BLOOD & BYLINE

POV: Mara Voss

The gravel is cutting into my stomach through my jacket and I haven't moved in eleven minutes.

Below me, Thomas Greer is still dead.

The Bureau closed this scene at nine-fifteen. Filed it as industrial accident. Packed up and left like they had somewhere better to be. I watched them go from my car, counted to two hundred, then climbed the fire escape on the east side of the building because I have never once in my career trusted a Bureau closure and I am not starting tonight.

My camera clicks. The sound feels too loud. I slow my breathing and shoot again.

Those wounds are wrong.

I've photographed four workplace deaths in three years. I know what machinery does to a body, what a cable snap looks like, what happens when someone goes into a gear press. This is none of that. The cuts on Thomas Greer's torso are clean on one side and ragged on the other, like something drove in deep and then tore coming out. No machine on that warehouse floor made those marks. I checked the equipment permit before I drove here.

Whatever did this had weight behind it. And intent.

Click. Click.

The fog off the water is thick tonight, carrying that low-tide rust smell the Dock Quarter never loses. One lamp post down on the dock keeps flickering, throwing the scene in and out of yellow light. Below, Greer's left arm is stretched toward a Meridian Foundation tote bag like he was reaching for it when he went down.

Meridian Foundation.

I wrote that name in my notebook forty minutes ago and my stomach hasn't settled since. Meridian Foundation runs out of the same registered address as Meridian Tier Partners, which is the company on Greer's employment roll, which connects directly to the Ashford Industries development network.

Cole Ashford's name was on the Meridian Foundation gala invite list three weeks ago.

I don't know what that thread means yet. I just know the Bureau's report doesn't mention it once, and the Bureau not mentioning something is its own kind of answer.

The camera battery blinks yellow.

Damn.

I shift my weight to get a better angle on the tote bag and a piece of gravel skitters loose and goes over the edge.

Every muscle in my body locks.

I press flat, face almost touching the roof, heart going absolutely insane. Three seconds. Five. Nothing moves below. No voices, no flashlight sweeping up, no shoes on concrete. Just the flicker of that lamp post and the distant moan of a freighter somewhere out past the harbor.

I breathe.

Dean used to say the Quarter swallows people. He said it laughing, like it was just something you said about a neighborhood. He was twenty years old and it was supposed to be a joke and then seven months later he went out for cigarettes and the Quarter proved him right.

Four years ago. Block and a half from here.

I use my last thirty shots and start for the fire escape.

Going down is worse than going up. The metal is slick from fog, my palms are sweating inside my gloves, and the second-floor landing has a bolt missing that shifts under my weight with a sound like a gunshot.

I freeze. Wait. Nothing.

Last rung is gone entirely. I drop the final four feet and hit concrete on one knee.

"Damn it."

I crouch there for a second with my knee throbbing and my bag clutched to my chest and I think about Thomas Greer's file, the one I pulled from public records before I came here. No next of kin listed. No emergency contact. Employment record that starts eighteen months ago and has nothing before it.

People don't just start existing at thirty-something. Someone made sure his history was thin.

I straighten up and walk.

Breslin Street is one block east. I parked under a working streetlight on purpose, something I started doing after the third time a source told me I was being watched. Practical habit. Like carrying two batteries for the camera, which I clearly should have done tonight.

My footsteps sound too deliberate in the quiet. I shorten them.

The fog is thicker near the water. It moves in slow rolls between the buildings, and for a second the street looks like something from a dream where all the familiar shapes are just slightly off. I hate this neighborhood and I cannot stop coming back to it and I have never once examined that too closely because some things you just don't.

My car. The key fob click. The locks pop.

Something on the windshield catches the light and I stop walking.

Paper. Folded once, centered under the left wiper blade. Not a flyer. The fold is too precise. The placement is too deliberate.

I look up the street. Down the street. Check the alley mouth opposite, the recessed doorway two buildings back, the gap between the dumpsters near the corner.

Nothing moves.

I step to the car and pull the paper free.

The handwriting is neat. No hurry in it. Like whoever wrote this had all the time in the world and wanted me to know that.

Stop. Before it stops you.

The street is completely empty.

I stand there with the note in my hand and the fog curling around my ankles and I think about Thomas Greer reaching for that tote bag. I think about Dean's file sitting in a box under my bed, four years of dead ends stacked in manila folders.

I get in the car. Start it. Pull onto Breslin.

I'm four blocks away before I look down at my hands on the wheel.

They're shaking.

Not a little. The kind of shaking that happens after, when your body finally gets to react to the thing your brain refused to feel in the moment.

Someone was on that street tonight.

Someone watched me come down off that roof, walk to my car, and get in. They were close enough to reach my windshield. Close enough that if they had wanted to do something other than leave a note, they could have.

They left a note instead.

Which means they wanted me scared, not gone.

Not yet.