"He has cleared the bottom four service levels. He is working up. Nothing yet. And Coleman—Hadley is calling his apartment now. His wife answered on the third ring. She said Walter left for work at 5:40 as usual. He told her he was picking up a regular client at 6:00. She has not heard from him since."
Harlan closed his eyes for a brief moment. He thought of Walter Coleman, a quiet man with a small silver pin in the lapel of his jacket from a service tour he had completed before Harlan was born. He thought of the way Walter always opened the rear door of the sedan with a small nod that was not quite a bow, and was not quite a greeting, and was somehow both. He thought of the woman somewhere in the freight shaft of his own building who had taken a phone call and then run.
"Frank," he said, "I want a wellness check sent to Walter Coleman's home address, right now. Not when Vance gets here—now. Use a private security firm if you have to; I do not want to wait on a precinct line."
"Yes, sir."
"And I want you to pull the security feed for the corner outside this building going back two hours. I want to know how long that sedan has been parked there, and I want to know whether anyone got out of it before Walter was supposed to arrive."
Frank's hands were already moving across the keyboard. The screen shifted. The image of the sedan at the curb sharpened and then began to roll backward in time.
Harlan stepped closer. He watched the morning unwind in reverse: the light dimmed; a street sweeper passed; a man walking a dog passed; a delivery cyclist passed. The sedan remained.
The footage rolled back to 6:14 in the morning, and at 6:14, the sedan was already there. Frank kept rolling. At 6:09, the sedan pulled to the curb from the south end of the block, parked, and sat. The driver did not get out. He did not check his phone. He did not adjust his mirrors. He sat behind the wheel with his hands in his lap and his face turned toward the front entrance of the building. And he sat that way for two hours and twenty-one minutes without moving—the way a man sits when he has been told to wait, and has been told that nothing matters more than being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.
"Two hours, sir," Frank said quietly. "He has been there since just after 6:00."
"Walter Coleman was supposed to pick me up at 8:25," Harlan said. "Hadley always sends Walter forty minutes early because Walter is the kind of man who would rather wait at the curb than be one minute late. Whoever sent that text from Walter's phone this morning sent it knowing the exact time Walter would have been on his way."
He looked at the screen again. The driver of the sedan, frozen now at 6:09, was a man somewhere in his early thirties, lean, clean-shaven, with the kind of carefully ordinary face that did not stick in the memory. Harlan had not seen him before. He was almost certain of it. Almost.
"Frank, run his face."