65. Sage #3
He tilts his phone toward me, long enough for me to see the header for a department-wide case bulletin.
“What does it say?”
“The warehouse fire is officially an arson investigation.”
My stomach tightens. “I thought there was nothing left.”
“There were twelve vehicles in that lot. Fire investigators recovered enough from the VINs to start identifying the registered owners. Several have already been reported missing. The others haven’t shown up to explain why their cars were abandoned outside a burned warehouse.”
“But they didn’t find any bodies.”
“Which is why Missing Persons is involved now.” He scrolls through the update, his expression hardening. “Arson has the fire. Missing Persons has the owners. Several vehicles were registered outside the city, so other departments are asking questions too.”
“Can you make it go away?”
“No.” The answer is immediate. “Too many people are already looking at it. If I interfere, I put myself in the middle of a case I have no reason to care about.”
“So what can you do?”
“Monitor it. Make sure none of the evidence points toward us.”
His thumb stops moving.
“What?”
“They recovered a partial tire impression outside the main burn area. Heavy all-terrain tread. Probably from a pickup that crossed the lot.”
“Knox.”
“It could belong to thousands of trucks.” Holden is already opening the encrypted group thread. “I’m not giving them the chance to narrow it down.”
He types quickly.
Holden:
@Knox Change all four tires on the pickup today. Different tread pattern. Destroy the old set. Don’t drive the truck again until it’s done.
Knox’s reply appears almost immediately.
Knox:
Understood.
“Will that be enough?” I ask.
“It removes one path. I’ll keep watching the others.”
We pack in silence after that. Amy’s clothes, her books, her toiletries.
The face mask kits that never got opened.
The spray tan booth, deflated and folded into its carrying case and ready to return to the lady from Facebook Marketplace.
Then we pack up my remaining things. The few pieces I haven’t already migrated to Holden’s.
Ours. To our home.
I take one last look at the apartment before we leave. The new carpet. The fresh paint. All the evidence scrubbed clean, all the violence erased. It looks like a place where nothing happened. A blank page.
But I know what happened here. Good things and terrible things, sometimes in the same night.
Amy on the couch with her eyelash extensions and her Dunkaroos.
Tyler in the doorway with his ruined face.
Holden in my bed. Eli in my kitchen, trying not to love me.
Milo on the counter, swinging his legs, making me laugh until I cried.
Micah holding me through my nightmares. Knox on the couch, silent, a shadow that always feels safe.
I close the door.
“Ready?” Holden asks, boxes balanced in his arms.
I look at the door. At the man holding my things. At Milo’s truck in the parking lot because we borrowed it to take my things home.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m ready.”
Holden’s phone rings again.
He shifts the boxes against his chest and checks the screen. Whatever he sees wipes the softness from his face.
“Loki.”
He sets the boxes down and answers. “Tell me.”
I watch him listen. His jaw locks.
“When?”
A pause.
“Every device?”
Another pause.
“What did Fenrir save?”
His gaze moves to me.
“Is there any way back in?”
The answer makes his mouth flatten.
“Send me everything that survived. Does Odin know?”
He listens for another moment.
“All right. Keep me updated.”
He hangs up.
“What happened?”
“Loki says Fenrir was trying to recover the authenticated Kennel sessions from the devices Knox and Milo collected. One of them triggered a buried failsafe.”
“What kind of failsafe?”
“Every recovered device wiped its encryption keys and bricked itself. The remaining profiles connected to the local yard deleted at the same time. It cascaded through every access route the devices might have given us.”
“So everything’s gone?”
“Not everything. Fenrir still has the material he got before the wipe. Messages, handles, payment fragments. Enough to prove what the Kennel is and what these men were doing. But it’s static. He can’t see new activity and he can’t get back inside.”
“What about the men?”
“We can identify some of them from wallets, vehicle registrations, and what Fenrir had already matched. Not all fifteen. And without the authenticated sessions, we can’t connect every man to a specific Kennel account.”
“Can’t we use fingerprints? Dental records?”
“Dean finished the last of the bodies almost a week ago.”
The answer lands cold.
“So we still don’t know whether Stephen was one of them.”
“No.”
“And SMAN69 could still be out there.”
“Yes.”
“What do we do?”
“Watch. Wait. See whether anyone resurfaces.”
A minute ago, the apartment felt finished with. Now I’m standing outside it with everything I own packed into boxes and the man hunting me has no face, no account, and no trail.
Stephen is a ghost again.
“Fuck!” I yell at the sky.