The canvass on Coury takes two days and gives us almost nothing.
East End residents are not big talkers to begin with, and the block where his car was sitting is the kind of block where people have developed strong opinions about minding their own business. We knock on forty-three doors. Eleven answer. Of those, seven say they haven't seen anything, two say they haven't seen anything in a way that means they have, and two actually talk.
"You ever work this block before?" I ask Renee, between doors.
"Once. Four years ago. A noise complaint that turned into something else."
"What did it turn into."
"A property dispute that had been running since 1987." She rings the next bell. "The neighbor won. I don't know how that's possible legally but she did."
"Gotham."
"Gotham," she agrees.
One of the two who talks is an elderly man named Prescott on the second floor who'd been awake at two in the morning because of his hip and thought he heard a car door. He's not sure. He's sorry he can't be more helpful. He offers coffee.
Renee says yes. I say yes because Renee says yes.
We sit in his kitchen for twenty minutes while he talks about the neighborhood from fifteen years ago. Renee listens to all of it, asks questions that have nothing to do with the case, the bakery that used to be on the corner, the park down the street. He loosens. By the time we leave he's added two things he didn't mention first: a woman walking on the far side of the street and a dark jacket.
Outside I look at Renee.
"He didn't mention the woman the first time," I say.
"People don't remember what they don't think matters." She writes it down. "Dark jacket, walking east. Two in the morning."
"Could be anyone."
"Could be." She pockets her notebook. "It's more than we had."
The second person who talks is a woman named Dara Osman on the third floor of the building directly across from where Coury's car had been parked. She comes to the door on the first knock, which in the East End is unusual enough that I note it, though it doesn't mean anything by itself. Some people are just home.
She's mid-thirties, slight, with a kind of quiet about her. Not nervous. Still.
"We're canvassing about an incident nearby," Renee says. "Did you happen to see or hear anything unusual two nights ago?"
"The car," Dara says. "With the hazards on."
"That's right."
"I noticed it when I got home from work. Around eleven, maybe a little after." She leans against the door frame. "I thought someone had broken down. I almost called it in."
"Did you see anyone near the vehicle?"
"Not then. Earlier in the evening there was a man sitting in it. Seven or eight maybe. I glanced over from the window. I assumed it was his car."
Renee writes that down. "Can you describe him?"
"Mid-forties. Dark hair going gray. He was just sitting there." A pause. "He looked tired."
Renee asks a few more questions: how long she's lived here, anything else unusual. Dara answers directly. Four months. Moved from out of state. Nothing else she can think of.
Renee closes her notebook and holds out a card. "Thank you, Ms. Osman. If you think of anything."
Dara takes the card with her right hand. I'm standing just behind Renee's shoulder and I reach forward without thinking, some reflex I can't explain, and my bare fingers catch the back of her hand for half a second.
I'd taken the right glove off two doors back when I got warm climbing stairs.
What I get is quiet.
Not nothing. But quiet the way a room is quiet after everyone has left it. Old grief, the kind that's been lived with long enough to stop being sharp. Weight without rawness. Something structural, built in a long time ago.
Nothing alarming. Nothing that spikes or pulls.
I pull my hand back and say sorry, reflex, and she says it's fine and closes the door gently.
On the stairs Renee glances at me.
"Glove," she says.
I put it back on without answering.
We run everyone from the canvass that evening.
Prescott: clean, nineteen years at that address. The woman on the fourth floor: minor parking violations. The teenager: juvenile record, sealed, unrelated. Dara Osman: four months in the building, employed at a medical administration firm in Midtown, no record. Moved from out of state.
Nothing connects her to Coury or Marrs. Nothing connects her to anything except a window that faced the right street at the right time.
I close her file.
Old grief in the East End is not a red flag. Half the people on that canvass are carrying something they haven't put down. That's Gotham. That's the weather here.
I also pull the property records for the building she lives in. The land it sits on was sold by a Wayne Enterprises subsidiary in 1987, one line in a chain of transactions going back decades. Neither Renee nor I note it. It's just how the city was built: old money in the foundations of blocks that forgot it was there.
"Canvass is thin," I tell Renee.
"I know." She's already reading something else. "The woman in the dark jacket is the only thing worth keeping. Everything else is standard."
She'd follow up on the jacket. It probably wouldn't lead anywhere. But Renee would follow up anyway, because that's how she works.
I took my jacket off and got back to the other files on my desk.
The Coury case sits on top. No forensics. No clear motive. Two dead men with nothing on paper connecting them and one thing connecting them underneath, in a place I can't put in a report.
I open a fresh page and write two names. Marrs. Coury.
Then I sit there for a while and try to figure out what question to ask next.