Two watches. Two missing men. One number.
Anaya spent the whole day building a wall in the lab's back room — photos, timelines, maps. Harlan Vos, retired judge. Walter Pruitt, retired fire inspector. Both in their late sixties or seventies. Both gone at nine at night. Both from Halvorsen, Kansas, a small town she had driven past a hundred times and never stopped in.
"What connects a judge and a fire inspector?" she asked the empty room.
The room didn't answer.
Bell had gone back to the station to deal with reporters. The story had leaked by noon — Two Halvorsen Men Vanish — and her phone had buzzed six times with messages from her best friend Pooja, who worked at Channel 5 and could smell a story through concrete.
Are you on this? Tell me you're on this.
Anaya didn't reply.
She drove home at 8:40 PM, too tired to think. Her apartment building was quiet, the hallway lights humming. She checked her mailbox out of habit. Electric bill. A pizza coupon.
And a small brown package with no stamp and no return address. Just her name, written in careful block letters: ANAYA RAO.
She stood very still.
Every instinct from six years in the crime lab told her not to open it. She carried it upstairs anyway, set it on her kitchen counter, pulled on a pair of gloves from her bag, and cut the tape with a clean blade.
Inside was a sheet of old newspaper, yellow and brittle, folded tight around something small and heavy.
She unfolded it slowly.
A third wristwatch. Steel. Plain. Stopped at 9:00.
But it was the newspaper that made her breath catch. A front page from March 10, 1998. The headline ran across the top in thick black letters:
NINE DEAD IN HALVORSEN FACTORY FIRE
The clock on her microwave changed.
9:00 PM.
And somewhere in the building, a door closed.