The fly rail coughed once, and Victor Hale folded onto the boards beneath it. Red spike tape crossed the safety line above him, a cheap strip from the electrics cart, still clean at the edges where it should have stayed on the floor. Tessa Vale dropped to one knee. The stage carried dust and warm cable, with the sour bite of machine oil, and the metal taste of a fresh cut kept rising every time the house fan shifted air through the flies. Of course someone had cut it clean. Of course they had. Tessa put two fingers on the nylon, then pulled them back when the fray bit her skin. Straight blade. High enough for the hand to stay off the boards. Someone with the loft key. Someone who liked tidy edges. Her thumb came away black with rosin when she checked the knot on the lower safety drop, and that little stain told her more than the body did. Victor lay on his back with one shoe half off, his cuff button bright against the apron light, his mouth open toward the grid like he still had a line to cue. Inspector Bram Keene stood at the apron with one boot on the edge tape, writing in a pocket notebook. He had a neck for tight collars and a face made for bad news. 'Don't touch anything,' he said. 'You already have,' Tessa said, and kept her voice flat enough to pass for a tool laid on steel. Milo hovered by the masking flats, his cable bag hanging from two fingers. She nudged it with the side of her boot and shoved it behind a road case before Keene turned his head. Clean. Gone. Under Victor's shoe, a roll of yellow insulation tape had jammed against the apron seam, the sort Milo used for cable bundles, his initials pencilled on the core. Tessa hooked it under her boot and slid it behind the road case with the bag. 'Back up,' Keene said. 'The stage is mine until I say otherwise.' 'Then stop standing on it,' Tessa said. The old theatre gave a low hum under the work lights, the kind that came from transformers and bad patience. Victor's waistcoat had split at the seam. A brass tooth pressed through the cloth, stamped 7. Tessa slid it into her palm, closed her hand around it, and kept her arm loose at her side while Keene wrote. This place always had a smell for trouble, but tonight it came with varnish, hot dust, and a cut rope that should have screamed before it fell.