They sat on a public bench as Dryden scribbled something onto his glass tablet. His writing was small enough she couldn’t read it without looking more obviously, so she had no idea if it was notes to burn onto paper later or a message to somebody.

“I’m sorry if I interfered with your interview,” Claire said once they were outside. Perhaps she should have waited to tell him after, but that might have made it harder to untangle his thoughts. Besides- she just couldn’t stand the feel of somebody in her head like that.

“Not at all. By the time it wore off, I could have forgotten any number of important details. Besides, the reaction of a person who just got caught is always telling. Could you tell what emotions he was trying to suppress?”

“Of course,” Claire said, trying to keep it from sounding like the brag it was. Emotional manipulation detection had been her first training ground, after all. “They weren’t trying to cause any positive emotions, mostly trying to suppress awareness and curiosity.”

Dryden frowned in thought.

“That matches my theory.”

“Are they suspects?” Claire asked. Really, it was two questions: ‘is there a chance they did it’ and ‘do we have the political capital to treat them as suspects’. They’d mentioned Dryden’s name. She’d have to look up exactly who his family was.

“I don’t think so. Even if I doubted their grief, which I don’t, I can’t see them putting him in commoners clothes and letting people find the body. Whatever they’re hiding, I think it’s about image. They might know how he died, or maybe it’s totally unrelated. Maybe Caspian had an illicit lover or an unfortunate hobby of some sort. Investigations can turn up all sorts of things. For now, Flora is our best chance. She seemed a lot more distressed, and less worried about appearances.”

“So are we going to see her?”

“No. We give her time to think, and we collect evidence. If it’s something that could hurt her family, she might need an extra push.”

“Should I return to the office?”

“No need. I sent the names of Caspian’s drinking buddies to Cam. We should have their addresses any minute. And you know what I bet they’ll know?”

“What, sir?”

“Absolutely nothing.” Dryden grinned. “In fact, I’d bet good money not a single one of them has gone drinking with Caspian Handfellow in weeks.”

*

Meeting Caspian’s drinking buddies turned out to be a good introduction to the Church District. Dryden narrated as they went, explaining which neighborhoods housed what flavor of riches and who the most important families were. Caspian’s group seemed to be the children of successful merchants with the exception of Hugh Montague, the grandson of a priest. The true power, Dryden told her, was mostly among the city and church officials.

Dryden’s prediction turned out to be right. Not a single young man described Caspian as anything other than a casual acquaintance they hadn’t seen for a bit. Eric Aldercy was proving a bit more helpful, but not because he was close to Caspian. The boy just happened to be a bit more loose lipped.

“Honestly, not to speak ill of the dead, but I think we were all kind of relieved when he stopped showing up for drinks.”

“Why is that?” Dryden asked, looking perfectly unbothered by Aldercy’s disrespect to the dead. Of course, good information was better than respect.

“No offense to the guy, nobody can say his heart wasn’t in the right place, but he was a bit of a buzzkill, you know? Couldn’t talk to girls at all, and would be breathing down the back of your neck to make sure you were ‘respectful’, barely drank, in bed by ten. I don’t know why he even went drinking with us. He never seemed like he was having any fun. Couldn’t take a joke to save his life. I mean, like I said, a good guy, but not somebody you want to go let loose with.”

“Do you know why he stopped showing up for drinks?”

“No idea. Most of us assumed he’d made some nerd friends at work and was spending time with them.”

“And can you think of any sort of trouble he might have gotten into?”

“Not really. Like I said, Cas was virtuous to a fault. He could have a bit of a temper though. One time Hugh was hitting on a girl and said… well, turned out it was Cas’ little sis’ and Cas laid him the fuck out. If you ask me, righteous little… Caspian probably got in over his head trying to defend some girl’s honor or something.”

They thanked Aldercy for his time and headed back to the government district to see the cartography studio where Caspain had been apprenticing.

The government offices Claire was used to were warm and cozy, decorated with rich woods and bright carpets, quiet as the scribes worked diligently at their desks. This place was an open plaza of marble, desks scattered about like islands, full of people chattering and comparing notes. To her left, they used glass sheets to trace hand drawn maps, then used a projector to burn the images onto multiple parchements, leaving the air smelling of magic and burnt paper. On her right, survey equipment was organized in labeled rows and a short man argued that a level had been damaged before he’d taken it out.

The noise of the place was irritating, but it was nice to be able to ask around without feeling like she was disturbing the office. After a few questions, they were quickly pointed to where Capsian had worked. The cartographers worked in a quieter corner of the office, a handful of people drawing careful lines and double checking data, but they were more than happy to talk when asked.

Aldercy’s assumption that Caspian was making friends at work turned out to be wrong. He was liked around the office, universally regarded as considerate and helpful, but much younger than his coworkers. They described him as a polite, diligent young man, but nobody had any particular connection with him. He ate at his desk, went home late, and never joined the others for drinks.

“He was a bit quiet at first. We were a bit worried, honestly. The poor kid was working himself to the bone. He was working so many hours that we got genuinely concerned for his health, but he settled out eventually. Beautiful work too. That’s his work there.”

The woman pointed to a map hanging on the wall. It showed the river that ran through the city in detail, the currents, the buildings at the banks, even the depth of the water.

“Impressive, right? He’d be out there at 4 AM with wading boots and a depth crystal. We said he didn’t need to get the depth measurements. He was supposed to just be updating an old tourist map, but he kept insisting this would be helpful. He was right too. They had to stop selling them as souvenirs to make sure there was enough for locals, not that it did Caspain any good. We’re paid by the project, not on sales.”

Caspian’s desk was neat, still laid out from his last day, pens cleaned and lined at the side. He’d been working on topographical maps, stacks and stacks of parchments to copy so it could be printed in different colors.

There were no personal effects, no captures of family or trinkets from a lover. The closest thing was the occasional drawings on his survey notes, mostly of animals or plants.

“He liked to spend his breaks sketching things he saw,” his co-worker said. “I told him if maps ever didn’t work out, he could go work for a biologist.”

She picked up a sheet of notes where a sparrow had been drawn in pencil, then covered with an ink list of coordinates.

“Find out who did this. None of us are sleeping easy, knowing somebody killed that boy and walked away.”

*

The reporters had mostly given up when they got back, off to pursue more promising leads. Stephenson met them with lunch, but Campbell didn’t even look up, totally absorbed in papers.

Claire watched in amusement as Dryden gently tapped the paper Campbell was working on, and he jumped upright.

“You’re back! Hi!”

“Good to see you Cam. Any luck?”

“I think so…” Campbell said, averting his eyes. “I’d like to do more research before I say anything, but-”

“Don’t be modest!” Stephenson said, pushing her way back towards the conversation. “Guess what? Guess what?”

“The Handfellows are broke, aren’t they?” Dryden asked.

“We think so,” Campbell confirmed.

“I know how we know, but how do you know?” Stephenson huffed.

Claire remembered the spartan decoration of their house. She’d assumed it was the trend here. She was used to homes coated in wealth, but the Church District seemed less austentatious.

“I believe the Handfellows have suspicions about how their son died, but don’t want to admit it,” Dryden said. “That said, nothing that was said about him implies he’d fallen into vice. He’d stopped joining friends for drinks, and nobody seemed to know what he was doing in the evenings. His co-workers said he started the job tense and took as much work as he could, then seemed to relax and started working more reasonable hours. They assumed it was because he’d become more confident, but they also mentioned cartographers are paid by the map. His co-workers would never think it was about the money. The pay of a cartographer’s apprentice would be pocket change for the heir to a family like his.”

Claire resisted chewing her lip. The family’s behavior would make sense. If your family had fallen on hard times and you were attempting to hide it, your son’s corpse being found in cheap clothes could be seen as a threat to the entire family.

Where had the money gone? Gambling was a common culprit, or an expensive vice. Blackmail was also a fast way to secretly lose a fortune.

“What have you found?” Dryden asked. “Is something wrong with their finances?”

“I mentioned their farm had a good yield, right?” Campbell said. “But I started thinking, okay, if they used literally every foot that farm is registered for, no offices or parking or worker housing, it would still mean an almost perfect harvest every year. It’s nothing that somebody checking through a whole file would notice, because it’s in expected metrics, but it’s just not statistically likely. Besides, being registered means at least part of that farm is required to have space for staff. I’d like to see the place in person, but I’m pretty sure…”

“It’s a stamp farm,” Dryden finished.

“A stamp farm?” Claire asked.

Dryden nodded to Campell to explain, though he seemed to lose his nerve looking at Claire. She resisted rolling her eyes. She wasn’t that scary, was she?

“It means it’s a front for an illegal farm. To clarify, that’s not just not having a license, that means you don’t even register the farm as farmland or pay taxes. If you’re not registered, you can use cheaper supplies and underpay workers, but that causes a lot of problems. Guaranteed produce sells for a lot more than unguaranteed, and selling on the black market is even worse than that. If you have an official farm, you can mix low quality filler from your illegal farm in with your guaranteed products and inflate the price, especially with something like grain where it all gets mixed together. It also gives you an official income source so that nobody questions where your money comes from.”

“Why would that make the family broke?”” Claire asked. 

Blackmail? If the blackmail exceeded the profit, they could shut it down. They had enough invested by now to live well on that. So it would be-

“The flood,” she realized. “You said the lowlands flooded a few years ago. If the farm was being run illegally, they wouldn’t be able to ask for relief. They’d have a lot of ruined land and hungry workers who could report them if they didn’t get paid.”

“Bingo,” Stephenson said.

“We can’t be sure,” Campell says. “It’s suspicious, but I don’t have proof. I’d like like to visit their farm.”

“I’m sure most of the people there are in on it, so it would be best if I stayed away. Cam, are you comfortable going there with Abigail to look into it?”

Campbell looked nervously at Stephanson, swallowed, and nodded.

“Got it, boss.”

“Is he going to be alright?” Claire asked, watching the door swing shut behind them.

“Don’t worry,” Dryden said, with audible fondness. “Campbell is actually a genius with white collar crime. When we don’t have a case, he spends his free time picking up fraud cases for ‘fun’. Speaking of which, I recommend thinking about how you’ll spend your down time.”

“What do you mean?”

“In a job like this, I think it’s important to decompress. Depending on the case, we might spend a few days working more or less around the clock, so, when there isn’t a case or paperwork, you’re free to do what you’d like.” He smiled. “You strike me as the type who doesn’t know what to do with a week off.”

At home, she’d spend evenings with her current girlfriend or heading for drinks with the local construction workers, but she’d struggled with days off. Usually she’d make it a day or two reading, and then end up back in the office asking if there wasn’t some case she could work on.

Her time escaping Avairne had been torn between terrifying urgency and incurable boredom. There hadn’t been many hobbies to speak of, unless you counted it as some sort of mandatory camping.

“You’re not wrong, sir,” she admitted.

“Well, you’re in good company, honestly. Most of us just go consult for other companies. I try to spend time with my family, but I won’t pretend I don’t take some cold cases home to review once the kids are in bed.”

“How old are your kids?”

Dryden laughed.

“Oh, they aren’t my kids, they’re my young siblings. I’m not married.”

Her eyes shifted to his earring. Claire had been told it was illegal to wear the cartilage ring and chain if you weren’t in a church approved marriage.

“Oh,” he laughed again and touched his ear, following her gaze. “My parents were very determined that I marry, but I’ve never really been interested in relationships, so I officially married the city.”

Claire stared. You could marry a city? What did that mean? Could more than one person do it, or was the city monogamous?

“It’s somewhat similar to a religious oath of purity in Luvik, but your commitment is to the city rather than the church. It means the primary relationship in your life, and your destiny, if you believe in that sort of thing, is your community. For me… I love my work, and I don’t plan to have any other relationships, so it’s a good arrangement.”

Claire nodded.

“Sensible. So what are we working on now?”

“Reading up on his co-workers, drinking buddies, and his parent’s business competitors. The paired glass on your desk is connected to the records office. If you get anything important, transfer paper is in the left drawer of your desk. Any questions?”

“Where would you like me to start?”