The message came through the department's anonymous tip line at 3:17 AM on a Wednesday, which Detective Lena Park knew because she was awake at 3:17 AM on a Wednesday, sitting at her kitchen table with a glass of water she'd poured an hour ago and not yet touched.
She had been awake, more or less, since the Mariner case closed. That had been eleven days ago. Sleep and she were currently conducting negotiations.
The message came in as a voice recording, standard practice for the anonymous line. The department's system automatically flagged unusual pattern anomalies for overnight review, which meant it came to Lena's personal device with a priority notification and the automated classification: *Specific. Credible detail level. Recommend morning review.*
She listened to it at 3:18 AM.
The voice was processed — filtered through some kind of modulator, though not the cheap kind, not the downloadable app variety. This was expensive filtering, the kind that didn't just change pitch but actively disrupted voiceprint analysis. She noted this and kept listening.
*"There's going to be a murder,"* the voice said. *"Not a crime of passion. A planned killing, the kind that gets mistaken for an accident. The intended victim is Thomas Krauss — financial analyst, lives in the Meridian district, commutes on the 7:10 Green Line every morning without exception. He's going to have an accident on the railway platform in six days. The person responsible will be someone already known to your department. You should look closely at people who were in the Hargrove district on the night of March 4th three years ago."*
A pause. Lena noted the pause.
*"Detective Park. I know you're the one who'll hear this. I've been watching how cases are assigned in your unit. You're good at the pattern work. This will require pattern work."*
Another pause.
*"He knows you. Or someone close to you does. Be careful about who you tell."*
End of recording.
Lena set the phone down on the kitchen table. She looked at it for a moment. Then she picked it up and listened again, because she had learned, a long time ago, that the second listen was always different from the first.
He knows you.
---
By 6 AM she had the background on Thomas Krauss: forty-one years old, seventeen years at Mercer-Bell Financial Group, unremarkable credit profile, one speeding citation in 2019, divorced, no children, no criminal history, no obvious connection to any case currently active on her desk. He lived in a fourth-floor apartment in the Meridian district and had, according to the transit authority data she'd pulled quietly rather than through the official channel, taken the 7:10 Green Line every weekday for the past three years without exception.
The informant had checked.
She sat with this for a while.
Anonymous tips were common. Credible anonymous tips were less common. Anonymous tips that accurately predicted the methodology of a murder before the murder occurred were rare enough to be extraordinary. Anonymous tips that addressed the receiving detective by name and suggested she be careful about disclosure were in a different category entirely.
She thought about the March 4th reference. Three years ago. Hargrove district.
She had been in the Hargrove district on the night of March 4th three years ago. She and her partner, Detective Rios, responding to a reported domestic disturbance that had resolved itself by the time they arrived. Standard call. Nothing remarkable about it.
Except she had never put that information in any public report. Her daily log, her location data — those were internal, access-controlled. The informant would have needed to be very good with systems or very well-connected to know where she'd been on a given night three years ago.
She thought about who else had been in Hargrove that night.
She stopped thinking about it. That direction was too fast, too soon. She needed data, not inference.
---
Her partner was already at his desk when she arrived at the precinct at 7:45. Marco Rios had been her partner for four years — careful, principled, the kind of detective who assembled his cases like a craftsman and took the process personally. She had trusted him with her life on three separate occasions. She trusted him more than she trusted most things.
*He knows you. Or someone close to you does.*
She filed the thought very deliberately to the back of her mind.
"Hear anything interesting last night?" she asked, pulling up her chair.
He looked up from his monitor. "The Yuen case, finally — DA's accepted the amended charging document. Goes to trial in October." He studied her face with the attentiveness of someone who had been reading her tells for four years. "You look like you didn't sleep."
"I didn't." She was already pulling up the Krauss background on her own monitor. "I had an interesting tip."
"Interesting how?"
She summarised it. She listened to herself summarise it and noted what she included and what she left out. She included the methodology detail, the name, the timeline. She left out *He knows you* and the March 4th reference.
She watched him while she talked. She hated that she was watching him. She did it anyway.
"Anonymous tip predicting a murder six days in advance," Marco said, when she'd finished. "Either someone is very involved or someone is very good at social engineering."
"Either way, Krauss doesn't know he's a target. We need to talk to him."
"Informally, before we log it?"
She hesitated. "I want to see his reaction before this becomes official. If he knows who might want him dead, I want to hear it without lawyers in the room."
Marco nodded slowly. "I'll drive."
---
Thomas Krauss was a thin, precise man who made coffee in a specific order and aligned his chair parallel to the desk before sitting down. He listened to their summary with an expression that progressed from polite professional courtesy through mild confusion to something Lena categorised, carefully, as not-quite-the-right-kind of fear.
Not the fear of a man who had been informed he might be murdered.
The fear of a man who had been afraid of something for a while and was now wondering if this was it.
"Do you have any reason to believe someone might intend you harm?" Lena asked.
He looked at his hands. "No," he said. "Nothing specific."
"But not nothing."
A long pause. "I've been getting the feeling recently — the past few weeks — that I'm being followed. I haven't seen anyone specific. Just the feeling." He looked up. "I work with financial data. Sensitive accounts. I've always assumed that if I was ever targeted it would be because of what I have access to."
"What do you have access to?" Marco asked.
Another pause. Longer.
"I'd need authorisation to discuss specifics," Krauss said. "But I can tell you that three months ago I was asked to review a set of transfers that didn't make sense to me. I raised a flag internally. The flag was... removed. And the person who removed it is someone very senior."
He looked at them both.
"I made a copy," he said quietly. "I shouldn't have. I don't know what to do with it."
Lena looked at Marco. Marco was looking at Krauss with his professional expression, attentive and neutral.
She looked back at Krauss. "We're going to need you to be very careful about your routine for the next six days," she said. "And I'd like the name of the person who removed your flag."
His mouth tightened. He gave her the name.
On the way out of the building, Marco got a call and stepped aside to take it.
Lena stood on the street and thought about the name Krauss had given her, and the March 4th reference, and the voice that had known she would be the one to listen.
*Be careful about who you tell.*
The name Krauss had given her was someone Marco had worked with before. Closely, for over a year, on a case that had made both their careers.
Lena stood very still in the morning crowd and made herself think about this clearly.
She put her phone in her pocket and did not call anyone.
