Part 4
Noah did not open the gate right away. He stood beside Ranger in the wet weeds outside the abandoned freight terminal and listened to the wind move through the broken panels of the loading bays. The property had been city-owned since the company folded, fenced off after vandals stripped copper from the offices. Officially, no one was supposed to be inside without authorization. Unofficially, half the east side knew there were gaps in the fence.
Ranger knew one of them.
He led Noah along the perimeter with his head low and his leash loose, not dragging him, not guessing, simply moving with the grim certainty of a dog returning to the last page of an unfinished command. Near the west side, behind a stand of scrub trees and discarded pallets, the chain link had curled back just enough for a man to squeeze through. Ranger slipped in first, then looked back until Noah followed.
“I’m here,” Noah murmured.
The words steadied the dog. They steadied Noah too.
The west loading bay faced the river, where freight trucks used to back in beneath long metal awnings. Rust had eaten through the gutters. Rainwater dripped steadily onto the concrete, gathering in black puddles that reflected the broken roofline. Ranger walked past all of it to a steel service door half hidden behind stacked crates. He stopped there and lowered his nose to the bottom seam.
Noah saw the scratches before he crouched.
They were old but deep, gouged into the paint near the floor in frantic arcs. A dog’s claws. Not from one attempt, either. Ranger had tried again and again to get through that door.
Noah rested two fingers near the marks. “You were out here.”
Ranger’s breathing changed.
The door was locked, but the frame had rotted around an old maintenance entrance twenty feet down. Noah did not force anything. He found the gap already open, ducked through, and unclipped Ranger only after they were inside the bay. The dog moved into the darkness without needing a command.
The air held the sour smell of damp wood, oil, and old dust. Noah turned on his flashlight and swept the beam across the floor. Broken pallets, a plastic chair on its side, a scattering of yellowed paperwork, tire tracks impressed in grime. Nothing that shouted. Nothing easy. Scenes abandoned for months had a way of becoming quiet enough to lie.
Ranger crossed the bay to a darker stain on the concrete and stopped. He circled once, then sat beside it, his body rigid. The beam trembled slightly in Noah’s hand before he made himself slow down and look like an officer instead of a man following a ghost.
There were marks around the stain. Scrapes. Drag lines. A crushed button from a uniform shirt wedged near a crack in the concrete. Noah photographed each one, careful not to touch more than he had to. When Ranger stood again, he walked to the interior wall and pressed his nose against a low vent near the floor.
At first Noah saw only dust.
Then he saw cloth.
He used a pen to ease the object free. It was a torn strip of black nylon wrapped around something hard and rectangular. The casing beneath was cracked, caked with grime, but the shape was unmistakable.
A body camera.
Noah turned it over. The department label on the back had been scraped, but not completely. Three letters remained beneath the mud: C.W.
Caleb Ward.
Ranger pressed against Noah’s side with enough force to make him shift his weight. The dog was not excited. His body shook with the effort of staying still.
“You guarded this,” Noah said. “Didn’t you?”
The dog lowered his head.
Noah sealed the camera in an evidence bag from his kit, then took photographs of the vent, the doorway, the scratches, the floor. He knew every choice he made could be questioned later. He also knew that if he walked this evidence into the wrong office, it might disappear before morning.
He was re-clipping Ranger’s leash when the dog stopped breathing for half a second.
Noah followed the dog’s stare toward the broken office windows above the loading bay. Outside, beyond the fence, headlights moved slowly along the service road. Not traffic. Too slow for traffic. The vehicle rolled past once, disappeared behind the old dispatch building, then came back without turning on a spotlight.
Noah killed his flashlight.
Ranger lowered himself to the floor without being told, a trained response so precise it made Noah’s pulse kick hard. Through the rain-streaked glass, an unmarked department SUV idled at the curb. The driver’s window came down. Static cracked from a radio inside. A man’s voice carried faintly through the broken pane. – “Mercer isn’t answering…”
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