The call comes in on a Tuesday at eleven-fifteen at night.
Neighbor in Luc's building heard something. Not a struggle exactly, more like furniture moving, a sound that stopped suddenly in a way that sounds don't usually stop. She waited twenty minutes before calling it in because she wasn't sure, and by the time she was sure it had been long enough that she was afraid of what sure meant.
Renee and I are both still in the building when the dispatch comes through. She takes it before I can.
Luc's apartment is on the third floor. We take the stairs. The door is unlocked, not forced, which means he'd opened it himself at some point in the last few hours. Renee goes in first with her hand on her weapon and I'm behind her and the apartment is quiet in a way that has weight to it.
He's on the kitchen floor. Alive. Breathing, audible, the shallow rapid kind. Blood on the tile from a wound to the back of his head that looks worse than it is, and I keep telling myself that while I check his pulse and his airway.
Renee is already on the radio.
The apartment has been gone through. Not ransacked. Searched, efficiently. Drawers open. Papers moved. A laptop on the table with the screen dark but the indicator light still blinking, woken and put back without being shut down. Someone had come looking for something and either found it or ran before they could.
The paramedics arrive in seven minutes. Renee goes with them. I stay in the apartment.
Alone, I take the right glove off.
I put my hand on the kitchen floor, near where Luc had been lying. Close enough to where it happened.
What I get is loud in a way the Mooney Street wall wasn't. Recent trauma leaves stronger impressions. The kitchen floor is not a person but it had been very close to one, very recently, under conditions extreme enough to leave something behind.
Fear. Luc's fear, sharp and specific, the fear of someone who had been expecting this and still wasn't ready. Underneath that, an impression of movement in a small space. Fast. Then an impact. Then nothing from Luc.
And then the other signature. The same cold patience I'd felt in the alley, at the car window, through the wall at Mooney Street. The most coherent I'd felt it since Coury, closer and more recent, not diffused by time or location.
But there was something else this time. Something I hadn't caught in the other scenes.
Underneath the patience, deeper than it and older than it, something that felt like sorrow.
Not regret. Not hesitation. The sorrow was not new and it wasn't changing anything. It was structural, the way Dara Osman's grief had been structural, built into the walls of a person. The sorrow of someone who understood exactly what they were doing and why and had made their peace with the cost of it.
And there, at the very edge, the flicker again. The almost-absent signature. Present at the edge of the room.
Whoever touched Marrs was in this building recently. Not tonight. Before. Watching.
I hold it for as long as I dare. Then I pull my hand back and put the glove on and stand up.
Luc is alive. That's different from the others. Either she'd been interrupted, or she'd chosen not to finish it, or something about Luc is different from the other three.
The sorrow underneath the patience was new information. She feels it. She does it anyway.
That's worse, in a way, than someone who feels nothing. And it is also, in a way, something I understand.
I look at the laptop. The open drawers. The dark smear on the tile.
Also: the laptop's browser tab, visible when the screen woke briefly when Renee walked past it. An open page, a Wayne Enterprises quarterly report, six months old. Luc works in logistics. He'd been looking at it recently enough that it was still open. Neither Renee nor I make anything of it. It sits there.
Renee comes back from the ambulance looking like someone who has been patient and is now running on fumes of it.
"He's conscious," she says. "He's not talking."
"He's protecting something."
"Or he's terrified." She looks at the kitchen floor. "Both, probably." She walks the apartment slowly. Stops at the laptop. Looks at the open drawers. "Someone was looking for something."
"And either found it or ran before they could."
"The neighbor heard the sound stop suddenly." She turns. "This isn't staged. No robbery framing. This is different from the others."
"Interrupted," I say.
"Or a message." She looks at me. "Someone wanted Luc to know they'd been there."
The sorrow underneath the patience hadn't felt like cruelty.
"I think she was interrupted," I say.
Renee looks at me. "She."
I hold very still. The word had come out before I decided to say it.
"Staging feels like a woman's judgment call," I say carefully. "The Marrs scene, the Coury scene. Clean. Controlled. Nothing excessive."
Renee looks at me for a moment, and I can't tell from her expression whether she's accepting the explanation or filing the fact that I made one.
"Okay," she says. She goes back to walking the scene.
I watch her and think about the word I said without deciding to, and what it's going to cost me, and when.