The conference program was publicly accessible.
Ethan found it at 6:18 AM on a Friday morning, before Emma was awake, at the kitchen table with coffee he had made at 5:47 because the Net had not let him sleep past 5:30 and he had decided not to pretend otherwise. The hotel's website had the full program posted — a two-day leadership development conference for law enforcement supervisors and command staff, hosted at a hotel in the mid-Wilshire district, October 27-28.
Andersen was listed as a speaker. Friday morning. 10:00 AM session, Room 3B. Topic: Community-Facing Leadership in Active Accountability Frameworks.
The hotel was 1.4 miles from the precinct.
The parking structure adjacent to the hotel was a public commercial structure, seven stories, serving the hotel's overflow and the surrounding retail. The Board had the structure's address mapped against last night's Net vector within fifteen seconds of the hotel address appearing on the screen.
The vector was pointing at the parking structure.
Not the hotel itself. Not the conference room. The parking structure — which was where a person would be if they were moving from the hotel to a vehicle in the twenty minutes on either side of a 10:00 AM speaking slot. Arriving or departing. In a space that was public and had inconsistent camera coverage and was separated from the hotel's interior by sixty feet of open-air transit.
He had six hours.
He spent the first one mapping the structure from the satellite image, the permit records, the security camera placement from the city's vendor database, and the maintenance schedule which had a semi-public posting for the building's HOA notice board that someone had photographed and uploaded to a neighborhood forum in 2019. The Board absorbed each piece and assembled the composite. Level four had a camera gap on the south-east corner. Level six had the stairwell access that the hotel's valet used. Level two was the shortest path from the hotel's side exit to the street.
He spent the second hour not at the desk. Emma made breakfast — she did not ask him anything directly, but she had set his plate on his side of the island and pulled the stool slightly further from the counter before he sat down, which was her way of giving him a wider stance without explaining why. He ate. The food was good. He was aware of it in the specifically animal way of someone whose body needed fuel and had not allowed itself to register it for eight hours.
"You went to the precinct last night," she said. Not accusing. Noting.
"Yes."
"And Andersen was fine."
He looked at her.
"You were looking at me for about two seconds before you left," she said. "I ran the options. Andersen was the one that fit the timing."
He set his fork down. "Andersen was fine. But—" He stopped.
Emma waited.
"The thing I was tracking wasn't at the precinct. It was adjacent to something on her schedule. I found it this morning." He looked at the window. "She's speaking at a conference tomorrow. Hotel downtown. The parking structure next to it is—" A pause. "The angle is right."
Emma did not ask what that meant. She looked at him for a moment with the doctor expression — the one that was not evaluating him as a patient but as a person she had made a decision about a year ago and was noting new data about. "You need backup."
"I know."
"Not me," she said.
"No."
"Tim."
He looked at her.
She looked back. "You've been carrying this alone for three weeks and Tim has been watching you carry it and not asking because you told him you needed a few days. If you're going to be somewhere you have no reason to be, do it with someone who knows your move." She picked up her coffee. "That's basic trauma surgery. Never operate alone if you can avoid it."
He drove to the station.
Tim was at the locker room at 8:15 — already in uniform, already through his first coffee, going through the end-of-week administrative paperwork that accumulated Thursday evening and needed clearing by Friday briefing. He had the specific focused quality he had when the work was procedural and he was only using a third of his attention on it.
Ethan changed. He was three lockers down from Tim and had been for two years and the physical proximity had the texture of routine — familiar, unremarkable. He changed without speaking. Tim initialed the bottom of a form and filed it. Picked up the next one.
"You've been running pattern-checks on parked vehicles for three shifts," Tim said, without looking up. "You told me you were carrying something and needed a few days." He initialed the second form. "It's been nine days."
"I know."
Tim put both forms in the filing stack. He looked at Ethan.
"I've been tracking a threat to Andersen," Ethan said.
Tim's expression did not change.
"I've known there was a window coming for — a while. I've been trying to position correctly and I've been getting the angle wrong." He folded his jacket and put it in the locker. "Tomorrow morning. She's speaking at the leadership conference at the Brennan Hotel. There's a parking structure adjacent to the hotel. I think that's the correct angle."
"How do you know."
This was the question. Not how do you know she's in danger — Tim had already calibrated that Ethan's instincts were reliable in some way that defied normal explanation. The question was the specific one that had been building since the building collapse, since Tim had told Grey his boots had "scary instincts," since the serial killer case when FBI agents had described Ethan as operating on a frequency they could not name. Tim was asking it directly and without aggression, in the specific way he asked direct questions: as a statement of something he needed before he could continue.
"I don't know how I know," Ethan said.
Tim looked at him.
"I mean it literally. I can tell you I have very good instincts and I've been right before and that would be true and it would also be a compression of something I don't have a clean explanation for." He closed the locker door. "When I was in the building collapse, I knew the family was alive before I could have known. I've been like this since before I met you and I have never been able to explain it, and right now I am telling you that Andersen is in danger tomorrow at that parking structure because everything I have is pointing at that location at that time, and I need to be there, and I can't be there alone, and I can't go there officially."
The locker room was quiet. Somewhere down the corridor, a radio crackled and was adjusted.
Tim held the eye contact for four seconds.
"Where's the parking structure," Tim said.
Ethan gave him the address.
Tim picked up his remaining forms. "We're both off tomorrow. I can be there at eight."
"The session starts at ten."
"I know. Eight." He looked at the forms. "Do you want coffee before briefing."
Ethan looked at him for a moment. The weight of the last nine days sitting in the specific pocket that the building collapse and the serial killer case and Eddie Marsh had all been filed in — the pocket that held the things he had carried alone — and now Tim Bradford was standing in the Mid-Wilshire locker room asking him if he wanted coffee before briefing, because he had decided that the what mattered more than the how and he was not going to make Ethan explain something that was not explainable.
"Yes," Ethan said.
"Good." Tim walked toward the break room. "The machine's been fixed, by the way."
Ethan followed him.