She'd read it 11 times. It hadn't gotten any less strange to look at by the 11th.
She made coffee she didn't finish and sat with it anyway, both hands wrapped around the mug, and thought about Danny at 12 years old, watching his family's things get carried out to a curb somewhere in this state, in some year she hadn't even been born to witness.
It could still be a coincidence. She kept telling herself that. Ruiz wasn't a rare name.
But some part of her, the part that had spent years learning to trust a feeling in her gut before the evidence caught up to it, already knew it wasn't.
She thought about calling Colonel Kaine that morning, and decided against it twice, before she finally decided against it a third time, for good.
What would she even say? That she'd found an old eviction notice in a drawer, in a town Danny had never mentioned by name? That the math worked out, roughly, if you squinted at it the right way?
It wasn't enough yet. She had learned a long time ago not to move on a hunch, no matter how loud it was shouting, until she'd done everything in her power to confirm it first.
At the bakery, Marjorie took one look at her face and didn't ask any questions. Just put a cinnamon roll in front of her and told her to eat it before it went cold. And Ren, for once, didn't argue.
Frank came in a little after 8. And this time, he didn't sit at his usual table. He came straight to the counter, glancing once toward the door, like a man checking for company he didn't want overhearing him.
"You hear about the bus?" he asked, voice low.
"What about it?"
"Camera on the 8:40 route. The one that would have caught everything from yesterday morning. Grant knocking my cane, grabbing Norah's wrist. Transit office says it malfunctioned. Whole recording's gone. Nothing on the hard drive but static."
Ren set down her coffee slowly.
"Malfunctioned?"
"That's the word they used." Frank's jaw was tight. "Funny thing is, the company that services those cameras does the maintenance contracts for the whole transit fleet. It's a subcontractor out of the county. Owned, as it happens, by a holding company that leases its office space from none other than Colton Properties."
Ren went very still. "You're saying somebody erased it on purpose."
"I'm saying it's a mighty convenient malfunction," Frank said, "happening on the one week that footage would have mattered more than it ever has before."
He leaned in slightly.
"But I've got something they don't know about."
He reached into his jacket pocket and set his phone on the counter, screen dark.
"I've been recording video on this thing for a few years now," he said. "Habit I picked up after a friend showed me how. Keep it in my coat, propped in the handle of my cane most days, angled up. Half the time, I forget it's even running. Yesterday morning, when that boy started up on the bus, some old instinct told me to reach down and hit record before he ever touched Norah's wrist."