Four days pass without anything happening, which in the Narrows means something is about to.
I spend those four days being careful. Gloves on at the precinct, gloves on in the street, gloves in my jacket pocket when I'm home so I can put them on fast if someone knocks. I shake hands with my building super and feel nothing through the leather and tell myself that's fine, that's the point, that's exactly what I wanted.
I think about Joel Marrs constantly.
Renee keeps the file on her desk. Doesn't say anything about it. Doesn't close it. Just keeps it there like a question she isn't ready to ask out loud, which is how she holds everything she isn't ready for. She has more patience than anyone I've worked with and she uses all of it.
On the third morning she comes in with two coffees and sets one on my desk without looking at me.
"You're doing the thing," she says, sitting down.
"What thing."
"Where you stare at the intake log without reading it." She opens her laptop. "You've been doing it for three days."
"I'm reading it."
"You read the same entry four times yesterday. The parking dispute on Gilder Street. I watched."
I look at my screen. The parking dispute on Gilder Street is still open. "Maybe it's a complicated parking dispute."
"It's a fender-bender and a neighbor who won't let things go." She pulls up something on her screen. "Go do something. Run the Marrs background again if you need to be moving. Just stop staring at Gilder Street like it owes you something."
I run the Marrs background again. It doesn't give me anything new. It gives me something to do with my hands, which is the point.
---
On the fourth day Carver catches a domestic on the east side and takes me instead of Renee because the caseloads don't line up. We drive over in his car and he tells me a story about a collar from 2009 that I've heard before and I laugh at the right places and watch the city through the passenger window.
I need to test this on a person.
Not a victim. Not a stranger. Someone I know, someone I can compare what I get against what I already know is true. The problem is that every person I know well enough to run that check against is someone I work with, and touching a colleague to secretly read them is a line I keep looking at and not crossing.
I'm still looking at it when the call comes in.
---
Nate Coury's car is parked outside his apartment building on a side street in the East End, hazards blinking, has been there since the previous night. A patrol unit checked it around seven in the morning.
Renee and I catch it an hour later.
I stand on the sidewalk and look at the car and feel the specific stillness of a crime scene, not quiet exactly, but still in the way that the center of something always is.
Blunt trauma. Same as Marrs.
"Carjacking," one of the patrol officers says. He's newer than me, has the look of someone who decided what something was before he got here. "Interrupted, maybe. Perp spooked before they got the keys."
I look at the car. Four years old, clean, not the thing you'd target on this block when there are better options on both sides of it.
"Keys are in the ignition," I say.
The patrol officer looks. "Huh."
The car is parked directly under a streetlight. I look up and down the block. The rest of the lights in this stretch have been dark for weeks. I know because I know this part of the East End and broken lights here are like broken lights everywhere else in the city, they go out and they stay out. This one is working. New bulb, clean fitting, looks like a recent replacement.
I file it without knowing what I'm filing it under.
Renee is already crouching at the driver's side. I walk around to the passenger side and look in through the glass at Nate Coury and think about whether I'm going to do what I'm thinking about doing.
Mid-forties. Unremarkable face, the kind that's hard to hold in your mind. Work-worn hands resting on his thighs like he'd been sitting waiting for something.
I look around. Renee is talking to the patrol unit on the driver's side. Two uniforms at the tape. Nobody watching the passenger window.
I pull my right glove off and reach through the two-inch gap at the top of the window and press my fingers to the back of Coury's hand.
It comes in layers.
With Marrs it hit like a wave, total and immediate. This sharpens as I hold contact, one frequency resolving after another.
Fear first. Cold-water fear, same quality as Marrs, the settled kind that comes from knowing something is coming and not being able to stop it.
Then underneath: a phone ringing and not being picked up. The specific anxiety of calls going unanswered. He'd tried to reach someone, two people maybe, one after the other, and neither had picked up and the not-picking-up was its own kind of answer. He knew what it meant.
He'd known since Marrs.
He'd known since Marrs. I hold that for a moment. He knew the reason. These two men had something in common and whatever it was, they both understood it as a death sentence.
And underneath all of it, the same thing I'd felt before. The same temperature. The same quality of a decision already made and simply being carried forward.
Patient. Unhurried.
Same person.
Then the flicker. That almost-absent signature at the edge of everything, the one I'd caught off Marrs and attributed to inexperience. It's here too, faint and controlled, the residue of someone who touched this car recently and left almost nothing. Not Coury. Someone else, crouching at this window the way I'm crouching, reading the scene before anyone else arrived.
I pull my hand back. Glove on. Turn around.
Renee is looking at me from across the roof of the car.
I don't know how long she's been watching. Her expression doesn't tell me anything.
"Anything?" she says.
The question is too open. I don't know what she's asking.
"Staged," I say. "Keys in the ignition, nothing taken. Same as Marrs."
A pause. "I know."
"You already connected them."
"Yesterday." She says it simply, no edge on it. "Different neighborhoods, different staging. But the body positioning is almost identical and neither scene has forensics worth anything."
I look at her across the roof. "You think it's the same person."
"I think it's the same person." She looks down at Coury. "I think Marrs and this man knew each other or had something in common, and I think someone patient enough to make two killings look like two different kinds of street crime is going to do it again."
Patient.
I breathe through my nose and keep my face where it is.
"You should've said something yesterday," I tell her.
"I'm saying something now." She straightens. "Run Coury for me. Everything. Priors, associates, addresses going back ten years. See if anything overlaps with Marrs."
"Okay."
"And Voss."
I look up.
"Next time you want to look at something at a scene," she says, "you don't have to wait until I'm not watching."
She goes back to the patrol unit. I stand with my gloved hands at my sides and try to figure out what she saw and what she thinks it means.
Then I go to run Nate Coury.
---
The parking structure two blocks from Major Crimes is where I go at lunch when I need to think. I've been here enough times now that the attendant doesn't look up when I walk past.
I pull my right glove off on the second level and put my palm against a support pillar. Nothing. I try the painted stripe. Nothing. I crouch and press my hand to the concrete floor.
Nothing from any of it. Surfaces are dead. I knew this already.
I move to a pillar near the far wall, the one with a water stain running down from a crack in the ceiling. At the base of it, barely visible under years of gray paint, something that isn't a water stain. A symbol. Not graffiti, the edges are too clean, and it's below eye level, placed deliberately. Old. The kind of mark that gets painted over every few years but not removed because removing it would mean knowing it was there and deciding to do something about it.
I put my palm against it.
Nothing. It's old enough that whatever it once held is long gone, if it ever held anything. But the shape of it stays with me as I walk back to the precinct. Gotham has been here a long time. Things accumulate in its walls that nobody has a good file for.
---
The overlap between Marrs and Coury is nothing. Same city, different neighborhoods, no shared employers, no shared addresses, no priors that connect them. On paper they're two men who never met.
I sit at my desk and look at what I have: a database search that dead-ends and a set of things I absorbed through a car window that I can't put in a report. I think about what Renee said.
Same person. Patient enough. Going to do it again.
I pick up my pen. Write *known associates* on my notepad. Stare at it.
The only evidence this person is leaving is the kind I can feel in my hands.
I write *what did they do* underneath it and look at that instead.