CHAPTER 19: TIMELINE CORRECTION
[Jackson Street, Seattle — Late April 2015, 9:45 PM]
The broom was still in my hand when the second alert came.
Not a push notification this time — a text from Jackie, four words: They're saying it's Jerome.
The broom hit the floor. Don E looked up from the register. "Boss?"
"Close up. Lock the front." I was already pulling my jacket from the hook behind the office door. "Don't wait for me."
"What's—"
"Close up, Don E."
I drove. The car — the real Blaine's silver BMW, too conspicuous for fieldwork but the only vehicle I had — cut through the industrial district toward Pike Place. The police scanner app on my phone ran continuous audio from the lawyer's brain's memorized frequency list: District 1 patrol, homicide, dispatch. The chatter was procedural, clipped, the specific cadence of officers processing a scene they'd rather not describe.
"...confirmed deceased, male, late teens to early twenties, severe cranial trauma..."
"...bite marks consistent with previous cases..."
"...detective en route, coroner notified..."
Jerome. Jackie's text hadn't included a last name because Jackie's network — former colleagues, ER contacts, the informal intelligence web that night-shift nurses maintained through text chains and break-room gossip — didn't deal in last names. They dealt in details: male, young, found behind the fish market, head injuries, the kind that didn't come from a fall or a fight but from something with jaws and intent.
I parked four blocks south of the market and walked. The security brain mapped the perimeter before I reached it — two patrol cars blocking the alley entrance on Pike Street, yellow tape reflecting the strobes, a forensics van unloading equipment. Standard crime scene. Civilian traffic rerouted. Foot traffic slowing to gawk, accelerating past the tape when the officers' stares became uncomfortable.
I didn't approach the tape. Frank Goss's training: observe from the edge, never enter the perimeter, gather intelligence from what's visible and what's audible. The alley was narrow — dumpsters on both sides, loading dock access for the market's wholesale vendors, a service corridor that connected to the garage beneath the hotel on the next block. The body was behind the second dumpster, obscured by the forensics tent they'd erected to block camera phones.
But I could see the shoes. White sneakers, left sole loose — the same sneakers Major Lilywhite's shelter kid had worn on the basketball court three weeks ago, the ones that squeaked on the gymnasium floor while Jerome shot free throws with a release point that was two inches too low.
Jerome. Sixteen. Left-handed. Argued about hip-hop. Slept four bunks from Eddie Torres.
And now he was behind a dumpster at Pike Place Market with his skull opened by someone who'd learned the technique from the man whose face I wore.
The timeline hadn't corrected itself. The timeline didn't work that way — it wasn't a river finding its natural course, inevitably flowing toward the same deaths regardless of intervention. That was the comforting interpretation: it would have happened anyway, nothing I could have done. The truth was uglier. I'd fired Chief. I'd taken away his position, his income, his access to the supply chain he'd been part of for over a year. And Chief, stripped of structure, had done what unstructured predators did: hunted alone.
The same outcome through a different mechanism. Not fate — consequence.
I walked back to the car. My hands were steady. Webb's composure held the way it always held — the combat medic's gift was emotional compartmentalization under pressure, the ability to process horror while maintaining function. The horror would arrive later, when the compartments opened and the contents spilled.
The drive back to Meat Cute took fourteen minutes. I parked in the loading bay. Sat in the dark with the engine off and the scanner running and the specific weight of a dead teenager's name pressing against the inside of my ribs.
Four weeks ago, my first night in this body, I'd opened the ledger and counted seven names with lines through them. Seven dead. I'd sworn to stop the count. Changed the supply chain. Built an ethical operation. Fed zombies without killing anyone.
And the count had gone up anyway. Chief's two confessed kills, plus Jerome. Ten dead, minimum, connected to an operation I'd inherited and tried to dismantle.
I went upstairs. The apartment was dark. I passed the bathroom where the tainted Utopium sat behind its baseboard, entered the bedroom that still held the real Blaine's furniture and the real Blaine's clothes and none of the real Blaine's taste, and sat at the desk.
The drawer opened. Behind the false bottom, Eddie Torres's name on the torn ledger page, taped face-down. I pulled a fresh sheet from the notepad. Wrote Jerome in the same handwriting the accountant's brain had standardized — neat block letters, no flourish, the penmanship of records that mattered.
Taped it beside Eddie Torres. Two names in a drawer. The second one heavier than the first, because the first was a crime I'd inherited and the second was a consequence I'd created.
The phone buzzed. Not Jackie again. Not Don E.
A music community page notification — the app Lowell had shown me at the Crocodile, the one that tracked local gigs and connected Seattle's independent scene. Someone had posted: RIP Jerome. Good kid, better smile. If anyone knows anything, please reach out to his family.
Forty-seven comments. The number climbed as I watched — forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty-two. A community grieving in real time, the digital version of candles on a sidewalk.
Lowell followed this page. Lowell knew Jerome — the show had connected them through the Seattle music scene's overlapping circles, through the specific gravity that pulled people together in a city that was large enough for anonymity and small enough for everyone to know someone who knew someone.
I typed a text to Lowell: Need to talk. Tonight. Important.
Sent. Waited. The typing indicator didn't appear.
The community page climbed to sixty-one comments. Someone posted a photo — Jerome at a show, grinning, holding a guitar that was too big for his frame, wearing the sneakers with the loose left sole.
My phone rang. Lowell's name on the screen. I answered.
His voice was flat. Stripped of the warmth, the British inflection, the musician's modulation that made every sentence sound like it might break into melody. What was left was raw material — a man's voice with everything decorative removed.
"Jerome's dead."
"I know."
"The community page says brain injuries. Brain injuries, Blaine." A pause. The sound of breathing that was being controlled because the alternative was not controlled. "Did you—"
"No."
"Did your people—"
"A former associate. Someone I fired two weeks ago. He went rogue."
Silence. Long enough to count — three seconds, four, five. The scanner on my phone, still running in the background, crackled with static. Somewhere across the city, the forensics team was photographing Jerome's shoes.
"I'm coming over," Lowell said. The line went dead.
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