The PowWow

Curtis didn't stop at the address.

This was, I had come to understand, simply how Curtis operated. Give him a thread and he pulled it — not because he was asked to, but because leaving a thread unpulled was a kind of disorder he found personally offensive. He was already moving through connected databases before I had finished processing the fact that Roiya's name was attached to a residential property an hour outside the city.

"Property records," he said, pulling up the first layer. "Address has been occupied for eleven years. Current registered occupant — Roiya, no prior surname on record until three years ago." He typed. "Utility accounts in her name, consistent usage, no gaps. She's been there the whole time."

"Where did she come from?" Jacob asked. Still at the bookshelf.

Curtis ran it. "Out of state transfer. No — " He frowned. "No. There's nothing before the move. No prior address, no prior utility history, no employment records, no — " He leaned closer to the screen. "No digital footprint at all before she arrived at this address eleven years ago."

The room was quiet for a moment.

"Like she was placed," I said.

Curtis looked at me. "That's one way to put it. According to what I can find, she was eighteen when she showed up there, legal adult. She’s nearly thirty now."

I thought about St. Catherine's. About Jeremiah's careful words and the thing he hadn't said, and the sealed records, and a child adopted before two brothers arrived and never connected to them because the system had been designed to prevent exactly that connection.

Placed. Before she could be named. Before anyone who might have looked for her knew to look.

Curtis was already moving to the next layer.

"Cross-referencing the name with — " He stopped.

Spun his chair around.

Looked directly at me.

"Can I get Detective Stryker's number?"

The question arrived in the room with the simple confidence of a man who had decided to ask something and had asked it, and I heard it with the surface of my mind while the rest of my mind did something else entirely.

It dropped.

Not gradually. All at once — like a floor giving way, the particular lurch of a thought that arrives faster than you can manage it and takes everything with it on the way down.

Curtis wanted Rachel's number.

Curtis, who had the brief complicated expression when her name came up, who responded to her with a warmth he didn't extend to me, who had said nothing when I told him her involvement in the case was done except to turn back to his screen in a way that now, retroactively, felt like concealment.

Curtis was asking for Rachel's number.

Which meant Curtis was interested in Rachel.

Which meant the flicker I had seen wasn't what I had told myself it was — not professional admiration, not the devoted orbit of someone who found her impressive. Something else. Something that had been sitting in this apartment waiting for the right moment to announce itself, and the right moment was apparently now, in front of Jacob, while I was sitting on a couch that was probably disinfected twice weekly.

And if Curtis was interested in Rachel —

Then maybe Rachel already knew.

Maybe the distance I had been feeling, the comfortable-that-had-started-to-feel-like-a-holding-pattern, wasn't about Rachel working something out on her own schedule the way I had generously and apparently incorrectly assumed. Maybe it was about this. Maybe she had been pulling back because she was moving toward something else, toward someone else, toward a man with perfect hair and a laser-leveled apartment and the kind of focused competence that some women found—

My heart was hammering.

I was aware of that. I was also aware that I was sitting in a chair in Curtis's apartment not breathing at a normal rate, and that the edges of something that was probably panic were doing what edges did when you gave them enough material to work with, which was expand, and that I was doing this to myself, I knew I was doing this to myself, I could see myself doing it from a slight remove the way you watch someone walk toward a door you know is locked, and I could not stop—

Jacob crossed the apartment.

He didn't rush. He moved with the unhurried certainty of a man who had identified where he needed to be and was going there. He stopped in front of the couch and looked down at me.

"If then the light within you is darkness," he said, quietly, "how great is that darkness."

He said it the way he said scripture — not recited, not performed. Reasoned. Placed.

I looked up at him.

The hammering slowed.

I took a breath. Curtis hadn’t said the name Rachel, he’d said Detective Stryker. I fought the urge to take a deep cleansing breath.

Then I looked at Curtis, who was watching this exchange with the expression of a man who had asked a simple question and was now witnessing something that had the texture of a private language he didn't have the dictionary for.

"Why do you ask?" I said. My voice came out even. Minor achievement.

Curtis blinked. Then he grinned — the full, uncomplicated grin of a man who had something he wanted to say and was glad to finally be saying it.

"I could use the work," he said. "She's a detective. I do what I do. It would be a good professional arrangement, it would be for a good cause, and—" he spread his hands slightly "—it would generate income. I've met her. I want to ask her. That's all."

I stared at him.

That was all.

Professional arrangement. Income. A good cause.

I had just put myself through the complete interior architecture of romantic catastrophe over a man who wanted a referral.

I looked at Jacob. He’d been talking to me the whole time. Lord, bless my brother and thank you for Your grace.

Jacob was already looking at the bookshelf again, with the particular composure of a man who had done what needed doing and considered the matter closed.

"Thank you," I said. Quietly. Meaning it entirely.

He said nothing. Of course he didn't.

I looked back at Curtis. "I'll ask her," I said. "See if she's willing to share her number for professional inquiries."

Curtis blinked twice, with the satisfied precision of a man accepting a completed transaction, and turned back to his monitors.

"Good," he said, and kept working.

The husband appeared in the records three years in.

Curtis found him the way Curtis found things — by following the thread until it produced something, and then following that thread too. He pulled up the marriage record, the financial accounts, the property amendments, and laid them out with the quiet efficiency of someone assembling a picture from pieces that individually looked like nothing.

"Royce," Curtis said. "Three years of marriage. No prior record." He scrolled. "Clean on paper."

"But," I said.

"But." He leaned forward. "The accounts tell a different story once you know how to read them. Joint accounts established within the first month of marriage. Her individual accounts gradually consolidated — transfers, closures, everything moving under joint control." He paused. "Her name on the accounts but access increasingly routed through him. Utility bills, subscriptions, all of it." He sat back. "It's a pattern. Gradual. Quiet. The kind of financial control that doesn't look like control until you step back far enough to see the shape of it."

"You know how to look for it," Jacob said. Not a question.

Curtis was quiet for a moment. "Yes," he said. "I do."

Nobody pushed on that. It didn't need pushing on.

I looked at what Curtis had assembled across the three monitors — the address, the property history, the footprint that began eleven years ago with no before attached to it, and now Royce, three years of quiet control laid out in account transfers and consolidated access.

Eleven years at that address with no before.

Three years with Royce and his quiet, gradual control.

And a biological mother apparently willing to use whatever instrument was available to make sure someone was looking.

The information was real. The letter had been delivered by the wrong hands, through a compromised channel, by something that had its own reasons for delivering it. None of that changed what the letter said.

A sister was real.

And she had been in a dangerous house for three years without anyone looking for her, because she didn't know she was lost, and we didn't know she existed, and the system that had separated all three of them had done exactly what it was designed to do.

"Send me everything," I said.

“I will,” Curtis said. “Who is she?”

“Our sister.” I said.

Curtis was already compiling everything to send.