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mess he’d left in the living room. “Not exactly budget grocery shopping.”
    “So maybe he’s loaded outside of his job,” I said, glancing toward the bedroom door to my left. It was cracked open, the view of Lake Michigan sparkling visible through the door. “He could come from money.”
    “Could be,” Reed said. “Everything we’re picking up here so far is about money, which is weird considering this doesn’t look like a robbery.”
    “Maybe,” I said, heading for the bedroom door. “It’s just strange to kill someone in an alley and not take the four grand they’ve got in their pocket.”
    “Well, what are the options if it wasn’t for money?” Reed asked as I pushed open the bedroom door to step inside. “Personal grudge?”
    “Yeah,” I said, looking over the bedroom. “Friend, co-worker, family member, lover, the usual suspects.”
    “Maybe someone killed him so they could buy his apartment,” Reed called after me.
    “Maybe,” I said, not ruling anything out. I flipped the light switch and the lamp at the bedside snapped on, glaring against the reflective windows and giving me a dark, mirrored reflection of myself alone in the empty bedroom. “It could be anything at this point.”
    I wandered through the room, riffling through drawers in the dresser and finding clothes. I was no fashionista, clearly, but this guy’s closet was pretty top shelf stuff, name brands that I recognized even in my limited capacity. “You were living quite the high life, Mr. Jacobs,” I said quietly as I ran my fingers over one of five Brooks Brothers suits.
    “Find anything?” Reed called from the main room.
    “More money spent than any number of third world countries have in their entire budget,” I said at a normal volume, which was all I needed in order for Reed to hear me. I looked between two of the suits and found something in the back of the closet that was hidden back there. I pushed the clothing aside, the hangars making a rattling noise as they slid along the metal bar, revealing a black metal safe at the back of the closet. “Hello,” I said.
    “Did you find something?” Reed asked from the doorway. I nodded and he came wandering over and looked in. “Hmmm. How do we get into this bad boy?”
    “With greatest ease,” I said, looking it over.
    Reed gave me a blank stare. “It’s a safe.”
    I smiled. “It’s a safe that’s pre-meta.”
    Safe tech had taken a leap in both cost and quality in the last four years since metahumans had been announced to the world. Mostly it was stupid, in my opinion, since the majority of metas in the world couldn’t have cracked an old-school home safe if they had a gun to their head. What were they going to do? Push their flesh and blood fingers into the centimeter wide crack of the door and try and rip it open? Only a Wolfe-type could do that without tearing their fingers apart, and the only Wolfe left in the world was a prisoner in my head.
    Sure, there were other ways, but the truth was that the newer, anti-meta safes did nothing to keep us serious metas out. Once again, panic had ruled the day and cost people tons of money to little purpose. It's not like most metas had embraced careers in safecracking anyway.
    “This should be good,” Reed said, folding his arms in front of him as I squatted down to look at the safe door at face level. “Hey, we found another employable skill for you if this works—you could be a bank robber.”
    I grunted as I stretched my fingers out. The mechanism was one of those classic spin dials rather than one of the newer electronic ones. The safe looked kinda old, actually, but definitely solid, with thick steel around the edges. “Good to know I’ve got options,” I said as I lit up my index finger like a blowtorch, a stream of fire extending an inch from it, blue and hot enough that I could feel it on my face. I applied it to the front side of the safe, intending to slice about three-quarters of the way