Read Chapter 2: The First Clue

The watch was heavy in Julien’s palm, warmer than brass had any right to be. He had opened it twice in the last hour—once at his desk, once in the washroom with the door locked—and both times the tiny photograph inside had refused to resolve into a face he knew.

Now, with the late afternoon sun slanting through the blinds of Section 13’s bullpen, he opened it a third time.

The woman stared back at him with calm, dark eyes. Her hair was pinned in a style that belonged to a different century, but it was the set of her jaw that tugged at him, the way her lips curved into a knowing half-smile. He had seen that expression before. Just last week, in the mirror.

Élise Garnier, the photograph’s caption read in faded copperplate. The woman the 1924 werewolf case had claimed as its victim. And she looked, unmistakably, like a Moreau.

“Fascinating piece.”

Julien snapped the watch shut. Commandant Verne stood at the edge of his desk, a cigarette burning between her fingers, her dark coat draped over one arm. She was leaving for the day, and she looked like she wanted him to know it.

“It belonged to a witness,” Julien said. “Anonymous. He left it with the file.”

“He.”

“The silhouette suggested a man.”

Verne took a slow drag of her cigarette. “Witnesses don’t usually leave heirlooms for detectives they’ve never met.”

“I thought the same thing.” Julien turned the watch over in his hand. “The photograph inside is of Élise Garnier. I looked her up after the briefing. She died in 1924, in a way the official record calls a wildlife attack.”

“Because it was.”

“The file says otherwise. The file says it was a lycanthrope, and that Section 13 investigated.”

Verne’s expression didn’t shift. “Your point?”

Julien spread the archived case summaries across his desk. He had pulled them from the records room after the briefing, a dozen manila folders with yellowed edges, each one stamped with the Section’s crimson seal. He tapped the first folder—a poisoning in 1872—then the second, a series of disappearances in 1898, then a third, a body found drained of blood in 1911.

“Every one of these investigations has a Moreau attached,” he said. “As a witness, a consultant, a relative of the victim. Sometimes just as a name in a margin note.”

“We had a wide network of informants.”

“Two centuries of Moreaus? All in the right place at the right time?”

Verne’s eyes were unreadable, dark and flat as slate. She took one last drag of her cigarette before crushing it in the ashtray on the corner of his desk.

“The records are wrong,” she said. “Archival data deteriorates. Transcriptions get garbled. A name that looks like Moreau might have been Marot, Morin, Mureau. The difference of a few letters.”

“I checked the original handwriting. They’re all spelled the same.”

“Then someone had a sense of humor.”

She picked up her coat and slid it on with practiced efficiency, not looking at him. In the dim light of the bullpen, with the shadows pooling in the hollows of her face, she looked older than she had that morning—and more tired.

“Let the past stay buried, Moreau,” she said. “That’s the first rule of this place.”

She walked toward the doors, and Julien watched her go. He waited until the glass panels had swung shut behind her before he pulled the watch out again and snapped it open.

The photograph’s edges were worn, the sepia tones grainy with age, but there was something in the background—a suggestion of architecture, a stone balustrade, a row of windows that curved like a ship’s bow. He slid his thumb across it, feeling for a seam.

Click.

The back of the photograph hinged upward, revealing a second image underneath. Not a portrait, but a place. A narrow alley by the look of it, cobblestones wet with rain, and at its far end a building with an arched wooden door painted green. A street sign was half-visible at the corner. Julien squinted, turning the watch toward the window light.

Rue des Archives.

His stomach tightened.

Rue des Archives ran directly behind Section 13’s headquarters. He had walked past it that morning on his way in, noting the antiquarian bookshops and map sellers that crowded its narrow length. And at the end of the street, if he remembered correctly, stood a building with a green arched door.

He slipped the watch into his breast pocket and started for the door.

The records room occupied the basement level, a low-ceilinged warren of steel shelves stretching into darkness. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting a greenish pallor over dust motes and the smell of old paper. A young woman sat at the front desk, her hair dyed an improbable shade of violet, scrolling through her phone with the practiced disinterest of someone who had been left alone too long.

“I need to search the archive indexes,” Julien said. “Going back as far as they go.”

She glanced up. “You’ve got clearance?”

“I’m new. They gave me a stack of case files and told me to read up.”

“So you’re the one.” She pocketed her phone and stood, revealing a lanyard with a laminated card that read SOLANGE ROUX, ARCHIVES. “Commandant said someone might be sniffing around. She told me to give you the full tour.”

Julien followed her into the stacks. The shelves were organized by decade, then by case number, each file box stamped with the same crimson seal. Solange walked with a brisk efficiency, pointing out the cataloguing system, the preservation protocols, the procedures for requesting restricted materials.

“Most of the old files are on microfiche,” she said, gesturing to a row of grey readers against the far wall. “Anything before 1900 is parchment, and anything before that is… well, it’s a mystery. Some of the oldest boxes have never been digitized.”

“How far back does the archive go?”

“The founding of the Section. Officially, 1809. But there are boxes in the back—” she nodded toward a shadowed corner where the shelves were older, darker, their metal frames streaked with rust— “that my predecessor labelled with dates before the Republic. I wouldn’t recommend touching those without written permission from Verne herself.”

“What about the case indexes? Where are they kept?”

She stopped. “What exactly are you looking for?”

“A name.” Julien kept his voice easy. “I’ve been reading through the old files, and I keep finding a surname I recognize. I want to know how often it appears.”

Solange’s eyes flickered with something—curiosity, or wariness. But she turned and led him deeper into the stacks, to a bank of drawers labelled with letters of the alphabet.

“Index cards,” she said. “Every investigation opened by this Section, cross-referenced by principal parties, witnesses, and persons of interest. It’s the old system. Slow, but thorough.”

Julien pulled open the drawer marked M. The cards inside were packed tight, their corners dog-eared, their surfaces smudged with decades of fingerprints. He began to leaf through them, searching for the familiar string of letters.

Marteau. Ménez. Mercier. Moreno.

Then, with a jolt like a hand closing around his throat: Moreau.

He pulled the card out. It was filed under 1924, the year of Élise Garnier’s death, and it listed a single name — Thierry Moreau, consultant on the investigation. Julien’s hands were steady as he filed it aside and reached for the next card.

Moreau, 1924.

Moreau, 1924.

Moreau, 1924.

In a single year, the same name appeared on four separate cases. He pulled another drawer—1872, 1875, 1879. Moreau, Moreau, Moreau. He pulled a third—1812, 1816, 1823. The handwriting changed, the ink faded, but the name did not.

Two centuries of investigations. Two centuries of Moreaus.

He worked by the dim green light, ignoring the ache in his shoulders, the burn building behind his eyes. Solange had retreated to her desk, and the basement had gone quiet around him. The only sounds were the whisper of cards and the distant hum of the building’s old bones.

Then his fingers closed on a card that was different.

It was older than the rest, its edges crumbling, its surface stained with something brown that might have been blood. The label was typed in a style that predated the Section’s founding—a heavy serif font, the ink flaking with age. It read:

CASE NUMBER ONE. UNIDENTIFIED.

The card had no year. No case name. No principals listed. But at the bottom, faint as a watermark, was a single line of handwriting in a script so ornate it was nearly illegible.

Investigator: J. Moreau.

Julien’s breath caught in his chest. The watch seemed to pulse against his ribcage, and in the silence of the archive, he could hear his own heartbeat—heavy, deliberate, like a drum beating him forward.

Case number one. The first one.

The card was misfiled, jammed between two older cards, its edges bristling with cloth fibers that suggested it had been ripped out and shoved back in, hurriedly. By whom? And why?

He slipped the card into his breast pocket, next to the watch.

Then he began to search for the file that went with it.