Luc comes out of surgery at four in the morning. Fractured skull and a bleed the surgeon describes, with the specific careful optimism of surgeons, as manageable. Medically induced coma for thirty-six hours. Renee goes to the hospital twice during that window and comes back with nothing each time.
We keep the scene active, keep the welfare rotation on the hospital, and keep working the name change search Renee started before the attack.
The name on the lease is Sera Valk.
The name change search finds a filing seven years ago in a county office two states away. Previous name: Sera Valk. New name: Dara Osman.
Renee puts the result on her desk and looks at it.
I watch her from across our facing desks.
"The lease name," I say.
"From the Narrows address. Nine years ago." She looks up. "Sera Valk became Dara Osman seven years ago."
"And Dara Osman is—"
"A medical administrator in Midtown who moved to Gotham four months ago after living out of state for the better part of a decade." She looks back at the filing. "And who spoke to us on a canvass two months ago about Nate Coury."
The room is quiet.
"She held the lease," I say. "At an address where three of the four victims were documented on the same night, nine years ago."
"Yes."
"That's a connection."
"It is." She turns the filing over. "But holding a lease doesn't mean anything criminal happened. People have parties. People have roommates. People have nights that end up in noise complaints."
"She changed her name and left the state."
"People do that for a lot of reasons."
"And then came back."
"And then came back." She sets the document down. "And gave us a description of Nate Coury that she couldn't have given us unless she'd been watching him."
The silence has a different quality now.
Two months carrying the grief I'd felt off Dara Osman's hand in a doorway. The way I'd misread it. The way I'd kept it separate and told myself it didn't amount to anything.
"Renee," I say.
"Yeah."
"I think we should look at Osman again." I keep my voice neutral. "I recognized something about her, at the canvass. The way she answered. The way she was at the door before we knocked." I pause. "It's been sitting with me."
Renee looks at me across the desk. "You didn't flag it at the time."
"I didn't have a reason to. Nothing in her background. Nothing connecting her." I look at the name change filing. "Now there's a reason."
"The lease connects her to the address. The name change shows she left and came back." Renee is quiet. "What you're describing is an instinct you've been sitting on for two months."
"Yes."
"Why didn't you say something before."
The question sits between us, level and unhurried.
"I didn't have anything to attach it to," I say. "A feeling about a canvass witness isn't evidence."
"I told you feelings were data. I told you to write it down."
"I know."
She looks at me for a long moment. Not angry. Holding it.
"Is there anything else you haven't told me," she says.
The alley. The car window. The parking structure wall. The kitchen floor. The gloves. Delgado in the doorway. Rowe's hand, innocent, in a way I'd never been able to say.
"No," I say.
Renee holds my eyes for another moment. Then she pulls the Dara Osman file and opens it on her desk.
"Then let's look at Osman again," she says.
The name change filing. Renee had noted it without comment. But at the bottom of the county form, there's a notation neither of us had seen before in a filing like this, an expedited processing provision I don't recognize, a federal code, three letters and two numbers. I look it up later that afternoon.
It's a federal provision. Available to registered metahumans seeking identity protection from demonstrable harm.
I sit with that for a long time.
Dara Osman had used a federal meta protection provision. Either she was registered somewhere we can't access, or she'd found a way to use the provision without being registered, or someone had registered her without her knowing. I don't know which.
What I know is that the forms exist and they're not just for protection. They're for accountability too. And I know that I am sitting in a building where nobody has asked about the forms on my behalf because nobody knows to ask, and I am looking at a woman who used those forms to disappear, and I am trying to decide what that means about both of us.
I close the window and keep working.
The building canvass after the attack on Luc turns up two things.
Two residents independently describe hearing something on the roof in the days before the attack. Not footsteps. Weight shifting. Something large, settling, then moving. They'd both decided it was pigeons. They both say it with the tone of people who decided not to think further about it.
I write it down.