The garbage truck arrived at the Textile Factory just past ten.
It was a working vehicle, the factory had legitimate operations on the floor below the parts that mattered, and waste removal came on a schedule. What came off the truck tonight was not scheduled.
The Butcher's body was laid out on the loading dock under the overhead lights. Shot in the thigh, the chest, and once between the eyes.
Fox stood with her arms at her sides, reading the scene without showing what she was reading. Wesley Gibson was next to her, still weeks from finished with his training looking at the body with the expression of someone who had already decided he knew who was responsible.
The Repairman said: "Cross."
Wesley didn't say anything. He was filing it under the same column as Mr. X.
One of the collection crew passed an item to Sloane. "This was next to the body."
A business card. Black matte stock: Notice of Sin.
Fox looked at it. Her expression shifted in a way the others didn't catch.
"That's not Cross's work," she said. "Cross doesn't leave cards. This is Peerless, the one from Texas."
She gave Wesley the short version: two years active, fifty-plus contracts, NYPD's internal name for him was the Sin Hunter. No confirmed identity. He'd moved to New York a few days ago.
"Why would he target the Butcher?" the Repairman asked.
Sloane gestured. An aide produced a file.
Fox was holding it ten minutes later. Photograph clipped to the front: young, male, sixteen, transferred to Midtown High from Texas three days ago. She looked at the woven cloth strip beside it, Locke Broughton's name in the Loom's output.
"He's Peerless?" The Repairman looked at the photo and laughed, not unkindly. "He's sixteen. Peerless showed up two years ago. That's a fourteen-year-old on his first contract."
"His cell signal never left New York City today either," someone else added. "He couldn't have made it to New Jersey and back."
Fox set the file down. The photograph looked back at her - calm, giving nothing away. "Then it's either a coincidence, or someone's running a careful parallel operation."
She didn't say which she thought it was.
Sloane looked at the card, then at the file. "This one is yours and Wesley's." He said it with the quiet finality of a man who hadn't been questioned in a long time.
Fox nodded. The meeting broke.
Fifteen minutes later, a different set of headlights appeared at the factory gate.
An NYPD cruiser and a Jersey City PD vehicle rolled in together. The officers on the gate conferred briefly and then let them through.
Sloane was at the door before the cars had fully stopped.
Captain George Stacy stepped out of the NYPD cruiser. The man beside him, broad-shouldered, the easy authority of someone who had come up through a different department but the same general philosophy, was Chief Cullen out of Jersey City. George and Cullen had the particular ease of two people who had worked around each other long enough to have established a functional trust.
Sloane came down the steps with his hand extended and a smile arranged on his face.
"Captain Stacy. Chief Cullen." He shook both hands. "A surprise visit at this hour. Please, come in, we can talk in the office."
George followed, reading the building as he moved through it. The loading dock was visible from the corridor. Whatever had been there had been cleared, but not perfectly, there was a faint residue on the dock floor that George's trained eye registered without lingering on.
He kept walking.
The reason for the visit was straightforward: two bodies, both employees of this factory. One was the person or what remained of a person who had fallen onto a civilian vehicle during the explosion on the residential block. The second was a taxi driver found in a Jersey City alley this afternoon. Different jurisdictions, same employer.
Sloane listened with the attentiveness of a man who was very good at appearing cooperative.
George asked questions. Sloane answered them in the manner of someone who had answered questions from police before and found it a manageable experience. The factory, he explained, employed people in a variety of roles. He couldn't speak to the personal activities of every employee. He was naturally devastated to hear about the losses.
George nodded at the appropriate intervals.
He hadn't expected a confession. He'd come to take the temperature of the place, to see how it arranged itself when a badge walked through the door. And what he was seeing, the careful welcome, the smoothly managed corridors, the way certain staff had positioned themselves just out of direct sightline, told him something about what kind of operation this was.
He'd come back.
With more preparation.
Outside the fence line, half a block north on higher ground, Locke lay flat on a parking structure roof with a sniper rifle, a thermal scope, and a growing sense of irony.
He'd done everything right. He'd scouted the approach route in the afternoon, identified the optimal firing position, calculated entry and exit paths, laid out his equipment with the particular care of someone who had done this enough times to have developed real preferences about it. He'd been ready to move inside by ten-thirty.
And then the police car had come through the gate.
He watched through the thermal scope as the two silhouettes, one of which he recognized immediately by posture and gait, because he'd been paying attention to George Stacy's body language for a week, moved through the interior of the factory.
George.
Locke adjusted the scope. His finger was well clear of the trigger, the safety was engaged and he was in zero danger of an accidental discharge, but he moved the muzzle offline out of principle. He was not going to have George Stacy die at the Textile Factory because of a mechanical failure in the dark.
He watched the movement inside the building.
The factory was almost empty. He'd noticed it when he first set up, the thermal return from inside suggested a skeleton crew, maybe a dozen people, rather than the hundred-plus he'd calculated in his attack plan. That was the first thing that had slowed him down. The arrival of law enforcement was the second.
He lowered the scope and thought.
Saturday.
Tomorrow was Saturday.
He turned that over with the particular feeling of someone who has made a very careful plan and has just discovered a variable they didn't account for. Professional assassins, it turned out, also had weekends. The Textile Factory's operational headcount on a Friday night was apparently about twelve percent of what it was on a Tuesday.
Two hundred Achievement Points per person.
Twelve people.
Two thousand, four hundred Achievement Points.
Versus the twenty-four thousand he'd calculated for a full house.
Hm.
Locke engaged the scope again, watched George and Cullen finish their visit and walk back out to the cars, watched the factory gate close behind the police vehicles.
He wasn't frustrated, exactly. Frustrated was what happened when you didn't learn something useful. What he'd learned tonight was the Textile Factory's weekend staffing pattern, the presence of at least one police line of inquiry connecting to the factory, and the fact that George Stacy was apparently developing independent interest in the same organization Locke was planning to dismantle.
That was useful.
All of it.
He broke down the rifle, stowed the equipment, and climbed off the roof.
Monday, he thought. Or whenever they're fully staffed.
The math wasn't going anywhere.