Sgt.

D.

No message history.

No recent calls.

Just the name, waiting for me to do the thing someone clearly wanted me to do.

I stood there for a full minute in the sun and made myself slow down.

The bag in my trunk carried the same case number as the bag Cole had just tried to plant on me.

That meant one of two things.

Either someone in the department was copying Markham's work, or Markham was running more than one play at once.

Either way, whoever had done this had done it while I was twenty feet away, wrestling Cole across the hood of his cruiser.

That window was maybe ninety seconds wide.

Whoever it was, they had known exactly when I'd be distracted.

I called my supervisor, Lieutenant Alicia Boyd.

She picked up on the fourth ring, and her voice sounded tired in a way I hadn't heard before.

"Marcus, listen to me," she said before I could say anything.

"I'm on administrative leave as of this morning."

"What are you talking about?"

"Policy review found some issues in the unit.

I'm not cleared to talk about casework with you right now.

Don't call me again on the work line."

The line went dead.

I stood next to my open trunk and listened to the parking lot hum around me.

The bag was still in there.

The phone was still in there.

The seal on the bag was still fresh.

Somebody had planned for this.

I sealed the trunk, walked back to Cole's cruiser, and leaned down to his open window.

"Who sent you here this morning?"

He looked straight ahead through the windshield.

"You don't want to know."

"Try me."

He shook his head once.

My personal phone buzzed in my jacket pocket.

A number I didn't recognize.

One line.

"You're being set up.

Meet me at the impound lot at nine.

Come alone."

I read it twice.

Then I looked back at Cole, sitting in his own sweat behind the wheel.

"Nine o'clock tonight," I said.

"Don't leave town."

He swallowed hard and nodded.

I drove home with the trunk of my department car carrying more evidence against me than against anyone else, and I spent the rest of that afternoon trying to figure out which name on my own list had put it there.

At eight-thirty I put on a jacket I don't usually wear, left my credentials locked in my kitchen drawer, and drove to the impound lot with nothing but my personal phone in my pocket.

I parked two rows back from the gate and killed the engine, and I sat there watching the chain-link fence and the sodium lights and the rows of towed cars that nobody had come to claim.

At eight fifty-eight, a silver sedan pulled in behind me and parked with its headlights off.

Chapter 4 - Sgt

Posted Oct 16, 2026

Chapter 4 - Sgt. D

The driver's door of the silver sedan opened, and Dana Reyes stepped out.

I hadn't expected that.

Dana runs records at Fairmont — she logs evidence, files casework, signs the sheets — and in six years of getting files from her, I had never once seen her look nervous.

She looked nervous now.

She didn't wave.

She didn't say my name.

She just walked to the passenger side of my car and stood there until I unlocked the door.

She got in and closed it quietly.

For a few seconds neither of us said anything.

Then she said, "You're not surprised I came."

"I'm a little surprised," I said.

"Sgt.

D.

Dana.

I should have put it together sooner."

She almost smiled.

Almost.

"The bag in your trunk was mine," she said.

"Not the evidence in it.

I don't know what's in that envelope and I don't want to know.

But I put the bag there, and I put the phone there, because I couldn't get to you any other way."

I sat with that for a second.

"You broke into my car."

"The department garage keeps a spare key set for the pool cars in a lockbox in the back hall.

You know that.

I'm not proud of it."

"Why?"

She reached into her coat and pulled out a manila folder, worn at the corners from being carried around.

"Because I've been keeping a second set of books," she said.

"Not the ones that get submitted.

The ones that are true."

She opened the folder on her lap and turned it so the dome light caught the page.

It was a hand-ruled ledger.

Date on the left.

Case number.

Bag number.

Officer who logged the bag out.

Officer who signed it back in.

At least a dozen lines had a second initial written in the margin in her handwriting — small, careful, in pencil.

"What am I looking at?"

"Bags that got logged out under names that don't exist," she said.

"Badge numbers that don't match any officer on the roster.

Case numbers that match real cases."

She tapped a line near the bottom with her fingernail.

"That one's Cole.

He signed out the bag from the October drug arrest on a Sunday, which is a day he wasn't assigned to evidence, and he signed it back in three days later.

Missing weight.

Missing contents."

I leaned in and read the line.

Then I read the line under it.

My own name.

My own badge number.

A bag I had never seen in my life, logged out on a Tuesday in November, signed back in two days after.

"That's my name," I said.

"I know," she said.

"That's why I came to you first."

I read it three more times.

My name.

My badge.

A date I could actually remember, because I had spent that Tuesday in court testifying on an entirely different case.