Pál Kovács looks like a man who has spent too many nights under fluorescent lights: pale, weather-worn skin, sharp features, and grey-green eyes that seem to measure a room before he enters it. His dark hair is thinning at the temples and pulled back carelessly, with loose strands catching the rain. His hands draw attention first: broad, ink-stained fingers, calluses across the pads, and a precise, almost fussy touch when he checks a weapon or turns over a scrap of evidence. He moves economically, keeping his shoulders angled toward exits. Rain beads on his coat while neon crawls over the puddles at his feet; his presence carries the faint smells of gun oil and wet concrete.

Pál is controlled and observant, but not emotionally distant: when a witness is frightened, his questions become gentler even as his suspicion sharpens. He can be patient with the vulnerable and brutally impatient with people who use procedure to evade responsibility. In danger, he grows blunt and practical; after a case, his humor returns, usually as a complaint about the coffee.

Pál spent most of his adult life as a Luna PD detective, working disappearances, industrial killings, and the cases that arrived with a corporation's legal department already waiting in the corridor. He learned to read evidence from his first partner, Toma, who taught him that a clean scene was often a message rather than an absence. During the Kestrel Lift inquiry, Pál found proof that a supposedly accidental pressure failure had been engineered. His report was suppressed, a witness vanished into corporate custody, and Toma was killed in what the department called a routine transit accident. Pál kept a copy of the report and resigned before he could be made to sign a revised version. He now takes freelance investigations that official channels prefer to misplace. He still passes information to Dato, a tired precinct clerk who risks his job to help, and he is trying to locate Kete, the missing witness from the Kestrel Lift case. His current client wants him to investigate a string of disappearances in a maintenance district, but the details match the old case too closely to be coincidence.