"I want you to bathe her in our tub.

I showed Alejandro the message at six in the morning.

He read it twice.

He set the phone on the kitchen counter and poured his coffee without speaking.

"It came from a burner," I said.

"I already checked."

"I know." He picked up his coffee.

"He's rattled."

"He's threatening us."

"A rattled man threatens.

A confident man acts." He looked at me over the rim of his cup.

"Holt is not confident right now.

He's guessing at what we know and trying to find out if a warning will make us stop."

"Will it?"

He set the cup down.

"What do you think?"

I took my phone back and forwarded the message to Gerald Marsh with a timestamp note.

Then I blocked the number, not because it would stop anything, but because I didn't want it sitting in my inbox.

Gerald called within twenty minutes.

He had already been in contact with the forensic investigator — a woman named Diane Cho who had spent fifteen years working insurance fraud cases before going private.

She had pulled the original County intake report from twenty years ago and found something Gerald described as "interesting."

"The report lists Elena Vasquez as an unidentified female, found unresponsive near the Halsted construction site at approximately nine forty-five in the evening," he said.

"Standard procedure would be to canvass the surrounding area for witnesses.

The report notes that canvassing was conducted.

It lists zero witnesses."

"That's not unusual for that time of night," Alejandro said.

He had me on speaker at the kitchen table.

"No.

But Diane found something else.

There was a security guard employed by the site contractor at the time.

His name appears on the site log as having been on duty that evening.

His name does not appear in the witness canvass report."

Alejandro put his cup down.

"His name was omitted," I said.

"His name was omitted," Gerald confirmed.

"Diane tracked him down.

He's retired now, living in Rockford.

She spoke with him yesterday." A pause.

"He remembers that night."

The security guard's name was Thomas Brierly.

He had been twenty-four years old when it happened.

He had seen a woman arguing with a man near the site perimeter.

He had seen the man grab her arm.

He had seen her fall — not trip, not stumble, fall — backward into the excavation trench that ran along the site's eastern edge.

He had called it in immediately.

He had given a full statement to the responding officer.

And then, three days later, a man in a good suit had come to his apartment and explained to him, very calmly, that his statement had created a paperwork problem, and that the problem would be much easier to resolve if Thomas simply confirmed that he had not actually witnessed the incident directly.

Thomas Brierly had been twenty-four years old, new to the job, and very afraid.

He had signed a revised statement.

He had carried it ever since.

"He's willing to talk now?" Alejandro asked.

"He's been waiting for someone to ask," Gerald said.

"Diane says he cried for most of the interview."

I stood up from the table.

I walked to the window.

Outside, the garden was bright and ordinary in the morning sun.

"The man in the suit," I said.

"Did he describe him?"

"Silver hair.

Expensive watch.

A voice Thomas described as — and I'm quoting from Diane's notes — 'the kind of voice that makes you feel like you've already lost before he finishes his sentence.'"

Lucy's words from the sofa.

The kind of voice that doesn't need to get loud because it already knows it has won.

"We need to tell Lucy," I said.

"Not yet," Alejandro said quietly.

"Let Gerald and Diane build the full picture first.

She's been through enough.

I don't want to bring her more pieces until we have the whole thing."

"She deserves to know."

"She will know.

All of it." He looked at me.

"But let's make sure when we tell her, we can also tell her what's being done about it."

That afternoon, Rowan Holt called Alejandro again.