Chapter Eight Detective Moss
Avery Moss had been awake for nineteen hours when the call came in about a school pickup that didn’t check out, and she almost let it go to voicemail, because nineteen-hour days had become the shape of her whole month and her body was starting to send warnings her mind kept overriding.
She answered anyway. Old habit. The kind that had made her a name people trusted in a department most of East Baltimore had long since stopped trusting, the kind that had put her photo next to the mayor’s at three separate press conferences this year alone, the kind of habit that was, depending entirely on which version of her life you were looking at, either the last honest thing she had left or the single most useful piece of cover a person in her position could ask for.
“Moss,” she said, phone wedged between shoulder and ear while she pulled her jacket off the back of her chair.
“Ma’am, it’s Ortiz, downtown. We got a welfare call on a nine-year-old, Callaway Elementary, sign-out sheet’s got a name that doesn’t match any listed guardian.
Kid’s uncle, brother, something like that — mother’s deceased, father’s not in the picture, guardian’s a Jerome Ellis, twenty-seven, tow truck driver.
Ellis called it in himself around four, sounded frantic, then went dark. Not answering his phone since.”
Moss’s hand stopped on the jacket zipper.
Ellis. She knew the name the way she knew a hundred names in this city, filed somewhere in the back half of her memory from a police report eight months old — a cousin, shot dead in a robbery case that had gone nowhere, closed without an arrest despite what should have been an easy trail to follow, a case Moss herself had flagged as strange at the time and been quietly told to let sit.
She remembered the family. Remembered a woman crying in a hallway, a young man standing very still beside her with his jaw locked tight, a little boy too young to understand why everyone kept hugging him.
“You got eyes on the school?”
“Unis rolled through twenty minutes ago. No sign of forced anything, kid’s just gone, along with whoever the fake uncle was.
But ma’am—” Ortiz’s voice dropped slightly, the particular register cops used when they were about to say something they didn’t fully want on record.
“There’s chatter on a couple channels I don’t usually pay attention to.
Something about a notebook. I wouldn’t have caught it, except your name came up in the same conversation, twice, on a burner line we’re not supposed to be monitoring but somebody left the feed running anyway. ”
Moss went very still in the middle of her own office, phone pressed hard enough to her ear that it would leave a mark.
“My name.”
“Yes ma’am. Context wasn’t clear. Wanted you to hear it from me before it hit anybody else’s desk.”
She thanked Ortiz, hung up, and sat down slowly in her chair, staring at the framed commendation on her wall — Detective of the Year, two years running, the kind of thing that photographed well next to a mayor and meant absolutely nothing about the actual math of a person’s life.
A notebook.
She’d heard the phrase before, years ago, secondhand, from a source who’d since disappeared off the map entirely — a rumor passed down through whispers in holding cells and backroom deals, something about a ledger that moved from hand to hand through the city’s underworld, carrying names too dangerous to say out loud and too valuable to ever destroy.
She’d filed it under the same category she filed most rumors like that: colorful, probably exaggerated, the kind of urban myth that grew bigger every time somebody retold it in a cell block to pass the time.
She hadn’t filed it under contains my name because nobody had ever told her that part.
Moss pulled up everything she could find on Jerome Ellis in the next twenty minutes — a clean record, a work history that read exactly like what he presented as, a tow license, a dead mother, a younger brother he’d apparently raised alone for the better part of a year, no gang affiliation, no priors, nothing that explained why a man like that would suddenly be at the center of chatter involving a notebook and, somehow, her own name.
Unless the explanation wasn’t about who he was. It was about what he’d found.
She thought about the impound auction two weeks back — she’d approved that release herself, standard procedure, vehicles with no owner claim past ninety days went to auction automatically, it happened every month, dozens of cars, nothing that should have registered as significant to anybody.
Except she remembered, now, pulling the thread back through her memory with the particular cold precision she’d built her whole career on, that the vehicle in question had originally been flagged under a case that closed without charges four years ago — a case she hadn’t worked, but had heard about, the kind of quiet closure that happened when certain names got involved and certain evidence stopped mattering.
She opened her desk drawer, the bottom one, the one with the false panel she’d installed herself two years back after she understood, with total clarity, exactly what kind of city she’d agreed to work in and exactly what kind of insurance a person needed to survive it.
Underneath the panel: cash, a second phone, and a single folded piece of paper with a phone number on it that she’d been given years ago by a man who no longer existed under the name he’d given her, with instructions to use it only if the notebook ever surfaced again.
She sat there a long moment with the drawer open, her career laid out on one side of an invisible scale and something she couldn’t yet name laid out on the other, and thought about the little boy from that old case file, too young to understand why everyone kept hugging him, now apparently missing from a school pickup line because his brother had stumbled into the one object in this entire city capable of ending every career that mattered, including possibly her own.
She closed the drawer without touching the phone.
Instead she picked up her department cell and called dispatch, requesting a quiet pull on Jerome Ellis’s last known cell location, no BOLO, nothing official yet, framing it as a welfare check follow-up rather than what it actually was — the first move in a search she intended to win before anyone else in this city even understood the race had started.
Because Avery Moss had built a career on being the detective people trusted, the one whose name never showed up in the kind of whispered conversations Ortiz had just described to her, and she intended to keep it that way no matter what it cost — even if the truest, coldest part of her understood, sitting alone in her office at one in the morning with a false-panel drawer still faintly warm from her hand, that the only way to guarantee her name stayed clean now was to make absolutely certain that notebook, and the tow truck driver carrying it, never made it into anyone else’s hands first.
Not Fields’.
Not Internal Affairs.
Hers.
She grabbed her jacket for real this time and headed for the door, already running through every East Baltimore contact who owed her a favor, already building the mental map of a city she knew better than almost anyone alive, and did not let herself examine too closely the particular chill that settled into her chest at the thought of what she’d do, exactly, if she found Jerome Ellis before anyone else did — and he refused, the way people sometimes did when everything they had left was a stubborn kind of love for a little brother, to simply hand it over.