THE CLEAN LIST

CHAPTER FOUR: Wrong Hands

Maya's editor was a man who didn't believe in conspiracies.

That wasn't an opinion — it was a professional position. Frank Deluca had been in journalism for thirty years and his standing rule was simple. When a story felt too neat, too connected, too much like something out of a movie, you slowed down. You checked twice. You didn't run with it until it was airtight.

Maya had worked under him for six years and respected that rule.

Today it was going to be a problem.

She found him in his office at half past eight, door open, glasses on, reading something on his screen with the focused scowl he wore whenever someone had turned in copy he wasn't happy with. He looked up when she knocked on the door frame.

"You look terrible," he said.

"I need to talk to you about something."

"Sit down."

She sat. She put her notebook on the desk between them, opened to the page with the six names. She walked him through it carefully — Marcus Webb first, then Sandra Obi, then Elijah Tran, then the other three. The complaint dates. The death dates. The gaps in between. Raymond Cole and the photograph and the tag in the housing authority system that someone was using to make complaints disappear.

Frank listened without interrupting. That was a good sign. Frank interrupting meant he'd already decided you were wrong. Frank staying quiet meant he was still processing.

When she finished he sat back in his chair and looked at the ceiling for a moment.

"The phone call," he said. "Last night. Unknown number."

"Yes."

"Could have been anything."

"It could have been," Maya said. "It wasn't."

He looked at her. "You don't know that."

"Frank. They said my name."

He was quiet for a moment. She could see him running the logic the way he always did — methodical, unsentimental, poking at every weak point.

"The photograph," he said. "Croft and Vance and Prestor sitting together at a city function. That's not evidence of anything, Maya. These people move in the same circles. Of course they're at the same events."

"I know that."

"Six deaths over three years. Different causes, different neighborhoods. A defense attorney could drive a truck through the gaps in that pattern."

"I know that too," she said. "I'm not saying I'm ready to print. I'm saying I have enough to keep pulling and I need you to know what I'm pulling on."

Frank took his glasses off and cleaned them. He did that when he was thinking hard about something he didn't want to think about.

"The system tag," he said. "CL. That's your strongest thread."

"That's what I think too."

"You need the nephew on record."

"I'm not going near the nephew yet. Not until I have more around him. If this system exists the way Raymond described it, there will be other people who've noticed it. I just need to find them."

Frank put his glasses back on. Looked at her for a long moment with the expression she'd seen him wear before — not quite worry, not quite admiration, somewhere in between.

"Who else knows you're looking at this?"

"No one."

"Keep it that way," he said. "Don't put anything on the company server. Don't discuss it in the building."

Maya thought about the empty newsroom at 3 a.m. The database searches she'd run on office wifi before she caught herself and switched to her phone.

She didn't tell Frank that part.

"I need a week," she said.

"You have three days," he said. "After that I need something concrete or I need you back on the city council beat. Understood?"

Three days.

She picked up her notebook and stood.

"Understood."

She spent the morning in the public library.

Not the closest branch — she took two buses to get to the main branch downtown, the old stone building on Carver Avenue with the high ceilings and the reading rooms that still smelled like the 1970s. She used one of the public terminals there, logged into nothing personal, and started searching.

She was looking for a thread Frank hadn't mentioned but that had been sitting in the back of her mind since she left Raymond Cole's kitchen.

The evictions.

Halo Properties had filed eviction orders across the city for four years. Judge Allan Prestor had signed off on all of them. That meant there were tenants — real people, dozens of them — who had been pushed out of their homes to make way for Halo's towers. Some of those people had filed complaints. Six of them were dead.

But some of them were still alive.

And some of them might still be angry enough to talk.

She cross-referenced the eviction records with the complaint database, filtering for cases where the complainant was still listed as active in the system — no death record, no archived file, just an open complaint sitting unanswered in the bureaucratic void.

She got eleven names.

She spent the next two hours tracking down contact information for each one. Phone numbers, addresses, social media profiles, anything public. Eight of them had moved — some out of the city entirely, which she understood. When a judge signs a piece of paper and a developer sends men with trucks, sometimes you just go.

Three of them were still in the city.

She wrote down all three addresses and closed the browser. Cleared the history. Logged out of everything.

She was folding the paper into her notebook when her phone rang.

Raymond Cole.

She answered immediately.

"Mr. Cole."

His voice was different from this morning. Quieter. Tighter around the edges.

"Miss Reeves. I need to tell you something and I need you to listen carefully."

"I'm listening."

"After you left this morning, I had a visitor. A man I don't know. He said he was from the city housing authority, doing a follow-up on my complaint. Very polite. Very professional." A pause. "He spent a long time looking at my kitchen table."

Maya's hand tightened on the phone.

The papers. The photographs. Everything Raymond had laid out on his kitchen table when she was there.

"Did he take anything?" she asked.

"No. I'd put everything away before I answered the door." Another pause. "But Maya — he knew your name."

The library was warm and quiet around her. Somebody's child was crying softly in the picture book section nearby. An old man two terminals down was watching a video with the sound too loud.

"He asked me if I'd spoken to anyone from the Courier," Raymond said. "He mentioned you by name."

Between leaving Raymond's house and now, someone had flagged her visit. Either they were watching Raymond's building, or they were watching her, or both.

She thought about the unknown number. The voice on the phone.

You've been busy tonight.

They weren't just watching the database. They were watching everything.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

"I'm fine. I'm not easy to rattle." A dry pause. "Thirty-one years on this block, Miss Reeves. I've seen worse than a man in a suit asking polite questions."

"Don't answer the door again if you don't know who it is," she said. "And call me if anything else happens. Anything at all."

"I will."

She hung up and sat still for a moment in the warm library quiet.

They knew about Raymond. They knew about her. They were moving fast — faster than she'd expected, which meant they were more organized than she'd assumed, which meant the system Raymond's nephew had described wasn't just a filing quirk or a bureaucratic accident.

It was operational. Right now. Today.

She picked up her notebook and her bag and walked out of the library into the hard midday light.

She had three days.

She crossed the first of the three remaining names off her list — too exposed, too close to people who were already watching. She looked at the second name and the Southside address beside it.

Then she started walking.