The Same Building, Different Doors

The Same Building, Different Doors

Tomas called back two days after the fence line, earlier in the morning than he usually called anybody, which was itself the first thing that told Jonah this was worth answering on the first ring.

"You get a read on the code?" Jonah asked, coffee still in his other hand, the kitchen light not yet doing much against the gray outside.

"I got more than a read. I got a distributor." Tomas sounded like a man who'd been up most of the night with it, the particular rasp of someone running on curiosity instead of sleep. "You want the short version or the version where I walk you through how I got there."

"Short version first. I'll ask if I need the rest."

"Fine. The part's a valve actuator, industrial grade, the kind you'd use on a large-diameter control valve. Not consumer stuff. Not even standard municipal stuff, really — this is a step up from what most water districts bother installing, because it costs about four times as much as the thing it replaces and does maybe fifteen percent more."

Jonah set the coffee down on the counter, the sound small and deliberate. "Somebody paid a premium to keep an old valve running well."

"Somebody paid a premium to keep an old valve running well and quietly," Tomas said. "That model's popular with facilities that don't want a failure showing up on anybody's monitoring dashboard. It's built for reliability, not for reporting. You don't buy that part because you're trying to be seen doing maintenance. You buy it because you don't want to be doing maintenance again for another decade, and you don't want anybody asking why you were doing it the first time."

"Where's it distributed out of."

"One regional supplier for the whole valley. Corvix Fluid Systems. They don't sell retail, business-to-business only, and they run everything out of a depot on the east side, off Redding and Third." Tomas paused, and Jonah could hear him shifting something on his end, papers maybe, or just his own weight in a chair he'd probably been sitting in too long. "I called and asked about ordering one, told them I was doing renovation work on an old property, and the woman on the phone told me they don't do walk-up sales. Everything's account-based, invoiced through registered contractors. She was polite about it. Firm, but polite. The kind of firm that's had the same conversation a hundred times and has a script for it."

"So whoever's maintaining River Annex has an account with this place."

"Has to. That's the only way that part gets to that fence line."

Jonah pulled a chair out from the table and sat, the coffee forgotten now, both hands flat on the wood the way he used to sit when a witness was about to say something he needed to remember word for word. "That's good work, Tomas. Genuinely. That's more than I had an hour ago."

"There's something else." Tomas's voice changed on that sentence, something in it that wasn't quite reluctance but sat close enough to it that Jonah felt the shift before he heard the words. "I went digging in Adrian's old files last night. I wasn't looking for this, I want to be clear about that. I was looking for something else entirely, a contact list he kept for a case that had nothing to do with any of this, and it just about fell out of the folder at me."

"Say it."

"Six weeks before he stopped answering calls, Adrian placed a phone call to Corvix Fluid Systems. I've got the log. Not the content, just the log — a number, a date, a duration. Eleven minutes, which is longer than you spend confirming a delivery address, longer than you spend on hold for somebody, longer than most conversations that don't actually go somewhere."

Jonah didn't say anything for a moment. He looked at the window instead, at the gray light doing nothing to the yard, and let the fact sit where it had landed before he tried to do anything with it.

"You still there," Tomas said.

"I'm here. I'm just letting it settle." He exhaled slowly. "He found the same supplier I just found. Six weeks before he disappeared."

"Looks that way."

"Any note on what he was asking them."

"None that I've got. He wasn't the type to leave himself a memo about a phone call, not one like this. Adrian didn't narrate his own process, you know that, he just did the work and left the paperwork for whatever came out the other end of it." A short pause. "But I know Adrian. He didn't call companies to make small talk, and he definitely didn't stay on the phone with a valve distributor for eleven minutes unless he was trying to get something specific out of them. Either he was confirming they served a particular address, or he was trying to get somebody on that call to admit they had an account they shouldn't have had."

"That's not proof he went to the Annex."

"No," Tomas agreed. "It's not."

"But it's the first time I've got him doing anything that actually touches this. Everything before now was just him disappearing somewhere near a place I happen to find interesting. This is him working the exact same thread I'm working, weeks before I ever knew the name River Annex existed."

"That's how I read it too," Tomas said. "I don't like how I read it, but that's how I read it."

Jonah rubbed at his jaw, feeling the old tiredness that came with a case going somewhere it hadn't gone in a long time. "You said you weren't even looking for this."

"I wasn't. I was looking for a name in an unrelated contact sheet and this was sitting three pages further into the same folder. I almost didn't open that folder at all last night. Figured I'd already been through it twice before and gotten nothing."

"Third time's apparently the charm."

"Apparently." Tomas didn't sound amused by it. "Send me everything you've got on the depot. Hours, address, anything public about who owns the building itself, even if it's just a holding company nobody's bothered updating in ten years."

"Already did, before I called you. Check your email instead of your inbox anxiety."

That got a short, dry laugh out of Tomas, more relief in it than humor. "Jonah. Don't go marching in there and asking the same question Adrian asked. Whatever answer he got, or didn't get, it's the last thing on record before he stopped being reachable. I don't want to be having this same kind of phone call about you in six weeks."

"I'm not planning on asking anybody anything," Jonah said. "I'm planning on looking at a building from across a street. I've been doing that for three weeks now at the Annex itself. I know how to look at a building without the building noticing me looking at it."

"I know you do. I've watched you do it for longer than I care to think about. I'm just saying it out loud so I've said it, so that if this goes somewhere I don't like, I can tell myself I told you."

"Understood," Jonah said, and meant it, in the same careful way he'd meant most things Tomas had told him to be careful about over the years, which was to say he intended to be exactly as careful as the situation required and not one degree more, because more than that stopped a man from ever learning anything at all.

Three days earlier and on the other side of the city, before Jonah had ever run the manufacturer's code through a phone call, Kai had found the same kind of unremarkable address buried in a spreadsheet, though he didn't yet know it was the same one, and it would be another two days before either investigation noticed how close the two of them had already come to standing in front of the same door.

"Facilities maintenance, quarter three, line forty-one," he read out, angling his laptop so Mika could see the row without having to lean all the way across the table. "Paid to a vendor code, not a name. Vendor code resolves to an EIN, EIN resolves to a company called Corvix Fluid Systems. Business address is a depot off Redding."

Mika leaned in anyway. "That mean anything to you?"

"Not yet. Could be exactly what it looks like — Kanzaki buys industrial parts from somebody, files it under facilities, totally boring." He scrolled, found the line he wanted, tapped it twice like he didn't quite trust it to stay put on the screen. "Except this vendor code shows up four times over three years. Always the same rough dollar amount, always filed under the same internal reference format we already flagged as Kanzaki's, and every single one of those four payments lands within about two weeks of an unrelated line item labeled 'site inspection — northern corridor.'"

"Walk me through that again," Mika said. "Slower. I want to make sure I'm not doing the thing where I hear what I want to hear."

"Fair." Kai turned the screen fully toward her. "Four payments to Corvix, spaced out over three years, not on any obvious schedule — not quarterly, not annual, just whenever they needed something. Each one's followed, within about two weeks, by a completely separate line item, different account code, labeled as a site inspection somewhere called the northern corridor. I don't know yet what the northern corridor is. Could be a road. Could be a piece of the old water system, there's a dozen names that get used for different stretches of it depending on which decade's maps you're reading."

"So somebody buys a part, and then two weeks later somebody goes out and inspects something."

"That's what it looks like."

Mika sat back, arms crossed, working it the way she worked everything, looking for the load-bearing part before she let herself trust the shape of it. "That's what maintenance looks like."

"That's exactly what maintenance looks like," Kai said. "Which is the actual problem with it. It's boring in the specific way that makes me believe it, not the specific way that makes me doubt it. If I were building a cover story, I wouldn't build four years of consistent, unglamorous facilities spending. You don't fake something that boring for that long. You fake something flashier if you're trying to hide behind a story. This isn't a story. This is just what it costs to keep something running, quietly, on a schedule nobody outside the company would ever think to ask about."

"So what's the northern corridor."

"I don't know yet. I'm cross-referencing old county water district maps against anything current that still uses that name. It's slow. Half the old naming conventions got retired decades ago and nobody bothered to publish a key."

Reid, who'd been half listening from the far end of the room while he cleaned a rifle he had no immediate intention of using, set the cloth down without looking up right away. "You said parts. What kind of parts."

"Industrial valve components, according to the invoice descriptions. Actuators, mostly. Couple of line items for conduit housing."

Reid looked up at that. "Valves. On a security contractor's facilities budget."

"On a security contractor's facilities budget," Kai confirmed, "buying parts for water infrastructure. Which either means Kanzaki maintains office buildings that happen to have old plumbing in them, completely normal, totally boring — or Kanzaki is quietly keeping some piece of the old water system alive and calling it facilities maintenance because that's the least interesting line item on a budget nobody audits closely."

"Which do you believe."

"I believe the second one," Kai said. "I can't prove the second one yet. That's the difference between what I believe and what I'd actually put in front of Juno as a finding."

"Put it in front of her anyway," Reid said. "Let her decide how much weight it's carrying."

Juno had come in partway through that last exchange, coat still on, the specific brisk energy of someone who'd walked fast the last block on purpose. She listened to the tail end of it without sitting down, arms folded, the posture of someone who'd walked in mid-conversation before and knew better than to interrupt one that was already moving somewhere useful.

"You want to go look at the depot," she said, once Kai had finished. It wasn't a question.

"I want somebody to go look at the depot," Kai said. "Not me. I've done everything I can do with a screen. I can trace invoices until I go blind and it still won't tell me whether that building is a warehouse full of ordinary plumbing supplies or something worth caring about. Somebody needs actual eyes on it."

"Define actual eyes," Juno said. "Because I've heard that phrase before from people who meant something considerably more than eyes."

"Just eyes," Kai said. "I promise. Drive past, park somewhere reasonable, watch what comes and goes for an hour, come home. That's it."

Ghost, who'd said almost nothing since arriving, looked up from the corner where he'd been sitting with his own quiet unreadable patience. "I'll go."

"Not alone," Reid said, already reaching for his jacket. "I want to see it too."

Juno held up a hand before either of them got further than the door. "Look, don't touch. I mean that in the literal sense today, not the general sense. This isn't a job yet. It's a building with a name on it and some invoices that make me uncomfortable. You go, you look, you come back and tell me what kind of building it actually is, and then we decide together whether it's worth becoming a job."

"Understood," Reid said.

"I'm serious about the not touching part."

"I heard you the first time."

"I'm saying it twice because the last time I said something once, you parked three blocks closer than you were supposed to and called it efficient."

"That was one time."

"It was enough times," Juno said, and that was the end of the argument, mostly because Reid didn't actually have anything to argue back with. He zipped the jacket instead, which was as close to a concession as Juno was likely to get out of him today.

"Take the truck the long way," Mika added, not looking up from her own screen. "If Kanzaki's got anything watching traffic patterns near their own vendor's depot, I'd rather you not arrive looking like you drove straight there from a known address."

"You think they're watching their own supplier's street."

"I think I don't know, and that's exactly the kind of thing I'd rather assume until it's proven otherwise," Mika said. "Cheap insurance."

"Cheap insurance," Reid repeated, and didn't argue that one either.

The depot, when Reid and Ghost found it forty minutes later, having taken the long way exactly as instructed, turned out to be as unremarkable as a building could be while still somehow holding somebody's real attention. A low corrugated warehouse off Redding, chain-link around a gravel yard, a loading dock with two bays, one truck backed into the near one with its engine off, no signage beyond a faded Corvix Fluid Systems placard bolted above the office door, the letters half sun-bleached into illegibility.

"Doesn't look like much," Ghost said, from the passenger seat, the two of them parked across the street and down half a block, the truck's engine off, both of them doing the specific unhurried nothing that made two men sitting in a parked vehicle look like they were waiting for someone rather than watching something.

"It's not supposed to look like much," Reid said. "That's the whole point of a place like this. Nobody builds a suspicious-looking warehouse. You build the most boring building on the block and you let the boring do the work for you."

"You've got opinions about warehouse architecture now."

"I've had a lot of time lately to develop opinions about buildings."

"Is that what the last three weeks have done to you. Turned you into a building critic."

"Apparently," Reid said. "You want to hear my opinion on the fence too, or should I save it."

"Save it."

Ghost almost smiled at that, then went still, his attention sliding past Reid toward the far corner of the block. "We've got company."

Reid followed the look without turning his head too fast, the habit three weeks deep in both of them now. An older man was parked across from the depot's far side, further down than Reid and Ghost, alone in a modest sedan that looked like it belonged to somebody's retired uncle, engine off, a thermos visible on the dash through the windshield glare.

"Cop?" Ghost asked.

"Doesn't sit like a cop. Cops fidget less, or fidget more, depending on the cop, but they don't sit like that. That's somebody who's done a lot of sitting and stopped being bored by it a long time ago."

"PI, maybe."

"Maybe." Reid watched a few seconds longer, the old man in the sedan not moving, not on his phone, just watching the same loading dock they were watching, with the same patient, unbothered stillness Reid had spent three weeks trying to teach himself. "Whoever he is, he's not with the depot. Nobody watches their own building from across the street with a thermos."

"You want to go say hello."

"No," Reid said, immediate enough that Ghost glanced at him. "We don't know who he's working for. Could be nothing to do with us. Could be exactly to do with us and we just haven't figured out how yet. Either way, two strangers walking up on a man alone in a car is the kind of thing that gets remembered, and I'd rather not be a thing anybody remembers today."

"You're getting cautious in your old age."

"I'm getting cautious in my last three weeks," Reid said. "Ask me again in a year if it stuck."

They sat another twenty minutes. The truck at the loading dock finished whatever it was doing and pulled away empty. Two men in plain coveralls carried a stack of boxed components from the office into a smaller panel van, nothing on the boxes that told Reid anything beyond a generic manufacturer's logo he didn't recognize.

"You getting any of that on your phone," Ghost asked.

"Getting what I can without holding the thing up like I'm filming a documentary." Reid angled his wrist, the phone low against his leg, screen dimmed. "Plate on the van, at least. Whatever that's worth."

"Kai'll want it regardless."

"Kai wants everything regardless. That's sort of his whole personality now."

The old man across the street didn't move the entire time, patient in a way that made Reid faintly uneasy, the particular unease of watching someone be good at the same job you'd only recently started being good at yourself.

"He's better at this than we are," Ghost said, quietly, like it cost him something to admit it.

"He's had longer to practice," Reid said. "Give it time."

They left before the old man did, pulling out slow and unremarkable, blending into the light traffic on Redding without incident. Neither vehicle acknowledged the other, and Jonah, watching the panel van pull out from the depot's second bay and noting its plate out of habit more than expectation, never once looked twice at the truck two spots down that had pulled away a few minutes ahead of him, driven by a man he'd never met, working a thread that ran, several turns back, into the exact same tangle of invoices and phone calls he was slowly working loose himself.

Lei was building a fence for the ants.

It wasn't a real fence, just a border of pebbles she'd been arranging along a crack in the porch steps for the better part of an hour, one small gray stone at a time, watching the ants detour around each new addition rather than simply climb over it the way any sensible ant should have. Her mother had told her once that ants left an invisible trail for each other, some kind of smell nobody could see, and Lei had decided that if she broke the trail up enough with pebbles, she might eventually watch them build an entirely new one and get to see the exact moment it happened.

"You're going to run out of rocks before they run out of patience," her father said, coming out onto the porch with a mug of coffee gone lukewarm in his hand, the screen door clapping shut behind him the way it always did no matter how carefully anyone tried to ease it closed.

"They already went around twice," Lei said. "I think they're mad at me."

"Ants don't get mad. Ants just reroute." He sat on the top step above her, close enough that she could feel the warmth coming off him, and looked out at the yard the way he did most mornings, like he was checking that all of it was still there. "Your mother wants to know if you're coming in for lunch or if you're planning to marry the ant colony instead."

"Can I finish the fence first?"

"You can finish the fence first."

She went back to the pebbles, humming something without words, the kind of hum that didn't belong to any song she'd actually learned, just noise that came out when her hands were busy and her mind wasn't doing anything in particular. It was the sound of the gravel under tires that made her stop, small and distant at first, coming up the long dirt drive that led to their place from the county road, and she sat back on her heels to watch it because visitors were rare enough out here that any car at all was worth watching.

It wasn't a car she knew. Not Desmond's old truck, not the mail carrier's little white hatchback, not anyone from town that she recognized by the sound of their engine the way she recognized most of the handful of vehicles that ever came up this far. It was dark, plain, moving slower than it needed to on a road this empty, and it pulled to a stop a little short of the house, like whoever was driving it wanted a few extra seconds before committing to actually arriving.

Her father had gone very still beside her.

"Dad?"

He didn't answer right away. He was looking at the car the way he sometimes looked at a bill he didn't want to open, and then he set his coffee down on the step, untouched, and stood up.

"Go find your mother," he said. "Tell her someone's here."

"Who is it?"

"Go find your mother, Lei."

She went, because his voice had a flatness to it she didn't hear very often, but she didn't go far — just to the screen door, where she called her mother's name into the kitchen and then, instead of going all the way inside like she was supposed to, drifted back out onto the porch to watch, because a strange car in the driveway was more interesting than anything currently happening in the kitchen.

Her mother came out wiping her hands on a dish towel, and Lei watched her face change the moment she saw who was climbing out of the car — a man, not old, not young, wearing a jacket that looked too clean for the dust out here, moving toward them with the careful, unhurried walk of someone who'd practiced looking harmless.

"You shouldn't be here," her father said, before the man had even reached the bottom of the porch steps.

"I tried calling first," the man said. "Nobody picked up."

"That was the point of not picking up."

Her mother's hand had found the porch railing and was gripping it harder than seemed necessary. "How did you find us."

"I knew how to reach you," the man said, not unkindly, which somehow made it worse. "I just didn't have a reason to come out here until now."

"There's no reason now either," her father said. "Whatever this is, we're not doing it."

"You don't know what it is yet."

"I don't need to know what it is. I need you to get back in your car."

Lei had crept down two of the porch steps by then, close enough to see her father's jaw working, close enough to see her mother's knuckles white on the railing, and something about the way the two of them stood — angled slightly toward each other, like they were bracing against the same wind — made her stomach do a small, unfamiliar flip.

"Five minutes," the man said. "That's all I'm asking."

"We thought this was settled," her mother said, and her voice cracked on the last word in a way Lei had never once heard it crack before, not over anything, not a fight, not a bad phone call, nothing.

The man opened his mouth to answer that, and it was in the pause before he did that her father turned and saw her sitting on the steps, close enough to hear all of it.

"Lei." Her name came out sharper than she was used to. "Inside. Now."

"But—"

"Now. Go to your room."

She'd never heard him use that voice on her before, not really, not one that left no room in it at all, and it startled her enough that she was moving before she'd decided to move, through the screen door and across the kitchen and up the narrow stairs, her socked feet quiet on the wood, her heart doing something quick and confused in her chest that she didn't have a word for yet.

She didn't go all the way to her room. She stopped at the top of the stairs instead, in the little hallway where the window looked out over the porch roof, and crouched below the sill where she could hear without necessarily being seen, the way she sometimes did when she wanted to know if her parents were talking about her birthday.

The voices came up in pieces, warped by the glass and the distance, her father's low and hard, her mother's higher and tighter than normal, the stranger's calm in a way that seemed to make both of them angrier the longer he kept it up. She caught her father saying something about not out here, and her mother saying something that had the word promise buried somewhere inside it, and then a long stretch where nobody seemed to be saying anything at all, just the wind moving through the walnut trees and, faintly, a car door.

By the time she worked up the nerve to look through the gap in the curtain, the dark car was already turning around in the wide part of the drive, dust rising pale behind it in the afternoon light, and her parents were still standing exactly where they'd been standing, not moving, watching it go the way you'd watch a storm cloud to make sure it was actually leaving and not just circling back.

Lei sat with her knees pulled up to her chest and waited, the way you wait after something's happened that you don't have the shape of yet, turning over every piece she'd caught and finding that none of it fit together into anything she understood. She thought about going down. She thought about what her father's voice had sounded like, and decided against it, and sat a little longer instead.

It was her mother's voice that finally moved her — not words, just a sound, small and broken, coming up faint through the floor, the specific sound of someone trying very hard not to cry and failing anyway.

Lei was down the stairs before she'd fully decided to go, her instruction to stay in her room forgotten somewhere behind her, because whatever had just happened in the yard, whatever the man in the clean jacket had wanted, none of it mattered as much right now as the fact that her mother was crying and Lei had never once, in nine years, heard her sound like that.

She found them on the porch. Her father was standing at the top of the steps with his arms crossed tight over his chest, staring down the empty driveway like the car might still be there if he looked hard enough. Her mother was sitting on the top step where the coffee mug still sat forgotten and cold, her face in her hands, her shoulders moving in small, uneven jolts.

"Mom?"

Her mother's head came up fast, swiping at her cheeks with the back of one wrist, trying and failing to arrange her face into something ordinary before Lei got close enough to see it clearly. "Hey. Hey, baby, I thought I told you to stay upstairs."

"You're crying."

"I'm okay." Her voice wobbled on the second word, undoing the sentence before it finished. "I'm okay, I promise."

Lei didn't say anything else. She climbed the last two steps and sat down against her mother's side, the way she used to when she was smaller and something had scared her, and after a moment her mother's arm came around her, pulling her in close, her chin resting against the top of Lei's head.

Her father hadn't moved from where he stood at the railing, still watching the driveway, still saying nothing at all, and Lei, tucked against her mother's shoulder with no idea who the man had been or what had been settled or unsettled or why her whole house had gone strange and quiet in the space of five minutes, didn't ask any more questions. She just stayed where she was, listening to her mother's breathing slowly even out, and let that be enough for now.

"Anything on the plate," Mika asked, when Kai ran the panel van's number through what few channels he had later that evening, the two of them back at the table with Reid's phone propped between them.

"Registered to Corvix. Not helpful on its own, but it confirms the depot's real, actively shipping product, and shipping it in unmarked vehicles instead of anything with a Corvix logo on the side, which is one more small thing that doesn't need to mean anything and somehow keeps meaning something anyway."

"You keep saying that. Doesn't need to mean anything and somehow keeps meaning something."

"Because it keeps being true," Kai said. "I wish I had a better sentence for it."

Reid dropped into the chair across from them, still in his jacket, looking like a man who'd spent the last hour being patient and was now allowing himself to stop. "There was somebody else watching the place."

"Somebody else," Mika repeated.

"An older guy, alone, parked down the block, been there a while by the time we noticed him." Reid rubbed at the back of his neck. "Ghost clocked him before I did. We didn't want to spook him, so we don't know who he was working for, or if he was working for anybody at all instead of just being an actual bored retiree who likes watching trucks."

"You believe that."

"No," Reid said. "I don't think anybody sits that still for that long over trucks. But I also don't have a name, a plate, or a reason to think he's connected to anything we're doing. Could be Kanzaki's own countersurveillance, checking their own vendor. Could be somebody else entirely, running a completely different thread through the exact same building for reasons that have nothing to do with us."

Kai leaned back, rubbed at his eyes. "That's an uncomfortable amount of maybe."

"Welcome to the whole week," Reid said.

Ghost, from where he'd settled by the window, added the one thing he'd been turning over since they left Redding Street. "He didn't move the whole time we watched him. Didn't check his phone. Didn't eat, didn't drink beyond the thermos, didn't shift in his seat more than once or twice in twenty minutes. Whoever he is, he's done a lot of this before us."

"Comforting," Kai said.

"Wasn't meant to be comforting. Meant to be accurate."

Mika looked between the three of them, the specific expression she wore when she was deciding how much weight to actually put on a piece of information that felt bigger than it currently had any right to be. "Do we tell Juno there's a third party."

"We tell Juno everything," Kai said. "That's sort of the rule now, isn't it. Even the parts that don't resolve into anything yet."

"Especially those parts," Juno said, from the doorway, having let herself in sometime during Ghost's last sentence, coat still damp from a rain that had started sometime in the last hour without any of them noticing. "I'd rather hear about a man in a sedan who might mean nothing than not hear about him and have him turn out to mean everything." She hung the coat by the door, unhurried. "Description."

"Older. Sixties, maybe. Alone. Modest car, nothing flashy, plate we didn't get a clean look at from our angle." Reid thought about it. "Looked like somebody who used to do this professionally and never quite stopped."

"That could be a lot of people in this city," Juno said. "It could also be exactly one person, and we won't know which until he shows up again somewhere that isn't a coincidence." She looked at Kai. "Keep the depot on the list. Don't approach it again this week. Let it sit. If whoever that was is watching it too, the last thing I want is two separate parties circling the same building often enough that either one of them starts noticing the other on purpose instead of by accident."

"And if he comes back," Ghost said. "And we're there again."

"Then you leave first," Juno said. "Every time. Whoever he's working for, we don't need to be the ones who get remembered."

Jonah, for his part, drove home that same evening with the depot's layout fixed in his memory the way he fixed every layout he'd ever needed to remember — the two loading bays, the office door, the chain-link gap on the northeast corner where a man could get eyes on the yard without standing in view of the office window — and with one more small, unplaceable itch riding alongside all of it, the memory of a truck two spots down that had pulled out just ahead of him, two men in the cab who hadn't looked his way even once, which was itself the kind of thing a careful man noticed precisely because it was the kind of thing careless men never bothered to do.

He mentioned it to Tomas that night, almost as an afterthought, the kind of detail a man tacks onto the end of a call because it's been sitting at the edge of his attention and he wants it off his chest before he tries to sleep.

"There was a truck," he said. "Parked a couple spots down from me. Two men in it. Left maybe five minutes before I did."

"You get anything on them."

"Not really. Didn't look my way once, which is either nothing, or exactly the kind of nothing worth noticing."

"You want me to run the plate."

"I didn't get the plate. Wasn't watching them, I was watching the depot. I only clocked them at all because they left in that specific unhurried way people leave when they don't want to look like they're hurrying." Jonah rubbed at his eyes, tired in the particular way that came from sitting still and paying attention for three hours straight. "Probably nothing. Contractors, maybe. Somebody making a delivery."

"Probably," Tomas agreed, in the tone of a man who didn't fully believe it either but wasn't going to manufacture concern out of two strangers in a truck.

"I'm more interested in the eleven minutes," Jonah said. "That call. I keep coming back to it."

"So do I."

"I want to know what he asked them. Not what they told him — I doubt they told him much, a company like that doesn't hand out account information to a stranger on the phone — but what he asked. What made him think to call in the first place. Somebody had to point him at Corvix before he ever picked up that phone."

"Maybe the same way you got there. A part number, a fence, a hunch that didn't want to leave him alone."

"Maybe," Jonah said, though something in the way he said it suggested he didn't fully believe that one either, not yet, not until he found whatever piece of paper or whatever conversation had put the name Corvix into Adrian's head months before it had ever found its way into his own.

He didn't think much more about the truck. There were, after all, plenty of reasons for two men to sit across from a warehouse and then leave without incident, and he had a phone call from six weeks before Adrian's disappearance sitting far heavier on his mind than a truck full of strangers who'd shown no more interest in him than in the pavement. He drove the rest of the way home turning that call over instead, the eleven minutes of it, the questions he couldn't hear the answers to, and the growing, uncomfortable certainty that whatever Adrian had found at the end of that call, it had been enough to keep him working the thread right up until the moment somebody, or something, had made sure he stopped.