He turned on his heel and walked toward the briefing room at the end of the hall. The heavy oak door shut behind him with a sharp latch click, followed immediately by the sound of the inside deadbolt turning.
I looked down at the desk. The precinct station was dead quiet now. The two patrolmen who had backed away earlier had vanished out the rear parking bay, their cruiser engines idling briefly before fading down Elm Street. Outside, a steady autumn drizzle was beginning to smear the high wire-reinforced windows along the holding corridor.
I picked up the black keycard and slipped it beneath the rubber desk pad, right next to the intake scanner. The municipal auditor’s office occupied the third floor of the city hall annex, two blocks north of the precinct house. Two weeks ago, the city council had announced a special forensic audit of the municipal fleet accounts, following rumors of three hundred thousand dollars in off-book maintenance vouchers. At the time, nobody in the precinct had paid attention. Patrol officers worried about overtime cuts and vehicle tires, not line-item depot invoices.
I stood up, walked down the short concrete corridor, and stopped in front of the bars of cell four.
The man in the field jacket looked up. His left eye was beginning to swell shut where Miller’s elbow had caught him during the arrest, but his hands were steady. He had torn a strip of clean white lining from his pocket and pressed it against the cut on his cheek.
"Your name isn't John Doe," I said quietly, keeping my back to the hallway camera.
"Special Investigator David Vance," he said. His voice was raspy, dry from breathing the dust off the depot floor. "State Attorney General’s Public Integrity Section. Miller took my badge, but he didn't search my left boot. There’s an encrypted flash drive tucked behind the ankle tongue. It has forty-two mirror images of the fleet dispatch logs from midnight to three this morning."
I looked toward the briefing room door at the far end of the hall. The sliver of light beneath Miller’s door remained unbroken.
"What were you doing at the depot, Vance?"
"The fleet manager called our field office three days ago," Vance said, leaning his forehead against the cold vertical bars. "He found twelve city-owned transport vans logging phantom repair hours while they were actually being run through an unlicensed salvage lot on the south dock. Miller’s brother owns that lot. When I went into the fleet terminal tonight to pull the GPS transponder backups, Miller came through the bay door with his service weapon unholstered. He didn't come to arrest me, Officer. He came to destroy the audit server. The only reason he brought me here is because the private security guard at the commercial gate saw him cuff me."
The room seemed to shrink around us. A cold draft pulled through the vent over cell four, carrying the smell of wet pavement and diesel fumes.
"If I log your real name," I said, "the system alerts the shift lieutenant on his home pager. Lieutenant Briggs is Miller’s brother-in-law."
"Then don't log it on the local system," Vance replied, his voice dropping to an urgent murmur. "The precinct terminal is bridged to the regional court docket through the state magistrate line. If you enter the audit card number into the evidence chain as seized municipal property, the regional server in Capital City creates an automated offsite backup that Briggs can't purge from his office desk. But you have to do it before Miller leaves that briefing room."
I stepped back to the booking desk. The blue intake monitor was still blinking, counting down the idle minutes before an automated session logout.
I took the black keycard from beneath the pad. My hands were sweating against the plastic edges. If I entered the audit code into the open docket, Miller would see the transmission report the second he printed the morning shift manifest. There would be no claiming it was a clerical error. I had fifteen years on the job, a pension vesting in thirty-six months, and a daughter starting her sophomore year of college sixty miles away. Walking away was the easiest thing in the world. I could close the file, stamp the John Doe paperwork, and let the morning shift sort through the mess.
The briefing room door clicked open.
Miller stepped into the hall, carrying a yellow legal pad and his leather gear bag. He had taken off his duty vest and was buttoning a civilian windbreaker over his uniform shirt. He glanced toward cell four, then looked straight at me behind the booking cage.
"You done with that intake sheet yet, Marcus?" Miller asked, walking toward the counter with slow, deliberate steps. He didn't look angry now; he looked cautious, his eyes tracking every movement of my arms above the desk surface. "Sign the paper, drop the keys in the watch drawer, and clock out. I’m locking up the intake desk until the five o'clock relief car gets in."
He reached out his hand, palm up, waiting for the hardcopy folder.