Didn’t write anything up. I turned around and walked back out to my cruiser with the weight of every missed question pressing between my shoulders. There was only one place left that made sense. Lincoln. He’d mentioned it offhand the first time we spoke—barely more than a word dropped into the night. Work. Lincoln. At the time, I’d logged it and moved on.
Now it replayed in my head with an insistence I couldn’t shake. Lincoln was the kind of place that never fully shut down. Warehouses. Loading docks. Graveyard shifts that blurred one day into the next. If someone was moving on foot at strange hours, if they needed work that didn’t ask many questions, that stretch of road made sense. I told myself I was just following up.