The supervisor called him “Moth.”
Morrow’s face changed.
The deputies noticed it before I did. His shoulders pressed harder against the pavement, and the chain around his waist went still.
“No one has called me that since I was thirteen,” he said.
The supervisor backed away from the transfer terminal.
His name was Curtis Grant.
Until that moment, I had not known he was Morrow’s older brother.
Curtis had removed Grant from his county identification, foster-care credentials and every document displayed in the loading bay. He had spent sixteen years approving juvenile transfers without once acknowledging that the tattooed man beneath the van shared his blood.
The girl struck the window again.
Four taps.
One.
Seven.
Morrow looked at me.
“Ask her where she learned it.”
Curtis reached for the van’s emergency release.
A deputy stopped him.
I opened the communication panel beside the rear door but kept the lock engaged.
The girl pressed her face near the small speaker.
“My mother taught me.”
“What was her name?”
“Rachel.”
Morrow closed his eyes.
Rachel Grant had been his younger sister.
County records said she died in a motel fire seven years earlier with her five-year-old daughter, Emma.
The same Emma whose identity now appeared on the transfer bracelet.
Morrow had identified neither body. Curtis had handled the funeral, the insurance documents and the closed-casket burial while Morrow was serving the final months of a prison sentence.
“What is your name?” I asked the girl.
She hesitated.
Curtis answered for her.
“Emma Vale.”
The girl shook her head violently.
Morrow looked toward the rear door.
“Tell the clerk what your mother called you.”
“June.”
Curtis moved so suddenly that both deputies turned toward him.
He said the child was delusional and had been scheduled for emergency psychiatric placement after attacking a foster parent.
The transfer file supported him.
Then the terminal began printing automatically.
The bracelet scan had triggered a death-identity audit. The first page showed six children transferred under Emma Vale’s name during the previous four years.
All six had disappeared from county supervision within seventy-two hours.
Curtis stared at the printer.
He had known the audit existed.
That was the mini-payoff we needed: he had not been trying to protect a confused child from Morrow.
He had been trying to move her before anyone scanned the bracelet.
The deputies removed the driver from the van and opened the rear doors.
June did not climb out.
She stayed against the far wall, gripping a faded green jacket.
Morrow recognised it immediately.
Rachel had worn it in the last photograph taken before the fire.
June reached into one pocket and removed a brass motel key attached to a melted plastic tag.
Curtis whispered, “That should have burned.”
No one had told him where she found it.
Morrow slowly unlocked the chain around his waist and crawled from beneath the axle.
He did not approach his brother.
He approached June and stopped several feet away.
“Your mother gave you the code?”
June nodded.
“She said if they changed my name again, I had to find Moth.”
Curtis’s face emptied.
Morrow asked the question quietly.
“Where is Rachel?”
June looked past him toward the courthouse basement entrance.
“She works downstairs.”
I told her there were no offices beneath the loading bay.
She pointed to the transfer elevator.
Curtis lunged for its control panel.
The deputies caught him before he reached it.
At the same moment, the elevator doors opened by themselves.
A woman stood inside wearing a county transport uniform and Rachel Grant’s green jacket.
She looked directly at Morrow.
Then she said, “You were never supposed to find June alive.”