“I left it charging down here when I crashed. What’s going on?”
She was already at the table, pulling out her laptop. “Sit down. You need to see this.”
He did.
The thread had run through the night.
He read it from where he'd left off—GraveDigger's upload of morgue photographs and clean, concise notes on the personal effects she’d found bagged and labeled. The group had taken them and run.
Sextant had moved first, flagging the injection site Morgan—but not GraveDigger—had documented. Under Pennsylvania statute, that finding alone should have triggered a mandatory toxicology hold. Sextant laid out the procedural failure without editorializing. The implication sat in the thread: either the Pine Ridge PD hadn't done their job, or they’d made a conscious decision not to.
Ledger had run the financial angle on the clothing description Morgan had documented. Quality construction, well-maintained. Ledger mapped the expense profile against known operational funding patterns and found the absence of a traceable footprint where one should have existed. His conclusion: this man had been resourced and erased, and that combination had a specific and documented profile.
Halcyon had found the photograph. The facial recognition match came from an open source search through Philadelphia news archives. A bystander image from a crime scene, the kind of incidental photography that accumulated around public tragedy without anyone paying attention to what was in the background. A wide street shot. Police tape. Investigators moving through the scene.
And behind the tape, a man watching.
Medium height, medium build. Dark hair. He blended. No one would give him a second glance but had somehow ended up on a slab in the Pine Ridge morgue.
Archivist used the Philly connection to create an overlay. Patrick recognized Riley's work before he registered her handle—meticulous layering of documented organized crime operational territories across Philadelphia mapped against the location of the crime scene in the archive photograph Halcyon hadsurfaced. She'd placed the dead man's last known location inside a territory that had a name, even if the thread was careful not to use it directly.
Then NorthStar had posted.
NorthStar:Who was he working for?
Patrick followed the link Halcyon had included to the news article.
He hadn’t heard of the case but that wasn’t unusual. Philadelphia homicides didn't make it to northeastern Pennsylvania unless something made them impossible to ignore, and this one had been kept quiet enough that even a targeted search returned almost nothing. Thatwasunusual, even for a city known for its crime rate. Which could mean someone had gone to considerable effort to bury it.
He studied the photograph for a long time, repeatedly zooming in and increasing the resolution until he had a crystal-clear image of the man behind the tape, quietly watching the scene.
Patrick sat back, an uncomfortable feeling tightening his gut. “It can’t just be a coincidence, right?”
“You mean the same guy in that picture ending up dead in Pine Ridge on Sullivan land while a Philly MDI is on forced leave because she wouldn’t sign off on a case?” Riley deadpanned.
“Yeah, that.”
“No, I don’t think it’s a coincidence. But Philly’s a big city. Morgan’s not the only MDI on staff.”
Patrick zoomed out, scanned the photo again. “There,” he said pointing to a figure near the edge. “That’s Morgan.”
Riley squinted and put her face to the screen. “How can you tell? That person is wearing a hat and a jacket and facing away from the camera.”
He couldn’t explain it. He just knew.
“Can you work your magic and find out if Morgan worked that case?” Riley asked.
“Public records typically don’t mention the MDI that worked a scene,” Patrick said, shaking his head. “The internal ME records would have that information, though.”
“Or you could just ask her,” Riley said drily.
Patrick smiled. “Or I could just ask her. Not sure she’ll tell me, but it’s worth a shot.”
Riley’s expression grew serious. “Sooner rather than later, right? Because if thisissomehow related, Morgan could be in danger.”
He knew. His gut was saying exactly the same thing. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Good. Keep me posted. And Patrick?”