Chapter 5: Doc and the Lighthouse
"Where did you get that?"
Rowan's voice came out rough. He was looking at the brass lighthouse in Cassian's hand, and he could not look anywhere else.
Cassian did not answer right away. He turned the keychain over once between his fingers. Then he looked at Rowan, for a long time, the way someone looks at a thing they have been searching for and are afraid to touch.
"Doc," he said.
No one had called Rowan that in three years. No one had ever called him that at all, as far as he could remember.
But something in his chest recognized it.
Neither of them moved. The rain drummed on the roof of the car.
"We should talk," Cassian said at last. "Not here. You choose where. There's a diner on Fifth that's open all night, lots of people, good lighting. Or my office, at the port. Either is fine."
Rowan thought about it. A diner was safer. A diner was public.
"Your office," he said.
The Rourke Maritime Terminal took up all of Pier Nine. At night it was a city of shipping containers stacked five high, lit by tall orange floodlights, with cranes moving slowly against the fog like the necks of enormous birds. At the far end of the pier stood an old harbor control tower, built of concrete and painted white a long time ago. The top floor had glass on three sides.
Cassian's office was up there.
It was not what Rowan had expected. No leather sofas, no bar, no view designed to impress. A large wooden desk covered with shipping manifests. Two chairs. A shelf of old nautical charts. A coffee maker. Through the windows, the lights of the cranes blinked orange, on and off, on and off, across the black water of the bay.
A lighthouse, Rowan thought. He works inside a lighthouse.
Cassian poured two cups of coffee, set one on the desk near Rowan, and sat down in the other chair instead of behind the desk. He left the door to the stairwell open.
"Tell me what you remember," he said. "About Harrow Street."
"Almost nothing. Rain. A flashlight. Heat. A voice." Rowan kept his hands around the cup. "And a word. Lighthouse."
Cassian nodded slowly.
"Then I'll tell you what I remember," he said. "And you can decide what you believe."
He spoke quietly and without drama, in the same even voice he had used to call the ambulance on the dock.
"It was the night of the big storm. The whole port district lost power around nine. I went to Harrow Street because someone asked me to. I'll come back to who. Before I reached the pharmacy, four men came out of an alley. They'd been waiting. One of them had a knife. He cut my arm before I got away from them."
He pushed back the sleeve of his right arm and laid it on the desk between them. The long pale scar ran from just below the elbow almost to the wrist.
"I got into the building next door. An old stationery shop, empty. I was bleeding badly, and it was completely dark. I thought I'd wait them out. Then someone came in through the back door with a phone flashlight. A young man. Twenty, maybe. Soaking wet. He saw the blood and didn't run. He found a first aid kit behind the counter and a bottle of vodka the owner kept in a drawer, and he told me to hold still."
Rowan looked down at the scar.
In the lamplight, the stitch marks were easy to see now. Pairs of small dots, evenly spaced, one close to the edge and one farther out. Deep bites to hold the tension, shallow bites to line the skin up neatly. His instructor had made the class practice on pig skin until they could do it in the dark. You won't always have light, she had said.
"I asked his name," Cassian went on. "He said, 'Just call me Doc.' He saw my keychain when I dropped it and asked if I was a sailor. I said no. After that, he called me Lighthouse. Neither of us said our real names. I think we both knew it was safer."
"What happened next?"
"We smelled smoke. The pharmacy was on fire. You..." He stopped himself. "Doc ran toward it. He kept shouting for someone. His father. I caught him at the door. The front of the building was already gone. I pulled him back into the street. Something fell from the roof, and he put his hand up to protect his face."
Rowan looked at his own left hand. The crescent-shaped burn scar across the back of it.
"Then the men from the alley came back," Cassian said. "I told Doc to run toward the main road and not stop. I stood between him and them long enough for him to get away. When I looked for him later, he was gone. I spent weeks trying to find him. I didn't have a name. Just a face I'd seen by flashlight."
The coffee in Rowan's cup had gone cold. He put it down.
"You said someone asked you to go there," he said. "Who?"
Cassian was silent for a moment.
"Your father," he said. "Elias called me that evening. He said he was in trouble and he needed help getting somewhere safe. He said he'd explain when I arrived." His jaw tightened. "I got there too late. That's the part I can't fix."
Rowan sat very still.
The story fit. It fit the scar and the stitches and the burn on his hand. It fit the fragment he had remembered at the fence. It fit the voice he had heard on the dock.
But fitting was not the same as proving.
"Being there doesn't mean you didn't light it," he said quietly.
Cassian did not flinch. He did not argue.
"No," he said. "It doesn't. So keep investigating. Including me."
Rowan had not expected that. He was still deciding what to say when something hit the window behind Cassian with a sharp crack.
Glass exploded inward.
Cassian moved before Rowan understood what was happening. He turned in his chair, one arm coming up, his whole body between Rowan and the window. Pieces of glass hit his back and shoulder and scattered across the desk and floor. A fist-sized stone rolled to a stop beside Rowan's foot. Cold wet wind rushed into the room.
Down below, somewhere among the containers, footsteps ran away into the dark.
Cassian was already on his phone. "North side of the tower. One person, on foot, heading for the fence. Don't engage. Just see where he goes." He hung up and turned back. "Are you hurt?"
"No." Rowan was looking at Cassian's right arm. Blood was running down from the forearm onto his hand. A long piece of glass had caught him across the old scar and opened part of it. "You are."
"It's fine."
"It's not fine. Where's your first aid kit?"
"Rowan..."
"Where is it?"
Cassian looked at him, then pointed at a cabinet beside the door.
Rowan found the kit. It was a good one, better than most clinics had. He washed his hands at the small sink in the corner, pulled on gloves, and came back.
"Sit," he said.
Cassian sat.
Rowan pulled the other chair close and took Cassian's wrist in one hand, turning the arm toward the lamp. He cleaned the wound and checked it for glass. The cut was long but not deep. The old scar tissue had split along part of its length. It did not need stitches this time. He closed it with adhesive strips, spaced carefully, then wrapped it in gauze.
He worked in silence, and so did Cassian. The only sounds were the wind through the broken window and the soft tear of the tape.
It was not until he was securing the last strip that Rowan realized something. Every time his fingers touched the inside of Cassian's wrist, Cassian stopped breathing for a moment. Just a moment. Then he breathed again, carefully, as if he did not want Rowan to notice.
Rowan noticed. He did not say anything. He finished the bandage and let go.
"You shouldn't have done that," he said. "Turned into the glass."
"It was the only direction to turn."
"You didn't think about it at all."
"No," Cassian said. "I didn't."
Rowan looked at the bandage, not at him. His own pulse was faster than it should have been. He noted it, and for once he did not name the reason.
Before Rowan left, Cassian took a spare jacket from the cabinet and held it out, because the wind through the broken window had turned the room cold. Rowan put it on. Then Cassian opened a drawer in his desk and took out a car key on a plain ring.
"The gray sedan parked by the gate," he said. "It's registered to the company, it has a full tank, and nobody will ask where it goes. It's yours while you need it."
"I don't need a car."
"Tonight you needed me to drive you home." Cassian held the key out, and waited, and did not put it in Rowan's hand until Rowan lifted his own. "So you never have to depend on me to leave."
Rowan took it.
He drove home alone. The car was quiet and smelled faintly of new leather, and he kept both hands on the wheel the whole way. He did not turn on the radio. He thought about four men in an alley, a stationery shop in the dark, and a man who would not argue when he was accused of murder.
He parked outside his building just after midnight and climbed the three flights of stairs with his backpack over one shoulder.
The hallway light on the third floor was out.
He noticed that. He noticed, a second later, that his apartment door was not fully closed. A thin line of darkness showed along its edge.
He stopped.
The door swung open from the inside, and a man came out fast.
He hit Rowan with his shoulder and slammed him back against the wall. Before Rowan could get his balance, the man grabbed the backpack and pulled. The strap held. Something flashed in his other hand, a short blade, and the strap parted with one cut.
Then he was running down the stairs, taking them three at a time.
Rowan pushed off the wall and ran to the railing. Two floors down, the man passed under the one working stairwell light, and for half a second Rowan saw the back of a shaved head, and behind the left ear, a small dark tattoo of an anchor.
The front door banged. Silence.
Rowan went back up. His apartment had been turned inside out. Every drawer open, every book on the floor, the mattress pulled off the bed.
He found his backpack on the landing of the second floor, where the man had dropped it as he ran. It had been slashed open along the bottom. His laptop was still inside. His wallet was still inside.
The navy leather notebook was gone.
Rowan sat down on the stairs with the empty bag across his knees and made himself think.
A thief would have taken the laptop. A thief would have taken the wallet. This man had searched the whole apartment first, found nothing, and waited in the dark for the bag. He had known exactly what he was looking for.
Rowan had opened the notebook in exactly one place outside his home in the last three years. The toxicology lab, at six o'clock on Monday morning. In a corridor where a Halcyon vendor card had opened the door seven hours later.
And the man with the anchor tattoo had once called himself Detective Harlan.
Halcyon, Rowan thought. It keeps coming back to Halcyon.