The note was handwritten in the margin.
Contact through S.R. only.
Marcus felt the familiar chill return.
“Samuel Reed.”
“Almost certainly.”
“Then Reed wasn’t just holding evidence,” Marcus said. “He was handling witnesses.”
Sloane shook his head.
“Or trying to protect them.”
“Is that what you believe?”
“No,” Sloane admitted. “Not anymore.”
Marcus looked at the time. The federal investigator Mercer had promised to contact was supposed to call them by morning. But Marcus no longer trusted the chief enough to wait passively for that meeting.
He needed an independent route to Reed.
He needed to know whether Daniel was alive.
And he needed to understand why the photograph had been left at the workshop instead of sent directly to him.
The answer came from an unexpected place.
Elena’s laptop chimed as a new message appeared in an encrypted mailbox she had not used in years. The sender’s address was a random string of letters and numbers, and the message contained no subject line.
There was one attachment.
A scanned page from an old military personnel file.
Samuel Reed’s name appeared at the top, followed by his service history and a list of assignments. Most of the document was ordinary administrative material. But one line had been highlighted in yellow.
Status: Retired under special protective arrangement. Location restricted by federal authority.
Beneath it was a handwritten note.
Subject may be contacted through the original witness.
Marcus stared at the screen.
“The original witness,” Elena said quietly.
“Patricia Wynn.”
The woman who had seen Victor Raines leave the scene of Thomas Avery’s murder had disappeared from public view years ago. Her testimony had been dismissed as unreliable, and her name had vanished from the trial records. Marcus had assumed she was either dead or living under another identity.
If she was the original witness, she might know where Reed was hiding.
He looked at Sloane.
“Can you find her?”
Sloane shook his head slowly.
“I can try. But if her identity was protected, the records may have been sealed.”
“Then we find the person who sealed them.”
Elena closed the laptop.
“Mercer.”
Marcus nodded.
“He has the access. He has the history. And he has been lying about how much he knows.”
For the first time that night, the path ahead seemed clear.
They would return to the city, confront Mercer with the evidence, and demand the truth about Patricia Wynn. If he refused, they would find another way to reach her.
But as Marcus started the engine, his phone vibrated.
An unknown number.
One message.
Do not go to Mercer. He has already chosen his side.
A second message arrived before Marcus could respond.
If you want your brother, come alone to Pier 19 at 5:30 a.m. Bring the brass key. Do not bring the detective or the prosecutor.
Marcus read the messages twice.
Then he looked at the time.
It was 12:17 a.m.
Five hours and thirteen minutes until the meeting.
Elena saw his expression.
“What is it?”
Marcus handed her the phone.
She read the messages, and the color drained from her face.
“It could be a trap.”
“It probably is.”
“Then you’re not going.”
Marcus looked at the photograph of Daniel, still tucked inside his jacket.
“For seventeen years, I’ve been told that my brother disappeared. Tonight, I learned that he was alive six months ago. Someone knows where he is, and they’re offering me a chance to find him.”
“They’re also telling you to come alone.”
“I won’t.”
“You can’t take us if they explicitly warned you not to.”
“I’m not going to walk into an unknown location without a plan. But I’m not ignoring this, either.”
Sloane reached for the phone.
“Let me examine the number.”
“It’s probably routed through a disposable service,” Elena said. “But I can try to trace the message headers.”
She began typing.
Marcus turned onto a quiet road and pulled into an empty parking area beside a closed warehouse. The city lights shimmered across the river, and the first faint signs of dawn seemed impossibly far away.
He had spent his adult life searching for the truth about Daniel. Now the truth was reaching back toward him, but it was doing so in the language of threats, secret meetings, and carefully controlled information.
He knew the danger.
He also knew that if he refused to respond, the people behind the message might disappear again, taking Daniel with them.
Elena finally looked up from the laptop.
“I can’t identify the sender yet. But the message passed through a relay connected to a government network.”
“Which government?”
“That’s the problem. The relay is part of a protected system used by several agencies. It doesn’t tell us who sent the message. It tells us the sender knew how to hide inside the system.”
Sloane gave a bitter laugh.
“Then it could be Reed.”
“Or Raines,” Marcus replied.
“Or Mercer,” Elena added.
Marcus looked out at the river.