Warren Luc wakes on a Wednesday.
The doctors describe it as a good outcome. He's awake, responsive, tracking. He knows his name and the year and the name of the current mayor, which he gives with the specific contempt of a man who has opinions about the office regardless of how long he's been unconscious.
Renee goes that afternoon. She comes back two hours later.
"He's conscious. He's not talking."
She goes again Thursday morning. Same result. Luc is awake, cooperative about everything except the reason she's there. He asks about his apartment. He asks whether they've found who did it. When she tells him they're working on it he looks at a spot on the wall above her head and says okay, and that's where the conversation ends.
"He knows what talking means," I say, when she comes back Thursday.
"He knows what not talking means too." She puts her jacket on the back of her chair. "He's deciding which one he can live with."
"Give him time."
"We don't have much." She looks at the board.
"She won't run," I say. Renee looks at me. "She didn't run when Fasano's team came through. She came into the precinct to follow up on the Coury case. She's been patient for nine years. Running is not something this person does."
Renee holds that. "Okay. But I'm going back Friday."
Friday she goes and I wait.
I think about what I would read off Luc's hand if I touched it. Whether the fear would still be there, or whether it would have settled into something quieter. Whether he knows the name of whoever attacked him without needing to see her face.
I decide I don't want to know. The decision surprises me.
This is the first time I've chosen not to use this.
I sit with that for a while without doing anything about it.
Renee comes back at six-thirty. I know from the way she walks in.
She sits down. Takes her coat off. Pours a coffee she's carried from the hospital, already cold.
"He talked," I say.
"He talked." She wraps both hands around the cup. "Took two hours. I didn't push. I just sat there."
"And."
"He told me about the night." She sets each word down. "Not every detail. Enough. The four of them were together. They'd been drinking. She was walking home." She stops. "You read the complaint."
"Yes."
"He said they never talked about it afterward. Among themselves. The agreement was nobody talked about it, nobody looked at it. It was one night and it went away." She looks at the cold coffee. "He said when Harlow closed the case he thought it really had gone away. He said he told himself she'd moved on."
When Marrs died, Coury called Luc and he didn't answer. He'd known the moment he saw Marrs in the news, but answering meant talking about it and he'd spent nine years not talking about it.
"He said when Coury died he locked his apartment door and waited," Renee says.
"He waited."
"He said he figured if she was going to come for him she'd come. And he didn't want to explain to anyone why."
Three days in a locked apartment. A welfare check he'd opened the door three inches for. A man sitting with what was coming rather than outrunning it.
Something in his building, before the attack: weight shifting on the roof. Something large, settling, moving. He'd heard it too. He knew it wasn't pigeons.
"He also said something before he started talking," Renee says. "Before any of it. He said something's different in the Narrows lately. He said it like it had nothing to do with the case. Like it had been sitting with him for a while." She pauses. "I waited. He didn't say more. Then he started talking about nine years ago."
I look at my desk.
Something different in the Narrows. A nervous street-level associate saying the same thing three weeks ago in an interview room. Rowe's hand carrying the imprint of being near something that left no trace. The flicker at every scene, present and gone.
I write it down. I don't know what I'm writing it under.
"He gave you her name," I say.
"He gave me Sera. He said he'd always known it was her. He said he'd understood why since the night she filed the complaint and nothing happened." She sets the cup down. "He said he'd been wondering for nine years whether she'd come back."
The room is quiet.
"Does he want to press charges," I say.
Renee looks at me. "He says no. Right now he says no. That might change." She opens a file. "But we have enough. We have the complaint, the connection, the lease, the name change, the photograph that brought her back. We have a statement from a victim who can identify her."
Seven pages in careful block letters.
"Yeah," I say.
We had a case.
I just wasn't sure what I felt about it.