The crime lab at 7:00 AM smelled like burned coffee and floor cleaner. Anaya had slept three hours. The gold watch sat under the magnifier on her bench, and she had been staring at the scratched number for twenty minutes.
It was not random. Someone had held a fine, sharp tool — a needle, maybe a jeweler's pick — and carved the 9 with patience. The lines were clean. Deliberate.
She wrote it in her report: Hand-etched numeral "9" on interior case back, recent, likely tool-made.
At 9:30, Detective Bell walked in without knocking.
"The scratch," Anaya said before he could speak. "It's new. The edges are bright. Somebody put it there in the last week."
"Could be the judge did it himself."
"A man who wears a watch for forty years doesn't carve into it."
Bell rubbed his eyes. "Look, Rao. Old man wanders off, drops his watch, battery dies. That's the story until it isn't."
"It's a wind-up watch," she said. "It doesn't have a battery. Someone stopped it. On purpose. At nine."
He opened his mouth, then closed it. For a moment the only sound was the hum of the lab freezers.
Then his phone buzzed. He read the screen, and something changed in his face — not much, just a small tightening around the jaw.
"What?" Anaya asked.
"Second missing person," he said. "Walter Pruitt. Sixty-eight. Retired county fire inspector. Wife reported him gone this morning."
"When did she last see him?"
Bell was already walking to the door. "Last night. Around nine."
Anaya grabbed her kit. "Where?"
"His house in Halvorsen. Across the state line." He stopped in the doorway. "His wife found something on the kitchen table. She hasn't touched it."
Anaya didn't need to ask. She already knew.
And she was right. Forty minutes later, in a neat yellow kitchen that still smelled of last night's dinner, she bent over a silver wristwatch lying beside a cold cup of tea.
Stopped at 9:00.
She turned it over with gloved fingers.
9.