Page 25 of Rogue’s Mark

Three blocks from the Rot, there's a corner I have no business recognizing, but I recognize it anyway.

It's nothing now. A boarded-up unit on one side, a chain-link lot on the other, weeds coming up through the cracked asphalt. Ten years ago, this was the corner where my father used to stop on Sunday mornings when we walked to the market on Clement Street. There was a coffee cart there, a man who'd been in the same spot for years, where my father always got a black coffee and I got a hot chocolate. I remember asking for extra marshmallows and being scolded by my father for my rudeness. But the man running the cart just laughed and filled my cup until it nearly overflowed.

The cart is gone, the man is gone, and the corner is gone, in every way that matters.

I don't say any of this out loud. The city is full of corners like this and saying so doesn't make it any better.

I glance at Rogue and watch something cross his face, quick, as we pass a shuttered garage on the left. He doesn't say anything either.

We just keep walking.

Rogue steps in line to walk beside me without breaking stride, which is such a Rogue thing to do. He's just suddenly there, not looking at me but fully reading the street.

"You good?" he asks.

"Yeah."

He nods once, staying beside me for another half block and then drifts back to his position, reading the next doorway, the next parked car, the next thing I probably would have missed in my haze of memories.

I think about my father walking these streets, building his case, knowing what was coming and doing it anyway.

I think about the coffee cart corner and the extra marshmallows.

I keep walking.

15

VI

The property office is on Merchant Street.

Merchant Street was where you went when you needed business things handled, like a notary, a title company, or an accountant. My father had an office three doors down from where we're standing right now, back when being the mayor of Rothwell meant you needed a place to work that wasn't city hall. I spent a lot of Saturday mornings doing homework in the waiting room while he took meetings.

His office is a nail salon now. Or was. The sign is still there but the windows are dark. I see a few old fashion magazines littering the floor and a small pile of bills just inside the mail slot, waiting for someone who's never going to come.

I don't mention this. I don't trust my voice not to break.

The property office is the kind of place where you go when you need a company that looks real on paper but doesn't actually do anything. Frosted glass on the door, no signage beyond a small placard with a suite number, the kind of hidden-in-plain-sight that's a choice. Rogue looks at it, then nods once, which means we're going in.

Sting stays at the door.

Inside, there's a front desk with nobody behind it and a wall lined with filing cabinets. A man in his fifties emerges from the back office, takes one look at Armen, and after a moment's hesitation where he seems like he'd really like to kick us out, throws us a forced smile.

"Hello," he says without any hint of enthusiasm.

Armen does the talking. He's good, formal without being aggressive, precise without showing his hand, asking for what he needs and nothing extra. The man produces three folders without being asked twice. Armen sets them on the desk and Rogue goes through them.

I watch Rogue work.

He doesn't touch anything he doesn't need to. An old digital camera I've never seen him use comes out and he photographs each page from the folders in sequence, unhurried, like he's done this before. His eyes move across each document before the camera does. Read first, record second.

I lean in beside him.

Three folders. Three different fake companies, all pointing to the same money moving through the same hands. Fischer's name is on all of them, no surprise there. These are the paper trails my father spent a year quietly building a case around, fake businesses set up to make stolen public money look like legitimate investment. The kind of thing that's invisible until someone knows what they're looking at.

I know what I'm looking at. Months of living inside my father's case files will do that.

But there's a second name.