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Ripley’s brief moment of amusement vanished. She crossed her arms again, the familiar posture of deliberation. ‘Hold on, Dark. We don’t have a warrant for this. We don’t even technically know it is a safe.’

‘Mia, come on. It’s a safe disguised as furniture in the home of a murdered ex-FBI profiler. We’d be stupid not to look inside. What more probable cause do you need?’

‘Need? Officially, you need a judge to agree with that chain of logic,’ Ripley countered.

‘Unofficially, you still can’t justify breaking into this thing based purely on your gut feeling about some woman named Jennifer Marlowe who was apparently murdered 50 years ago.

That’s not enough. Anything we find could be inadmissible. ’

Ella sighed. Ripley was right, as usual. Procedure was procedure for a reason. Busting open a safe based on a phantom memory and a hunch felt reckless, even if the hunch screamed truth in Ella’s gut.

‘Okay, fine. We log it, we wait for-’

Her words were cut off by a soft sound from the doorway. A sleek tabby cat padded silently into the office. It paused, surveyed the two intruders with unnerving feline composure, then let out a plaintive meow directly at Ella.

‘Kids and cats. You’re two for two, Dark.’

‘It’s my lucky day.’ Ella extended a hand. The cat sniffed her fingers cautiously, then seemed to deem her acceptable and rubbed its flank against her leg. ‘Poor guy. Must be lonely. Wondering where Frank is.’

‘Yeah,’ Ripley murmured absently. ‘The shelter will get him sometime today.’

Ella scratched the cat behind the ears. It arched its back and purred, a small engine vibrating against her shin. ‘Still think we should call forensics back? See if they can get this thing open officially?’ She looked up at Ripley for an answer, but her partner wasn’t looking at the safe anymore.

Ripley stood unnaturally still. She was gazing at the new intruder as though it held the secrets to the universe in its backside.

‘Mia?’ Ella prompted. ‘Oh. You’re allergic, right?’

Ripley didn’t respond immediately. Her stare remained fixed on the tabby. Ella felt a prickle of unease. Ripley wasn’t prone to zoning out, especially not at a crime scene.

‘Mia, what the hell are you looking at?’ Ella asked.

Slowly, as if surfacing from deep water, Ripley raised her eyes to meet Ella’s. There was a dawning, incredulous light in them.

‘The collar,’ Ripley said. ‘Look at the cat’s collar.’

Ella frowned. She leaned over and gently tilted the cat’s head.

A simple brown leather collar, slightly worn. Attached to it was a small, silver, bone-shaped tag. Engraved on the tag, in neat capital letters, was a single word.

MARLOWE.

Not Fluffy. Not Patches. Marlowe. The same surname as the 1976 Palm Harbor victim. Jennifer Marlowe. The skepticism and procedural caution had evaporated from Ripley’s face.

‘That can’t be a coincidence, can it?’ Ella said. The cat, oblivious, continued its purring inspection of her sneakers.

‘Okay. I admit, that’s quite bizarre.’

Ella was still underneath the desk. ‘So, we look?’

Ripley stared at the safe again. She chewed the inside of her lip. Finally, she blew out a puff of surrender. ‘Alright. To hell with the warrant for now.’

‘Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

‘Yeah. Only problem is the keypad. We need the code.’

The code. That was Ella’s next barrier. She tried to crawl inside Frank Sullivan’s head.

This wasn’t like some online account where you changed the password every six weeks.

This was a safe. The code for a safe was bedrock.

Something permanent. Something you could recall half-asleep, half-drunk, or staring down the barrel of your own mortality.

What numbers mattered to a man like Frank?

Not birthdays or anniversaries; too sentimental, too easily guessed by anyone who bothered to check public records.

Frank was Bureau to the bone. His paranoia wasn’t the flamboyant kind.

He wouldn’t pick the street address or his social security number’s last four digits.

Too sloppy. He’d built a career reading people, anticipating their moves. He wouldn’t make it easy.

Ella scanned the office again, not for clues, but for the feel of the man.

The meticulous order. The true crime paperbacks.

The photo of him and Ripley frozen in their prime.

He lived in the past, professionally speaking.

His identity was bolted to his career. What number was Frank Sullivan?

What sequence represented the core of him, the part that wouldn’t change even when the world outside did?

Then it hit her.

The plane ride here. Something Ripley had said.

‘His badge number… He had it tattooed on his shoulder right before he retired. Said if he ever got dementia, if he ever forgot who he was, that number might trigger something.’

A number literally etched into his skin. The ultimate identifier.

‘Mia,’ Ella said, turning from the safe. ‘What was Frank’s badge number again?’

‘Eight-three-seven-four-two-nine. Do you think…?

‘I do think.’ Ella turned back to the keypad. Her fingers felt steady as she pressed the small, responsive buttons.

8…3…7…4…2…9

She hit the small ENTER key below the sequence.

For a heartbeat, nothing. Then, a quiet electronic thump resonated from within the metal box. A small green LED blinked once above the keypad. The heavy little door clicked and sprang outward, just a fraction of an inch, and released the scent of old paper.

Ella felt a jolt of pure adrenaline dumping into her system. Her pulse kicked against her ribs like a trapped bird.

She reached inside and carefully slid out the topmost bundle. It was heavier than it looked; a thick manila folder, yellowed at the edges, held together by two thick rubber bands that looked ready to snap from sheer age.

Then she saw the name of the file.

JENNIFER MARLOWE – PALM HARBOR P.D. CASE #76-1109 – UNSOLVED.

This was it. The anchor point her memory had been snagged on.

Ella tore off the rubber bands and pulled the file open.

The first page wasn’t typed text. It was a photograph.

A flimsy, dark reproduction, maybe a photocopy of a photocopy, bleeding into shades of gray.

It showed a woman slumped in an armchair.

The room around her was a time capsule of dated décor; dark wood, fussy patterns. Mundane suburban death, almost.

Except for one thing.

Where vibrant, living eyes should have been, two milky-white, perfectly round stones were nestled deep in the sockets.

The white stones. They weren’t a phantom memory. They weren’t a distorted detail from some other case.

They were real.

And Frank Sullivan had known about them.