CHAPTER 1: The Name That Was Already Dead
Sergeant Hoyt slammed my leather cred wallet onto the scratched laminate desk, chuckling as the gold seal spun against the Formica. The steel cuffs bit into the bone of my left wrist, chaining me to the floor ring beneath the booking bench while my duty weapon and encrypted phone disappeared into his locked lower drawer. I could not run even if the deadbolt gave way; forty miles of swamp timber lay outside, and my credentials were the only thing keeping me from becoming an unidentified John Doe in Mercer County’s swamp logs.
“Gold plate looks real enough to fool a tourist,” Hoyt said, tapping the badge with the tip of his unclicked pen. “Trouble is, stranger, we don’t get many federal inspectors driving unmarked sedans down old timber access roads after midnight. ”
“You can verify the field office code on line four,” I said. My voice was dry, scraping against my throat, but steady. “Call the regional duty desk in Atlanta. It takes ninety seconds. ”
Hoyt didn’t reach for the desk phone. Instead, he pulled the intake keyboard closer, heavy shoulders hunching under his gray uniform shirt. Beside him, Deputy Ellis, a kid barely old enough to grow a proper mustache, shifted his weight from boot to boot, avoiding my eyes. Ellis held the plastic intake tray like a shield, his knuckles white around the rim.
“See, that’s where you’re mistaken,” Hoyt said, his fingers clattering against the grease-slicked keys. “Nobody at federal dispatch knows who you are because you aren’t in their system anymore. Not here. ”
The dot-matrix printer behind the desk gave a sharp, metallic screech. A thermal plastic wristband fed out into the tray.
Ellis reached down to tear it off, but his hand hesitated for a fraction of a second. His throat bobbed. He glanced from the slip to the sergeant, then back down at the floor.
“Sergeant,” Ellis muttered, his voice barely clearing the hum of the fluorescent fixtures. “The system auto-populated the jacket from the cold roster. It pulled the old quarry file. ”
“Put it on him, Ellis,” Hoyt said without looking up.
Ellis stepped around the counter, the plastic band trembling slightly in his grip. He bent down, took my right wrist, and snapped the thick plastic clasp into place.
I twisted my wrist under the glare of the overhead tube.
The black ink was still warm against my skin. It didn’t say John Doe. It didn’t say my name, Mark Brennan.
The label read: Thomas Vance. Intake #09-4112. Status: Deceased (Remains Unrecovered).
A cold knot tightened in the pit of my stomach. Thomas Vance had been a Mercer County deputy who went missing four years ago after filing a formal complaint about stolen county timber and impound fraud. His patrol cruiser had been dragged out of the Blackwood River with the windshield kicked out and no body inside.
Hoyt wasn’t laughing because he thought my credentials were fake. He was laughing because he knew exactly who I was—and by tagging me with the name of a dead man whose file had been closed and buried, he was wiping my existence off the live state registry.
“You’re going to the regional annex at four in the morning,” Hoyt said, rising from his swivel chair. He picked up my leather wallet, dropped it into a brown canvas evidence sack, and zipped it shut. “Old Vance here has an outstanding warrant for dereliction and failure to appear. Terrible tragedy what happened to him, but the state will be glad to finally close the ledger. ”
“You can’t move a federal agent on a county manifest,” I said, tension pulling taut behind my ribs. “The satellite transponder on my sedan logs every forty seconds. When my supervisor loses my ping, they won’t call your office. They’ll send Marshals. ”
Hoyt leaned across the desk, smiling with teeth yellowed by chewing tobacco.
“Your car took a wrong turn at the river bridge, Vance. Pity about the current this time of year. ”
He reached for his jacket, but as his sleeve pulled back, I caught sight of the intake clipboard on the counter. Tucked beneath the transport sheet was a pink tow-yard slip dated three hours before Hoyt had supposedly pulled me over on the access road—and across the top, written in fresh purple ink, was the direct cell number of my own regional director.
CHAPTER 2: My Director's Private Number Proved They Planned This Ambush Hours Earlier
I memorized the seven digits scribbled across that pink tow slip before Hoyt’s forearm swept over the blotter. It was Donald Miller’s personal exchange—the unlisted number my regional director gave out only to his senior case leads and his family. Seeing it scrawled in Hoyt’s pencil meant my sudden reroute off Interstate 16 was no accident; my own supervisor had handed my travel itinerary and vehicle description to Mercer County three hours before I crossed the county line.