It takes four weeks to build the Kelley file.
Gideon does not rush it. He never rushes the building. Speed in research is how innocents get hurt, and while he has never hurt an innocent and intends to keep that record intact, he holds the rule in place not because he is virtuous but because the rule is what separates him from the thing he is hunting.
He says that to himself sometimes. The thing I am hunting. As if there is some other thing out there in the city doing what he does, and all he is doing is managing a specific kind of civic ecology.
He knows that is not entirely honest. He keeps the rule anyway.
The sealed record is worse than Marcus described. Not deeper — Marcus had it right — but more systematic. Kelley's protection operation ran for four years. Six confirmed victims, possibly more. The three who ended up hospitalized were people who had been trying to organize their block against a demolition project that would benefit Kelley's contributors directly. They were not criminals. They were not connected to violence. They were a retired schoolteacher, a landlord, and a woman who ran a daycare from her home.
The woman who ran the daycare still has limited use of her right hand.
Kelley has been in office for twelve years. He has voted on fourteen city contracts that benefited the same network he was protecting. He is, as of last month, on the short list for an appointment to a state board.
Marcus delivers the final piece on a Thursday — a statement from one of the victims that was excluded from the record on a procedural technicality. The woman is sixty-seven now. She describes what happened in plain, specific language, without embellishment. She describes the men who came to her door. She describes what one of them said to her. She describes what the other one did.
Gideon reads it once.
He does not read it again. He does not need to.
He adds Kelley's name to the active column.
The security detail is the primary tactical complication. City-assigned, two officers, rotating schedule. He has been mapping the rotation for three weeks. There is a window — Tuesdays, from nine to eleven PM, when Kelley is at a standing weekly commitment in a private dining room at a restaurant on Walnut Street. The security rotates outside. The restaurant has a service entrance.
He builds the access plan in his head over two evenings.
The method is already decided.
One more week.