That's why I was in the parking lot that morning, standing next to my own car with a cold coffee and a legitimate reason to be there, watching Cole come in for his shift.
I wasn't there to confront him.
I was there to follow him.
Cole had his own reasons for being there that morning.
The moment he walked up to me, I could see it in the way he moved, like a man who had practiced a scene in his head and wanted to get it finished before anybody noticed.
He knew I was IA.
That was never a secret.
What mattered was that he knew something else, something I didn't.
When he pulled that bag of white powder out of my chest pocket, I recognized it immediately.
Same size.
Same seal.
Same faint pink marking on the corner where the property room labels them.
It matched the missing bag from case 24-1187.
My hand knew the weight of that bag before my brain caught up.
Someone had taken a second bag from the same evidence stash and handed it to Cole.
Which meant whoever was directing him had access to the property room, or knew how to get past the log.
I didn't arrest him in that parking lot because I wanted to know who sent him.
If I'd arrested him on the spot, he'd have been arraigned by noon, out on bail by dinner, and whoever was behind him would have known exactly how much I had.
That was the calculation I made while I had him pinned across the hood.
Keep it messy.
Keep it public.
Keep him talking afterward.
The officer down call complicated everything.
The second patrol officer to reach us was a woman named Jamie Tran.
I knew her file better than she knew it herself.
She stopped a few feet away and looked at Cole, then at me.
"What happened, Marcus?"
"Ask him," I said.
"I'd rather you hear it in his words."
Cole didn't say anything.
He just kept his cheek on the hood and stared at his own hands.
Tran stepped closer and lowered her voice.
"Whatever's happening here, IA is already on the way.
I heard it on the radio before I came out."
That was the first real piece of information I got that morning.
Someone had called IA before I did.
Someone had built a story about me fighting an officer in the parking lot before the fight even happened.
I stepped back from the car and let Tran take control of Cole.
While the uniforms walked him to the back wall and started the standard questions, I pulled out my phone to call my supervisor.
Before I could hit the number, the phone buzzed in my hand.
Unknown number.
One line of text.
"You're not the only one watching Cole.
Check the trunk."
I looked across the parking lot at my own car.
The trunk was closed.
I hadn't opened it since I left home.
I checked it anyway.
I slid the key in, lifted the lid, and stood there for a moment, because I was learning in real time what kind of morning this was going to be.
Inside were two things I did not leave there myself.
A second bag of white powder, sealed and marked exactly like the first one.
And a phone I had never seen before, lying face up, its screen dark, its case already warm from someone else's pocket.
Chapter 3 - The Second Bag
Posted Oct 16, 2026
Chapter 3 - The Second Bag
I stood over Nathan Cole for a moment and watched the fear finish settling into his face.
The asphalt of the Fairmont PD lot was still hot from the morning, and my knee ached where he'd caught me with that first wild swing, but none of that mattered yet.
I let him up slowly.
"Get in your car," I said.
"Stay there.
Don't touch your radio."
He didn't argue.
That was the first time in six weeks I'd seen Cole do exactly what he was told, and it told me more about him than anything in the file I'd been building since February.
I walked around to the back of my own car — a gray department-issued sedan I'd been driving since the pool cars got reassigned in the fall — and I popped the trunk for no reason I could have explained at the time.
Maybe it was habit.
Maybe it was the badge in my hand.
Maybe it was the small, quiet voice that had kept me alive for twenty-two years on this job.
The trunk was mostly empty.
A jumper cable.
A case file I'd brought from home.
A pair of work gloves.
And a brown canvas evidence bag I had never put there.
I knew the bag on sight.
Every bag in the Fairmont evidence room is stamped with the case number on the seal, and this one carried the same number as the bag that had gone missing in October — the one that started all of this.
Fresh tape.
Fresh seal.
Same number.
"You've got to be kidding me," I said out loud, to nobody.
I photographed it where it sat.
The angle of the trunk lid against the asphalt.
The seal.
The tape.
The empty space around it, so nobody could say I'd moved it before the pictures were taken.
Then I put a glove on and lifted the flap.
Inside the bag was a small plastic evidence envelope — the kind we use for a controlled buy — and stacked on top of it was a black prepaid phone, the cheap kind you buy at a gas station with cash.
The screen was already on.
No lock screen.
One saved contact.