THE DROWNING FILE
Caleb had the kind of walk that made nurses step aside without resenting him for it. He carried Rowan's canvas bag like it was ordinary, but the tendons along his wrist told the truth: nothing today was.
"Discharge in an hour," Sloane announced, folding Rowan's chart shut with the satisfaction of a tiny victory. "Vitals are good. Lungs sound like a creaky door we've decided to love."
"I brought the creaky door gifts," Caleb said. He set the bag on the rolling table and slid out the SD case from last night's locker. Chain-of-custody labels already kissed the plastic like postage; his name and badge number sat in neat block letters. "I logged it on the way in. We'll view it in my office; I don't want it on the hospital Wi-Fi, which doubles as a miracle and a sieve."
Sloane arched a brow. "He's not wrong."
"He's also very proud of himself when he says sentences like that," Rowan said, voice shredded and fond in a way she'd deny later.
Caleb's mouth admitted the smallest ghost of a smile and then disciplined itself into a line. "We'll take your prints for elimination and document the injuries on your wrists," he said. "Then we go. You can sleep in the car."
"Romance is alive," Rowan said.
"Not my department," he said, and for the second time in twelve hours she wanted to bite him for how steadied she felt when he was near.
They signed forms. Sloane threatened to baptize anyone who stressed her patient with saline. Caleb stood quiet sentry while Rowan pulled on soft clothes that didn't smell like harbor. When they stepped into the winter light, the cold snapped its teeth playfully at their cheeks.
Caleb drove a state-issued SUV that had seen worse roads and better days. He didn't put music on. The silence between them felt clean, like snow that hadn't been stepped in yet. Rowan watched the town blur by: Ellery's tidy campaign office with the tasteful wreath; Carrow Construction's yard with its cranes and coils of cable; the firehouse, bunker gear drying like husks. People moved through the morning with their shoulders a little higher than usual, speaking in the careful voice tragedy teaches.
"Did anyone die?" she asked quietly, because she had been too busy surviving to do the inventory.
"One," Caleb said. "A contractor hired last week for temporary rail reinforcement. Fell with the mid-span. We pulled him out too late."
"A name?"
"Levi Drue," he said. "No priors, no flags, two daughters in Augusta. The part of the job I hate is calling to tell people they are now the kind of family that gets called."
Rowan closed her eyes briefly. "I shot him yesterday," she said. "Laughing. He had a nail behind his ear like a pencil."
"Keep that," Caleb said. "It's heavy, but keep it."
"Why was he there?" she asked. "On parade night. On that section."
"Loose report says 'final safety check.'" Caleb's tone turned dry. "We'll see."
His office at the field unit had the stubborn neatness of a man who has known both chaos and evidence checks. A coffee ring on the desk, a line of Sharpies like soldiers, a map of the harbor marked with a handful of pins. He cleared a space, set down the SD case, and gloved up. He glanced at Rowan. "You don't have to watch."
"I do," she said, and he nodded as if he'd expected that answer long before he'd asked.
He slotted the card into a hardened laptop with no outside channels and waited while the machine did its fussy handshake. The first file opened with the drone's cheerful indifference. They watched the bridge at golden hour last week, sunlight combing the planks, water doing its old hypnotist trick.
"There," Rowan said softly, pointing. Left third. Hood. Scar.
Caleb scrubbed back and forward with the slow mercy of someone who had learned to respect the frame. He froze the moment the figure paused at mid-span and zoomed. The pixels fought him. The ear's pale crescent refused to be a fingerprint, but the echo of last night on Rowan's screen was precise enough to make her skin pebbled.
"Pause on the supports," Caleb said. He backed the drone footage to a lower pass, focused on the under-structure. "Again. Slower."
Rowan leaned in. On screen, the drone dipped obediently along the trestles. Galvanized bolts gleamed dull gray. On one junction near the middle, a bolt glinted the wrong color; bright, almost pretty.
"That's stainless," Caleb said. "Wrong spec for that join. Looks newer than the rest."
"Newer is good?"
"Newer is different," he said, and it was not praise. He zoomed until the image threatened to be nothing but light and guessed aloud: "Carrow's crews have been swapping hardware. 'Temporary' upgrades. If you wanted fatigue to focus on a single point, you'd create a weird little choir: one voice doing soprano while everyone else is bass."
"Sing the wrong note," Rowan said. "Make the bridge find the failure for you."
"Or make it easier to pretend a failure found you." He rolled the footage forward one frame at a time. The hood lifted his head and looked straight into the drone as if he could see through lens and pilot. Caleb froze, then leaned closer. "There," he said.
"What?"
"Reflection," he said. "On the rail cap. Just enough." He magnified until the screen gave up and became squares, then backed off. The reflected smear suggested a boat's running lights in the channel, the barest hint of a registration number like a shadow. He jotted it down anyway: ME 541– and then surrender.
"We can work with partials," he said. "If the plate belongs to a municipal boat, we go through interagency hell. If it's private, we knock on doors."
Rowan felt the pulse of it: momentum. "Who gets mad if we find the right door?"
"Everyone," he said. "The mayor because it's messy; Carrow because it's expensive; whoever is under the hood because we ruin their hobby."
"Was the patrol car stolen?" she asked, and was surprised by the steadiness of her voice.
"Signed out by a rookie who swears he parked it outside the substation for a bathroom break." Caleb's mouth went hard. "Keylog says the engine started five minutes after the rookie went in. The logs also say he never left it idling. The logs would make a good children's book titled Lies We Tell Our Computers."
"So a leak," Rowan said. "Or a ghost."
"Leaks corrode," he said. "Ghosts leave footprints. We'll find which this is."
He printed stills from the drone footage; hood, scar, the wrong-shine bolt and logged them. He moved with the stubborn grace of a man who didn't trust miracles but kept them on the shelf anyway in case they got bored and wanted to help.
Rowan watched him work and, against her will, let a small piece of her rest. It made room in her for the other thing she'd been carrying: the photo from twelve hours earlier, the one where Ellery's wave had gone from campaign to human. She slid it onto the desk.
"You know him," she said. "Mayor Thomas Ellery. Fostered me sixteen years ago, which buys him loyalty he hasn't called in lately. He's also standing in a truck that made it across the weak point before the collapse. He knows timing like other men know golf."
Caleb studied the frame without sighing or smiling. "He'll be interviewed today," he said. "He will not enjoy it."
"He's very good at not enjoying things he doesn't have to," Rowan said.
The office phone rang. Caleb answered, listened, and said, "Don't touch anything. Ten minutes." He hung up and met Rowan's eyes. "Your apartment."
"What about it?"
"Someone broke in," he said. "They didn't take your TV."
"They took my backups," Rowan said before she knew it for a fact, and then knew it for a fact with the bright sharpness of a cut.
He was already moving. "Let's go."
They reached her place in eight minutes that felt longer. The front door showed no tantrum, no kicked-in theatrics; just a lock that had been loved by the wrong key. Inside, the sugar canister's lid sat back on wrong, an insult only its owner would spot. The freezer hummed with false innocence. The hollow book had lost its weight. The manila envelope with the six prints from last night lay open on the table like a mouth mid-protest; three of the photos were gone, three remained intact but marked in ballpoint pen with a single word scrawled across each face:
DELETE.DELETE.DELETE.
Sloane arrived on the run and stopped dead in the doorway when she saw the photos, her breath riffling the edges. "Touch nothing," she told herself and did it, hands in fists at her sides.
Caleb moved slow as church. He took latex from his pocket and made the place into a scene. He photographed every wrongness: the shifted lid, the re-stacked books, the footprint on the sill that wasn't Rowan's. He bagged the remaining prints with tweezers, then crouched by the window and unfocused his gaze the way you do when you want the thing behind the thing.
"Foot tread's cheap," he said. "Bought at Benny's or the gas station. Size… ten? Eleven? Too common to be a gift." He peered at the sill. "Wood flake. Salt. Smells like fuel."
"They came from the pier," Rowan said. "Straight here."
"They wanted you to know they were here," Sloane murmured. "Or they wanted you to think they wanted you to know."
Caleb pointed at the photos. "Why take three and leave three?"
"Confuse me," Rowan said. "Or prove a point."
"What point?"
She felt it land in her mouth before she had time to be afraid of saying it: "That they can choose which truths I get to keep."
Caleb straightened. Something in his face changed, a door closing in a house she had only just learned the shape of. "No," he said, very softly. "They don't."
The phone on Rowan's counter buzzed again, as if it had somehow learned to hear its own cue. Unknown number, the benevolent rectangle. She put it on speaker.
"Ms. Hale," the modulated voice said. "Checking your recycling habits. I see you like to keep paper."
Caleb pointed two fingers and she moved the phone an inch to the left, exactly where he indicated, as if the air there were an antenna and this was an old radio. He held up a notepad; Stall, and she did.
"Not a fan of waste," Rowan said. "You called last night, too. We should get a punch card."
"Delete the rest," the voice said, pleasant as the bank. "Don't make me count for you."
"Come do it yourself," Rowan said, the courage in her mouth running ahead of the fear in her bones. "You seemed shy at the pier."
The pause on the line had the texture of a smile. "You are a difficult woman, Ms. Hale. Difficult women drown, too."
The call ended. Caleb didn't move for three heartbeats, listening for the far thing the rest of them couldn't hear. Then he was motion again, orders into his radio, addresses, the quiet machine of an investigation picking up speed.
"Pack a bag," he told Rowan. "Three days. Essentials. Cameras. We're not leaving you alone."
"I can't go to a safe house," she said. "I need my files. I need my light."
"My place," he said, like he hadn't meant to say it and then decided to mean it anyway. "Better locks. I can work, you can work. We're not giving them the time they want."
Sloane opened her mouth, then closed it again when she saw Rowan's face. "If he tried to leave you at a motel, I'd object," she said. "This is fine, because I like his dog."
"I don't have a dog," Caleb said.
"You look like the kind of man who deserves one," Sloane said. "Don't make me wrong."
They moved like a small army after that. Rowan threw clothes into a duffel and, because her mother had raised her to be sensible even when she couldn't be safe, she added her toothbrush and a pair of warm socks she'd been saving for a real winter. Caleb took the SD case and the remaining prints; Sloane packed Rowan's backup drive and put the sugar canister into a grocery bag with the tender contempt of a woman who knew precisely why it mattered.
Outside, a reporter angled toward them, microphone leading like a spear. "Ms. Hale, is it true you staged photos for clicks? Did you tamper with the bridge? State sources say...."
Caleb stepped between them with the single most effective word in English: "No." He kept walking. The reporter found another target to explain.
Rowan's chest felt tight and unhelpful by the time they reached the SUV. She tried to guide it into competence, the way Sloane had taught her: in, hold, out, don't waste. She got as far as in before her vision narrowed in that dramatic way that made you look like you were being swallowed by a tunnel.
"Sit," Caleb said. The command was a hand on her shoulder without the hand. She sat. He bent until he was in her line of sight and took up enough space that everything else grew quiet. "Look at me."
She did. He had a faint cut along his jaw from the harbor last night and a living steadiness that could have been mistaken for stoicism by a less careful observer.
"You're allowed to be afraid," he said. "You're not allowed to do it alone."
"I don't do anything alone," she said, trying for a smile and almost managing it. "Even my worst decisions come with an audience these days."
He made the nice problem of a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Seatbelt," he said.
They left Winter Harbor's center and took the coastal road that curled along the inlet, the water to their right doing its innocent morning act. Caleb's place turned out to be a second-floor apartment over a boatyard that smelled like varnish and history. The stairwell steps were scarred and dignified. Inside, the space was simple and good: wood floors, a table that had known elbows, a couch that had known naps, books that had been opened and closed and opened again. Hooks held coats and an extra parka in a size that would nearly fit her.
"You do have a dog," Rowan said, because a ceramic bowl sat by the back door with nothing in it but fidelity.
"I did," he said softly. "He didn't like Boston. Winter Harbor is too quiet to grieve in and too loud to forget in. So he lived where the noise made sense."
"I'm sorry," she said, and because grief knows grief, she meant it.
He set her duffel on the couch, then hesitated in a way that made her want to change the subject to the weather forever. "Kitchen's there," he said instead. "Bathroom down the hall. Bedroom's mine; take the couch until I borrow a cot from the station. Work at the table if you want. If anyone besides me walks up those stairs, they'll meet a very bad door."
He said it like a promise and a fact. She stood there with her hands suddenly useless at her sides and felt a flush that didn't belong to fear.
"Thank you," she said, and it didn't cover any of it.
"Coffee?" he asked.
"Yes," she said. "And the footage."
They drank and worked. He pulled the partial registration into a database that didn't want to help and made it help anyway. She scrubbed the drone clips for anything that looked like human error disguised as accident. They built a list so tidy it could have been a prayer: Where did the stainless bolt come from? Who swapped it? Who had access to the drone? Why did the hood want the bridge to fail while pretending not to? Who moves like a person who has been told he's invisible his whole life?
At noon, the partial plate paid off. Caleb straightened, a small muscle jumping in his cheek. "ME 5417Q," he said. "Registered to a work skiff leased by Carrow Construction. Assigned to foreman on the bridge project."
"Nate Carrow," Rowan said. The name tasted like sawdust and campaign checks. "The fixer with the carpenters' smile."
Caleb did not respond to the editorial but did respond to the noun. "We'll ask him about his skiff."
Rowan's phone buzzed on the table where she'd placed it face up to punish the universe into behaving. The message preview wasn't a number this time; it was an image. She opened it before good sense could arrive to volunteer.
A photograph filled the screen: her porch, this morning, at dawn. The angle came from the maple across the street with the dent in its bark. A figure stood in the porch shadow, head tilted. The cut on the ear showed white even at this distance. Under the image, one line of text:
You look better dry.
Caleb took the phone, and whatever softness the morning had earned burned off him in a clean, controlled anger that made her feel safer than any soft words would have. He forwarded the image to himself and to a number labeled Digital with no other dignity; he killed the preview on her screen, then set the device back down like it had tried to bite her.
"Stay away from windows," he said.
"I wasn't going to dance in one," she said, because standing upright in the blast of his attention made humor come out like a survival instinct.
"Rowan." He put her name in the middle of the room and made everything else reorganize around it. "We're going to the yard to talk to Nate. Then we're going to talk to Ellery. Then you're turning your phone off unless I'm the one calling."
"I need it for...."
"Use my spare," he said. He dug in a drawer and came up with a battered brick that had been a phone two generations ago. "It calls. It texts. It doesn't entertain."
"I'm very entertained," she said, tucking it into her pocket with an obedience that startled them both.
The Carrow yard wore its competence like cologne: cranes, barges, coils of cable, men moving with the relaxed pace of people who know how to do the same hard thing all day without missing any of the small changes that mean danger. Nate Carrow himself came out of a prefab office with a smile that could have been printed and laminated. He was white, early forties, handsome the way pictures in equipment catalogs are handsome; jaw, teeth, hands that had learned over the years to shake before they lifted.
"Investigator Wright," he said with a nod that remembered authority. "And Ms. Hale. You got your shot last night? Tragedy makes for hell of a lead image."
Caleb showed him the partial registration. "Skiff 5417Q on the water under the bridge a week ago. We're building a timeline."
"Had crews staging booms," Nate said easily. "Parade night drops confetti in the drink. Town hates it when the tourists see trash."
"Who had the boat?" Caleb asked.
"Rotates. Benny. Clay. Levi sometimes. God rest him." He bowed his head like a man who knew how to hit all the right notes at a funeral.
"You run drones, too?" Rowan asked.
"Boys play with toys," Nate said. "We like to see our work from above."
"Who pilots?" Caleb again, steady, unbothered by folksy fog.
Nate gestured at a lanky kid by the coil rack. "Jake likes the joystick. Why?"
"We'll need the control logs," Caleb said.
"Warrant?" Nate asked, still smiling.
"Invitation," Caleb said.
"Warrant," Nate decided, smile not shifting at all.
Caleb inclined his head as if Nate had just helped him with a door instead of locking it. "We'll be back."
Nate watched them go with the amused patience of a man who thinks the tide is on his side. Rowan had the sudden, childish urge to turn and take a picture of him just to ruin his day. She didn't, which felt like growth and also like a missed opportunity.
"Ellery next," Caleb said once they were in the SUV again. "He'll do his I-love-this-town act. He'll hate my questions. He'll answer them anyway."
"His office," Rowan said, pointing. "Turn right."
Thomas Ellery welcomed them into rooms that pretended to be humble with wainscoting and lived-in chairs. He wore grief like a scarf—visible, tasteful, removable. He hugged Rowan in a way that put everyone who saw it in his pocket.
"My girl," he said softly. "I saw you on the rail. I've never been so proud and so terrified."
"Thomas," she said, because she had once believed him when he told her to use his first name. "They're saying sabotage."
"They're saying lots of things," he murmured, eyes shifting to Caleb. "Investigator. To what do I owe the pleasure."
Caleb asked the questions that ruined lunch: who had signed off on the mid-span's staging; whether any emergency repair orders had been pushed through without council review; why a contractor's skiff sat under a bridge on an off day with a drone in the air. Ellery answered with the mild condescension of a man who had learned to outlast other men's convictions.
"Public life is triage," he said at last, spreading his hands. "We do what we can with what we have. We get through the parade, we fix the bridge, we tell the children it will be better next time."
"Who told you to say it in that order?" Rowan asked.
He smiled with all of his teeth, which were very good. "My communications director."
"You mean yourself," she said.
"Ms. Hale," he said, and this time when he used her last name it was not paternal; it was a string tied around a memory's neck. "Have some tea. You look cold."
"I am," she said, not moving toward the cup. "And I'm tired of the cold being a reason to sit down."
Caleb thanked the mayor for his time with the exquisite politeness of a man who keeps knives very sharp and uses them rarely. They left with nothing clean enough to hold and everything messy enough to be useful.
Back at the SUV, Rowan exhaled and found her breath making shapes in the air that belonged in winter stories told to scare children into behaving.
"He knows," she said.
"He knows something," Caleb agreed. "Men like that always do."
The spare phone in her pocket buzzed. She had forgotten it could. She fished it out, thumbed the tiny screen, and felt the now-familiar drop in her stomach that the body saves for roller coasters and crime.
FROM: UNKNOWNSUBJECT: TIDE TABLESATTACHMENT: IMG_0042.JPG
She opened it. The photo was a close-up of a bolt head half submerged at low tide, the stainless steel so bright it looked like jewelry. On the margin, a grease-pencil finger pointed and a shadow fell into the frame: the outline of a hood.
Underneath, text:
YOU MISSED A SPOT.
Caleb leaned in, eyes narrowing. "They're taunting," he said. "Or guiding."
"Why would the saboteur help us?" Rowan asked.
"Because they're both," he said simply. "Cowards like to feel clever. Clever people like to prove they're braver than they are."
He put the SUV in gear, and the day shifted. They spent the next hours being methodical: pulling historical maintenance orders; requesting a warrant for Carrow's drone logs; assigning a patrol to sit on Rowan's block in shifts that made sense to a calendar and a mortgage. Caleb gave statements to outlets that reported the facts without music; Ellery gave ones that rhymed. Sloane texted threats disguised as love.
As afternoon sagged toward evening, fatigue blurred the edges, and Rowan's body remembered the cold the way a scar remembers the burn. Caleb noticed the moment it caught her.
"Eat," he said, and put a paper bag in her hands. He'd somehow found time to stop at a place that smelled like good soup and clean knives.
"You're very bossy," she said around a spoonful.
"You're very alive," he said. "Let's keep you that way."
They worked at the table until the room turned the blue of late day. When she reached for a file, their hands bumped, and the small, stupid spark of it shot through her in a line as clean as electricity. She didn't look up; neither did he. The not-looking was as loud as thunder.
"Rowan," he said finally, and her name in his mouth felt like it had been measured. "If I ask you something, will you answer as a witness or as a person?"
"As both, if I can."
"Do you think the hood is someone you know?" he asked. "Not just as a face. As a…shape."
"You're asking if I can smell his childhood on him," she said, trying for lightness and getting somewhere complicated instead. "The answer is yes. I feel something…homegrown."
He nodded like she'd told him the weather would hold and that was exactly the forecast he'd hoped for.
"Then we list men we both wish we didn't know," he said, and pulled a legal pad toward them.
They wrote the names of Winter Harbor's invisible citizens, the ones who fixed things with invoices that ended in zeroes and favors that ended in fingerprints. They wrote Nate Carrow and two of his foremen. They wrote a councilman who always "just happened to be nearby." Rowan paused over Ellery's name and wrote it down, then put a question mark so large it embarrassed her. Caleb didn't comment. He added a name she didn't expect, Levi Drue and when she looked up sharp, he lifted a palm.
"We treat victims like suspects until we can give them their dignity back," he said. "It keeps us honest."
The spare phone chimed again. Another photo slid onto the tiny screen. This time, a close-up of Rowan's own camera strap where it rested on Caleb's table. The angle came from outside the window, between slats in the blinds. Her breath stopped, then returned hot and useless.
Caleb didn't swear. He was out of his chair and at the window in a single, silent move, hand on his sidearm without drawing it, scanning the alley with the patient hate of a man hunting something he refuses to be afraid of. He opened the door fast and clean, took the stairs in a long-legged sprint, and vanished into the blue.
Rowan stood very still because stillness is a kind of armor. She listened with everything she had left. Below, in the alley, a trash can tipped, a cat objected, a man's shoe scuffed, a breath was taken and held. Then the sound of pursuit: not reckless; controlled, exact, a dog at heel that had just been told to go.
Sloane would have said: Don't go to the window. Rowan didn't. She stood where he'd left her, the soup cooling on the table, the legal pad open to all the names that would ruin lives when they were finally true.
Footsteps returned; not alone. Caleb came in with the quick vertical energy of an unsatisfied chase and the kind of frustration that sharpens instead of blunting. He locked the door like it owed him money.
"Gone," he said. "Left a present."
He held up a rubber wristband, the kind you get at charity fun runs, stamped with a slogan:
WINTER HARBOR STRONG.
"Ellery's post-parade swag," Rowan said, and her laugh was the brittle kind you keep in the cabinet for when nothing else fits. "Of course."
"They want us to look at him," Caleb said. "Or they want to make us think someone wants us to."
"You sound like me," Rowan said. "I sound like you. We're either a dream team or a cautionary tale."
"We can be both," he said, and the not-smile at the corner of his mouth finally arrived.
Night pressed its forehead to the window. Sloane texted: Nate's lawyer filed to block drone warrant. Translation: bring snacks. Another message followed from a number Caleb labeled Digital: Pinged your porch stalker to a temporary handset bouncing through three towers. We'll get it. Bring the handset tomorrow at 0800.
Rowan set the spare phone down like a dare and leaned her hip against the table because she needed a piece of wood to remember she had a body. The day had drawn tight around them, and in the small quiet that came after the chase, the air shifted.
"You're shaking," Caleb said softly, not an accusation, a fact he wished were not true. He shrugged out of his parka and put it over her shoulders in one unhurried motion that made intimacy feel like an accident with good manners.
"I'm fine," she lied.
"You're many things," he said, hands lingering for a heartbeat too long on the collar before they withdrew, disciplined. "Fine is not required."
She turned, and for the first time since the bridge folded she let herself look at him without the filter of survival. The line of his mouth had been carved by refusing to lie too often. His eyes were tired in the way that meant he'd stay awake anyway. The cut on his jaw was a brief bright flag.
"Caleb," she said, and didn't know what the rest of the sentence was yet. She knew only that whatever it was would be expensive and true.
Something in his face altered like a decision being made in a quiet room. He took one small step closer and then stopped, because he was a man who stopped when stopping was the right thing to do.
"Tomorrow we go at Carrow again," he said. "Tomorrow we make Ellery say something on the record he can't pretend he didn't say. Tomorrow we move the bolt from 'different' to 'wrong.'"
"And tonight?" she asked, because she wanted a small thing that didn't feel small.
"Tonight you sleep," he said. "And I sit in that chair with bad coffee and worse posture and make sure sleep is something you get to keep."
He did not touch her. He did not have to. The relief that moved through her was so sudden and complete it felt like an apology she hadn't known she was owed.
"Okay," she said, and the word landed like a key being turned.
She slept under his spare quilt that smelled like cedar and distance. He sat in the chair with a mug and the legal pad and a face that learned the shape of the room until it was as familiar as his own hand. The harbor breathed under the window. Somewhere in town a man with a hood and a scar watched a house that was not his and told himself the story that made him brave.
In the morning, the water would go out and come in again, the way it always does. In the morning, bolts would be measured and men would say each other's names in tones that meant nothing and everything. In the morning, the words on Rowan's phone would either be prophecy or a punchline.
For tonight, the house kept faith with its occupants. For tonight, neither of them drowned.
Morning broke like it had nothing to apologize for.
By eight, Digital had turned a sketch into a shape. Caleb stood over a light table the unit still loved for sentimental reasons while a tech named Rishi narrated.
"Burner handset," Rishi said, tapping a printout. "Hopped across three towers, classic 'look how clever I am' routing. But your image attachments bled a bit of EXIF. No GPS, but the handset time skews two minutes fast. Crossed with municipal cam sweep at Pier Three: our sender's hoodie enters frame at 01:22:13…two minutes after the photo's internal clock says it was taken." He looked up. "Someone rehearsed, not perfect."
"Good," Caleb said. "I prefer imperfect."
Rishi slid a second sheet forward, still of the tide-bared bolt. He'd digitally teased contrast until a faint blur sharpened. "See right edge? Reflection in the water. That's not your saboteur. That's a second figure."
Rowan leaned in. The distortion of ripples couldn't make a liar out of shape: someone else, not hooded; cap brim, winter coat, hands in pockets, watching. She felt that inside-out sensation again, being seen while you're looking.
"Two at the bolt," she said.
"Or one and an audience," Rishi said. "Either way, not alone."
They left with the prints and the small lift that comes when a shadow grows an outline. At the courthouse, the warrant judge wore yesterday's grief like a coat he hadn't taken off yet. Caleb argued clean; public safety, specific cause, a partial plate tying Carrow's skiff under the bridge the week before collapse. The contractor's counsel, slick as the sleet, argued cleaner, no probable cause, drone logs are proprietary, parade footage is a tragedy not a crime.
The judge denied without pleasure. "Get me more," he said, not unkindly. "I'll sign in ink when you bring me bone."
On the courthouse steps, Rowan blew into her fingers and watched her breath try to be fog. "We'll never get Carrow's logs in time."
"We don't need time," Caleb said. "We need a leak."
"Your word of the day," she said.
"I like words with more than one meaning," he said. "Let's go talk to the kid with the joystick."
The Diner
Jake, the lanky crew hand who flew the drone was already in a back booth with two coffees and a pair of hands that couldn't decide whether to shake or sit. Winter light made him look younger than the twenty-two he probably was. When he saw Caleb's badge he sat on his own shoulders.
"I didn't do anything," he said.
"Neither did we," Rowan said, sliding in opposite and forcing her smile to be the kind that disarms without promising anything. "We're just drinking coffee near you."
Jake's mouth tugged. "Ms. Hale. I know your pictures."
"I know your air footage," she said. "It's good."
His eyes flickered; pride, then fear for having felt it. "Mr. Carrow says I can't talk."
"Mr. Carrow isn't here," Caleb said pleasantly. "And I'm not asking you to talk. I'm asking you to hand over a thing you accidentally dropped."
Jake swallowed. His fingers tapped a rhythm on the underlip of the table, one-two three, one-two three, as if he'd learned percussion instead of patience. He lifted his sweatshirt hem and slipped something onto the vinyl: a micro SD card in a cheap plastic sleeve, taped shut with the kind of care you gave a secret you were done carrying.
"I made mirrors," he said to the sugar caddy. "Drones dump to my laptop. Company owns the laptop but not my dumb habit. I shouldn't have done it. I did it."
Rowan's throat went tight. "Why?"
"'Cause...." His mouth twisted. "Because I don't like being told I didn't see what I saw."
Caleb palmed the card and let relief move through his posture without letting it make him soft. "What did you see, Jake?"
Jake exhaled like a tire.
"Three days before the parade, we swapped hardware on the mid-span." He said it in a fast, flat voice, as if speed could sand down guilt. "Mr. Carrow said it was a spec update; stainless for galvanized, 'til we could do a proper winter retrofit. He said temporary, he said the word 'safety' like it was a prayer. But when I watched from above, the mid joist flexed funny. Like the new piece didn't want to sing with the old ones."
Rowan thought of Caleb's line; make the bridge find the failure for you. "Who set the bolt?"
Jake's fingers paused. Tiny pales lines marked his knuckles, healed-over nicks that spoke of rope and salt. "Benny. And a guy from off-books who never signed in. Hood up, even on the water."
"You film them?" Caleb asked.
"Everyone films everything," Jake murmured, which was either cynicism or a confession. "I did a pass for the 'Gram and forgot to crop right. Then I remembered and saved wrong."
"The off-books guy," Rowan said. "Did you see his ear?"
Jake's eyes jumped to her face, startled. "The scar."
She nodded. Coffee sloshed in her paper cup. "We need what you saved."
"You'll take it anyway," he said without heat. "Might as well give it and pick my own regret."
"Smart," Caleb said.
The bell over the diner door gave a deceivingly cheerful jingle. Jake flinched. Rowan's gaze tracked the reflection in the napkin dispenser: a man in a blue cap buying a paper, nothing more threatening than a crossword. She made herself sit back.
"Jake," Caleb said, low. "You're safe?"
Jake's laugh was a hinge. "In Winter Harbor?"
"Relative term," Rowan said. "Do you have a place to sleep that isn't on Carrow's payroll?"
"My aunt's," he said. "In York."
"Go there," Caleb said. "Today. No goodbyes. Leave your phone at home and write her address on a napkin like it's 1997."
Jake nodded. He looked, briefly, like a boy, then like a man again. "Tell them I got sick."
"You did," Rowan said. "Of people who think you're an extra in their show."
Jake's smile flashed, there and gone. He slid out of the booth and left with his shoulders trying to choose between shrinking and squaring.
They watched him cross the icy lot toward a battered Civic. The sedan coughed to life. He pulled to the curb to wait for a gap in traffic. A box truck roared past, a little too fast for Winter Harbor in February.
Jake looked left again, eased out, and someone clipped his rear quarter with a bumper kiss too precise to be an accident. The Civic spun slow, tapped the snowbank, stalled.
Rowan was already up. Caleb's hand landed on her sleeve, not stopping her so much as aiming. "Stay behind me," he said, and they were moving, the diner bell a slapstick commentary as they hit the cold.
The box truck didn't stop. It turned the corner like it was following a map only it could see.
Caleb reached Jake first, wrenched the driver-side door. The kid blinked, dazed, forehead bleeding in a thin line. "I'm okay," he said, which was almost never true in a sentence that starts with blood.
"Out," Caleb ordered, voice all command. They crossed him to the sidewalk and sat him on the newspaper rack as the Civic's engine wheezed. A couple of locals stared with the polite hunger of people who wanted stories but not trouble.
"Accident," one offered.
"Sure," Rowan said brightly. "Like weather is a choice."
Caleb scanned the corner, memorized the plate of the truck that had chosen to be careless; nothing. He breathed once, slow, anger pinned back like hair before a fire. He dialed, barked it in, hit-and-run, possible witness intimidation and hung up before anyone could offer sympathy.
He looked at Jake. "York," he said. "Now."
Jake nodded, eyes wide. He scrubbed his face on his sleeve, left a pink comet across the cuff. "Thanks," he said, voice shaking. "For...."
"Go," Caleb said.
They watched the Civic disappear down the street like a small prayer trying not to sound like one.
The Break
Back at the field unit, Rishi built them a sanctuary of pixels. He slotted Jake's card into the hardened laptop and copied everything onto storage that didn't speak to the outside world, then onto two more drives, then onto a thing that might have been a church if you squinted redundancy as religion.
"The kid shoots nice," Rishi said, almost wistful. "Shame about his boss."
He opened a folder labeled RAW_DUMPS and cued up a clip. The drone skimmed the mid-span from below, camera tilted to pick up the fat gray lines of joists and the fat grayer lines of salt life clinging to them. Caleb told him where to pause, where to magnify. The stainless bolt stood out like a new coin dropped in a jar of old change. A gloved hand came into frame, bracing the join. A second hand, ungloved; pointed, ring less, knuckles nicked. The camera rose to catch a face and got the brim of a hood instead, angle careful, practiced.
Rishi slowed. The hood looked up. In the shimmer of water light, his ear flashed white crescent scar, clear as a signature. The hood didn't flinch at the drone's hum. If anything, he cocked his head, amused.
"No fear," Rowan said softly.
"Or all of it, smelted," Caleb said.
Rishi let the clip run. On the audio track usually nothing but prop hum and harbor gossip, a voice filtered up, distorted by distance and echo.
"Hold it," the voice said. "We only need the look."
Another voice, lower, close to the mic, maybe the gloved one. "Tom says we're late."
Rowan and Caleb looked at each other. They didn't say the mayor's name. They didn't have to. Tom was common, ordinary, the name of five men in the phone book who'd buy you a beer. Thomas Ellery had trained Winter Harbor to hear his first name as a lullaby.
Rishi rolled back, scrubbed forward again, isolated the phrase, cleaned it until the consonants felt like stones you could hold. Tom says we're late.
"Could be any Tom," Rishi said, holding his breath anyway.
"We'll ask all of them," Caleb said.
Rishi clicked into a second file. The drone rose along the railing this time, angle accidental and perfect. The hood moved out of frame. A figure in a winter coat, no hood, cap brim came into view, hands sunk in pockets, watcher not worker. The drone's shadow skittered along the rail cap; the figure looked up and turned away like a shy man leaving church early.
"Second," Rowan said. "Audience."
"Works the kind of job where you get to keep your coat on while other men freeze," Caleb said. "Supervisor or someone who doesn't need a hard hat because his head's already hard."
They printed stills. They chased serial numbers across procurement spreadsheets that looked like snow if you didn't know how to read them. The stainless bolt; wrong grade, wrong spec, had come through a vendor Carrow started using last quarter. Three invoices carried a second signature N. Carrow and a third: E. Ward, Ellery's chief of staff, acting as "municipal liaison."
Bone, Rowan thought. The judge's word. Bone, not just blood.
Caleb took the packet, jaw set in that way that made his vowels more precise. "Back to the courthouse."
They got ink this time. The warrant purred when Caleb slid it across the Carrow office desk. Nate didn't bother to hide the small change in his smile.
"Investigator," he said. "You look like a man who likes paperwork."
"I look like a man who likes obedience," Caleb said. "Logs. Now."
Nate's gaze ticked to Rowan, measuring, not admiring and then to the outer room where Jake's chair sat empty. He signaled a clerk, keys clacked, a door opened, a folder emerged. Rishi's clone on the scene copied the contents to state media and to two drives and to the invisible courtroom in Caleb's head that never closed.
They had their drone logs. They had their bolt invoices. They had a name that could belong to any Tom but only one that mattered.
They also had an apartment to return to with blinds that had been watched from the outside.
The Fire That Wasn't
Night arrived early, as if winter had decided to be generous with the dark. Rowan worked at the table while Caleb took a call in the hall, voice low, a hum that meant bad news and a plan to soften it.
The first thud against the window sounded like a question. The second was an answer.
Caleb was moving before thought. He crossed the room in a straight line and grabbed Rowan's arm just as the third bottle hit and shattered against the exterior wall. Flame hiccupped into existence, orange, hungry, young. It licked the siding, then sputtered into a sulky line, smothered by the damp and the quick throw of a thick wool blanket from a hook by the door.
"Molotovs," Rowan said, voice calm like she was reading a label. She had the sudden, ridiculous memory of her mother teaching her how to snuff a candle with a wetted finger. Don't blow. Smother.
"Baby ones," Caleb said. He peered through the slat of the blinds; the alley, empty except for exhaust ghosts. "Teenage courage."
"Sends the same message," she said.
"I liked the message where I saved your life better," he said, and then he blinked as if surprised he'd said it aloud.
They stood too close in the heat that wasn't. The room smelled like kerosene and singed cotton. Rowan's pulse found a drumline in her throat. The quilt he'd put over her shoulders last night lay rumpled at the end of the couch like evidence. She realized with humiliating clarity that if he reached for her she would not step back.
He didn't. His control was an animal he fed and walked and refused to let off leash without cause. He touched her wrist instead, light, clinical, thumb soft on skin where last night's zip-tie had chewed. "Burns?"
"Just pride," she said, and the near-laugh that broke off in the middle was worse than crying.
"Sit," he said, because it was the only command he had that didn't cost either of them too much. She sat. He crouched to eye level, police and not. "Rowan."
She met his gaze. He looked like a man who had put out a thousand fires and knew which ones left smoke inside your lungs for years.
"You okay?" he asked.
"No," she said, with an honesty that flayed and relieved. "And yes. Both."
"Good answer," he said softly.
His phone vibrated. He stood and answered without looking away from her. "Wright." He listened, then went still in that way she'd learned meant the world had tucked a new surprising knife under the table. "Say that again."
He ended the call and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Break on your mother's case," he said.
The floor under Rowan re-titled. "Now?"
"Arson report was amended a year after the fire." He said it carefully, like a man setting a bone. "A supplemental page. Says a neighbor heard a smoke alarm at 02:04 and a woman shouting, 'Don't let him in.' That line was…redacted in the digital copy that went to the insurance file."
Rowan's mouth opened and shut. She tasted ash. "You're telling me Ellery's clerk lost that page."
"I'm telling you someone did," he said. "And that the neighbor died last spring, before anyone interviewed him again." He added, after a beat in which he might have chosen to be kinder and chose truth instead: "Cancer. Nothing exciting. Just…gone."
Rowan put her elbows on the table and her fingers in her hair and sat with the fact like it had been in the room all along, waiting for a chair.
"Don't let him in," she said, testing the shape of the words in the present tense. "Him who?"
"We'll ask," he said. "We'll ask everyone who might answer wrong."
"You think I'm a conflict of interest," she said, not accusing, not pleading, only wanting to know how her shape fit into his patience.
"I think you're why I care more than is professionally attractive," he said, not moving, not softening. "And I think caring makes me not miss the thing a careful man misses when he thinks he's a machine."
It shouldn't have landed like an intimacy. It did. It landed like a hand on the back of her neck in a room where the air was finally the right temperature.
Outside, a siren wrote a diagonal line through the street and then kept going. The alley smelled faintly of failure and cheap gasoline. Inside, the room held.
"Okay," Rowan said. "What next?"
"Next we set a decoy," he said. "You send the saboteur a lie they can't resist correcting."
Rowan smiled, and this one had teeth. "I speak fluent correction."
They built the bait together, bent over the table until their shoulders learned the shape of each other's nearness. She doctored a frame, one of the stills from Jake's card; laying a false reflection on the rail cap: not Carrow's skiff, but a municipal boat with Ellery's office's pet department stamped on the side. She framed it with a line even a coward couldn't resist: "Missed a spot? Looks like the city didn't."
They sent it to the burner that had been taunting her, then sat with the silence like it was a timer on a bomb you could defuse by staring.
The reply came in under three minutes.
WRONG BOAT.DON'T EMBARRASS YOURSELF.
Under it: a new attachment. Another rail-cap reflection, this one clean, angle perfect, a little too proud of its own precision. Registration letters clear as daylight: ME 5417Q Carrow's skiff mirrored by the water into legibility like a gift.
Caleb forwarded the package to Rishi and to the warrant judge with a single line: Bone attached. He grabbed his coat.
"Let's go arrest a skiff," he said.
They made it three blocks before the world reminded them that prey thinks too.
The Carrow yard was a bonfire without flames; people running without knowing why, voices pitched to the sharpness that comes after a siren and before explanation. The skiff slip yawned empty. A coil of burned rope smoked at the edge, grease-black. A clipboard floated; charred, sodden bumping the dock with the insistence of a child.
"Someone torched the mooring line," a deckhand shouted. "Boat drifted on slack and went missing."
"Or they cut it clean and staged the mess," Caleb said.
Rowan's phone; the brick one vibrated. A single text, no image this time.
STOP COUNTING. YOU'LL RUN OUT OF NUMBERS.
She watched the water for a long second, hoping it would answer, then tucked the handset away like she was putting a swear back in her mouth.
When they got home, Sloane was in their kitchen with a bag of groceries and the look of a woman practicing forgiveness in advance. She made dinner in the way of someone who knew cooking was sometimes the only thing that kept grief from colonizing the next hour too. They ate at the table like people in a photograph where nothing bad could happen because you could see their faces.
After, Caleb took first watch again, stubborn and steady. Rowan took the couch and the quilt and the knowledge that the saboteur's number had run through a tower by the mayor's office, the drone had captured a voice that said Tom, and her mother had once told a door not to open.
Sleep came like an argument she lost.
The Clip
At 02:17, Digital pushed a secure ping to Caleb's screen and to Rowan's brick.
NEW AUDIO PULL: DRONE_041B.MP4 — 00:32:08–00:32:26.
They played it with the volume low, faces inches from the laptop, the room's quiet so complete it was like breath had learned to tiptoe.
Prop hum. Water slap. The hood's voice closer this time, less echo, speaking into the wrong end of a conversation.
"We're done," the hood said. "He wants the look."
A second voice, amused, a smile audible: "We always rebuild."
Rowan's heart tripped. Her throat went desert-dry. The phrase was Winter Harbor's prayer and Ellery's brand and a sentence she had heard in her kitchen when a foster father taught her how the town spoke to itself at night.
Rishi had amplified, filtered, cleaned enough to strip harbor's wind from vowels, not enough to put a man in a cell on tone alone. But the cadence, the lullaby cadence was a fingerprint more personal than skin.
Caleb didn't look away from the screen. "Could be any Tom," he said again, because he was a man who had to be able to say it.
"Not in that voice," Rowan whispered.
They sat with it, the short clip looping like a bad thought. On the tenth play, a third sound crept in at the end, a faint metallic tick, then a scrape like a ring against aluminum.
Caleb rewound two seconds, rolled forward one, listened again. His eyes went distant in the way that meant he'd set himself a small, difficult test and intended to pass it.
"Signet," he said finally. "Right hand. Ring finger."
Rowan closed her eyes and saw a winter fundraiser in the high school gym. Mayor Ellery balancing a paper plate, his right hand talking as much as his mouth, the family ring flashing like loyalty. She felt something old and loyal and tired and angry stand up inside her and ask for a glass of water.
When she opened her eyes, Caleb was looking at her, the question already answered for both of them.
"You ready to make this messy?" he asked.
"I was raised for it," she said.
He reached, then, and put his hand over hers; warm, not careful, the exact weight of solidarity. It wasn't a kiss; it landed heavier. It was the kind of touch you could build a war with.
Outside, the harbor rolled on, innocent as a knife in the drawer.