1
Visitor
The knock came just after eleven. Not the polite rap of a late-night delivery or the drunken fumbling of a neighbor who'd lost their keys. This was different. Three hard, deliberate thuds against the reinforced steel of my door, each one landing with the weight of a final judgment. They were too loud for the hour, too sober. They were the sound of a man who had run out of other doors to knock on.
I didn't move from my chair. Outside, the rain hadn't stopped for three days, a steady, percussive drumming against the window that did little to wash the grime from the glass. It was the kind of rain that sinks into the bones of a city like this, making everything feel damp and heavy and old. The bottle of cheap whiskey on my desk was half-empty, its amber glow the only warm color in a room painted in shades of shadow and gray. I took a slow sip, letting the burn slide down my throat, and listened. Silence followed the knock. No shuffling feet, no muttered curse. Just the rain and the waiting.
Whoever it was, they weren't going away.
With a sigh that felt like it came from somewhere deep in my marrow, I pushed myself up. The floorboards groaned under my weight, a familiar complaint. I didn't bother with the lights. The neon sign from the noodle bar across the street cast a flickering red gash across the floor, enough to see by. I checked the small, grimy monitor wired to the camera over the door.
The man on my screen was a ghost drowning in the downpour. He was maybe fifty, dressed in a suit that might have been expensive yesterday but was now a soaked, wrinkled mess clinging to his frame. His shoulders were slumped, not just with the weight of the rain, but with a kind of exhaustion that had hollowed him out from the inside. He wasn't looking at the camera. He was staring at the wood of the door, as if he could burn a hole through it with the sheer force of his will. His hands were jammed in his pockets, but I could see the tremor in his jaw.
He was a cop.
I didn't need to see a badge. It was in the set of his shoulders, the way he held himself even in defeat—a posture of authority so ingrained it persisted long after the authority itself had evaporated. Cops had a particular brand of desperation. It was sharper, more bitter. They spent their lives believing in a system, and when that system finally turned its back on them, they didn't just break. They shattered.
I unlocked the three deadbolts. The sound of them retracting, one after another, was loud and definitive in the quiet hallway. I opened the door just enough to frame my face in the gap, leaving the chain on.
"We're closed," I said. My voice was rough from the whiskey.
He flinched at the sound, his eyes snapping up to meet mine. They were the color of a faded sky, bloodshot and frantic. Water dripped from his salt-and-pepper hair, tracing paths down a face that was all sharp angles and rough stubble. He looked like he hadn't slept in a week.
"Are you Lena Winters?" he asked. His voice was a low rasp, gravelly and cracked.
"Depends who's asking."
He swallowed hard, his gaze darting past me into the darkness of my office. He was looking for a secretary, a waiting room, some semblance of legitimacy. He wouldn't find it. There was just me, the desk, and the ghosts.
"My name is Robert Collins. I'm… I'm a detective. NYPD." He fumbled inside his wet jacket, pulling out a leather wallet. He flipped it open, the gold shield inside catching the dim light.
I didn't look at it. "A bit far from your jurisdiction, Detective."
"I'm not here on official business." The words came out tight, strained. "I'm here because they told me… they said if anyone could help, it was you."
"'They' have a bad habit of running their mouths," I said, my hand resting on the edge of the door, ready to close it. "Whatever trouble you're in, I'm not interested."
His face crumpled. It wasn't a dramatic, theatrical display. It was a quiet, devastating collapse of features, the way a building gives way right before it falls. "It's not for me," he choked out, his voice breaking. "It's my daughter. Lily. She's gone."
I held his gaze for a long moment. The rain hammered against the roof. A siren wailed somewhere in the distance, a lonely, mournful sound that was the city's unofficial anthem. Missing persons cases were messy. They were full of hope, and hope was a currency I didn't trade in. It was a luxury for people who still believed in happy endings.
"I don't find people, Collins," I said, my tone flat. "I find answers. There's a difference."
"Please," he whispered. The word was stripped of all pride, all authority. It was just a raw nerve, exposed and trembling. "Just… five minutes. That's all I'm asking."
Against my better judgment, I felt something shift inside me. Not pity. I'd buried that part of myself a long time ago. It was something colder, more pragmatic. A curiosity. What could make a man who carried a badge and a gun come to a place like this, to a woman like me, looking so thoroughly broken?
I slid the chain off. The metallic rattle echoed in the hall. "Five minutes," I said, stepping back into the shadows of the office. "And you're dripping on my floor."
He shuffled inside, looking less like a detective and more like a stray dog seeking shelter from the storm. He stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, water pooling around his worn leather shoes. He took in the sparse surroundings—the metal filing cabinets scarred with rust, the corkboard on the wall with its chaotic web of newspaper clippings and faded photographs, the single chair opposite my desk. My office wasn't designed for comfort. It was designed to make people feel exposed.
"Sit," I said, gesturing to the chair as I moved back behind my desk. I didn't offer him a drink. The last thing a desperate man needed was more fuel for his misery.
He sat down heavily, his hands resting on his knees. I watched them shake. His knuckles were white. He was a man holding himself together by a single, fraying thread.
"Start from the beginning," I said, leaning back in my chair, my face half-hidden in the darkness. "And don't waste my time with the parts you told your buddies at the precinct."
He took a deep, shuddering breath. "Lily… she's a doctor. Or, a resident. Was. At St. Marlowe Hospital, over in Manhattan. Twenty-five years old. Smartest person I've ever known." He spoke of her in the present tense, then corrected himself with a wince, the first crack in his composure. "She lives… lived… in a small apartment two blocks from the hospital. She hasn't been seen in six days."
"Last contact?"
"She called me last Friday night. Just to check in, like she always did. She sounded… tired. Stressed. Said she was working on a big case, something about a patient who died unexpectedly. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary." He paused, his gaze dropping to the floor. "The next day, she missed her shift. Lily has never missed a shift in her life. Not once. Her supervisor called me. I went to her apartment. The door was locked. Everything was exactly where it should be. Her purse was on the counter, her keys next to it. Her phone was on the charger. It was like she just… evaporated."
I swirled the whiskey in my glass, the ice clinking softly. "And the official report?"
A bitter, humorless smile touched his lips. "They filed a missing persons report, took my statement. They talked to her friends, her colleagues. Found nothing. No signs of a break-in, no signs of a struggle. Her credit cards haven't been used. Her social media is silent." His voice dropped to a near-whisper, laced with contempt. "After forty-eight hours, they started feeding me the official line. She was young, under a lot of pressure at work. Maybe she just needed to get away. A young woman who decided to walk away from her life. They're not looking for her, Winters. They're waiting for her to come back."
"And you don't think she will." It wasn't a question.
He looked up, and the raw agony in his eyes was so potent it was almost a physical force. "My daughter would not do that. She would not leave without her phone, without her wallet. And she would never, ever leave without telling me. Someone took her. I know it."
I took another drink, the alcohol doing nothing to dull the familiar ache of a story I'd heard a thousand times before. The world was full of people who vanished, swallowed by the cracks in the pavement. Most of the time, the reasons were mundane, pathetic. A secret lover, a hidden debt, a life they couldn't bear to live another day.
"Why me, Collins?" I asked, cutting through his grief with a cold, practical edge. "You're NYPD. You have resources I don't. Friends in high places. Why come to a PI in the armpit of Cedar Hills?"
He leaned forward, his hands gripping the edge of my desk. The tremor was more pronounced now. "Because this isn't a normal case. I told them… I told them what Lily had been talking about the last few weeks. She was worried. She'd noticed things at the hospital. Irregularities."
"What kind of irregularities?"
"Organ transplant logs. That's what she said. Patients at the top of the list suddenly being taken off, marked as 'deceased,' only to be replaced by someone else whose name was nowhere on the registry. Healthy patients coming in for routine procedures and dying from sudden, inexplicable complications. She said it was quiet. Hidden in the paperwork. She thought someone was… harvesting."
The word hung in the air between us, ugly and sharp. The story had just taken a turn, away from the mundane and into something far darker.
"She reported this?"
He shook his head, a look of profound regret on his face. "She was gathering proof. She didn't want to go to the administration with just a suspicion. She said they would bury her in paperwork, call it a clerical error. She wanted something concrete. She told me she was close." His voice cracked again. "That was in her last call. 'I'm close, Dad.'"
I stared at him, my mind piecing together the narrative. A bright young doctor stumbles onto something rotten in a prestigious hospital. She gets too close to the truth, and then she disappears without a trace. The police, for reasons of incompetence or something more sinister, were content to label it a personal crisis. It was a clean, simple story. It was also a lie.
"You think her disappearance is connected to what she found at the hospital," I stated.
"I don't think it," he rasped. "I know it. They took her to silence her."
He finally broke. The rigid control he'd been clinging to dissolved, and he slumped forward in the chair, his face in his hands. His shoulders shook with silent, wracking sobs. It was a terrible sound, the sound of a strong man utterly defeated. I looked away, giving him the small dignity of not being watched. My gaze fell on the rain-streaked window, on the broken city outside. A city that ate people like Lily Collins for breakfast.
I let him cry for a full minute, the only sounds in the room his ragged breathing and the relentless rain. When he finally looked up, his face was a mask of raw desperation. His eyes were pleading.
"They told me you don't care about the law," he said, his voice thick. "They said you get things done. I don't care how you do it. I don't care who you have to hurt. Just… find my little girl. Please. I'll pay you anything. I cashed out my pension. It's everything I have."
He reached into his jacket again, this time pulling out a thick, rumpled manila envelope. He pushed it across the desk. It was heavy. Full of cash. The life savings of a man who had nothing left to lose.
I looked at the envelope, then back at his face. I saw the sleepless nights, the endless calls that went unanswered, the gnawing, acid-pit of fear in his gut. I saw a man who would burn down the world to get his daughter back.
And I knew, with a certainty that settled in my bones like a cold stone, that I was going to say no. This wasn't my fight. It smelled of conspiracy, of powerful people with a lot to lose. It was the kind of case that got people like me killed, or worse. It was a hole, and I had no intention of jumping into it.
"Your five minutes are up, Detective," I said, my voice devoid of emotion. I pushed the envelope back toward him. "I can't help you."
To Be Continued...
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