Chapter 12 · Blood in the Wine

The warehouse district smells like rust and diesel. Every shadow looks like a fed with a warrant.

Locke parks the Audi three blocks out. Engine dies. He doesn't move. Just sits there gripping the wheel, staring at the chain-link fence ahead where Unit 47 squats between two shipping containers.

"Twenty-six minutes," I say.

He knows. The clock's in both our heads now, ticking louder than my pulse.

He gets out. I follow. Gravel crunches under my boots. The air tastes like metal and salt—lake wind mixed with blood I can still smell on the car keys in my pocket.

The storage unit is the size of a garage. Locke punches in a code on the rusted keypad. The lock clicks. He yanks the door up and fluorescent light floods out, cold and dental-office bright.

Inside: file boxes. Dozens of them. Stacked floor to ceiling along steel shelves. Labels in faded marker. Dates going back twenty years.

Locke goes straight for the back corner. Finds a box marked 2009 and rips the tape off. Pulls out a binder. Flips it open.

Photographs spill onto the concrete. Crime scene shots. Blood on pavement. A restaurant sign—Vaucluse & 5th—half-collapsed.