Chapter 15: Solenne Names the Corruption

Three days is a long time when you're carrying a name you can't verify and a dead man's silence where your corroboration should be.

I spent the first day learning the shape of the contact chain. It started, as most things in this case started, with what wasn't there — with the absence of a system rather than its presence. The courier who'd delivered Solenne's note to my car hadn't been registered. The paper the note was written on wasn't traceable. But the note had found me, which meant someone had found me first, and finding a detective without touching any of the infrastructure that tracks detectives is not something that happens by accident. It happens by method. And method leaves texture, even when it leaves nothing else.

I went looking for the texture.