SOPHIE ALVAREZ'S POV
The numbers never lied, but the people who moved them did. That was the first lesson they drilled into you as a crime analyst. The data was pure and was obedient. It followed patterns, rhythms, probabilities. Human beings were the messy part, the irrational variable that turned a clean spreadsheet into a crime scene.
For ten years, I had lived inside those patterns, and for the last two, most of them had revolved around one man. Most people in the department saw Nate the way the newspapers did: a decorated captain, a war hero, the kind of officer who kept a system like ours from collapsing under its own weight.
But numbers told a deeper story, and I had watched the subtle shift begin months before anyone else noticed. Tiny anomalies are buried in the metadata of case files. Changes in the hours he logged into the system. Searches that didn't match the official direction of the investigation.
