2 Days Later
At 07:12 the RTPD chat flashed green: a small, efficient ripple of text that claimed clarity. Sofie's name sat at the top like a lighthouse. Brendon read it twice before the words congealed into the slow, sinking realization he'd been trying not to admit.
[RTPD Homicide – Core Team]
Sofie: "Follow-up —
The 'Mark' handle is a dead end. Name he gave? Not in any regional database.
No credit history.
No council tax.
No registered phones.
Social checks come up vacuum. I pulled the only contact we could — his 'Lucy Barns' alias — and it's a shell. Likely a burner maybe fake. Does she used that as a legal name? No. There's no trace. I'm digging offshore. If Mark's statement is real, then there's a high possibility that he's hiding some more information from us."
It arrived with attachments — a screenshot of the chat log with the ex — Mark — his messages to the station, the fragmented video he'd posted, the trembling pronouns. Brendon opened the image Elena had drawn: the portrait that had become a ritual in itself for everyone at the precinct. Elena's lines had turned memory into a face. The woman on the page had shoulders that sloped like someone used to giving everything away to the world and expecting nothing back. It was a face with a history he didn't know about.
He scrolled, hands cold, then pinged Sofie back privately.
Brendon (1:1): "Lucy Barns? You sure?"
Sofie: "100% — the logs. He gave that name in a pinned comment. Tried to run it through merchant banks but... still nothing. If it's Whitney's another alias, she has guarded herself from her boyfriend too, which implies their relationship wasn't that good. And if it's Mark who has faked it, then it's safe to assume he has more layers than we thought."
---
The office hummed with small, domestic noises: the tea kettle on the back table, a printer spitting out subpoenas, the far-off laughter from a uniformed desk. None of it matched the noise in Brendon's head. The more their net closed, the more the thing they chased slipped sideways.
He didn't have to be told twice that there were two possible truths now: either Whitney had been living several lives and chosen to vanish, or someone was building an elaborate fiction around a dead woman and handing it to the world like an offering.
Robert came in from the interview wing an hour later, shoulders hunched under the weight of a case too big in places and tight in others. His eyes were red at the rims; he hadn't slept. Brendon had watched him in the last days — sincere, eager, the type of cop who used his gut like a compass and sometimes let it run him into trees. Chief Tyson liked that about him when things were quiet. When things were not, that same eagerness made him a target for the scoreboard.
Tyson's voice had been a freight train at nine that morning. He'd pulled Robert aside in the hall and unloaded the sort of reprimand that smells of broken trust: shipping a witness's location to a rookie detail, too lenient a perimeter, a lapse of hands-on follow-up. If the man named Mark had walked under Robert's watch, then the chief had an argument he preferred to make with someone who'd look at him when he talked.
Robert's jaw flinched as he spoke.
"Chief — he was quiet when I checked. O thought he left town for some personal reason. You know... he was emotionally unstable. Thought maybe he—"
"You thought?" Tyson had cut him off. "Robert, supervision is not a suggestion."
Brendon had not been there to witness the scolding; he'd been on call, running down a lead Sofie had flagged, and when he returned to the station the residual of that conversation hung like stale smoke. He saw it in Robert's shoulders: recoil, guilt, the small animal fear that got under honest skin.
They pulled Robert into the main room then; a formal reprimand, a memo, signatures. Paperwork was a way to make the wound feel procedural. The chief's voice was quieter when Brendon caught him on the side, but sterner for the lack of an audience.
"You need to be better, Wolf," Tyson said. "We can't afford mistakes right now."
Brendon let the word settle. It always did—the way "Wolf" cut through things in this town: a name that meant fear and superstition and, worse, an easy scapegoat when headlines wanted drama. He didn't argue about the fact that Robert had been overrun; that would have been indulgent. He walked over to where Robert sat with his hands clasped, and he asked, quietly, "You... all right?"
Robert blinked. The tremor in his face was not just tiredness. "I should've done more. Right?"
"You did what you could," Brendon said. It came out flat; he had a species of tiredness that couldn't be cured by standard platitudes. "Chief — he yells. He writes memos. He doesn't sleep on street gutters. You were doing your job when you were physically able. Don't let him make you feel smaller than you are."
Robert laughed, an ugly, short sound that had nothing to do with humor. "Feels small, though."
"That's not your job," Brendon said. "Your job is to come back when you're hammered and figure out what you missed. Your job is to clean the mess but do not let the mess swallow you."
---
It was late afternoon when they left the station. The rain that week had been a thin, relentless thing, as if the sky were willing to be polite about the town's rot. They walked the long way: past Rust & Sons hardware, past the boarded-up pharmacy, toward the river where the town loosened and breath smelled of water and rust. They needed the cold honesty of the outside.
Robert's breath came in shallow pulls. He kicked at a loose stone and it skittered off into the gutter.
"You should have watched him," Brendon said finally. The words were simple. The pain behind them was not. He was honest because it was a cheap way to be kind. Robert flinched.
"I tried," Robert said. "I ran logs. Checked camera angles. Left him a message. When I got back — the feeds... were gone. No response. I checked the bus depot. Nothing. Then the Chief—"
"That's not what you need to talk about tonight," Brendon interrupted. The wind ran cold and made both of them pull their collars up. He was thinking about how easy it is to twist failure into shame, and how shame makes people hide when they should run toward the noise.
They walked along the riverwalk, where the town's lights blinked like tired constellations and the water moved in patient loops.
"You look like you're failing," Brendon said.
Robert let out a long breath that tasted like hope he'd lost at the station. "Everything keeps breaking, Brend. The case, the leads, the way people treat others—" He stopped. "You get used to people stepping back when you put your badge on. A power you are given. But tonight… when it matters? It felt like I'd already lost the trust I had."
Brendon studied him. "People step back because they're scared," he said. "They step back because they project their fear onto you. You can't fix the town's preconceptions. You can only show them that you won't let those preconceptions define your work."
Robert's look was half-guilty, half-hope. "What if I missed something important? What if Mark was the only lead — and he was a hoax — and we let him go? What if I'm the reason another body ends up in some pines next week?"
"That kind of thinking will kill you," Brendon said softly. He'd felt that same spiral during the months before and during his conviction seven years earlier: the way guilt ate at one's edges until there was nothing left but echo. He had lived those hours and still carried the bruise where the system's scales had tipped.
Robert scrubbed his face, fingers damp. "How do you do it? Not spiral?"
Brendon considered. He could have said something heroic—"I don't." He could have offered a coping strategy—"sleep." Instead he gave a truth that wasn't pretty.
"I let myself be angry sometimes," he said. "And then I make the anger useful. Anger gets you to show up, but it doesn't solve things. You turn it into curiosity instead. Ask, check, ask again. But don't let that feeling become the verdict. Use it like a compass. Learn the difference between shame that's deserved and shame that's just an old prejudice putting a shadow on your chest."
Robert watched him like someone trying to memorize a map. "You make it sound easy."
"It's not," Brendon said. "I've got a list of sins like most men have hobbies. The difference is, I try to be honest with my consciousness. You must keep records of your mistakes too — write them down. If you miss something, you own it, report it. Don't let the fear of punishment keep you silent. Collection of mistakes is not a death sentence; it's the ledger of experience."