The PowWow

Curtis opened the door, looked at us, and closed his eyes briefly in the manner of a man receiving news he had already emotionally prepared for and found insufficient preparation.

"You guys must be stuck, if you’ve come to my humble abode." he said.

"Good afternoon, Curtis," I said. "Lovely to see you too, and I’d never attach humble to you, Curtis."

He stepped back. We came in.

The apartment was exactly as it had always been — immaculate. Organized by someone with opinions and the discipline to enforce them. Every item in its place, every space measured and probably disinfected. The gaming setup along the far wall looked capable of managing a small nation's infrastructure and probably had been asked to do something adjacent to that on a handful of occasions. At least.

Jacob stepped inside and stood with his hands loose at his sides, present in the way he was present in rooms — completely, without effort, with the particular quality of stillness that made the air around him make decisions about how to behave. All vision seemed to flow straight to him.

Curtis glanced at him. Then back at me.

"Does he have to — " Curtis gestured vaguely at Jacob's general existence.

"Yes," I said. "He does. It’s who and what he is, Curtis. Don’t let it get to you. Besides, it’s not like he hasn’t been here before.”

Jacob said nothing. He looked at the bookshelf. Curtis straightened slightly and turned back to his chair with the bearing of a man who had decided to simply perform at a higher level than usual and hope that covered it.

I pulled the legal pad from my jacket. "We have a name and five numbers."

Curtis held out his hand without turning around. I gave him the pad.

He looked at it. Looked at it longer. Then he swiveled his chair to face us with the expression of a man who had just been handed a grocery list written in invisible ink.

"A name and five numbers," he said. "That's what we have."

"That's what we have."

"Not six numbers. Not a partial plate — which, for the record, was already an unreasonable ask. Five numbers. And a name."

"Roiya," I said helpfully.

"I can see that it says Roiya." He looked at the pad again. "Do we know what the numbers are numbers of?"

"That's partly why we're here."

He inhaled slowly through his nose. The inhale of a man composing himself for a task that did not deserve his talents and was going to receive them anyway.

"How come you guys never make things easy?" he said. “Let's see what five numbers can be."

Curtis liked his genius witnessed. This was not new information, but the current exhibition was particularly thorough. I guess he felt Jacob was looming, but Jacob was really big, so looming was a natural event. Maybe it was the platform sized feet of the man.

"Running them as a phone number first, accounting for missing digits." he said, fingers moving across the keyboard with the focused precision of someone who had made peace with the fact that they were the most competent person in most rooms and had decided to simply demonstrate rather than discuss it. "No matches. Disconnected or unassigned." He typed. "Now as a zip code — partial match to three districts, none of which — " more typing " — produce anything cross-referenced with the name." He leaned back slightly. "Routing number fragment. Running against financial institutions." A pause. "Nothing useful. Social security fragment — I won't go there, that's a different kind of afternoon."

"We appreciate the restraint," I said.

"Product serial number. License format variations." He shook his head. "The numbers want to be something but they're not cooperating."

Jacob was looking at the bookshelf with the patient attention he brought to things he was waiting on. Curtis glanced at him again, probably seeing the shadow cast from the ceiling fan light looked even larger against the wall than Jacob himself. Jacob did not look back. Curtis typed faster.

"The most logical route," Curtis said, with the tone of a man arriving at a conclusion he had been circling for a while, "is an address. Street number with a zip or partial zip." He pulled up a mapping interface and input the sequence. The results populated.

He frowned.

"Addresses exist," he said, "but — " He scrolled. "This one's in a rural district forty miles out, property records show a retired couple in their eighties who have owned it since 1987." He scrolled further. "This one is a commercial property. Warehouse. Currently vacant." More scrolling. "This one—" He stopped. Made a face. "Condemned."

I leaned forward. "All of them?"

"Every viable match. Either the wrong demographic entirely, wrong property type, or — " he gestured at the screen " — not a place a person named Roiya is currently living, unless Roiya has very specific tastes and a high tolerance for code violations."

He leaned back in his chair and looked at the legal pad again.

"This is the Nathanial Lim situation," he said. Not accusatory. Just placing it in its proper category. "Different problem, same fundamental frustration." He brightened slightly. "Although — at least you have all five this time. Small mercies."

"The Nathanial Lim situation resolved," I pointed out.

"Eventually," Curtis said. "After considerable suffering."

I sat back on the couch and looked at the legal pad in his hand. Five numbers. The way Elias had delivered them — I ran it back in my head. I let my mind review the moment again., then another time.

"Is Detective Stryker involved in this investigation," Curtis said. The sentence arrived in the precise inflection of someone who had decided that a question stated as a statement was less revealing than a question stated as a question.

"She was," I said while my mind flowed over Elias’ words. "The part she was involved with is closed. Missing person — found, safe, case done."

Something moved across Curtis's face. It pulled me out of my thoughts.

It was brief. Genuinely brief — a flicker, quickly managed, the expression of a man who had received a piece of information and was processing it on multiple levels simultaneously while trying to ensure that none of those levels were visible. He turned back to his screen.

I filed it.

And then, because I was apparently incapable of simply filing things without them unpacking themselves at inopportune moments, it unpacked itself.

Curtis and Rachel had a thing. Not a romantic thing — I was reasonably certain of that — but a thing nonetheless. The devoted orbit, the at least to me she had said in the car. Whatever it was, Curtis felt something when her name came up, and what he had felt just now when I said her involvement was done had not been neutral.

Which meant Curtis wanted more of her time than he was getting.

Which meant—

I stopped myself.

That was not a reasonable chain of inference. That was a man who had been feeling slightly stuck for four months constructing a competition that almost certainly did not exist because the alternative was sitting with the stuckness, which was less interesting than manufactured jealousy and also considerably less useful.

I was aware I was doing this. I was doing it anyway.

We had said what we said on the search grid during the Cross case. We had meant it — both of us had meant it, I was certain of that. And since then we had the river path and the phone calls and her hand finding mine on our walks, and all of that was real and good and I was grateful for it. But grateful and satisfied were not the same thing, and somewhere in the months between the Cross case and this one, comfortable had started to feel like a holding pattern.

I looked at the legal pad.

Curtis wanted more of Rachel's time. I wanted forward motion. And here we both were, wanting things we weren't getting, which was—

"You're worrying," Jacob said.

I looked at him.

He was still looking at the bookshelf. He had not moved. He said it the way he said observations — flatly, without judgment, simply placing the fact in the room. From the maelstrom of my current thoughts, I didn’t know if he was talking to me and Curtis was looking at my brother like he’d been accused of something.

Jacob looked at Curtis.

"In the Sermon on the Mount," Jacob said, with the particular calm of a man who had considered this and found it sufficient, "Jesus told His followers not to worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow will worry about itself."

Curtis blinked. "I — yes. That's — correct."

"Each day has enough trouble of its own," Jacob finished, and looked back at the bookshelf.

Curtis stared at him for a moment. Then, slowly, turned back to his screen. He was no longer leaning away from Jacob, so that took care of the looming. Or was Jacob talking to me?

I sat with it.

Each day has enough trouble of its own. Not as a rebuke — Jacob hadn't delivered it as one. Just a fact, offered the way Jacob offered facts, with the quiet certainty of something that didn't require agreement to be true. The worry about Curtis and Rachel and the holding pattern and the forward motion — it was all tomorrow's trouble, and tomorrow hadn't arrived yet, and today I was sitting in an immaculate apartment trying to find a woman who needed finding. Then it fit. It didn’t matter who Jacob was talking to.

Today was enough.

The tightness in my chest loosened by a fraction. I picked up the legal pad.

Elias had been giving the numbers to Rachel and I. The first one clear. The last two clear. But the second and third — the stumble, the halting quality, the slight frown of a man whose signal was breaking up specifically in that part of the sequence.

"The delivery," I said. "When Elias gave us the numbers. The second and third — he stumbled. Specifically those two. The signal broke up right there."

Curtis didn't look up. "So?"

"So what if they're out of order?"

Curtis's fingers paused.

"Levi and numbers out of order," he said, without inflection, without looking away from the screen. "Why is this a pattern."

"That's not—"

"Running the transposition now," he said.

He swapped the second and third digits, input the new sequence into the address search, and leaned back.

The screen populated.

Curtis leaned forward.

I leaned forward.

Jacob turned from the bookshelf and looked at the screen for the first time since we'd arrived.

"There," Curtis said.

One result. Residential. An address an hour outside the city. A name attached to the property records.

Roiya.

The room held it for a moment.

“Send me a pin on that, please.” I said in an amazed whisper.