fitting properly. Her spray tan was good but not perfect; the wrists were lighter than the face, a detail that most people wouldn't clock and that I only caught because I lived with the same problem.
They walked toward the entrance. And something else happened.
A hum. Low, subsonic, felt more than heard — a vibration in my molars and the base of my skull. The same sensation I'd caught twice before: once near Jackie at the diner, faint enough to dismiss as stress, and once at the FG building last night when the woman entered through the keypad door. Both times I'd filed it under exhaustion or hunger.
This was neither. The hum intensified as Liv approached the front door, peaked when she was within ten feet, and settled into a steady frequency once she crossed the threshold. Not painful. Not unpleasant. Just... present. Like a tuning fork held against bone.
The bell above the door chimed.
"Mr. DeBeers?" Clive extended his hand. His handshake was firm, brief, professional. "Detective Babineaux. This is my colleague, Liv Moore."
"Welcome to Meat Cute." I shook Clive's hand. Turned to Liv.
She didn't extend hers. Her eyes — brown, contact lenses over the zombie-white that hid beneath — locked onto my face with an intensity that she tried and nearly succeeded in disguising as polite attention. Nearly. The muscles around her jaw tightened a fraction. Her left hand, hanging at her side, curled into a loose fist and then released.
She'd seen this face through the eyes of a dying teenager. And now it was smiling at her across a deli counter.
"Ms. Moore. Can I offer you anything? We just put out fresh bresaola."
"I'm fine." Two words. Controlled. Her voice was flat in a way that was different from Boss's practiced monotone — this was a woman compressing something large into something small and holding the seams together through force of will.
"Coffee?" I offered to Clive.
"If it's no trouble."
It wasn't. I poured two cups — one for Clive, one for myself, the act of preparing coffee providing a natural reason to turn my back and let my face do whatever it needed to do without an audience. The hum continued. Steady now, a background frequency I could work around.
"Mr. DeBeers, we're looking into some cold cases in the neighborhood. Missing persons, primarily minors, over the past eighteen months." Clive produced a small notebook. "You've been operating here for about a year?"
"Fourteen months." True, per Blaine's records.
"Have you noticed anything unusual in the area? Suspicious activity, unfamiliar vehicles, anyone hanging around the loading docks?"
The irony of the question — asked inside a shop that had stored murdered teenagers' bodies in its walk-in freezer six weeks ago — required a level of composure that I owed entirely to Frank Goss. The security brain treated the interview as a perimeter assessment: identify the threat vector, control information flow, present a hardened exterior.
"Not particularly. The neighborhood's quiet — mostly industrial traffic during the day, empty at night. We've had a few issues with vandals near the dumpsters, but nothing I'd call suspicious." I handed Clive his coffee. "What's prompting this?"
"Just a broader review. Several kids from a Capitol Hill shelter have gone missing over the past two years. Their last known movements put some of them in this part of the city."
Some of them. Eddie Torres. The others whose names lived in the ledger. Teenagers who'd been lured to Meat Cute with promises of work or food or shelter, and who'd left in specimen bags.
"That's terrible." I let the words carry the weight they deserved. Not performed sympathy — genuine revulsion, because the thing those teenagers had experienced was revolting regardless of who'd done it. "I wish I could help, Detective. We're mostly a daytime operation. Not much visibility into what happens around here after hours."
Clive wrote in his notebook. Standard cop notation — shorthand, abbreviations, the habit of someone who'd learned that memory was unreliable and paper didn't lie.
Liv hadn't spoken since declining the bresaola. She stood slightly behind Clive and to his right, positioned where she could observe my face without appearing to stare. She looked at my hands twice. Specifically: at the way I held the coffee cup, the way I'd held the coffee pot, the angle of my grip.
She was comparing my hands to the hands in her vision. The hands that held the knife over Eddie Torres.
"Mr. DeBeers, are you the sole proprietor?" Clive asked.
"I have a business partner who handles the front-of-house. Don Erickson. He's in the back doing inventory." I kept my hands on the counter. Open. Visible. The security brain understood the semiotics: palms showing, nothing concealed, body language that communicated cooperative transparency. "I handle purchasing, financials, supplier relationships."
"And you source your products from where?"
"Local distributors, mostly. Pacific Meats for the pork and beef. A specialty supplier in Rainier Beach for some of our imported items." The second part was technically true — Watkins was in Rainier Beach, and human brains were certainly a specialty product.
Clive nodded. Wrote.
Liv asked her first question. "Nice knife block." She pointed to the Wüsthof set on the kitchen counter visible through the service window. "You do your own butchering?"
The chef's brain recognized the setup. The security brain flagged the subtext. And somewhere in the overlap between them, I understood: she wasn't asking about butchering. She was asking about knives. About hands that held knives. About the specific way a blade fits into a palm — the detail that brain visions captured with photographic clarity.
"Some custom cuts," I said. "Mostly I leave the heavy work to the supplier. Better equipment, consistent quality."
"Mm." She looked at the knives. Looked back at me. A long, slow assessment — not the angry glare I'd expected, not the barely contained horror of a woman confronting her victim's killer. Something worse.
Patience.
She was patient. She was cataloguing. She was building a file in her head the way Clive built one on paper, except her file included information she couldn't share — a vision from a dead boy's brain, a face she could identify but couldn't explain identifying, evidence that was damning and completely inadmissible.
"One more question." Clive pocketed his notebook. "Have you noticed any new businesses or operations starting up in the neighborhood recently? Unusual deliveries, vehicles you don't recognize?"
I thought about the town car. The gray SUV. Pacific Shield's industrial unit two miles south. "There's been some activity in the industrial corridor. New vehicles coming and going. But that's typical for this area — turnover in the warehouse leases is pretty high."
"Appreciate it." Clive produced a business card. Detective Clive Babineaux, Seattle PD, Major Crimes Unit. "If anything comes to mind, don't hesitate."
"Absolutely." I took the card. Set it on the counter.
They turned to leave. Liv walked two steps toward the door, then stopped. She looked back — not at me, at the shop. At the display case, the kitchen through the service window, the walk-in freezer door at the far end. Her gaze moved across the space the way a photographer frames a shot: composing, contextualizing, storing.
Then she looked at me.
"Nice shop," she said. And the word nice carried the weight of a woman who knew exactly what this shop had been used for and was telling me, without telling me, that she knew.
"Thank you."
The bell above the door chimed as they left. The sedan pulled away from the curb. The hum faded.
I stood behind the counter for a long time.
[Back Office — Twenty Minutes Later]
Don E emerged from the walk-in when the car was out of sight. "They gone?"
"They're gone."
"The woman. She was... she was kind of intense, right?"
"She's a medical examiner's assistant. They're precise by nature."
"No, like—" Don E rubbed the back of his neck. "She was staring at you, boss. Not regular staring. Like she was measuring you for something."
"I noticed."
"Is that a problem?"
"It might be."
Don E waited for more. I didn't give it. He retreated to the kitchen, and I heard the playlist kick in — Creedence, "Bad Moon Rising," which was either his idea of a joke or the most perfectly inappropriate soundtrack for a scene about a murder suspect being identified by a psychic zombie detective.
I sat at the desk. Opened the drawer. The torn ledger page was still taped to the false bottom. Eddie Torres.
The first name on a list of names. The first thread in a case that Liv Moore was building with the patience of someone who understood that evidence didn't have an expiration date and that the man she'd just interviewed would make a mistake eventually.
She was right. Everyone made mistakes. The question was whether I'd make mine before or after I'd done enough good to offset the blood that was already on these hands.
I closed the drawer. Pulled out Clive's business card and stuck it to the corkboard above the desk — the first item on a board that would eventually hold pushpins and string and the architecture of a defense strategy I hadn't built yet.
Then I called Tomas Herrera. The hospital contact answered on the second ring, and we talked logistics for twelve minutes, and when I hung up I had a delivery schedule and a cost structure and the beginning of a supply chain that might actually work.
The hospital brains would arrive Thursday. Among them — Tomas had mentioned it almost casually, the way you'd mention a special at a restaurant — was a former EMT. Forty-four, brain aneurysm. Field medicine, trauma assessment, rapid-response protocols.
A brain that could change what my body knew about keeping people alive.
I wrote the delivery time in the ledger. Closed it. The corkboard above me held one business card. The drawer beneath me held one dead boy's name.
The office was quiet. The playlist had moved to "Fortunate Son," and Don E was singing along with every word wrong.
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