Chapter 33: The Legend's Shadow
The drainage channel was a slash of concrete and shadow cutting through the industrial underbelly of the Arts District. The air here smelled of wet cement, stale urine, and the faint, metallic ghost of the river that once was. Yellow police tape, now limp and bleached by the sun, fluttered from a rusted fence.
Scott killed the engine. The silence was immediate, thick. He didn’t move right away, just stared at the site through the windshield, his eyes tracing the invisible paths a killer might have taken.
“He was here four days before they found him,” Scott said, his voice low in the quiet car. “The coroner puts time of death about twelve hours before dump. So he was killed elsewhere, stored, then brought here. This is a stage. A display case.”
Jennifer unbuckled her seatbelt, the click loud in the stillness. “Why this stage? It’s remote, but not inaccessible. A risk.”
“Maybe risk is the point.” Scott finally turned his head, looking at her. The map light from the dash was off, but the grey morning illumination carved the lines of his face into something stark and contemplative. “Or maybe it’s familiar. Comfortable. Killers like familiar ground. Even if it’s a fucking drainage ditch.”
They got out. The heat was already building, promising a stifling afternoon. Jennifer approached the tape, her boots crunching on gravel. She ducked under it, Scott following close behind. The concrete channel was about ten feet deep, its sloped sides stained with algae and graffiti. At the bottom, a trickle of sluggish, brackish water reflected the flat sky.
The CSIU markers were still there, small plastic tents with numbers indicating where evidence was logged: the body’s position, the hat. Jennifer stood at the edge, looking down. She tried to see it as it was: a young boy, arranged in this concrete gullet, a team working under floodlights in the dead of night. The scene photos were one thing. The emptiness left behind was another—a hollow, waiting silence.
Scott moved with a quiet economy, circling the perimeter above. He stopped, crouched down near a cluster of scrubby weeds growing through a crack in the asphalt service road. He didn’t touch, just pointed.
“Tire marks. Not fresh. But not years old. Heavy vehicle. Van or a box truck.” He glanced back toward the road access. “You could back right up to this edge. Drop something heavy over. No dragging.”
Jennifer joined him, her mind working. “So he transports the body in a vehicle. Backs in. Dumps. Drives away. It’s efficient. Clinical.”
“It’s practiced,” Scott corrected. He stood, brushing dirt from his knee. “The two upstate. One was in a culvert off a county road. The other in a storm drain maintenance access near a state park. Both required a vehicle to get close. This guy doesn’t carry his victims far. He’s not strong. Or he’s careful with his back.” A grim, humorless smirk touched his lips. “Even serial killers get middle-aged.”
The casual profiling, the dry insight, sent a thrill through Jennifer’s professional core. This was why he was legend. He saw the rhythm in the chaos.
“You said you’ve been chasing him for two years,” she said, moving back toward the car, needing to pace, to think with her body. “What’s the profile? Beyond the vehicle and the drainage systems.”
Scott leaned against the rental’s fender, folding his arms. The pose was deceptively relaxed, but his eyes never stopped moving, scanning the surrounding warehouses, the empty windows. “White male. Forty to sixty. Probably has a job that gives him reason to be on the road, or at least lets him move without raising eyebrows. Construction, trucking, utility work. Something that makes a box truck or a van normal. He’s a planner. The souvenirs aren’t random—they’re specific to the victim. Intimate. He knows them, or learns them quickly.”
“So it’s personalized,” Jennifer mused. “Not just predation. It’s… curation.”
“That’s the word.” Scott nodded, a flicker of approval in his gaze that warmed her in a way she immediately distrusted. “He’s building a collection. The locations are part of it. They’re all… negative spaces. Places where things are meant to flow away, to disappear. He’s putting them in the city’s veins after they’ve stopped moving.”
The poetry of the observation was dark and startling. Jennifer leaned against the car next to him, not too close. The sun had climbed higher, burning off the haze. “How does a Queens kid end up in his collection? That’s a big geographic leap.”
“That,” Scott said, pushing off the fender, “is the question that got me on a plane. Family’s clean. Working class, tight-knit. Mateo wasn’t a runaway. He was at a friend’s house playing video games, left to walk home, never arrived. No history of trouble. Just… poof.” He snapped his fingers. The sound was sharp in the quiet. “The leap suggests either the killer is mobile—a long-haul trucker is the obvious fit—or he’s based somewhere in the middle and the victims are mobile. Maybe he meets them online. Grooms them. Convinces them to meet.”
“We need his digital footprint,” Jennifer said. “Phone records, social media. If he was groomed, there’s a trail.”
“NYPD is pulling all that. It’s a mountain of data. We’ll need to sift.” He looked at her, really looked, and the professional mask slipped for a second. There was a fatigue there, deep and old. “Two years, Wu. I’ve seen the reports, the evidence bags, the grieving parents. I have notebooks full of maybes. He’s a ghost. A smart one.”
The shared frustration created a sudden, powerful bond. She knew that feeling—the cold case that haunts your sleep, the face you can’t give a name to. “Then let’s give him a shadow. Ghosts can’t exist without a light source. We just have to find what he’s standing in front of.”
Scott held her gaze for a beat too long. A slow, genuine smile softened the stern lines of his face. It transformed him, took the grizzled edge off and revealed the sharp, engaging intelligence beneath. “I like how you think.”
The compliment, simple and direct, landed with unexpected force. She felt a flush creep up her neck. God, really? Now? She straightened up, turning back toward the channel as a cover. “We should canvass the warehouses. See if anyone saw a vehicle that night. Even if they didn’t think it was important.”
“Lead the way, Detective.”
Across the city, in a drab, fluorescent-lit conference room that smelled of old carpet and burnt coffee, John Ruiz felt his brain beginning to atrophy.
His “partner” from Financial Crimes, a pale, fastidious man named Arlo who wore suspenders and talked about actuarial tables with disturbing relish, had spent the last two hours walking him through a flow chart of suspected insurance fraud linkages. The suspect was the owner of the storage facility that had burned. The alleged motive was drowning in debt. The evidence was a series of questionable financial transfers.
“As you can see,” Arlo droned, pointing a laser pen at a spreadsheet projected on the wall, “the infusion of capital from the holding company in the Cayman Islands coincides precisely with the lapse in the facility’s updated fire code compliance report. The temporal proximity is suspect.”
John nodded, pretending to take a note. He’d drawn a detailed spaceship in the margin of his legal pad. He knew this was a test from his father—a lesson in patience, in due diligence. But every instinct he had, every lesson Jennifer had implicitly taught him about digging, about looking for the thing that doesn’t fit, was screaming that this was wrong.
Not wrong as in incorrect. Wrong as in… off.
He raised a hand. “Arlo. Question. The fire started in Unit G-17, right? The one rented by a ‘John Doe’ with a fake ID.”
“Correct. A classic straw man. Untraceable.”
“And what was in G-17? The inventory list from the facility just says ‘household goods.’”
Arlo adjusted his glasses, flipping a page. “Presumed to be fraudulent. Part of the claim.”
“But did anyone actually see anything go into that unit? The night before the fire, the security camera at the gate malfunctions. The one covering the G-block hallway is conveniently blurred. It’s all very neat.”
“Insurance fraud is often sloppy,” Arlo conceded with a thin smile. “The sloppiness is how we catch them.”
John leaned back, tapping his pen on the pad. It was too neat. A perfect, textbook case of a small business owner cooking his own books and torching his property. Handed to them on a platter. In his brief time with Jennifer, he’d learned that cases were never this clean. Life was messy. Crime was messier.
“Can I get the raw security footage? Even the blurred stuff? And the traffic cam feeds from the street that night?”
Arlo blinked. “That’s… unnecessary. The case is built on the financials. The physical evidence is just corroboration.”
“Indulge me,” John said, hearing an echo of Jennifer’s tenacity in his own voice. “I’m new. I want to see how the sausage is made.”
With a sigh of professorial disappointment, Arlo handed him a thumb drive. “Knock yourself out. It’s gigabytes of useless gray fuzz.”
John plugged it into his laptop. He spent the next hour ignoring the spreadsheets, instead scrolling through time-stamped video files. The blurred hallway footage was indeed useless. The street traffic cam, positioned a block away, showed the front entrance of the storage facility. He watched cars come and go in fast-forward, night bleeding into grainy dawn.
Then he saw it. He rewound, played it at normal speed.
At 3:17 a.m., a dark van approached the facility. It didn’t turn into the main entrance. It drove past, turned down the alley behind the G-block. The camera only caught a glimpse of its rear doors as it disappeared from view.
Twenty-three minutes later, the van re-emerged from the alley and drove off.
Ten minutes after that, the first flames were reported in Unit G-17.
John’s heart thumped against his ribs. The fire department report listed the cause as “accelerant-based ignition, source undetermined.” A professional job. Not the work of a desperate small-time business owner.
He zoomed in on the van. It was a generic Ford Econoline. The license plate was muddy, unreadable. But on the rear doors, even in the grainy footage, he could make out a faint, rectangular outline where a decal or sign had been recently removed. A ghost of a logo.
This wasn’t insurance fraud.
This was a paid torch. A professional arsonist hiding another crime.
He looked up at Arlo, who was happily annotating his flow chart. The words from his father’s office echoed: Prove you can do competent, focused police work without getting distracted.
But this wasn’t a distraction. This was the work.
He copied the video file, emailed it to himself, and closed his laptop. “Hey, Arlo? I’m gonna grab some air. This financial stuff is… intense.”
Arlo waved a dismissive hand, already lost in his numbers.
John stepped out into the hallway, the door swinging shut behind him. The silence of the corridor was a relief. He pulled out his phone, his thumb hovering over Jennifer’s contact.
He imagined her with the legendary Scott Harding, knee-deep in a real case, chasing a shadow across state lines. She was probably in her element, learning from the best, not stuck in a room with actuarial tables.
He put the phone away. He wouldn’t call her. Not yet.
He had his own shadow to chase now. And for the first time all day, he felt the familiar, electric pull of the hunt. It was a quiet, personal current, one that had nothing to do with his father’s tests or Jennifer’s complicated legacy.
It was his.
The realization was a quiet, solid thing in his chest, a counterweight to the morning’s frustration. He wasn’t just following a paper trail; he’d found a rupture in the official story. The van with the ghost logo meant someone else was involved, someone who knew how to make fire and cover tracks. This wasn't his father’s test anymore. It was a door, and he had his hand on the knob.
Back at his desk, he pulled up the DMV database. He started a search for Ford Econoline vans registered to commercial cleaning services, delivery contractors, handyman operations—anything that might use removable magnetic signs. The list was enormous, a scrolling monument to LA’s anonymous service industry. He refined it, focusing on registrations that had lapsed or changed in the last six months.
An hour bled away, marked only by the click of his mouse and Arlo’s occasional smug sigh from the adjacent desk. Then he found it.
A van registered to “Blue Star Maintenance” had its plate renewal flagged six weeks ago. The address was a P.O. box in Echo Park. The registered owner was a shell corporation. He cross-referenced the plate with parking and traffic citations from the night of the fire. Nothing. Of course not. But a second, deeper search into the shell corporation’s filing agent revealed a name: Lionel Greer.
A quick records check showed Greer had a sealed juvie record and one adult bust for possession of burglary tools, five years old. No convictions. He was a ghost, but a ghost with a name.
John leaned back, the office chair groaning. He stared at the name on his screen. This was a thread, thin but palpable. He could tug it. He opened a new browser tab, his fingers hesitating over the keys. He knew the smart, by-the-book move was to file a memo, route it through Arlo and Financial Crimes, let the bureaucracy chew on it.
Jennifer’s voice echoed in his memory, not from yesterday but from a crime scene weeks ago, her gloves smeared with something dark. “The manual is for solving puzzles they’ve already seen. Our job is to see the new picture first.”
He opened a personal incognito window. It was a slight breach, a shadow of a rule. He started a social media search for Lionel Greer.
Across the city, the warehouse canvass was yielding nothing but dust and shrugged shoulders. Jennifer stood in the loading bay of a furniture refurbisher, the air thick with the smell of sawdust and polyurethane. The foreman, a man with tattooed knuckles and tired eyes, shook his head.
“That channel’s where the kids drink and tag. We hear nothing. We see nothing after six PM. You’d have better luck asking the concrete.”
Scott thanked him, handed over a card that would never be used. Outside, the heat was a physical weight. He shrugged off his suit jacket, slinging it over his shoulder. The movement pulled his dress shirt taut across his shoulders. Jennifer looked away, focusing on the notepad in her hands, which was blank.
“A whole lot of nothing,” she said, stating the obvious just to break the silence between them.
“Nothing is data too.” Scott pulled a pair of sunglasses from his pocket, the lenses so dark they turned his eyes into invisible spaces. “It tells us he picked his spot well. He knew the rhythms. This wasn’t panic. It was appointment.”
His phone buzzed. He glanced at it, his expression tightening almost imperceptibly. “That’s my contact at Queens SVU. They finished the forensic download on Mateo’s laptop.” He scrolled, reading. “No obvious grooming chats. No stranger contacts. But there’s a private server. A gaming forum for some obscure multiplayer mod. Requires an invite. The kid was a member.”
“A private club,” Jennifer said. Her mind snapped to the curated victims, the specific souvenirs. “That’s how he finds them. He’s not trolling public spaces. He’s in their niche. He speaks their language.”
“Gives him access to their lives, their hobbies, the things they’d wear every day.” Scott tapped the phone against his palm. “We need the server admin records. That’s a warrant, and it’s gonna be a fight if it’s hosted overseas.”
“We can lean on the parents for the kid’s login. See his direct messages, his friend list.” Jennifer was already moving toward the car, her brain kicking into a higher gear. This felt like a vein, not just a thread. “If our guy is there, he’ll have a username. A digital footprint.”
Scott followed, his long strides easily matching her pace. “You’re good at this. The jump from A to B. It’s fast.”
The compliment, again. It shouldn’t have mattered. “It’s just logic,” she said, pulling the passenger door open.
“It’s not.” He got in, starting the engine. The cool air from the vents was a relief. “It’s instinct. You can’t teach it. You either have the wiring or you don’t.” He looked over at her as he reversed. “Ruiz’s kid. John. He have it?”
The question was a landmine. It was professional, but it felt intensely personal. “He’s learning,” she said carefully. “He’s bright. He cares. That’s more than half the battle.”
“Caring can get you killed.” Scott’s tone was flat, a statement of fact. “It clouds the ‘why’ with too much ‘who.’ You ever work with someone you cared about? Romantically?”
The bluntness of it stole her breath. The car seemed to shrink. “That’s… a direct question.”
“I’m a direct guy. And I’ve been doing this a long time. I see the way the Captain looked when he split you two up. That wasn’t just protocol. That was paternal intervention.” He merged onto the freeway, his eyes on the road. “I’m not judging. Hell, my second marriage was to a prosecutor I met on a RICO case. Lasted eight months. The job ate it. We cared too much about the wrong things.”
Jennifer watched the city stream past her window. “Is that a warning?”
“An observation.” He glanced at her. “And maybe a question. About where your head’s at.”
Her head was a riot of contradictions: the ghost of John’s kiss, the solid, imposing presence of the man next to her, the dead boy in the concrete. “My head is on the fourteen-year-old in the morgue. Everything else is background noise.”
Scott accepted that with a slow nod. “Good answer.”
But it didn’t feel entirely true.
Back at the precinct, the background noise found a frequency. As she walked toward the conference room they’d commandeered, she passed the break area. John was there, alone, staring intently at his phone. He looked up, their eyes meeting. A complicated current passed between them—apology, frustration, a question.
He gave her a small, tight smile and looked back down at his screen.
She wanted to go to him, to ask what he’d found, to share the pulse of the gaming server lead. But Scott was beside her, a palpable force. And the Captain’s rule was a wall. She kept walking.
Inside the conference room, she dumped her bag on the table. “Let’s get the warrant drafted for that server. I’ll call the Flores family’s liaison, get their consent to access.”
“I’ll handle the judge,” Scott said, already dialing a number from memory. “I know one who hates predators more than he loves privacy.”
As she listened to the phone ring, she saw John through the glass wall. He stood up, pocketed his phone with a decisive motion, and walked not toward Financial Crimes, but toward the stairwell. His posture had changed. It was focused, intent. He was moving with purpose.
He had found something. She was sure of it.
And for a reason she couldn't quite name, that certainty filled her with a sudden, sharp dread.
The phone in Scott’s hand connected, and he turned slightly away, his voice dropping into a low, persuasive register Jennifer couldn’t fully catch. She forced her attention to her own screen, pulling up the warrant template, but the image of John disappearing into the stairwell was stuck behind her eyes. That focused stride was the one he used when he was onto something, a tell she’d catalogued without meaning to.
“Okay.Yeah. Send it now.” Scott’s tone shifted, a current of urgency beneath the calm. He ended the call and looked at her, the usual grim patience replaced by something sharper. “That was my contact in Queens. They pulled data from the family’s router. Mateo’s laptop accessed that private gaming server the night he disappeared, via a VPN. But the router log shows a second device accessed the same server an hour later. A device that wasn’t in the house.”
Jennifer stood up, her chair rolling back. “He was in their Wi-Fi range. Outside the house.”
“Parked on the street, maybe. Close enough to ping their network. He was monitoring the kid’s activity in real time, waiting for a window.” Scott scrolled through his own phone, his jaw tight. “They’re sending the MAC address of that second device. It’s a long shot, but if we ever get a physical device to match…”
“It’s a fingerprint,” she finished, her dread momentarily eclipsed by a surge of adrenaline. This was the break they needed. “What about the server admin? Any progress?”
“The warrant’s a logistical nightmare, hosted in Estonia. My contact has a guy at the FBI’s cyber division who might lean on them, but it’ll take days.” He finally looked up from his phone, his expression calculated. “But he also has something else. Physical evidence from the first upstate scene, two years back. Something that was logged but never processed because the tech didn’t exist then. A partial latent print lifted from the victim’s skateboard grip tape. They just ran it through an updated spectral analysis system. Got a few new points.”
“A match?”
“No. But it’s something. A ghost of a print. He’s sending the enhanced file.” Scott plugged his phone into a laptop on the table, pulling up his email. “We need to run this against every database we can access—local, state, federal non-criminal holdings. Driver’s licenses, security licenses, anything. It’s a haystack, but it’s our only needle right now.”
The next few hours collapsed into a focused, silent grind. The enhanced print image appeared on Scott’s screen—a swirling, partial constellation of ridges and whorls, lifted from griptape grit and two years of stored darkness. They split the workload, Jennifer accessing California DOJ databases with her credentials, Scott using his NYPD codes to tap into interstate repositories. The room held only the hum of the computers, the rapid click of keys, and the occasional muttered curse when a search returned ten thousand useless results.
They refined parameters, cross-referencing with known occupational fields that fit the profile. Trucking licenses. Public works employee rolls. Private security certifications. Each search felt like digging through wet cement with a spoon. Outside the glass wall, the squad room slowly emptied as shifts changed. The sky beyond the windows deepened to a bruised purple.
Jennifer’s stomach growled loudly, a rude sound in the quiet. She glanced at the time on her monitor and was startled to see it was past eight.
Scott heard it. He leaned back, rubbing his eyes with thumb and forefinger. A weary laugh escaped him. “Okay. Even ghosts need fuel. Let’s get dinner. My treat. You know a place that’s not a pretentious precinct-adjacent shithole?”
The question, so ordinary, felt disorienting. Her mind, still scrolling through digital fingerprints, blanked for a second. The first image that surfaced was the loud, steamy interior of the Vietnamese place from her date with John, but that felt wrong, a violation of some unspoken boundary. Then another memory clicked—equally tied to John, but from a different lifetime, a different case.
“There’s a taco truck,” she said, the words out before she could second-guess them. “Over on Alvarado. It’s where I went with John after we closed our first case together. The food is stupidly good and they don’t ask questions.”
Scott was already grabbing his jacket. “A truck it is. I haven’t eaten street meat in a city that wasn’t mine in a decade. This should be interesting.”
The night air was cool, a relief after the stale, charged atmosphere of the conference room. They took his rental, the silence between them now comfortably exhausted rather than tense. The truck, “La Estrella,” was parked under a string of bare bulbs, a line of five people snaking from its window. The smell of roasting al pastor and crisping onions wrapped around them, immediate and grounding.
They got their food—overflowing cardboard platters—and took them to a low concrete wall to eat. No pretense. Scott ate with a focused appreciation, devouring two tacos before she’d finished her first.
“This,” he said, wiping grease from his chin with a thin napkin, “is the best thing I’ve put in my mouth since I left Brooklyn. Thank you.”
“Told you.” She took a bite, the flavors exploding—cumin, citrus, char. It was a sensory reboot. For a few minutes, they just ate, watching the traffic pulse by, two cops in a rare moment of uncomplicated peace.
“That Gowanus case,” she said eventually, circling back to their earlier car conversation. “The truck full of people. How do you come back from something like that and just… keep going to work?”
Scott was silent for a long moment, swirling a piece of pork in the bright red salsa. “You don’t come back. Not all the way. A piece of you stays in that desert, staring at those locked doors. You just learn to carry the piece that left.” He took the bite, chewed thoughtfully. “The work after that… it became cleaner. More precise. I stopped caring about making friends at the precinct. I cared about making cases that stuck. Became a bastard, according to some.”
“According to legends,” she corrected softly.
He shrugged, a fluid roll of his shoulders. “Legends are just people who got too obsessed to quit.” He shot her a sidelong glance, a playful glint entering his tired eyes. “Speaking of precinct reputations. I have to ask. It’s a professional habit—I always look into my partner’s backgrounds. Gets interesting when the file reads like a dating roster for the LAPD.”
Jennifer froze, a forkful of rice halfway to her mouth. The casual warmth of the moment evaporated.
He ticked them off on his grease-stained fingers. “Sam Weaver, the M.E. with the dark jokes. David Paqueta, the polyglot from the Florida case. Marcus Cole, the old-school legend himself—damn, that one must’ve been complicated. Julian Campbell, the priest? Really?” He finally looked at her fully, his expression unreadable. “And currently, John Ruiz, the captain’s son. That’s quite a lineup.”
Heat flooded her face, a vicious, undeniable blush that burned from her chest to her hairline. She stared at her food, appetite gone, humiliation a solid weight in her throat. “That’s… that’s not… it’s not a lineup,” she stammered, her voice tight. “Those are… complicated situations. It’s not like that.”
“Relax, Wu.” His voice was low, utterly calm. “Who you sleep with doesn’t define you. Not to me.” He took a long drink of water. “The fact you have a nice ass and a disarming smile? Hell, I don’t blame the guys. But it’s the mind I’m interested in. The mind that sees the jump from a gaming server to a Wi-Fi log. The rest is just background noise.”
The blush intensified, if that was possible. He’d called her smart and attractive in the same breath, delivered with a clinical detachment that made it somehow more like he was flirting with her. She had no response. The cardboard plate in her hands felt suddenly flimsy.
He stood, gathering their trash. “Come on. Let’s get you home. That print isn’t going to run itself tonight, and we’ve hit a wall our eyeballs can’t scale.”
The drive back to her apartment was quiet, but the silence had changed again. It was charged, but not unpleasantly so. It felt acknowledged. He pulled up to her building, letting the engine idle. “I’ll text you if anything pings overnight. Get some sleep. Tomorrow we find his shadow.”
“Yeah.” She got out, leaning back in before shutting the door. “Thanks for dinner. And the… insights.”
“Any time.” He gave her that same small, transformative smile. “See you tomorrow, Detective.”
She watched the rental’s taillights disappear, the cool night air doing little to cool her skin. Upstairs, in the stark silence of her apartment, the day replayed in fragments. The grim horror of the drainage channel. The electric thrill of the Wi-Fi lead. John’s purposeful exit, which now felt like a premonition. And Scott Harding’s voice, laying her history bare between bites of a taco, his blue eyes seeing everything.
Her hero knew her most embarrassing truths and hadn’t flinched. He’d called her brilliant. He’d looked at her and seen more than the rumors.
She poured a glass of water, standing at her dark window. The city glittered, indifferent. Two separate hunts were running now—hers and Scott’s for a ghost who collected boys, and John’s for a van with a logo. Both were shadows. Both felt perilously close to things that could break.
The print was out there in the digital ether, a few ridges of possibility. The van was somewhere on the physical grid. And she was caught in the middle, the familiar, tempting pull of a formidable new partner warring with a protective fear for the hopeful young detective she’d once babysat and was now dating.
She finished the water, the glass clicking softly on the counter. The dread hadn’t left. It had just taken a new, more complicated shape, wrapped in the scent of al pastor and the ghost of a print from a two-year-old skateboard.
Sleep, when it finally came, was thin and full of converging shadows.
When the sun rose, it felt like an intrusion, glaring through the half-drawn blinds of Jennifer’s bedroom. She woke to the dull throb of a headache behind her temples, the echo of a dream where she was running down a corridor lined with closed doors—all of them locked, all of them labeled with names she couldn’t quite read. The distant chirp of her phone on the nightstand pulled her back to the surface.
She rolled over, squinting at the screen: a text from Scott. "Partial print cross-referenced. Hit on a commercial license plate. DMV registration’s for a Lionel Greer. Address in Boyle Heights.
Might be related to the storage fire. Call me when you’re up.
Jennifer sat up, the sheets pooling around her waist, the sudden fullness of the day crashing over her like cold water. Lionel Greer. Her brain made the connection instantly—the name from John’s private incognito search, the van in the grainy footage behind the G-block. The arson. Now this.
She swung her legs to the floor, the hardwood cool against her bare feet. The headache was still there, a low-grade pulsing behind her eyes. She needed coffee. She needed to move.