The unfinished scarf was in Ward's apartment, wrapped in brown paper beneath a stack of unpaid bills. Brooks obtained his consent to retrieve it. Its yarn was identical to Caleb's, but the blue star contained two hidden rows of stitches rather than one. Mara recognized Daniel's old habit: he used knitting patterns to remember number sequences because he had never trusted written passwords.
She had once teased him about making a spy novel out of household crafts. Now, with his name poisoned and a decade missing, the small private joke made her hands shake. She unfolded the scarf on Naomi's office table and counted the stitches. Ruth translated the sequence against a former courthouse index. It pointed to a sealed civil deposition from an unrelated zoning dispute, filed under an ordinary case number.
The deposition belonged to Claire Benton, a county accountant who had disappeared after reporting suspicious municipal payments. Publicly, Claire had been described as a disgruntled employee who'd falsified expense claims. In the sealed testimony, she identified Crescent Holdings as a conduit for illicit payments tied to witness intimidation. Her final paragraph mentioned an officer who had promised to hide her identity until she could testify safely: Daniel Turner.
Brooks traced the deposition to a federal protective order. Someone had tried to unseal it twice using forged authorizations. Both requests originated from legal representatives linked to Simon Keene. Brooks recognized the pattern: Vale's allies weren't merely hiding evidence; they were hunting living witnesses who could authenticate it.
Mara wondered why Daniel would send Ward a scarf instead of contacting her directly. Naomi answered carefully. A package mailed to the wounded officer might be both a warning and a test, a way to find out whether the old ally was still trustworthy. If it reached Mara, the hidden stitches could lead her to Claire.
Caleb tried counting the stitches and lost his place twice. Mara found herself laughing for the first time since the bus stop, then unexpectedly crying. The scarf had been made by a man who liked repairing broken clocks and baking terrible pancakes. Seeing his private habits transformed into clues made Daniel feel both closer and farther away. Naomi did not rush her. She moved the legal folders aside and gave mother and son room at the table. It was an unusual pause in a grim investigation, but perhaps the first moment Caleb understood that his father had once been more than a name spoken in warning.
Time passed.
That afternoon Brooks received a message from an investigator in another state. Claire Benton had recently asked about Daniel Turner. She had also reported that a man with a green stone ring was waiting outside her workplace.