CHAPTER TWO: The Third Name
1043 Words
Maya didn't go home that night.
She told herself it was the rain — heavy and mean against the newsroom windows, the kind that made cabs disappear and umbrellas useless. But that wasn't it. She'd walked home in worse. She stayed because she couldn't close the laptop. Because every time she tried, she saw those two names sitting in that document like they were waiting for company.
Marcus Webb. Sandra Obi.
She ordered bad coffee from the vending machine down the hall, pulled her cardigan tighter, and went back to work.
The public records portal was slow at this hour — slower than usual, if that was even possible. She ran search after search, varying the terms, widening the net. *Halo Properties complaints. Daniel Croft housing violations. Crest Avenue deaths. Eastside accidental deaths.* Most of it returned nothing useful. Bureaucratic noise. Closed cases, outdated filings, the usual city paper trail that led nowhere interesting.
Then she tried something different.
She searched the housing authority complaint database directly, filtering for any complaints filed against Halo Properties in the last three years. The system wheezed. The hourglass spun for so long she thought it had frozen.
Forty-one complaints came back.
Maya stared at the number. Forty-one. For a company that size, operating across dozens of properties, that wasn't unusual on its own. Developers collected complaints the way they collected permits — constantly, inevitably, mostly without consequence.
But she wasn't looking at all forty-one. She was looking for something specific.
She started cross-referencing. Complaint filed. Name of filer. Date. Then she opened a second tab and ran each name through the city's death records — a public database most people didn't know existed, maintained by the county coroner's office and updated monthly.
It took two hours.
She found him on the twenty-third name.
*Elijah Tran, 28. Drowning. Ruled accidental. Body recovered from the Harlow River.*
Maya's hand hovered over the mouse.
Elijah Tran had filed a complaint against Halo Properties Group. Unlawful eviction from a building on the city's Northside — a building that, according to a quick search, had been demolished four months later to make way for a Halo Properties luxury tower now valued at three hundred million dollars.
Elijah Tran had filed his complaint eleven weeks before they pulled him out of the river.
Maya pushed back from her desk and stood up. She needed to move. She walked to the window and looked out at the rain-soaked street below — yellow taxi lights blurring on the wet asphalt, a lone figure hunched under an awning, the city doing what it always did, moving, breathing, indifferent.
Three names.
Three complaints against the same company. Three accidental deaths. Three different neighborhoods, three different causes of death, spread across fourteen months so that no one would ever think to connect them.
She pressed her forehead against the cold glass.
Someone had thought about this. Someone had been very, very careful.
She went back to the desk and opened the document. Added the third name beneath the other two, her fingers steady even though something beneath her ribs was not.
Marcus Webb.
Sandra Obi.
Elijah Tran.
She sat back and looked at the list.
Then she did something she hadn't planned on doing. Something that would have seemed paranoid an hour ago and now seemed like the most reasonable thing in the world.
She unplugged her work laptop from the office network.
She pulled out her personal phone, turned off the wifi, switched to mobile data. Then she kept searching — off the grid, off the company server, off anything that could be traced back to a journalist at a city newspaper who was suddenly very interested in the wrong people.
The rain hammered the windows.
Maya kept working.
---
By 3 a.m. she had six names.
Six people who had filed complaints against Halo Properties. Six people who were dead. Six rulings of accidental death, spread across three years, five different city neighborhoods, filed under four different precincts.
No pattern visible unless you were looking for one.
She had been looking for one.
She stared at the list until her eyes burned. Then she saved the document to a personal cloud drive she hadn't used in two years, logged out, cleared the history, and shut the laptop.
She needed to think. She needed sleep. She needed, more than anything, to talk to someone she trusted.
The problem was she wasn't sure she trusted anyone anymore.
She pulled on her coat, grabbed her bag, and headed for the door. The newsroom was empty at this hour, the overhead lights dimmed to their nighttime setting, the rows of desks ghostly and quiet. Her footsteps echoed on the hard floor.
She was almost at the elevator when her phone buzzed.
An unknown number. No caller ID. She almost ignored it — spam calls weren't exactly rare at 3 a.m. — but something made her stop. Made her thumb hover over the screen.
She answered.
Silence on the other end. Not dead silence — she could hear breathing. Slow and deliberate, like whoever it was had been holding it and just let it go.
Then a voice. Low. Male. Unhurried, the way a person sounds when they have nothing to be afraid of.
"Miss Reeves."
Her blood went cold.
"You've been busy tonight."
The line went dead.
Maya stood in the empty newsroom, phone pressed to her ear, listening to nothing. The overhead lights hummed. Rain tapped against the high windows. Somewhere in the building a door clicked shut.
She lowered the phone slowly.
They knew her name. They knew she'd been working tonight. Which meant they were watching the building, or they were watching the database, or they were watching her — and any one of those options meant the same terrible thing.
She wasn't just chasing a story anymore.
She was already on their radar.
She looked down at the document still open on her phone screen. Six names in a list. Six dead people who had made the mistake of standing in Daniel Croft's way.
Her thumb hovered over the delete button for exactly three seconds.
Then she locked the phone, dropped it in her bag, and walked out into the rain.
She wasn't deleting anything.
- Writer
