Chapter 6 Questions With No Answers

POV: Wren

Dani's kitchen smells like burnt popcorn and the candle she lights every time she's stressed, vanilla something, and I sit at her counter with my laptop open and my coffee going cold while she watches me from across the room like she already knows what I'm about to do before I do it.

"You're being weird," she says.

"I'm being normal."

"You drove forty minutes after a double shift to sit at my counter instead of going home and sleeping. That's not normal, Wren, that's you needing a witness for something you already know is a bad idea."

I don't answer right away. I'm typing Gideon's full name into the department's public personnel lookup, the kind of database any taxpayer can technically search if they know where to click, and the page loads slow enough that I have time to second guess myself twice before the results come up.

"What are you even looking for," she asks, dropping onto the stool beside me, peering at the screen.

"I don't know yet."

"That's the worst possible answer."

The search returns the basics. Hire date, eight years back. Promotion to lieutenant, then captain, both right on schedule for someone who's good at the job. Commendations, three of them, vague language about bravery and leadership that could describe almost anyone in this line of work. Nothing flagged. Nothing red. The kind of record that looks clean enough to frame.

"See," Dani says. "Boring. Go home."

"It's too boring."

"That's not a thing."

"It is when somebody's name is attached to a fire that almost killed me with familiarity two days ago and there's nothing on paper that explains why." I scroll back up, scroll down again, like the page will rearrange itself if I look hard enough. "You don't get eight years on this job with literally nothing in your file. Everybody's got something. A complaint, a write up, a bad call that went sideways once. He's got a wall of commendations and not one single bad mark, and that doesn't feel clean to me, it feels scrubbed."

Dani's quiet a second, picking at the edge of her sleeve, and when she finally talks her voice has dropped the teasing out of it completely.

"You know what this looks like, right? From where I'm sitting."

"Enlighten me."

"It looks like you finding a brand new way to dig up the same old grave." She says it gently, which somehow makes it land harder than if she'd just snapped at me. "You did this after David. Looking for somebody to blame, looking for a name to put on what happened, because not having a name was the part that broke you worst. I watched you do it for months. I'm not saying don't grieve him, Wren, I'm saying this captain isn't a crossword puzzle you get to solve so you finally feel like you understand what happened that night."

"This isn't about David."

"You've got his case file's date practically tattooed on your arm and you're telling me a torn page falling out of a supply shelf, on the exact anniversary you never talk about, in the one new station you got reassigned to without warning, isn't about David." She raises an eyebrow, not unkind, just done pretending she doesn't see what's right in front of her. "Come on."

I don't have a good answer for that, so I don't give her one. I close one tab and open another instead, this one a records request form for the department's internal archive, the kind that requires a case number I don't actually have yet, just a date and a rough description of what I'm hoping to find. I fill it out anyway. Half hoping it bounces back as invalid. Half hoping it doesn't.

"You're going to get hurt twice," Dani says, quieter now. "Once for losing him, and once for whatever you dig up about this captain, if there's anything to dig up at all. And the second one, that one's optional. You get to choose not to do that to yourself."

"I'm not choosing anything. I'm asking a question."

"Same thing, with extra steps."

I submit the request anyway, and the confirmation page that loads back tells me nothing useful, just a tracking number and an estimate of three to five business days, which feels like forever and also feels like exactly the kind of delay that would let someone with something to hide get ahead of whatever's coming. I close the laptop a little harder than I mean to.

"Fine," Dani says, standing, refilling both our mugs without asking if I want more. "Forget the official channel. You know what I'd do, if I actually thought you were going to keep pulling at this thread no matter what I say."

"What."

"The old archive room at headquarters has boxes going back further than anything that database pulls up. Paper only, never digitized, because nobody ever got around to it." She says it like she's handing me a loaded gun and hoping I'll have the sense not to use it. "My cousin used to work records. She mentioned it once, complaining about how disorganized it all was. If there's anything from eight, nine years back that never made it into the system, that's where it'd be."

I don't say anything. I'm already thinking about how to get access to a room I have no business being in, and Dani watches me think it, sighing the way she does when she knows arguing further is a waste of breath she'd rather spend on something else.

Two days later, I find a reason to be at headquarters anyway, a supply pickup that takes me past the records hallway, and I tell myself I'm only looking, only curious, nothing more than that, while I slip through a door that isn't locked the way it probably should be and into a room stacked floor to ceiling with boxes nobody's touched in years.

It takes almost an hour of digging through folders that smell like mildew and old toner before I find a box labeled with a year that lines up close enough to matter, and inside it, near the bottom, a thin file with most of its pages missing, water damaged at the edges, barely holding together.

One page near the back still has a name typed at the top, a name some clerk years ago decided to redact with a thick black marker line that's faded just enough at one end to leave a single letter showing through, the first letter of whoever this file actually belongs to.

G.