Mira went for a third round, she wasn't sure when she'd decided on it, somewhere past the maintenance shed, past the bench, past the exact spot where Arthur Percy had said her name with careful and deliberate non emphasis. The card was in the small zip pocket of her running jacket; she could feel its edges.
Back in the apartment, Morse regarded her from the counter with his usual judicial composure, she filled his water bowl, then stood at the kitchen window with her hands around a coffee mug and let herself think. Percy had been twenty minutes too late for Diane Collier, Henry Miller had said almost nothing about Percy, Carmen Jones had recognized him with the particular expression of someone encountering a familiar damage.
Mira set down her coffee, the card was still in her jacket, she left it there and went to get dressed. At the station, she moved through the rhythm of an ordinary day. She jotted supplemental notes on the platform nine canvas, made two calls regarding the transit coroner's preliminary timeline and had a quick chat with Reyes about another case that lingered in her mind. She did it all without logging the drive, opening the bottom drawer, or even glancing toward Soane's office.
Chen brought her a coffee at quarter past eleven without being asked and leaned against the partition with seventeen things to say but said only one, "Percy didn't come back."
Mira remembered spotting him on the bench and hearing him call her name just the way he did.
"Soane left for lunch at twelve-thirty and didn't come back until two, which is unusual for him." Chen continued, "The Authority has four legal coordinators who rotate handling fatality incidents. Arthur Percy isn't on that list, never has been, there's no record of him being sent out this morning."
The air conditioning hummed to life overhead, as it did every forty-five minutes, a sound Mira had long since tuned out over the past eighteen months but suddenly found herself noticing again.
"He came to see how much we had and how fast we were moving." Mira kept her voice steady.
"The question is who sent him?" Chen asked.
"Uhm... it's whether he was sent at all, or whether he came on his own." Mira murmured.
Chen let it be and that was something she appreciated about him, the way he could leave a silence once he'd said just enough.
At half past three, she pulled the card from her jacket pocket and flipped it over at her desk. One side had a phone number, handwritten with the same quiet restraint that seemed to define him, neat but not fussy, the other side was empty.
At 7:52 p.m., Meera dialed the number on the card from a phone she had purchased from a pharmacy on her way home.
He picked up after two rings and said nothing.
"I want to know how the wire gets out? Not the recording, I want to know the chain of custody afterward, who touches it, how it gets to someone who can actually use it."
Arthur paused briefly; he had been expecting the question, "Carmen Jones."
"You know her." Something settled in her chest.
"I know what happened with her work on the Delgado case." He said, a measured tone entered his voice for the first time, "I was the legal monitor, I signed off on the credit attribution, if I could undo one thing from the past four years, that would be it. She'll know how to handle it and she has the standing to take it somewhere that's not already claimed."
Mira looked at Morse, who had transferred himself from the windowsill to the armchair and was regarding her with the focused detachment of someone listening to a negotiation he had no stake in.
"Eleven o'clock."
"I'll send the details at ten."
"One more question." She nearly kept it to herself, but asked anyway, "About morning in the park, you could have gone to the station. You had a reason, but instead, you came to the park at five-thirty."
He was quiet for three seconds, then he spoke, "You were chosen by a careful woman, I wanted to know if the choice held."
He hung up before she could respond, which felt like either dodging the question or answering it in its own way and she sat with that uncertainty in the still apartment while Morse shut his eyes. The city outside carried on with its usual Thursday night rhythm, steady and unconcerned, as if nothing at all was about to change.
The details arrived at 9:58 p.m., a single text on the burner, no greeting, a residential address in the street southwest, a gate code and message, "Staff entrance, south, wire arrives with you."
Mira read it twice, pocketed the phone and picked up the jacket she'd laid out an hour ago, then she did three things. First, she'd eaten, rice and lentils from the pot she made on Sundays. Second, she'd written everything she'd down in reporter's notebook she kept in the lining pocket of a winter coat she owned for that purpose alone. Dates, named, the chain as she understood it. Miller's car, Carmen's napkin, the serial number scratched into the bottom of the drive.
Third, she'd called Chen and told him that if she hadn't checked in by 1 a.m., he should open the bottom drawer of her desk with the spare key she'd left under the station's east entrance fire extinguisher bracket.
Chen went quiet for a moment, "1 a.m."
"1 a.m."
To be continued...