The sergeant paused, his hand still holding my left wrist against the scanner. He looked at me through the wire mesh, his eyes tired and bloodshot from a double shift.
"Lieutenant Miller hasn't touched a property transfer since Tuesday," the sergeant said flatly. "He’s been out on medical leave with a torn rotator cuff. Captain assigned Vance to cover the evidence lockbox until Monday morning."
The air in the alcove seemed to thin out instantly.
The carbon copy that had fallen from my jacket zipper hadn't been initialed by Miller during normal shift duties. Vance had used an absent supervisor’s stamp to pull that dead boy’s sealed evidence from the precinct safe, betting that no one would audit the weekend locker until Toby’s operating bond was already destroyed.
"Wipe your hands," the sergeant said, pointing to a dispenser of paper towels mounted to the cinderblock wall. "Go sit in cell two until the transport van gets here from central."
He unlocked the sliding steel gate and pointed toward the rear row of temporary holding pens. The corridor was empty, save for an older maintenance worker pushing a mop bucket toward the basement drainage trench.
I walked into cell two, the iron bars sliding shut behind my heels with a heavy mechanical clatter. Through the front bars, I could see the high, narrow transom window that looked out onto the rear parking alley at ground level.
Outside, rain had begun to fall in heavy, deliberate sheets, drumming against the barred glass. Through the grime on the lower panes, I saw Vance’s silhouette kneeling near the storm drain twenty feet away, his tactical flashlight cutting a yellow cone through the dark. The beam swept across the wet asphalt, darting back and forth over the grease stains where my brother’s sedan had been parked.
He hadn't found it.
The runoff from the precinct gutters was surging down the alley incline, washing trash and fallen leaves toward the iron grate. If the top half of that yellow carbon slip washed into the city sewer main, the only paper trail connecting that white powder to Marcus Bell’s county property locker would be the torn scrap sticking to the rubber heel of Vance’s boot.
And once Vance realized the water had taken it, he would walk back down these concrete stairs with an affidavit already typed, closing the door on my brother's business forever.
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
The torn yellow paper had not washed down the city main.
It had drifted sideways, caught flat against the rusted flange where the rain gutter joined the brick foundation of the transformer vault, barely four inches above the rising pool. In ten minutes, the gutter overflow would tear the carbon slip to mulch, dissolving the ink that proved Vance had pulled that dead boy’s evidence from the basement locker under an absent supervisor’s name.
The heavy basement access latch clicked. Vance’s boots struck the steel steps, slow and measured, shaking the pipe fittings overhead.
I gripped the cell bars. Across the narrow aisle, behind the chicken-wire partition, the gray intake desk stood deserted while the booking sergeant stepped into the records vestibule to file my fingerprint cards. Beside the booking monitor sat the metal wire bin holding my personal belongings: my worn leather billfold, my pocketknife already tagged in clear plastic, and the blue carbon copy of Toby’s commercial hauling permit.
Next to Toby’s permit lay Vance’s desk log.
The binder lay open beneath the green glow of the terminal screen, its ring clips binding fifty carbon pages of night intake entries. The top sheet showed the case number Vance had assigned to the brick of powder he’d crammed into my coat: Case 44-09, Bell, Marcus. Supplementary field recovery. Beneath that line, Vance had pressed hard enough with a ballpoint pen to leave deep ridges in the underlying sheets, forging Lieutenant Miller’s medical-leave initials, R. M. , with the heavy downward slant Miller never used on formal dockets.