"Stay near your phone." Mira said as she stood up and left.
"Always." He glanced at her once. She walked away without looking back, knowing he was watching her and he knew she knew.
Soane logged out five minutes later, Chen sent a follow-up text with the timestamp. He had gone back into the system to retrieve it, sitting at his desk close to midnight on a Friday, running surveillance on his own lieutenant with focused determination.
Mira called him from the car, "Where are you?"
"At the station, I told Reyes I was finishing the platform nine supplemental and he went home without questioning it. Reyes has excellent instincts about which evenings he doesn't want to know more about. Soane took his personal car, I got the plate from the lot registry and ran it through traffic monitoring, he headed north on the bridge."
"Heading north leads him toward the federal district."
"Or down the southwest street, both directions are actually north."
Southwest street, Soane driving to Aldric's house at this hour was either a crisis meeting or a managed handoff, someone delivering a status report in person because the phones had become unreliable.
"Can you keep the traffic monitoring live?"
"Already on it. I'll send position updates every ten minutes if he passes another camera." Chen's anxiety had given way to focused determination, "One more thing, Callow's office issued a formal interagency request at eleven fifteen tonight for all materials tied to the Platform Nine investigation, evidence logs, interview notes, footage records."
"How long before the request has to be fulfilled?"
"It's seventy-two hours under protocol, but if Soane is handling the request internally, he can mark it as a priority inter-agency matter and get the materials transferred within twenty-four hours, bypassing the standard review queue."
Jones had about twenty left, Mira quickly did the math in her head before asking, "Has the request been assigned to anyone internally yet?"
"Not yet, it's sitting in the intake queue. Whoever picks up the morning shift in records will see it and route it to the investigating officer's supervisor."
"Which is Soane."
"Mira, if he processes that request in the morning and sends the evidence log to Callow's office, it'll show Callow exactly what we have and what we don't, including anything that hasn't been logged."
Everything that stayed outside the chain of custody was there because it was the only way to keep it safe; an evidence log showing a homicide case with sparse materials and no recorded forensics would speak for itself and tell Callow the real evidence was hidden elsewhere.
Mira made up her mind, "I'm going to need you to do something that can't be undone. Before Soane gets the evidence request tomorrow morning, I need it flagged for external review."
"I know the provision, it would hold the request for an additional forty-eight hours. It requires the investigating officer's digital signature and a written justification filed before the request can be processed."
"Can you access my credentials?"
"You gave me your secondary access code three years ago for the Harmon extradition filing. I used it four days ago to access the federal judiciary portal search." He spoke with subtle pride, he was several steps ahead without a hint of bragging.
Mira almost smiled, "File the flag, make it vague enough to be procedurally valid but specific enough that overriding it means someone has to put their name on the override."
"And if Soane comes in early and overrides it anyway?"
"Then we know exactly where we are and what needs to be done next."
"What about Callow?"
"Callow doesn't know what we have. He thinks Soane is running a status report tonight and he'd wait for the information request to move through normal channels, because that's the proper move and Callow always makes the proper moves." Mira reached the far end of the bridge, "File the flag, then go home."
"No, I'm going to sit in my car in the station parking lot with my thermos and the traffic monitor and I’ll watch where Soane goes tonight. If anything happens, you need to know within minutes, not when I wake up." Chen made it clear there was no room for negotiation.
A minute after Mira hung up on Chen, her phone lit up, it was Percy, she picked up the call.
"Soane went to Callow, where he has a private residence in the northern part of the federal district. His car is parked in the visitor bay and I'm two streets away."
"You followed him?"
"I drove north and saw his vehicle in the lane beside me and made a decision."
"Percy."
"Arthur." He said softly, "He's been inside for forty minutes. When he comes out, I can either follow him back or stay on Callow's building, I can't do both."
She quickly decided, "Stay on Callow. If Soane is checking in, the meeting might drag on for another hour and what Callow does afterward matters more."
"Agreed." He paused, thought for a moment and said, "The cafe, I've been thinking about it."
"Percy."
"Arthur." He almost smiled, "I don't sit in cafes at midnight with people unless it means something."
"Arthur, call me when Callow moves." Mira hung up and sat in the parked car for a while on the quiet street before heading home.
Morse, unfazed by the state of the world, sat in the chair by the window with her until her phone buzzed at two fifty.
"Callow's lights just went out, Soane left about an hour ago and nothing has changed. I'm going to sleep in the car and will talk to you at six."
She read it and typed back, "There's a parking space on Clement Street. Fourth floor, grey building, orange cat in the window, better than the car."
She set the phone down and sat in the chair with her heart racing, until it lit up again.
"What's the cat's name?"
She glanced at Morse and typed back, "Morse. He'll act like he doesn't like you, but don't take it to heart."
He knocked on the door soon after and she opened it. They stood there for a moment, having spent three days caught in each other's orbit through charged and complicated circumstances. Now, they stood in the doorway with none of that between them.
He was still in the dark coat, rain dampening the shoulders and looked just as tired as she did.
"Come in." She stepped back.
He did and she closed the door, while Morse, perched on the windowsill keeping watch, turned to size up the new presence in the room.
"He's deciding something." Percy looked at Morse.
"He always is." She moved toward the kitchen, "Tea or coffee?"
"Tea is fine."
He didn't sit right away; she could hear him move softly around the room behind her then she heard him stop.
"The novel, what page?" He asked.
"Forty three." She looked up from the kettle.
"You've read forty three pages."
"I've read forty three pages fourteen times, I've had it eight months, I read the same section repeatedly and then fall asleep."
"Because you've forgotten where you were?"
"Uhm... I just don't want to be further in without having actually been there, if it makes sense."
"It makes complete sense." He said it quietly.
She brought the tea and they settled in, not across from each other as they had at the café, where the table had served as a polite buffer, but at opposite ends of the sofa, a comfortable arrangement that acknowledged closeness without calling attention to it.
Percy glanced at her and there it was again, the same thing from the café, the hallway, the park bench in the early chill, the way he looked at her with an attention that served no purpose other than simply seeing her.
She met his gaze, "When did you know that you'd come to me in particular and not just to any other detective."
He wrapped both hands around his cup, "Diane sent your name eleven days ago, I read the Calloway thread the same evening, the notes that had been filed and then vanished, the six weeks of loose ends, the way the reassignment had been managed but it wasn't the work. The work told me you were capable, that was necessary but not sufficient."
"What was sufficient?"
"There was a note in the margin of your Calloway supplemental, handwritten in the physical notes. You'd written it, then the file was pulled and archived and whoever archived it hadn't noticed the margin note." He paused, "It read, he fought back, look harder."
"In the preliminary scene notes, before the report was written, there was a bruising pattern on the wrists that didn't match a cardiac event." She glanced down at her tea, "It was in the original responding officer's notes and then it was gone, I'd taken a photo of the page before it vanished."
"The photograph was in the physical file, tucked behind the margin note." He met her gaze, "Someone who snaps a photo of a page before it vanishes, then scribbles 'he fought back' in the margin of a file they know will be taken, is making sure the thought lives on somewhere, even if it can't exist officially, that was enough."
To be continued...