The fourth-floor hallway smelled of boiled cabbage and damp dog.
Severin climbed the warped oak stairs one step at a time, his boots heavy with the slush of the harbor streets. Every landing had its own distinct hum: on the second floor, a woman was coughing with the wet, hacking rattle of chronic anthracosis; on the third, an old television crackled with state radio broadcasts about grain quotas and maritime curfews.
On the fourth floor, there was only silence.
Flat 4B stood at the end of the corridor.
The door had not been replaced.
The heavy solid-oak door hung crooked in its jamb, its brass Yale deadbolt torn free from the splintered casing. Two yellow paper strips stamped with the faded blue seal of the Port Veridia Municipal Police—EVIDENCE SEAL: CASE 44-09—had been slit down the middle with a razor blade, fluttering in the cold draft from the stairwell window.
Severin pushed the door open with his shoulder.
The hinges groaned.
He stepped inside and closed the shattered door behind him, wedging a wooden wedge under the base to hold it against the wind.
He didn't turn on the electric lamps. The city utility grid had cut power to the residential sector at midnight to conserve coal for the naval dry docks.
Severin struck a sulfur match against his thumbnail.
The yellow flare hissed, illuminating the parlor for three seconds before he touched it to the wick of a tallow candle sitting on the mantelpiece.
The parlor was an archaeological dig of violence.
The oval dining table lay on its side, three of its fluted walnut legs broken off at the joinery. Shards of Mireille’s green porcelain teacups littered the Persian rug like chips of sea glass.
And in the center of the room lay the cello.
The instrument had been stepped on by a heavy, steel-toed work boot. The front spruce soundboard was crushed inward, splintered into twenty jagged ribs, its bridge snapped in two, the horsehair bow snapped across the corner of the radiator.
Severin walked past the shattered instrument, careful not to let his boots disturb the fragments.
Beside the sofa, near the radiator, was the stain.
A dark, irregular oval, eighteen inches across, soaked deep into the unvarnished pine floorboards. It was black now—the deep, brownish-black of dried hemoglobin that had oxidized over twenty-eight days.
Severin knelt beside the stain.
He reached out with his bare right hand, his fingertips tracing the edge of the wood where her hair had rested.
His memory fired.
The trauma memory was burned into his amygdala like a cattle brand on raw hide:
01:15 AM. October eighteenth.
Unlocking the door after a sixteen-hour double shift in the orthopedic bay.
The door opening before his key touched the brass.
The smell of cold rain and wet wool in the dark hall.
Two men. Heavy, broad-shouldered, wearing black oilskin coats and vulcanized rubber respirators. The glint of a lead pipe swinging through the gloom.
The blow to his left zygomatic arch that sent him crashing into the umbrella stand, his vision exploding into white stars.
And Mireille’s scream.
A high, shredded sound from the bedroom: "Severin! SEVERIN!"
He had fought. He had scrambled across the rug on his elbows, blood blinding his left eye, his fingers clawing at the ankle of the taller man. He had bitten through oilskin into calf muscle; he had smashed a brass bookend into the intruder’s knee.
Then the second blow.
Across the base of his skull.
The world going black.
And when he woke up at dawn, with the rain pouring through the shattered windows and his own blood frozen to his cheek... the flat was empty.
Mireille’s slippers were by the door.
Her coat was in the closet.
Only her body was gone.
Severin stood up. He walked to the kitchen counter and picked up his leather-bound journal.
The black oilcloth cover was swollen with rainwater, the pages buckled and grimy.
He opened it to page forty-eight.
Written in his small, precise surgical script were twenty-four names.
Dock foremen. Chemical brokers. Black-market fence men who operated out of the warehouses in the Lower Slums. The municipal police detectives had closed the file on day four—"Gang dispute collateral; husband cleared; victim presumed drowned in harbor."
Severin turned the page.
Underlined three times in red ink was a new lead he had extracted three nights ago from a beaten smuggler behind the grain elevators:
KESTNER’S WAREHOUSE. BERTH NINE. SHIFT CHANGE 02:00.
Severin closed the book.
He slipped it into his breast pocket, resting his hand over his heart until the tremor in his fingers stopped.
"I'm coming, Mireille," he whispered into the empty, cold room.
"I will find where they put you."