The body is in an alley behind a laundromat on Crane Street, which feels right. The Narrows doesn't have the decency to put its dead somewhere scenic.
Renee is already crouching over him when I catch up, her flashlight moving in slow methodical sweeps. Deliberate, like she has all night. I have a cold dinner waiting and a radiator that only works if you kick it twice on the left side, so I'm less philosophical about the timeline.
"Male, mid-forties," she says without looking up. "No wallet. No phone."
"Mugging."
"Maybe."
I hate when she says maybe like that. Like she's leaving a door open the rest of us already agreed to close and move furniture in front of.
I look at him. Average height, average build, a jacket you bought because it was on sale and kept because it still worked. No gang ink I can see. No jewelry. Nothing about him says target and nothing says witness and nothing says anything except that Gotham decided tonight was his night and that was that.
Above us, a woman speaks through a two-inch gap in a third-floor window, lights off, like the gap will protect her if someone decides she saw too much. Smart, actually. In the Narrows, smart looks like fear. Renee has her head tilted up toward the voice, notebook out, and I can tell from the set of her shoulders the woman isn't giving her much.
The ME is delayed. Traffic, dispatch said, which is the polite version.
I crouch down.
Not for any reason I can name. Boredom, maybe, or the restlessness that comes from standing in a cold alley next to a dead stranger while someone else does their job. I tell myself I'm checking for an ID, something tucked in a pocket, a card, a name, anything to clean up the paperwork later.
I reach out and my hand closes around his wrist.
The alley disappears.
Not gone. More like it falls away, the way a dream does when you're still half inside it, edges dissolving faster than you can hold them. What replaces it isn't a picture.
Terror. Not the hot kind, not adrenaline, but the cold kind, the kind that sets in after the adrenaline runs out and the body understands that running isn't going to be enough.
Then a street corner. Two blocks east, under the broken streetlight on Keane the city has been ignoring for eight months. Him walking. Footsteps behind him keeping perfect, patient pace. He speeds up. They speed up. He turns. They turn.
He knows.
The knowing is the worst part of what I feel, the specific horror of understanding exactly what's happening and having no way to stop it. He tried to think through it, I can feel him thinking. Corner store, people, busy street. But the Narrows at eleven on a Tuesday doesn't offer much in the way of witnesses, and whoever was behind him knew that too.
They chose the time as carefully as they chose him.
And then, underneath all of it, underneath the fear and the last desperate calculations, something else. Something that doesn't belong to him.
Whoever did this left something behind. Not an image. Not a face. Just a quality. A temperature. The weight of a specific silence.
Patient. Unhurried. The pressure of a decision already made.
And beneath that, so faint I almost miss it, something that cuts the signal entirely for half a second, like a frequency ducking out before I can name it. Someone else touched this man recently. Someone whose signature is so controlled it barely registers, clean in a way that leaves almost no impression, like a room that has been carefully tidied rather than never lived in. I don't know what to do with that yet. I don't know what to do with any of this.
Someone had followed this man for two blocks in the dark and they had not been afraid of what came next.
I'm back in the alley.
Twenty seconds. Maybe less.
Renee is still talking to the window above. My hand is in my lap and I don't remember pulling it back. The dead man's face looks the same as before, patient and slack, giving nothing.
Before I stand up I look at the fire escape above us. I don't know why I look. Maybe the same restlessness, the same body wanting to move that made me crouch in the first place.
The second rung has a boot print on it. Clean edge, no rust smear, not the tread pattern of anyone I can see at the scene. The angle is wrong for anyone who was here for this man. Too high up, and facing out, not in, like whoever left it was moving away from the building rather than toward it. I look at it for a moment, then look away. The ME isn't here yet. Renee is occupied. There is no good reason to put it in a report.
I take out my notepad.
Probable mugging, I write. My handwriting is worse than usual.
Renee comes back from the window, tucking her notebook away. She looks at me, the registering look, the one that means she's filing something for later, and doesn't say anything.
"You good?"
"Fine. Just cold."
She nods and moves back toward the tape line. I stay crouched for another moment, not looking at the body, looking at the space past it.
Patient. Unhurried.
Probable mugging, I've written.
I don't cross it out.