Célia approached the watchman, strategically reducing the personal space. She did not use force, but her presence was like a silent hydraulic press. The man, who had identified himself as Arthur, averted his gaze to the coffee, but the tremor in his hands now made the liquid oscillate in perfect circles.
— Arthur, look at me — Célia asked, her voice soft but charged with a glacial authority. — You said your flashlight failed and you tripped over the arm of one of the victims. But the terrain here is composed of dense clay and lime. Your boots are too clean for someone who tripped into an open grave in the dark.
The man swallowed hard. His Adam's apple rose and fell with difficulty.
— I... I must have cleaned them without noticing. The shock was great, ma'am.
— No — Célia interrupted, narrowing her eyes as she observed the persistent dilation in his pupils. — You're lying. And every second you maintain this farce, the real author of this gains a kilometer of distance. Why the fear, Arthur? Who said you were supposed to be here today?
Michell's Verdict:
Michell, who until then had remained a few meters away observing the horizon, walked slowly toward the circle. He did not need scanners or prolonged interrogations. His mind processed the scene like a chemical equation. He looked at the slope of Arthur's shoulders and at the way the man avoided stepping on certain areas of the ground, even those that had no bodies.
— He didn't kill them — Michell sentenced, his deep voice cutting through the humid air. — The profile of whoever buried these men demands surgical precision and a coldness that this man does not possess. Arthur is an involuntary messenger.
Michell leaned slightly, coming to the eye level of the watchman.
— You're lying about the encounter, Arthur, because the alternative is the death of your family, isn't it? You didn't trip over them. You received a map.
The watchman collapsed. His shoulders fell and the coffee cup slipped from his hands, soiling his pants with mud. He did not confirm with words, but the silence was the loudest confession of the day.
Michael, positioned just behind with his tablet, recorded the reaction. He saw the exact moment when absolute terror took hold of the man. It was not the fear of being arrested; it was the fear of something that was watching them now. Michael scanned the perimeter with his gaze, feeling that familiar sensation that the scene was too small for what was to come.
At HQ: The Digital Void:
Meanwhile, at the operations center, Owen was immersed in a sea of screens. His hands flew across the keyboard, trying to extract any frame from the security cameras on the Anacostia perimeter.
— Nothing — Owen grumbled, adjusting his headphones. — The last seventeen minutes before Arthur's report were deleted directly from the physical server of the monitoring company. It wasn't a remote attack; someone went in there, used a physical bypass, and wiped the traces. The traffic cameras within a two-kilometer radius also entered a maintenance loop.
Beside him, Foxy, still with a discreet bandage on her neck but with her eyes fixed on the data streams, analyzed the profiles of the three victims.
— Owen, look at this — Foxy said, pointing to an inconsistency in the HR records of the bankrupt security company. — These three men were not just security guards. They were part of a high-risk valuables transport unit that disappeared from the system two years ago.
She cross-referenced the dates with recent incidents.
— They weren't killed because they knew something — Foxy continued. — They were killed because they failed to deliver something. The lime on the ground wasn't to decompose the bodies faster, it was to preserve the fingerprints of whoever touched them last. It's an invitation for us.
The Archivist and the Map:
Michael listened to the radio in his hidden earpiece while organizing the photos of the scene. He realized that Michell was right about the map, but he went further. While the others focused on the "why," Michael focused on the structure.
He noticed that the watchman Arthur had a small identification sticker on his coat, half peeled off. The symbol on the sticker was almost identical to a detail of the spider origami he kept in his safe.
The board was moving, and Arthur's piece was just a necessary sacrifice to draw Michell and Célia's attention away from the real objective. Michael closed the tablet. He knew that the next move would not come from the soil of Anacostia, but from within HQ itself.