The PowWow

Curtis showed up at the office a little after nine that night without calling first, which was itself the first thing I noticed, because Curtis calls first. Curtis has called first for as long as I've known him, on the theory — stated once, early, and never revisited — that a man who shows up unannounced is a man asking to be misread.

He didn't knock either. He just came in, laptop bag already open over one shoulder, and set two monitors down on the conference table like he'd measured the space for them in advance, which knowing Curtis he probably had, mentally, on the drive over.

"Talk to me," he said. Not hello. Not are you okay, which I appreciated more than I would have expected to, because I did not currently have a true answer to that question that wouldn't have cost either of us something to hear out loud.

Jacob was already standing. "Curtis."

"I know what happened. I got it from three different directions before anybody called me directly, which I'm choosing not to be upset about right now because there are more useful places to put upset." He was unspooling cables as he talked, plugging things into things, the specific fluent choreography of a man whose hands had done this so many times they no longer needed his attention for it. "Rachel. Mara. Both of them, in one motion, this afternoon. Two officers down." His jaw did something brief and tight. "I am going to need you to walk me through every single detail either of you has, in order, starting with the parking lot in the beginning of this entire nightmare, because I am done being handed pieces of this after the fact."

I want to be honest about what I expected, walking into that. I expected the version of Curtis I'd watched almost come apart once before, standing outside a door Roiya had shut in his face, back when loving her on her terms instead of God's had been quietly killing something in him one two a.m. phone call at a time. I expected, if I'm honest, some version of myself a few months ago — the warehouse, the red string, the one lamp, the slow closing of a door around a man who'd stopped being able to tell the difference between grief and appetite.

I did not get that. And I noticed, because I had been half-bracing for it the entire drive over.

"You're not spiraling," I said.

Curtis looked up from the second monitor, genuinely surprised by the observation, which told me he hadn't been tracking it in himself the way I'd been tracking it in him. "Should I be?"

"I don't know. Last time something took someone you loved out of a room, it took you a while to find your feet again. I watched it happen. I'm not saying that as an accusation, I'm saying it as — " I searched for the word. "Data, I guess. Which felt like the correct currency to offer you tonight."

Something moved across his face, brief and unguarded, gone before I could fully read it. "I thought about that. On the drive." He didn't stop typing while he said it, which was somehow the most honest part of the answer — that whatever this cost him, it wasn't costing him his hands. "I am angrier right now than I think I have ever been in my life, Levi. I want you to understand that clearly, because I don't think it's visible from the outside, and I don't want either of you mistaking calm for indifference." His fingers paused, just once, over the keys. "But anger with nowhere to go becomes a wall. I’ve watched you build one. I built one of those once too. I am not building another one. I am going to point this at something instead, and the something is going to be every piece of data in this city that touches Nathanial Lim, because pointing it is the only version of this feeling that I can survive being inside of for as long as it's going to take."

Jacob, from the doorway, said nothing, but something in his shoulders eased half an inch, the relief of a man who had been quietly afraid of one more person breaking and had just been told, plainly, that this one wasn't going to.

"Where do you want to start," I said.

"The funeral." Curtis pulled up something already — he'd clearly started before he ever walked through the door, on his phone, in the car, wherever he found five unoccupied minutes these days. "Nathanial Lim died in custody, quietly, according to the record. I want the funeral home. Even if there was no funeral home, I want who signed off on the death certificate. I want whoever handled the body between the prison infirmary and the ground, because somewhere in that chain is either a person who was paid to look away, or a gap where nobody was looking at all, and either one is useful to me."

"And the van," Jacob said.

"The van." Curtis nodded once, sharp. "Unmarked, dark, no plate recovered from the hospital lot. I'm running it against every commercial and rental registration within a fifty-mile radius that matches the silhouette Levi described, cross-referenced against any vehicle reported stolen or unaccounted for in the last four months, because whoever's driving that thing didn't walk into a dealership and buy it under Nathanial Lim's name." He glanced up. "And the gas."

"What about the gas."

"The gas has a manufacturer, Levi. Incapacitating agents in a pressurized canister don't grow on trees. There's a batch number, there's a supply chain, there's a very finite list of entities who can legally acquire that particular compound in that particular concentration, and an even shorter list who'd sell it to someone who isn't on the first list." He said this the way other people recite a grocery list, which was, I had come to understand over eleven years of knowing him, simply what competence sounded like coming out of Curtis when the thing underneath the competence was actually rage. "Somebody bought that canister. Or stole it. Either way, it has a paper trail, because gas doesn't have free will and the people who move it around generally have to write things down."

I said, “We didn’t recover that.”

Curtis nodded. “I’m sure the police did, and I can get that information.”

He looked at me then, properly, the screens' glow doing something unflattering and honest to the exhaustion on both our faces.

"Which brings me to you," he said. "Did you get a plate."

I shook my head. "Three characters. Maybe four. Out of order, because of the gas — I told you, my memory of that whole thirty seconds comes out scrambled every time I try to pull it straight, like somebody reached in and shuffled the deck on purpose."

Curtis looked at me for a second, and then, against every instinct I had for how this conversation was supposed to go, he almost smiled. Not much. The corner of it. But real.

"What else is new," he said.

It shouldn't have been funny. Under any other circumstances, in any other week, I don't think it would have been. But something about the sheer, tired familiarity of it — of course the one piece of hard evidence I'd managed to hold onto in this entire nightmare had come out backwards, of course it had, that was simply the shape of my luck across years’ worth of cases and it wasn't about to reform itself now out of respect for how badly we needed a break — got a short, involuntary laugh out of me, more relief than humor, gone as fast as it arrived.

"Give me what you've got," Curtis said. "All of it. Every character, every order you've tried them in, everything you've already told yourself is wrong. I don't need your best guess. I need your worst ones too."

I gave him what I had. Two letters I was fairly confident of, a third I wasn't, a number that kept swapping positions with itself every time I tried to fix it in place, and one more I genuinely could not tell him was a seven or a one, which felt, saying it out loud, like the least useful sentence I had contributed to this investigation in ten years of contributing sentences to investigations.

Curtis took all of it without complaint, typed it into something with more fields than I had characters to fill them, and started running combinations — every plausible order, every plausible substitution, cross-referenced immediately against the van search already running in a second window, because apparently his software could do four impossible things simultaneously while the rest of us were still catching our breath.

"This is going to take a while," he said, not looking up. "Hours, maybe. I don't know yet whether it's going to take hours because there's an answer at the end of it or hours because there isn't one, and I'd rather not guess out loud which."

"That's fine," Jacob said. He pulled a chair up to the table — the third chair, I noticed, the one that had sat empty and unused in every case this family had worked since Curtis first started coming around, quietly repurposed tonight into part of the actual operation instead of a spare. "We have the night."

"You have exactly as long as it takes," Curtis said, "because I am not stopping until this list has a name on it, or until the sun comes up and one of you makes me eat something, whichever comes first."

I looked at the two of them — Jacob settling in with the case file he still hadn't fully let go of since earlier, Curtis already three windows deep into something I couldn't have followed with a week's notice — and felt, for the first time since Rachel's phone had gone quiet in my hand that afternoon, something that wasn't quite hope, but was at least its immediate neighbor. A third chair, finally occupied. A wall that hadn't been built. Anger with somewhere to go.

It wasn't enough. I knew, even sitting there, that it wasn't going to be enough, not against something that could put its hand through a locked door and not even flinch. But it was more than we'd had that morning, and on a night like that one, I had learned to be grateful for exactly that much, and not one ounce more, because one ounce more than the truth was its own kind of lie, and I was done telling myself those.