By eight the next morning, the boats were no longer a curiosity.
They were a pattern.
Alex had printed every still frame he could salvage from the Riverwalk camera and taped the clearest one to the board. Gareth Thorne stood beneath an umbrella, half-turned toward the hooded figure beside him. The face was still useless. The hand was not. Pale fingers held out a paper boat as if offering directions instead of paper.
And Gareth, blurred though he was, looked like a man recognizing something he had hoped not to see again.
"Run it again," Captain Black said.
Alex clicked to the next frame. Gareth took the boat. The hooded figure stepped back. In the last usable image, Gareth was turning toward the river path alone.
"That's all?" Brian asked.
"That's all the camera gives us before a delivery truck blocks the view," Alex said. "And before you ask, yes, I hate it too."
Lucas tapped the map with the back of his pen. "If the note is right and the river came first, then whoever met Gareth there started the route on purpose."
"Assuming Gareth followed voluntarily," Isaiah said.
Harley set her coffee down. "He didn't look frightened."
"That doesn't mean he wasn't under pressure," Lucas said.
On the board, Gareth's movements had begun to resemble something less like a timeline and more like a trail someone had forced into meaning. Riverwalk. Alder Finch Bakery. Calder Lane. And now the fourth boat, the one left at Mira Thorne's apartment with a message written inside: You forgot the river first.
Captain Black folded her arms. "Start with the people who knew him well enough to build that trail."
Alex rotated slightly in his chair. "I've got three names worth looking at. First is Dorian Flint, parent complaint from Gareth's workshop last month. Second is Sabra Holt, former admin at Riverwalk Annex, worked with Gareth on youth programs last year. Third is Yvette Doyle, ran a volunteer arts camp with him before the city cut funding."
Brian raised an eyebrow. "And which one folds creepy paper boats?"
"I'd love for the database to answer personality questions," Alex said. "It continues to disappoint me."
"Split it," Captain Black said. "Harley, take Flint with Brian. Isaiah, Lucas, talk to Holt. Alex, find Doyle and tell me whether she's still in town."
The room broke into motion.
__
Dorian Flint lived in a narrow rental house near the edge of South Harbor, where the fences leaned and every porch seemed to carry at least one broken chair. Harley could hear a television through the front wall before Brian even knocked.
Flint opened the door halfway and stayed behind it, broad-shouldered and already defensive. He wore a sleeveless undershirt despite the cold and looked at Harley's badge as if it had insulted him personally.
"What?"
Harley kept her voice even. "We're here about Gareth Thorne."
A flicker crossed his face.
Brian caught it too. "You know the name."
Flint's jaw shifted. "He taught at that community thing my kid went to."
"Went to," Harley repeated.
"She stopped."
"Because of him?" Brian asked.
"Because he embarrassed her." Flint opened the door a little wider, anger making him bold now. "He called her out in front of a room full of people. Told her she couldn't bully the other kids and stay. She was fourteen."
Harley studied him. Real anger. Still warm enough to reach for. "When was the last time you saw him?"
"A few weeks ago. Told him to stay away from my daughter."
Brian tilted his head. "That all?"
Flint looked at him. "That should've been enough."
Harley glanced past him into the house. Family photos on the wall. A narrow hallway. Two pairs of muddy sneakers by the door. Nothing obvious, which meant nothing.
"You own a dark hooded raincoat, Mr. Flint?" she asked.
His stare hardened. "Yeah. I do."
"Where was it last night?"
"In my house."
"Can anyone confirm that?"
"My daughter."
That was not helpful and he knew it.
Harley watched him for another beat. Dorian Flint had motive enough for a confrontation and temperament enough for one that turned ugly. But there was something too blunt about him. Too immediate. The boats, the notes, the route—none of it fit his kind of anger.
Still, not fitting was not the same as impossible.
"Did Gareth ever mention Riverwalk to you?" she asked.
Flint frowned. "What?"
"The river. The bakery on Alder. The old arts building on Calder."
"No." His frustration looked genuine now. "Why would he?"
Brian took out his notebook. "Because someone seems to think those places matter."
Flint's eyes narrowed. "What the hell happened to him?"
Harley answered because the reaction mattered. "He was killed."
Flint went still. Not shocked enough to clear him. Not cold enough to confirm anything either. Just still. Then, after a moment, he said quietly, "Well, it wasn't me."
Brian made a face like he was considering the sentence on its literary value alone. Harley stepped in before he said something unhelpful.
"We may come back," she said.
Flint's mouth twisted. "That sounds like a threat."
"It sounds like honesty."
__
Isaiah and Lucas had more luck with Sabra Holt.
By the time Harley and Brian returned to the station, they found both men at the board while Sabra's printed employee file sat open on the table.
"She confirmed Gareth was at Riverwalk last night," Lucas said without preamble. "Said he stopped by around seven asking for storage access."
Harley set her keys down. "For what?"
"He told her there was an old workshop box he wanted to pick up."
Isaiah slid a property inventory sheet across the table. "No record of him signing anything out."
"Then either he lied," Brian said, "or someone let him in off the books."
Sabra Holt, according to the notes, had worked with Gareth for nearly a year. Organized youth classes, kept supply closets, approved community room usage. Thirty-six, no record, well liked, practical. The kind of person who didn't usually end up on a homicide board unless practicality had curdled into something meaner.
"Where is she now?" Harley asked.
"Home," Isaiah said. "She was cooperative."
Lucas, who rarely used that word as praise, added, "Too cooperative."
Harley glanced up.
"She knew about the boats before we mentioned them," he said.
Brian straightened. "How?"
"She saw one yesterday afternoon," Isaiah said. "On a bench near Riverwalk Annex. Thought it was trash and threw it away."
"That would have been useful information to volunteer earlier," Harley said.
"Yes," Isaiah replied.
Harley read the rest of the notes. Sabra said Gareth had seemed distracted lately. Restless. He had asked strange questions about old program records from a closed summer arts initiative called Calder House. He had also asked whether anyone had been looking for him there.
"Calder House again," Brian muttered.
Alex, who had been listening from his desk, swiveled toward them. "I found Yvette Doyle."
Everyone looked over.
"She's in town," he said. "Owns a framing shop three blocks from Alder Finch Bakery. Also volunteered at Calder House with Gareth twelve years ago."
Harley felt the room sharpen.
"Twelve years?" Lucas asked.
Alex nodded. "That program goes back further than we thought."
Captain Black came out of her office at exactly that moment, as if the case had summoned her. "Then stop thinking of the boats as recent."
Harley looked at the still frame on the board again. Gareth at the river. The offered boat. Recognition.
Maybe he had not been recognizing the person. Maybe he had been recognizing the game.
__
Yvette Doyle's shop smelled like wood dust, glass cleaner, and old paper.
Frames covered the walls in every finish from pale ash to heavy walnut. A radio played low somewhere in the back. When Harley and Isaiah stepped inside, a woman in her fifties with silver-threaded hair looked up from a worktable and smiled automatically, the way people did before noticing badges.
The smile disappeared.
"Ms. Doyle?" Harley asked.
Yvette set down the brass corner tool in her hand. "What happened?"
That was becoming a pattern too. As if Gareth's name already carried tension.
Harley kept her voice level. "We're asking about Gareth Thorne."
Yvette leaned one hip against the table and crossed her arms. "Then I'm guessing this isn't social."
"He's dead," Isaiah said.
Yvette closed her eyes once. Opened them again. There was grief there, but old grief too, layered beneath the new one.
"Oh, Gareth," she said softly.
Harley filed that tone away. "You knew him well?"
"Once." Yvette looked toward the front window, rain sliding down the glass. "A long time ago."
She told them about Calder House then.
It had started as a summer arts program for older kids who needed somewhere to go after school let out and before home felt bearable again. Gareth taught drawing. Yvette handled supplies and volunteer scheduling. Sabra Holt had only been there briefly toward the end, mostly administrative support. There had been another instructor too, one Gareth was closer to than anyone realized.
"Who?" Harley asked.
Yvette hesitated.
Isaiah noticed. "Ms. Doyle."
Yvette rubbed both hands down the front of her apron as if grounding herself in the motion. "Petra Sloan."
The name meant nothing to Harley. Alex, on speaker through Isaiah's phone, corrected that immediately.
"I've got her," he said. "Former youth instructor. Left Grayhaven ten years ago. No current local address."
Yvette nodded faintly at the phone, then continued. "Petra and Gareth ran the river workshops together. Boats were part of it."
Harley felt a small shift inside the case, a click she had been waiting for.
"Explain."
"They used to start each session by folding paper boats with the kids," Yvette said. "Cheap paper, scrap paper, whatever they had. Then they'd float them along the shallow edge by Riverwalk and talk about balance, structure, what happens when something fragile is made well." Her mouth trembled once, just enough to show anger trying not to become grief. "Gareth always said the point wasn't making the boat. It was seeing whether it held."
Isaiah glanced at Harley. The river first.
"Did something happen at Calder House?" Harley asked.
Yvette laughed once, but there was no humor in it. "Everything happened at Calder House."
Bit by bit, with long silences between, the truth emerged. There had been a summer twelve years ago when one of the teens in the program went missing for nearly two days. She came back alive. No charges were filed. No public scandal followed. But inside Calder House, things changed. Staff turned on each other. Records vanished. Rumors spread about who had failed to report what, who had tried to keep it quiet, who had protected the program instead of the children in it.
"Who was the girl?" Harley asked.
Yvette shook her head. "I won't say her name unless you tell me I have to. She's got a life now."
Harley let that sit. "Did Gareth fail her?"
Yvette looked at her sharply. "No. Gareth tried to push it up the chain. He just…" She stopped.
"He just what?" Isaiah asked.
"He gave up when nobody backed him."
Harley thought of the note inside Mira Thorne's boat. You forgot the river first.
Not just a route. A memory. A beginning.
"Where is Petra Sloan now?" Harley asked.
Yvette's expression changed.
Fear, this time. Clean and immediate.
"I don't know," she said. "But if this is about the boats, you need to find her before someone else does."
__
By the time they got back to the station, the rain had thickened.
Alex had spent the afternoon combing old archives and bad scans of local reporting until his desk looked like paper had exploded across it. Lucas had found a property record tying Calder House's old grant paperwork to a storage unit on the east side. Brian had pulled a former student list, though half the names were incomplete and some had clearly been scrubbed later.
The room felt tighter now, fuller.
Harley stood at the board while Alex pinned up an old Calder House group photo beside Gareth's.
In the photo, Gareth looked younger and easier in his own skin. Yvette stood to one side, smiling at someone off-camera. Sabra Holt was near the back, half hidden. And next to Gareth, one hand resting lightly on a folding table covered in paper boats, stood Petra Sloan.
Dark hair. Sharp cheekbones. Direct gaze. Even in a faded printout, there was something steady and unmistakable about her.
Brian stepped closer. "If she's alive and in town, why not just come in?"
Isaiah answered first. "Because she's hiding from the same past."
Lucas, meanwhile, was staring at the student list. "Wait."
Harley turned. "What?"
He held up a page. "One of the kids from that summer? Last known address is two blocks from Calder Lane."
The station went quiet.
"Current?" Captain Black asked.
Lucas checked the printout again. "Leased under another name now, but yes. Recent enough."
Harley was already reaching for her coat. "Who?"
Lucas looked up, face hardening as the name landed.
"It's Mira Thorne."
For one suspended second, nobody moved.
Then Brian said, very softly, "Gareth's sister was in the program."
Harley felt the whole case tilt.
The boats had not just been leading through Gareth's past.
They had been circling back toward someone still alive. Someone close enough to mourn him from the inside of the story.
Captain Black's voice cut through the silence. "Go."
Chairs scraped back. Keys snatched up. Radios crackled awake.
And on the board, beneath the old group photo from Riverwalk, Petra Sloan's face looked out over the paper boats like someone who had once known exactly which fragile things would hold and which would sink.