Chapter 14: Chu Finds the S.H.I.E.L.D. Photo

The laptop came from a desk drawer.

Not under the mattress, not in a ceiling tile, not wrapped in a trash bag buried in the backyard the way they found them sometimes in the South Valley. It was in a desk drawer, underneath a takeout menu and a broken phone charger, in the bedroom of a twenty-six-year-old named Tomás Ibarra who had been arrested on a weapons charge that had nothing to do with narcotics, which was how the weapons charge had happened in the first place. Ibarra's lawyer had argued for three hours about the scope of the search warrant. The judge had not found the arguments persuasive.

Chu received the laptop on a Thursday afternoon, logged in the evidence chain under case number 2024-NR-0041, which was the file he'd opened after Estela Vásquez's toxicology report had produced words like *structurally impossible* and *no documented synthesis pathway* in the same sentence. He set it on his desk. He looked at it for a moment in the way he looked at most things — not urgently, but with the focused attention of a man who had learned, twenty-two years ago, that the first reading of anything was rarely the important one.