Lei found the crack in the evidence on the second night, and he found it, appropriately enough, in the one detail everyone else had been too rattled to properly examine — the wax.
He'd spent the first of his three days chasing dead ends — questioning palace clerks who knew nothing, tracking rumors that led nowhere, growing more frustrated with every hour that passed without progress. It was well past midnight on the second night when he finally burst into Jian's study, exhaustion written across every line of his face but something sharper underneath it too, the particular energy of a man who'd finally found the thread worth pulling.
