The building at the southern edge of the Narrows is six stories, mixed use on its registration, and has been operating as something else for at least three years.
We go in with a warrant on a Thursday morning, two units plus Renee and myself. Fasano sends one person, which is fewer than before, because the organized crime angle has become harder to maintain as the case develops and Fasano is conserving resources for things he can close.
The ground floor has a legitimate tenant: a storage company, two men who look exactly as surprised as people look when a warrant comes through for the building they work in. We badge them, move through, go up.
The second and third floors are empty. Clean empty, not abandoned empty. The same sealed-floor treatment as the Tricorner facility. Wall fittings that have been removed and left their shadows. No drain this time, but a specific ventilation configuration in the third floor that the building's registered plans don't account for.
The fourth floor is locked with a hardware that isn't original to the building.
We get through it.
The room inside is not empty.
Equipment. Not removed this time. Still here, some of it, the pieces that are too large to move quickly or weren't worth moving. Adjustable support frames, the kind that hold a person in a specific position for an extended procedure. A monitoring station, the equipment older but functional. Restraint fittings on the support frames, padded, the kind designed for long-term use.
And on a table in the far corner, files. Not digital. Physical. A surgeon who works outside the documented world doesn't trust digital records.
Renee photographs everything. I walk the room.
I take the right glove off.
The room has more in it than anywhere else I've read in this case. Fresher. More concentrated. The fear is present in layers the way the Tricorner facility was layered, but stronger, more specific, individual voices within the accumulation. More people had been here, over a longer period.
The procedure is here too, strong and recent.
And the interest. Specific, technical, the texture of craft engaged on its own terms. I hold it longer than I should.
Beneath all of it, at the deepest layer, something I hadn't found anywhere else in this case. Faint, but there.
Satisfaction. Not of the work but of something larger than the work. The texture of someone who believes what they're doing is correct in a way that goes beyond the immediate task. Not that the craft is good. That the purpose is right.
He believes it.
I pull my hand back. Put the glove on.
"Renee," I say.
She comes.
"He was here recently. Within the week." I look at the room. "He knows we found the Tricorner facility. He moved here. He's going to move again."
She looks at the equipment. "We have the files."
"We need them processed fast."
She's already on the phone.
I look at the restraint fittings on the support frames and think about Patrick Osei and Carl Reinholt in their hospital beds and the three other men on the board who are still missing.
The third location is somewhere. He's setting it up now.
We need to find it before he's ready.
The files take three days to process.
What they contain: case notes. Not in any medical format a licensing board would recognize, but case notes. Patient numbers rather than names. Procedure dates. Outcome notations. A running log of modifications performed, refined, adjusted across multiple subjects over what appears to be at least four years of active work.
The buyer is referenced only as a designation: a string of letters and numbers that Renee identifies as a format used by certain private research entities. She sends it to a contact at the FBI field office. The contact says they'll run it but won't commit to a timeline.
What the files also contain, at the back of the last folder: a name. Not Dulmacher's. A referral. Someone who had contacted Dulmacher seeking specific work. The name is partial, a first name and a professional title, written in handwriting that suggests it was noted quickly, not meant to be a formal record.
The title is: Consultant, W.E.
Wayne Enterprises.
I write it down. I look at it. I write it again on a different page to make sure I've read it correctly.
Wayne Enterprises. The company whose logistics facility closure displaced forty families from the Narrows nine years ago. Whose foundation money was in the legal aid office that tried to reopen Sera Valk's complaint. Whose quarterly report was open on Warren Luc's laptop the night Dara Osman broke in. A name that appears in the foundations of things in this city, quietly, in the places where old money and good intentions and bad outcomes coexist.
I don't know what a consultant seeking this kind of work means. I don't know if it connects to the company's official operations or to someone acting independently within it. I don't have enough.
I file it. Present on the board. Waiting for more evidence.
I don't tell Renee yet.