4338.219 · August 7, 2018 AD
The Badge in the Pocket
There's no operational reason to go back. The warrant is active, the evidence is bagged, the house is sealed. But Stout drives to Pillinger Street alone on a Tuesday morning with an instinct he can't file and a pull he can't explain, and when the front door opens onto a hallway that held a life three days ago and now holds nothing at all, the investigation stops being something he's running and becomes something he's inside.
The tape is intact when he arrives. He photographs it, breaks it, enters with Karl's spare key. The hallway light comes on and the hallway is empty — not Saturday-empty, with coats and shoes and the accumulated evidence of a life. Empty. Bare walls. Bare floor. The dust-shadow outlines of objects that stood here for years and don't anymore.
Every room is the same. The living room stripped to carpet compression marks. The kitchen cupboards hanging open on bare shelves. The study where Karl's obsession wall covered three surfaces — bare plaster now, every pin carefully extracted rather than torn free, as though the intention wasn't just to remove evidence but to erase the fact that evidence had been there at all. And on the phone to Sienna, while the Brody Taylor case file reveals a timeline that doesn't hold and a stepladder that was folded after the fall and an evidence log entry in Karl's handwriting that the official record doesn't acknowledge — something changes. A sensation across the skin. The body's ancient warning system firing before the mind can name what triggered it.
Then he reaches for the front door and finds fresh crime scene tape sealed across a frame he tore it from twenty minutes ago, and his hand finds something in his jacket pocket that wasn't there when he walked in, and the investigation crosses a line it can't uncross.
