2. Chapter 2
By five the task force office had mostly cleared out, leaving behind the low hum of half the fluorescents and the quiet of people who’d already murmured their goodnights on the way to the elevator.
Andre stayed at his desk, surrounded by the ghost-smell of stale coffee and paper.
He told himself it was the reports. Three incident summaries that should have taken him twenty minutes total had consumed most of the afternoon, he’d retyped the same sentence four times before realizing he’d just been staring at the blinking cursor, watching it pulse like a trapped heartbeat.
A paper cup of coffee sat cold at his elbow, brewed four hours ago and forgotten since.
Something had felt off since he woke, a low-grade static in his nerves.
He hadn't been able to name it, and that bothered him almost as much as the feeling itself.
He didn't believe in premonition. He believed in patterns, in the small tells a body gave off before the mind caught up, the tightness in the shoulders before bad news, the dry mouth before a confrontation.
All day his body had been humming something his mind refused to translate.
His badge was still clipped to his belt, right where it always sat. His weapon lay locked in the drawer, per department policy after hours. He’d loosened his tie two hours ago and now it lay coiled over the back of his chair like a shed skin. Small deviations.
The phone buzzed against the laminated wood of the desk, rattling faintly.
Whiskey brown eyes looked at it before he understood why, before his hand even twitched toward it. The screen glowed with a name: Marcus.
He’d kept it under his real name. Never saw a reason to hide it, not from anyone who might go through his phone, not from himself. If it ever rang, he’d wanted to know exactly who was calling, no half-second of pretending it might be someone else.
He let it ring twice before he picked it up. That much control he still had.
“Jefferson,” he said, professional and flat, the tone he used for numbers he didn’t recognize, except he did recognize this one, had known who it was before the first vibration faded, and the deliberate flatness in his own voice cost him more than any lie he’d told all year.
The line stayed silent for longer than a casual silence usually lasted.
Then, “Andre.” Said in the tone he knew as well as his own heartbeat.
In a tone that had been his heatbeat once upon a time before the world had broken him and his life.
Before he had walked away from everything that had put a smile on his face and passion in his nights.
Before he had ripped out his own still bleeding heart because the man on the other side of this call had walked into a darkness that Andre could not follow. Would not.
He didn't answer right away. His hand had already found the pen at the edge of his desk, one of a dozen identical black government-issue pens he'd never once written with in years of owning this desk, and he turned it once between his fingers before he let himself speak.
"I'm here," he said. Not, 'it's been years'. Not, 'I didn't think you had the balls to call this number again'. Just the two words that kept things exactly as contained as they needed to be.
"I've been following a trail." The silence that followed was thick with the ghosts of case files and unmarked graves. "In Atlanta... too many threads I've been following for years just converged. All pointing to one name."
Andre knew. Knew it in the sudden tension coiling through his shoulders, in the way his umber knuckles went white around the phone.
Knew it like the phantom ache in his left knee where the surgeon had dug out a bullet fragment six years back.
Marcus wouldn't have called after all this time for anything less.
His body shifted into a different mode entirely, the familiar, weary pivot into a hunt that had defined a decade of his life.
Years of slamming into walls some monster had engineered to be unscalable.
Years of chasing whispers that evaporated in daylight, of watching the task force's interest wane to polite, pitying nods when he'd mention the name they'd all officially retired.
He'd never closed the file. Never purged the number from his speed dial.
But he'd also stopped expecting it to ever lead anywhere but another dead end.
"Talk to me," Andre said, his voice low. The pen he'd been fidgeting with stilled completely in his grip.
A shipping manifest, Marcus said. Three sets of coordinates off the Carolina coast. A pattern of movements tracing back further than Andre's career, further than he wanted to consider before coffee.
Andre was already constructing the case in his mind, layer by layer, even as he began picking it apart.
He'd seen intelligence this promising crumble over a bad source before, seen a slick defense attorney pluck one loose thread in a courtroom and watch the whole tapestry unravel by lunch.
Chain of custody first. Where did this come from?
Would it hold up under scrutiny? Was there a way to use it without explaining how he still had a source his department hadn't worked with in years?
Parallel construction, if necessary. He'd need something clean, something independent, before any of this ever touched paper with his name on it.
"Send me what you can source clean," he said, voice gravelly with the late hour and emotions he couldn't afford to let slip right now. "Not what you have. What I can use."
A pause on the line, and Andre understood it for what it was, Marcus recalibrating, the same way Andre was, both of them running the same old math on how much of this could stay professional and how much couldn't.
"There's someone tied to it," Marcus said. "I need to know if he's already on anyone's radar before I move on him. Quietly."
Andre wrote nothing down. He didn't need to. He'd have the name inside an hour without leaving a trail that connected it to this call, and some part of him that should have been alarmed at how easily he'd already agreed to that wasn't alarmed at all.
He was, God help him, glad to be doing this again. A part of him that had been slowly and inexorably bleeding for years was soothed by the voice of the man he had loved with every bit of his heart, and too much of his ethos to keep.
They talked another twenty minutes, the rest of it clean and useful and entirely about Atlanta.
He'd be able to pull files and reports from the departments down south, though knowing the people with whom Marcus moved…
there would be more gaps than details. Ghosts and untraceable details.
Victims returned, but no bodies to find that would lead them anywhere.
He'd learned over the years that his cases brushed the edges of Lakefront…
that there would be nothing to find. There never was.
Marcus ended it the way he'd always ended calls, no goodbye, just: "I'll send the file.
" The line went dead before Andre could decide whether he'd wanted to say anything else, and that made him rub his chest as a phantom echo of pain took up residence there.
The place where memories of better days with Marcus would always live, no matter how much time went by.
The drive home took eleven minutes he didn't remember driving. He let himself in, dropped his keys in the bowl by the door out of a habit older than the apartment itself, and went straight to the kitchen without turning on more than the one light over the stove.
The kettle was on before he'd consciously decided to put it there, hands moving through a ritual built for Sunday mornings.
Tonight was Thursday, seven o'clock. The kitchen held none of that early, forgiving softness that belonged to eight a.m., to his mother's voice waiting on a call he hadn't made yet.
The mug he reached for, without thinking, was the one his brother used to tease him about, a hairline chip along the handle he'd never bothered to fix, and he filled it anyway.
The water boiled. He poured it, carried the mug to the table, and set it down without drinking from it.
Over the next twenty minutes, while he sat with what Marcus had told him about Atlanta, coordinates, a name he still wouldn't say out loud even alone in his own kitchen, the tea slipped from hot to warm to… something not worth drinking at all.
He got up instead and went to the hall closet, to the shoebox on the shelf above his winter coats.
Six years of a life that hadn't quite been his since.
He pulled out the file, never departmental, never official, not after the acquittal…
the one he'd started the same week everyone else had quietly closed their notebooks and moved on.
He'd kept it the way you keep a splinter you can't reach, updating it in fits when something surfaced and leaving it untouched for longer stretches than he liked to admit.
Eleven months since he'd last opened it.
He knew that number down to the week without checking, the same quiet arithmetic he ran on anything that still cost him something.
Marcus had been the other number he used to track that way, before he stopped being something he was allowed to count.
His short, black hair had a lot more silver in it now than it had back then…
just another mark of what this case had cost him in time and in his soul.
He sat at the table with the file and the untouched tea.
He did not open the file. Not yet. Just held the weight of it across his knees and felt the same old ache find the same old scar tissue, and somewhere under all of that, something new: the information that had come from the love of his life, the possibility he hadn't let himself name yet.
His phone was still on the table. He picked it up twice, the second time getting as far as his mom's name on the screen, thumb over the call button the same as every Sunday, before he set it back down.
It wasn't Sunday. She would ask why he was calling on a Thursday, and there wasn't a version of the truth that didn't end with her knowing the file was open again, and what that had always meant for them, and what it had finally cost.
He drank the tea cold. Didn't open the file. Didn't call her. Sat in his kitchen long after both decisions had already been made, and thought about a man who had walked out of a courtroom six years ago and was still walking, somewhere, but… fuck… just might not be for much longer.
It was almost too painful to hope. If he was wrong, if Marcus was wrong… he there might not be enough of him left to pick up after.