Malik’s Last Route
Naomi had not spoken about Malik properly since the funeral.
People kept asking for the manageable version: hardworking man, wrong place, tragic city violence. Nobody wanted the deeper truth because deeper truth usually meant institutions had failed long before a knife or a gun or a lie finished the job.
In Interview Room B, with Isaiah posted outside and Owen across the table, she told it whole.
Malik Brooks had worked nights at the city bus depot for twelve years. He was careful, funny, and impossible to intimidate in small matters. The trouble began when he noticed certain buses logged repairs that had never happened. Parts were marked installed, removed, replaced, or discarded on paper, while the actual vehicles passed through untouched. Then he saw men after hours transferring long sealed cases between maintenance bays and contractor vans under transport invoices that did not match any public schedule.
He told Naomi because she was the only person he trusted to read numbers the way he could read engines. Naomi was not merely a woman taking the bus home from work. She was a forensic bookkeeper at a mid-sized shipping firm, and once she examined the copies Malik smuggled out, she saw money moving through shell subcontractors linked to municipal contracts, city warehouse leases, and ghost maintenance orders.
Then Malik died in an alley two blocks from the depot.
Police took his phone, his notebook, and his keys.
Naomi buried him with none of his questions answered.
A week later, one notebook page appeared in her mailbox in a plain envelope.
No return address.
Just Malik’s handwriting.
Owen listened without interruption.
When she finished, he slid a photo toward her. It showed the masked attacker after processing, face still bruised from the takedown but recognizable enough.
Naomi’s breath snagged.
“I’ve seen him before.”
“Where?”
“Outside the depot lot. Twice. And once near my building. He was talking to a uniformed officer.”
Owen’s eyes sharpened. “Do you know the officer?”
“No.” She swallowed. “But the patrol car was unmarked except for one cracked tail light. I remembered because Malik used to say if you notice the broken things, you find the truth faster.”
Isaiah entered a minute later carrying a file and a look that told Owen something had shifted.
A vehicle match had already come back.
The car Naomi described had been signed out repeatedly by Lieutenant Victor Hale from Major Operations.
Owen said nothing for a long moment.
Then he stood.
May you like
“That’s my leak,” he said.
Naomi felt the floor tilt again, just as it had at the bus stop.
Only now the danger had a badge.
