Ravenport

Chapter 7 : Global Flavors

Leo Mercer’s office was in a modest four-story building in Ravenport’s commercial district, a area that tried to maintain a veneer of prosperity but showed cracks of neglect at every corner. The building’s facade was beige stone, stained by years of weather, the entryway flanked by two potted plants that were more brown than green.

The door to Mercer’s business, ‘Global Flavors Import/Export,’ was locked. Donovan produced a key from the wife, provided through the liaison officer. The lock turned with a soft click, and we stepped inside.

The office was small, tidy, and utterly normal. A desk of dark wood, a computer monitor, a phone, a stack of invoices. Filing cabinets lined one wall. A map of the world hung on another, dotted with pins in various ports. The air smelled of paper and a faint, lingering scent of spices—cinnamon, maybe, or cardamom. It was the office of a man who lived a quiet, orderly life.

“Nothing jumps out,” Donovan muttered, starting to riffle through the papers on the desk. “Bills. Contracts. Shipping manifests.”

I moved to the filing cabinets, opening the first drawer. It was organized alphabetically by client name. I scanned the tabs—‘Abernathy Distillers,’ ‘Bengal Spice Co,’ ‘Costa Rican Coffee Collective.’ Nothing sinister. Nothing that hinted at a connection to a warehouse dissection.

“Check his computer,” I said. “Last emails. Calendar entries for yesterday.”

Donovan sat at the desk, waking the computer. The screen glowed, showing a generic desktop background—a sunset over a beach. He opened the email client. “Last sent email was to his wife, at 4:47 PM. ‘Meeting running late, be home by eight.’ Nothing after that.”

“Calendar?”

He clicked. “Entry for yesterday, 5:00 PM. ‘Client Meeting – J. Smith.’ No location. No contact info attached.”

“J. Smith,” I repeated. “Generic. Could be real, could be a placeholder.” I kept scanning the files. In the third drawer, I found a section labeled ‘Personal.’ It wasn’t locked. Inside were a few folders—tax documents, a will, some personal correspondence. And one folder, labeled ‘Projects.’

I pulled it out. It was thin. Inside were a few sheets of paper, handwritten notes in Leo Mercer’s neat, looping script. They weren’t business notes. They were… musings.

One page had a list of words: ‘Luminance. Refraction. Cold spectrum. Non-thermal emission.’

Another had a sketch—a rough diagram of a circle, with smaller circles inside it, like a target or a mandala. In the center of the diagram, he had written: ‘The source is internal. The display is external.’

Donovan looked over my shoulder. “What the hell is that?”

“I don’t know.” I felt a cold prickling at the base of my skull. This wasn’t spice import paperwork. This was something else. Something abstract. “He was researching something. Or someone was researching something, and he was involved.”

“Researching light?” Donovan’s voice was low, skeptical. “The homeless guy said cold light.”

“Yes.” I flipped to the last page. There was a name, written alone, underlined twice: ‘Dr. Alistair Frost.’ No title, no affiliation. Just the name.

“We need to find this Frost,” I said, closing the folder. “Whatever Mercer was into, it wasn’t just coffee and cinnamon.”