The Source
Karl Warren sees ghosts and demons when others don’t.
When Mike goes to meet an interview subject, it sets off his instincts.
Warren
The text came in at half past eight, while I was at The Golden Door deciding between another drink and the better judgment that said to call it a night.
Meeting a source tonight. Developer story. Tell you about it tomorrow.
I read it twice. The phrasing was Mike's version of casual, which meant she'd thought about how to word it. She knew I'd want to know more, but she'd written it in a way that didn't invite questions. I set the beer down and asked one anyway.
Where at?
I kept it short. Just the location, neutral, like a man with no particular reason for asking.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
Why?
“Just in case,” I wrote back. “It’s late.”
A longer pause this time. I could picture her at her laptop or desk, deciding how much rope to give me. We'd been doing this long enough — whatever “this” was — that she had a good idea of what “just in case” meant coming from me. She knew I saw ghosts where they may not be, but I also saw the real ones where others might not.
Lake Merritt. A park bench near the Pergola. Right off Grand Ave.
I knew the area. Everyone in Oakland knew it was a beautiful stroll in the daytime, but a foolish choice for anything at night. I’d walked there a few times in the late hours. The unhoused, who make themselves scarce in daylight, make the park their home at night, taking up space on most benches and under many of the trees. Most of the unhoused are harmless, but there’s no reason to press your luck.
I told myself it was just a walk in the nearby neighborhood. I'd go past, satisfy myself that the area was quiet and the meeting was routine, and I'd come back to the Door, and Ma and the gang would be happy again. I'd been telling myself things like that for a while now. I was getting worse at believing them.
The walk lasted thirty minutes, giving me the overall mood and feel of the evening: dark and chilly, but the flow of late commuters heading home had slowed, and the city was starting to wind down. Nothing particularly tense about it. Nothing except me. I found a spot about 100 yards from the pergola, and from that vantage point, I saw three benches. I didn’t know which one Mike would choose, but I’d soon find out. A few joggers and walkers circled the lake, their motion catching my eye, but they looked normal and dressed normally for the occasion.
Mike arrived seven minutes later, probably coming directly from wherever she'd been. She locked her bike to a light post with the efficiency of someone who's done it ten thousand times and moved to the bench furthest from me without checking the area behind her. That bothered me a little. Mike had been in danger enough times that I hoped she would have taken more care to scout the area.
I settled in and waited for the source.
What came instead, two minutes after Mike arrived, was a man on the far side of the park. Then another, on the same side as I was, emerged from an SUV parked on Lakeshore Avenue. Neither was in any particular hurry, and they didn't look at each other. They didn't look at Mike. They looked at everything else in the methodical, unhurried way of people who are paid to look.
Nothing about them was remarkable. Dark jackets, one in jeans and the other in khakis, the kind of nondescript that looked both normal and obvious at the same time. A younger me would have glanced past them without registering anything. I wasn't a younger me, and my paranoia was paying off. They weren’t casual strollers, yet they were strolling too casually, towards Mike.
I brought out my cell phone, switched on the camera, zoomed in as far as it would go, and snapped a few photos of each of them. I worried my movements would draw their attention, but I needed to get these images—the man across the lake, three frames from different angles, then the second one, who was now about seventy-five feet behind Mike. I captured their grainy faces as well as I could in the near dark, their posture, and the geometry of their positions relative to where Mike was sitting. The pictures weren’t as clear as I hoped, but they showed enough.
The source arrived a few minutes later. A woman, mid-thirties, moving fast with the tight controlled energy of someone who'd talked themselves into doing something they knew was risky. She went straight to Mike. No greeting I could see, just the urgent, low conversation of people with limited time and things to say that couldn't be unsaid.
I watched the two men watch them. They had ended their too-casual strolls and had stopped in place and were making a point not to look in Mike’s direction.
I stayed where I was. There was nothing to do yet, and moving too soon might make things worse. So I held my position and surveyed the location. Both Lakeshore and Grand Avenue would have enough traffic and witnesses to prevent anything rash, and I’d be able to stop at least one of the men before they got too close. Still, I didn’t like any of this.
The source left the way she'd come, walking briskly with her head down. Whatever they'd discussed was done quickly. Then Mike was alone on the bench, perhaps thinking of her next move, and I was watching two men who were watching her, and it was time to move.
Mike
The source had insisted on the Pergola, which left Mike with limited options for a spot that offered any cover. She'd settled on the bench closest to Grand Avenue — separate enough to allow for some private space to talk, close enough to the sidewalk that either of them could leave quickly if they needed to.
Mike had been working on the developer story for six weeks. What had started as a routine piece on city contract irregularities, the kind of story she could write in her sleep by now, the kind Oakland produced as reliably as the A’s had losing seasons — had turned into something with more layers than she'd expected. Each time she thought she'd reached the bottom, another piece appeared. The police sweep operations came first: aggressive, coordinated, and timed with a precision that didn't match the city's official explanations. The rezoning paperwork was next: a corridor of industrial and residential blocks along the waterfront that had quietly changed classification in a series of votes so unremarkable they'd barely registered in the council minutes. The payments were third, the one she was still navigating in the dark.
She locked her bike and checked her phone. The source was two minutes out. Mike wondered why Voss couldn’t just tell her what she needed over the phone.
The source arrived on foot from the north, moving fast, head down, walking more intently than the casual lake strollers who were scattered about. Her name was Renata Voss, and she worked in the project management office of Harrow Development Group, the lead firm on the waterfront proposal. She was thirty-one, had been with Harrow for four years, and three weeks ago had sent Mike a message through the Hub's email tip line saying only: “I have information. I need to talk to someone who will use it.”
They had exchanged four messages before agreeing to meet. Mike had been careful. So had Renata.
"You came alone," Renata said. It wasn't a question, but it wasn't entirely a statement either.
"I came alone," Mike said.
Renata glanced around the park in both directions, then sat next to Mike on the bench. She was well-dressed for someone meeting a reporter for a clandestine chat: blazer, dark trousers, the kind of practical heels that said she'd come from the office and hadn't gone home first. There was a small canvas tote over one shoulder that she clutched with both hands.
"I want to tell you what I know," Renata said. "I want you to understand what you're dealing with."
"Take your time," Mike said. She kept her voice easy. Whatever pace the source needed, that was the pace.
Renata took a breath. "The sweep operations, the three encampment clearances on this corridor in the past eighteen months, they weren't city-initiated. The request came from Harrow. Through a councilman's office. I saw the emails." She paused. "I wasn't supposed to see them. I was cc'd by mistake on a thread that got forwarded up."
Mike kept her expression steady. "Which councilman?"
"Diaz. His chief of staff is the one who made the arrangement. There are also payments, not directly to Diaz, but through a PAC he controls. Three separate transfers from a Harrow subsidiary in the past two years. The amounts are varied, but there’s documentation."
"And the zoning inspectors?"
Renata's jaw tightened. "Two of them. Both signed off on assessments that cleared the rezoning path. Both received consulting fees from a firm that exists only on paper. I traced the firm back to a Harrow LLC in six steps." She almost smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes. "I'm good at my job."
Mike believed her. "You said documentation."
“I can’t access it anymore at work because they’re watching me closely, but the PAC payments are public record, so are corporate ownership filings. You could do a lot with that alone.” Mike took notes as Renata listed off the names of some of the LLCs that Harrow controlled in one way or another. “You can also do a FOIA filing for most of the city council stuff if that’s not available online. Most of what you need is out there, and that’s why Harrow is so nervous. There's one other thing." She looked down at her hands for a moment. "Eighteen months ago, a community organizer named David Peña was killed in a hit-and-run on International Boulevard. The driver was never identified. The police closed the case as unsolved." She looked back up. "There's a wire transfer in Harrow's internal accounts dated three days after Peña died. The memo line says consulting, but it’s for a company I’d never heard of, and I’d heard of them all."
The park was mostly quiet. Somewhere to the west, a cyclist’s headlight swept across the treetops. Renata's eyes followed it.
Something shifted in her face. It was subtle, a tightening around the eyes, a fraction of movement in her jaw, but Mike had spent enough time watching people decide to leave an interview that she recognized it immediately.
Renata shook her head as if to shake away a bad idea. "I have to go."
"Is there a number where I can —
"I'll reach out." She was already walking away. "Don't try to contact me at work."
She moved north along the paved path without looking back, her heels quiet on the pavement. In thirty seconds, she was at the corner. In thirty-five, she was gone.
Mike sat on the bench with her notepad in her hand and the name David Peña settling somewhere in her chest. She had heard of him, vaguely, from the margins of another story, a name in a list of people displaced by the first sweep operation. She hadn't known he was dead.
She was still standing there, turning it over, when she heard footsteps from the south, looked up, and saw Karl Warren walking quickly toward her out of the dark.
Warren
The source left the way careful people leave, with no goodbye, no backward glance, just a decision made and acted on. I watched her leave Mike and head out into the busyness of Grand Avenue until the city swallowed her. Then I watched the two men.
The one to the south moved first. A shift of weight, a half-turn of the head — but it was enough. He wasn't watching the bench anymore. He was watching the direction the source had gone. The second man, to the north, had already started moving, crossing the street at an angle that looked casual and wasn't.
They weren't interested in Mike — for now.
I held my position for another ten seconds, running the logic of it all, thinking of options. If they knew the source would be here, they already knew who she would meet. Following her now meant they were just keeping close tabs on her or making sure she understood the consequences of her loose talk. Neither possibility was good for the source. Neither changed what I needed to do next.
Mike was still on the bench, mulling over whatever information the source had given her. She hadn't clocked the men. She didn't know they'd been there, didn't know they'd just pivoted off her and gone after the woman she'd spent weeks trying to get to talk.
I stepped away from the shadows and walked toward her.
She looked at me the way she always looked at me when I'd done something she hadn't sanctioned. Not angry yet. That might come next, but for now, it was a mix of disappointment and a general look of “What the Fuck?”
"C’mon," I said quietly.
"Karl—"
"Not here." I turned on my heels and started heading south, away from where the two men had been. She fell in beside me after a beat, which told me she'd read my tone correctly. Mike was fast like that, even when she didn't want to be.
We moved across the park and another half block in silence. I kept my eyes on the street ahead and used my peripheral vision the way I'd been taught and never quite unlearned. Nothing behind us was moving with purpose. That was good news and bad news for the source.
"They went after her," I said. "Your source."
Mike said nothing for a moment. I could feel her processing it. "How many?"
"Two. They were on you before she arrived. Coordinated, working together; working the same perimeter. One south, one north." I pulled out my phone without breaking stride and held the screen toward her. "I got them."
She took the phone. She didn't slow down, but her eyes dropped to the screen and stayed there. I watched her enlarge the images, move between them, enlarge again. She was doing what she always did with information: filing it and cross-referencing it against whatever she already had.
"The one on the left," she said.
"What about him?"
"I've seen that jacket before. Outside the Hub, maybe two weeks ago. I thought he was waiting for someone." She handed the phone back. "I didn't think anything of it."
There was nothing useful to say about that, so I didn't.
"They're not police," she said.
"No."
"Private?"
"That's my guess. Trained, though. The way they held position — that's not a skip tracer or a process server. Someone spent money on these two."
Mike was quiet for another half block. The street opened up ahead of us, more light, a few parked cars, the distant sound of the city breathing in and out. I kept my pace even.
"She gave me a name," Mike said. "David Peña. Community organizer. Hit-and-run, eighteen months ago, unsolved. She's connecting it to Harrow."
"Meaning they've done this before."
"Meaning the story is bigger than zoning irregularities." She paused. "And if they're already watching me—"
"They are already all over her." I let that land without dressing it up. "You need to call her. Right now."
Mike had her phone out before I finished the sentence. I listened to it ring through — four times, five — and then voicemail, a brief professional outgoing message in a measured voice that matched the woman I'd watched walk away twelve minutes ago.
Mike left a message. Short, careful, the kind of phrasing that communicated urgency without stating it plainly in case the wrong person listened first. When she hung up, her face had settled into something that wasn't quite worry and wasn't quite calm.
"She picked that spot herself," Mike said. Not an accusation, more like something she was turning over.
"They probably knew the meeting was happening before she chose it," I said. "If they've been on her inside the company."
She looked at me. "You were there the whole time."
"Yes."
"You asked me for the location."
"Yes."
She held my gaze for a moment. I didn't look away and didn't offer anything beyond what was already out there. We had been here before, in different forms — the particular friction of two people who operated independently by nature and by necessity, circling the question of what they owed each other and how much of themselves they were willing to adjust. I wasn't going to apologize for being there. She wasn't going to thank me for it. That was an accurate accounting of where we stood, and I found I was fine with it.
"You should stay at my place tonight," I said.
She opened her mouth.
"Not an order, of course. Just a strong suggestion," I said. "They know you. They may or may not know where you live; they certainly know where you work, but they don't know where I live."
A long pause. The city continued to move and breathe in the dark and all around us.
"I need my laptop," she said.
"We'll get it."
Mike
Warren's loft had the particular quality of a space arranged by someone who didn't care much about interior decoration. Everything had a spot, that was clear, but the spots were chosen for function rather than looks. The good lamp sat next to the good chair. The table was by the window, where the morning light was useful. There were no decorative objects, only objects.
Mike had been here before, almost been killed here. Since then, she and Warren had grown close, and she’d spent a lot of time here hunched over her laptop, working toward a deadline. But this time, she was aware that she wasn't going home tonight, which overshadowed everything else she was thinking about. Her life was once again in danger.
Warren made coffee without asking, placed a mug near her elbow, and then went to the other side of the room. She could hear him moving quietly, doing whatever he did when he was giving her space to work. She appreciated it and said nothing.
Like Voss said, most of the information was already out in the world, waiting to be found and connected. She had been detailed in what she shared with Mike, and Mike’s notes were just as detailed, albeit in her own distinct shorthand. But it was enough, enough to fly through the web and collect all the drips and drabs of data that were out there. Mike wondered what more Voss might have shared had she been able to safely access her computer without being tracked.
Mike sat back.
She had covered enough of these corruption and crime stories to know she needed documentation and corroboration. It was one thing to say in a story that “sources said” something or another, but it was far preferable to have a trail of documents to show. The documentation was the difference between a lawsuit and a Pulitzer. She got the source's words, but the source had stopped returning calls. She knew Renata Voss hadn't answered her phone and might not answer it tomorrow or the next day, and without a source willing to stand behind the documentation, the documentation alone wouldn't get her very far. She knew all of that.
She also knew what she had.
The reporting on Peña’s death was easy enough to find. Even the Hub ran a story on it at the time, but it didn’t say anything more than any other paper’s story: he was 34, the case unsolved, had organized three encampment communities along the waterfront corridor, had run a food distribution service out of a church van, and had filed two formal complaints with the city about the sweep operations. The complaints were in the city’s public record. They were in plain sight when she had walked right past them six weeks ago without making the connection. She made it now.
Behind her, Warren quietly set something down, a plate, it turned out, when she glanced back. Pop Tarts, likely all he had in the apartment that didn't need actual cooking. She looked at them and then at him.
"Thank you," she said.
He nodded and returned to his chair without making a fuss. She had come to understand that was its own kind of language. With Warren, the lack of ceremony was the ceremony.
She turned back to her screen. The document was open, the cursor blinking in that patient, waiting-for-words way. Outside, Oakland was doing what it always did, moving, breathing, absorbing the lives of the people inside it. Somewhere in the waterfront corridor, the survey stakes stood in the dark vacant lots, and Renata Voss was not answering her phone.
Mike picked up a Pop Tart and started writing.
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