Danny Rowe lives in a ground-floor apartment on Crane Street with a dead plant on the windowsill and a neighbor who tells us, without being asked, that he's a loud man but not a bad one. The distinction seems important to her. We thank her and knock.
He answers in a work shirt with dried concrete on the sleeve and the tiredness of someone up since five. He looks at our badges the way people with records look at badges, not surprised, just calculating the shape of what's coming.
"Mr. Rowe," Renee says. "We're hoping you can answer some questions about Joel Marrs."
Something moves across his face. Not grief. Not guilt. Something more complicated.
"I heard about Marrs," he says. "It was in the paper."
"Can we come in?"
He steps back.
The apartment is small and clean. A television, a worktable along one wall with tools laid out in a row. A man who keeps his things organized. I note that.
He sits in the chair by the window. We stay standing.
"When did you last speak with Marrs?" Renee says.
"Six months ago, maybe. We had a disagreement."
"About money."
"He owed me money." No defensiveness. Just the fact. "Two thousand dollars. I lent it to him three years ago when he was short on rent. He kept saying he'd pay it back."
"The disagreement got heated."
"I raised my voice. I do that." He looks at his hands. "I shouldn't have gone to his workplace. That was stupid. But I wanted him to look me in the face."
"What did he say?"
"That he'd get it to me. Same thing he always said." A pause. "He wasn't going to get it to me."
Renee writes something. I stand behind her left shoulder, close enough to the worktable that if I reached back I could touch it. I reach back.
Wood and metal and old grease. Nothing.
I shift and let my hand brush the back of Rowe's chair instead. Wood. Dead.
Renee is asking about Coury now. Whether Rowe knows him, how well, when he'd last had contact.
"Coury I haven't seen in years. We ran together a bit when we were younger." He pauses. "This is about Coury too."
Not a question.
"We're looking into some connections," Renee says.
Rowe looks at her, then at me, then back. "You think I did something."
"We're talking to everyone who knew both men."
"Right." Flat, not angry. A man who understands how the geometry of this works. "Am I being charged?"
"No."
"Then I think I'd like to stop talking now."
Renee closes her notebook. "That's your right. We may need to follow up."
"Fine." He stands. "I didn't hurt either of them. Marrs owed me money and I was angry about it and now he's dead and I don't have the money and I'm not going to pretend I'm broken up about the man. But I didn't touch him."
He says it straight at Renee, the way people say things they need someone to believe.
On the way out I shake his hand.
What I get from Rowe is a lot, and none of it is what I'm looking for.
Anger, old and recent, layered like sediment. The specific frustration of someone who feels permanently looked past. Fear, present and sharp, the fear of someone who knows how this looks and can't fix it with the truth because the truth isn't enough when you have his record.
No patience. No cold. No sense of a decision made and settled and moved through.
What there is, underneath everything, is something I hadn't expected: grief. Not for Marrs. For something older. A shape I can't quite read, something lost a long time ago that he's never talked about and probably never will.
Then, at the very edge of everything else, something faint. Not an emotion. An impression. Rowe was in the Narrows four nights ago, this part of the Narrows, near these streets. I can't tell what he saw. He might not know what he saw. But something left an imprint on the edge of his recent memory, the way a bright light leaves a mark on the inside of your eyes after you look away. He'd been near something that left no trace it should have left.
Danny Rowe is not the person who followed Joel Marrs through the Narrows at eleven at night.
I know that the way I know things now, in my hands, in my chest, in the absence of what I'd felt in that alley.
I follow Renee out into the street.
"He's scared," she says, when we're half a block away.
"Scared people look guilty."
"They do." She pulls her collar up against the rain, which has started again because it's Gotham and it always starts again. "His alibi for the Coury night is thin. He says he was home. No one to confirm."
"Lots of people are home alone."
"Lots of people don't have his record and a documented threat against one of the victims."
I look at the wet pavement. "Renee."
"I'm not saying he did it." She keeps her voice even. "I'm saying the case is going to point at him until something else points somewhere else."
Rowe's hand: anger, fear, grief. The complete absence of everything I'd felt in Marrs and Coury.
"His reaction when we mentioned Coury," I say. "No hesitation. Could be true."
Renee walks for a moment. "Keep an eye on the Bellhaven lead. The woman who came asking for Marrs." She pauses. "And Voss. If you have a reason to doubt Rowe that you're not saying, now would be the time."
The rain falls between us.
"I don't have a reason," I say. "Just a feeling."
She holds my eyes for a moment. Then she starts walking.
"Feelings are data," she says. "Write it down."
I watch her go and think about what's written on my notepad already and what isn't, and what the difference between those two categories is going to cost me.