"You didn't tell him that his mother is dying," Nick observed as they walked back to the car.

"It's not my place to try guilt tripping him into making peace with her, you know?"

"And telling him about the picture wasn't a guilt trip?"

Judy hesitated. Nick sounded genuinely curious, like he was interested in her reasoning.

"That's different," she said finally, "Maybe she's got that picture because she regrets what she did. Maybe she keeps it because she was happy then, even if the rest of her family wasn't. If Hy goes to her to find out why, it's not the same as going to her because she's dying."

Nick seemed to consider it for a moment, and he nodded thoughtfully. "You're probably used to all kinds of family drama, aren't you?"

"Nothing like the Leaves–"

"Leaps," Nick interjected, a finger raised.

Judy rolled her eyes. "Nothing like the Leaps, but there were always little squabbles. You know, who was a gossip, or got too loud during the holidays, or accidentally-on-purpose dropped a casserole dish..."

"Do you miss that?"

"Sometimes," Judy said.

She had left Zootopia once, thinking that she would never return. Even after giving up on being a police officer, however, a quiet life on her parents' farm had been no more appealing than it had been when she first left it. Judy loved her parents, and her entire family, dearly, but she knew that she wouldn't give up on her dream and the city again.

"Maybe Hy misses his family too. Even if he does envy his sister."

"So do you think Hy's the one who did it?" Judy asked.

Nick shrugged. "On the one paw, it seems like he's got a good life going now. Why risk that for revenge now? Twenty years and change is a long time to nurse a grudge. On the other paw, well, it's not unheard of."

Nick's implication to Judy was perfectly clear; he had held onto the pain of something just about as long. Assuming, of course, that Hy was the guilty party.

"I don't think anything points one way or the other for him right now. We still have a lot to follow up on, you know," Nick said.

He was right. They had to follow up on alibis for Hy and Heather, see if any of the stores around Holly's apartment building had usable footage that might show the assailant's face, look into Jacques Lapin, and talk to Holly's coworkers. "Why don't we split up and cover more ground?" he continued, "You can follow up on Hy and Heather, and I'll see if I can track down anything around the apartment building."

An investigation was a lot like putting together a jigsaw puzzle after someone hid the pieces. Most of the time spent wasn't figuring out how the pieces went together; it was finding the pieces themselves. The sad fact of police work was that a lot of it was very boring and completely unproductive. The moments when the pieces aligned and a portion of the picture became clear could be few and far in between. The entire reason for the search was because they didn't know where the pieces would be found, which was the thought that Nick kept going back to as he came up empty-pawed.

The neighborhood that Holly's apartment building was in had a fair number of stores and other apartment buildings surrounding it, but very few of them had cameras that faced the street and might have captured something helpful. In the end, after a couple hours of doing his best at behaving like a reasonable authority figure trying to solve a crime and not a tired con artist, Nick walked away with three sets of camera footage. Mercifully, all of the shops he had procured them from had been much more modern in their security methods than Holly's apartment building, and the footage was at a decent resolution on a media format that the police station was actually equipped to read. The three cameras didn't provide anything close to complete coverage of all the possible approaches to Holly's apartment building, unfortunately. It was entirely possible that, either through luck or preparation, the assailant had slipped through without being recorded anywhere besides the hallway to Holly's apartment. But it was also entirely possible that the assailant hadn't, and the footage might be the clue that broke the case wide open.

Nick wasn't one for unfounded optimism, though. Even if the new camera footage was the key to the case, it would probably take a lot of monotonous watching of quiet streets to get to the useful parts. Just the thought of it made him have to stifle a yawn; he was still exhausted from the late night that kicked off the case. Still, he hadn't gotten word from his partner yet that she was done following up on the Leaps's (or Leaves's, since he fully intended on cheerfully correcting her no matter which one she used), and she had the car. He decided to follow up on Holly's apartment building to burn more time.

Nick was pleasantly surprised to find that the super of Holly's apartment building was just as friendly and cheerful as he had been when Judy had been there. Judging from Mr. Cony's accent, Nick had pegged him as being from the upper Northeast, probably from one of the places where a prey mammal could count on one paw all the predators they knew. Nick had expected–and prepared himself for–thinly-veiled patronizing condescension, of the sort that Judy herself had exhibited when they first met. Instead, Cony had warmly welcomed him back and reiterated that he would help in any way he could. "I was wondering if you could tell me more about Holly's neighbors," Nick said.

Cony paused for a moment, and the only sound was the slight hum of the elevator moving. There probably wouldn't be anything that Cony could tell him that the bunny hadn't already told Grévy and LaMerk, but Nick figured that there might be something that the hostile duo hadn't thought was worth writing into their report. Not that he had bothered to read it yet anyway. "Well, we got eight apartments on her floor," Cony said, "Only seven tenants, but it's really more like six."

"Why's that?" Nick asked, as the elevator dinged to announce that they had reached the sixth floor and the doors opened.

Nick allowed Cony off first, waiting as the older bunny limped into the hallway. Cony walked around the corner to the hallway that Holly's apartment was in before he answered.

"This one's Holly's, o'course," he said, gesturing at the door to the apartment that was on the side of the wall closest to the elevator, "'Cross the way, that one's Mr. Drove's place–he's the one who owns the building, mind–but he ain't hardly ever in. Don't think he cares much for Zootopia, so he only stays when business takes him here."

Nick nodded, understanding why Cony would consider Drove to not really be a tenant. "Is he out of town now?"

"Ayuh, probably won't be back for another couple weeks."

"What about the other two apartments in this hallway?" Nick asked.

"That one there," Cony said, pointing at the door of the apartment that was on the same side of the hall as Holly's, "Is the empty one. The one 'cross from it is Dave Hispid's. He works in a club or something like that. Works nights."

"How long's the empty apartment been empty?" Nick asked, wondering if a former neighbor might have had a grudge against Holly.

Cony looked both ways down the hall to confirm that they were alone before he answered, which instantly piqued Nick's interest in his response. "It used to be old Mrs. Lotor's place. The building's mostly bunnies, but she was a raccoon. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. But when her husband passed, she went a little funny."

This was starting to sound promising to Nick. "Funny how?"

"She started hoarding. Filled the place with worthless junk. Maybe she was always like that and her husband kept her from collecting too much. Maybe it was just because she was getting up there in years. But she started getting paranoid, thinking someone was going to steal her garbage. Always complaining about the other tenants, you know."

Nick nodded. "What happened next?"

Cony looked both ways down the hall again, and his answer was barely above a whisper. Nick leaned in to hear. "Well, Mr. Drove said to tell the other tenants that she moved out. Doubt any of them missed her. Truth is, though, one of her piles of garbage collapsed on her. Was at least a couple days before I found the body 'cause she didn't drop off her rent check."

That wasn't the answer that Nick had wanted, since he doubted that a dead raccoon was attempting murder. "And none of the other tenants know that?" Nick asked, his voice just as low as Cony's.

Cony nodded. "Ayuh. Mr. Drove made sure it stayed all quiet-like. He got a company to do the clean up, but the apartment's gutted now. Down to the studs and baseboards."

Nick sighed. It was a juicy piece of gossip for the super, but didn't seem particularly relevant to the case. The living tenants of the sixth floor weren't particularly helpful either. Dave Hispid, the only mammal who actually lived in the same hallway as Holly, had been particularly grumpy when Nick had woken him up by knocking on his door. The sullen rabbit was in his early twenties, with fur that had been artfully shaved into geometric patterns and dyed in colors that probably fluoresced under black lights. He had large wooden ear gauges that made the tips flop over from their weight and metal studs through his eyebrows and nose. Hispid had bloodshot eyes, narrowed as he evaluated the cop before him, and reeked of patchouli, which might have masked the scent of pot to a mammal with a worse sense of smell.

Overall, Nick found it easy to believe that Hispid worked in a club. "Look, I don't know anything, OK?" Hispid said, moving to close the door.

"But I haven't even asked you any questions!" Nick said brightly, giving the rabbit his most winning (and toothy) grin.

"I told the other cops," Hispid whined, "I was at Club 966 all night. So unless you got a warrant, leave me alone."

Hispid closed the door, and Nick frowned. Maybe he should have read the report that Grévy and LaMerk put together. Nick shrugged; he still had the tenants on the other side of the sixth floor to check up on.

The other tenants had been considerably more polite than Hispid, but they all told essentially the same story. They hadn't heard or seen anything until the police had shown up and started asking questions the night before. Considering that the the two apartments on the other side of the sixth floor that were closest to Holly's belonged to a bunny who looked about old enough to be Judy's great-great-grandmother and was almost completely deaf and a bat who worked nights and hadn't been home at the time of the assault, it was entirely believable.

While the interviews had been a complete bust, there was one more thing that Nick had wanted to check. It had occurred to him, when he saw the warning on the emergency exit on the first floor, that the building had an alarm system. Sure enough, there was a similar warning on a sign set on the wall next to the broken window that led to the fire escape. It had the text, "IN CASE OF FIRE, LIFT BAR AND OPEN WINDOW. ALARM WILL SOUND."

Above the words there were little pictograms of a stick mammal following the written instructions. The broken glass on the floor of the hallway had been cleaned up and the window covered with a tarp. The reason why the alarm had failed to go off was immediately obvious to Nick's eye; a metal shim had been jammed between the window and its frame, which kept the alarm circuit from going off. That, at least, was a potentially useful piece of evidence. He'd have to get Cony to turn the alarm off so that the shim could be removed; there was a good chance that the shim had forced the contacts apart enough so that once it was removed the alarm circuit would trip.

His train of thought was interrupted by a call from Judy. He leaned against the wall and answered, "Find anything, Carrots? I haven't."

"Maybe," she responded, and even over the tinny connection he got the impression that she was a lot more confident in what she had turned up than the word implied, "I'm coming to get you, OK? Where are you now?"

"The apartment building."

"I'll be there in five."