Shaw took out his own phone and approached the bottom step, aiming its camera at Maya's open credential case. "Let me get a picture of those badges," he said. "We'll see how convincing they look when somebody checks them." Maya closed the wallet and held it near her chest, refusing to surrender it to a stranger's personal device. She told him he could record the encounter with an authorized department camera and verify the identification through official procedures, but she would not allow an unrestricted copy of her credential details to be made on his private phone.
"Why not?" Shaw asked. "If they're real, what are you hiding?"
"I'm protecting official identification information," Naomi replied. "You can document what you see, but you don't need to put our credentials in a personal photo library to establish who we are." Shaw laughed, though the laugh lacked conviction. He lowered the phone a fraction, then raised it again as if the repetition might provoke an angry response. The sisters stayed still, and eventually he became bored with trying to manufacture one.
Mercer moved toward the driveway, where an elderly neighbor had appeared behind a hedge. "Ma'am, would you please step back into your yard?" he asked, more gently than the other officers had spoken. The woman looked past him at the porch and said she had known James Carter for years. She was about to explain that the women were his daughters when Pike called from beside the cruiser, ordering Mercer not to let neighbors interfere with an active investigation. The woman's expression changed at the words active investigation, and she went back behind the hedge without finishing her sentence.
Maya watched the exchange and felt an old, familiar frustration. Even the simplest facts became fragile when the person asking the questions refused to accept an answer. The police had arrived because someone claimed the house was empty, yet an actual neighbor stood ten feet away ready to say it had belonged to the Carter family for decades. A few more minutes of careful questioning would resolve the original complaint. Pike appeared to have no interest in those minutes.
Cole approached Mercer after the woman disappeared. "She was going to say something," he murmured, too low for the sergeant to hear. Mercer glanced toward Pike, then toward the porch. "Write down that she was here," he told the younger officer.
Cole looked uncertain. "Shouldn't we talk to her?" Mercer sighed. "We should have talked to her before anybody climbed those stairs."
Pike returned from his phone call wearing an expression of renewed confidence. "Lieutenant Keller is on his way, and we're holding this location until he gets here," he announced. He looked up at the badges, still in the sisters' hands. "If you really work for the Bureau, he can sort that out. And if you don't, you've just made your problem much worse."
Naomi turned her head toward Maya without speaking. Both women understood that their professional status had become a convenient distraction from the original question of ownership. Whether they were agents, accountants, teachers, or strangers passing through, the property records would be the same. Maya would not let Pike turn the matter into a dispute about the badges. "Have dispatch check the deed while we wait," she said. "It is a public record."
"I said we are waiting for the lieutenant," Pike replied, as though the words canceled every other possible action.
The October light thinned and the temperature dropped enough for Naomi to pull her jacket closed. Inside the open front door, a lamp illuminated the small table where James had placed his keys every evening; the sisters had left his bowl for loose change in exactly the same spot. Maya remembered him standing on that porch in the rain, waving at their car as they headed back to college after Thanksgiving. She remembered telling him he did not have to come outside every time they left, and his cheerful answer that he would decide when the house stopped needing a proper goodbye. The memory made the delay feel like a personal intrusion rather than an inconvenience.