Miller whirled toward the cell, his boots screeching against the wax floor. "Shut your mouth!"
"Tell him about the fleet manager, Sergeant," Vance said, his tone flat, entirely devoid of mockery. "Tell Officer Marcus why you were at the depot forty minutes before the alarm. The night superintendent didn't leave the back roll-up door unlocked by accident. He left it open because you told him internal affairs was conducting a spot inventory. You were clearing the staging rack before the morning warrants could land."
The phone on my desk stopped ringing. The silence that followed felt heavier than the noise.
Miller turned back to me. His face had lost its dark flush; it was pale now, his skin slick with a greasy layer of sweat. The arrogance that usually carried him through the precinct had evaporated, replaced by the frantic, calculating stillness of a man who realized the walls around him had turned to glass.
"Marcus," he said, lowering his voice until it was nearly lost beneath the air vent. "We’ve worked the same rotation for six years. I covered your desk when your girl had that surgery in three years ago. I signed off on your holiday comp time so you could take her to campus."
My stomach tightened into a knot. "Don't do that, Miller."
"Listen to me," he urged, leaning his forehead against the gate wire. "Briggs is thirty minutes away by highway. When he walks through that front vestibule, he isn't going to negotiate with state integrity officers. He’s going to declare an administrative breach, impound this terminal tower, and reassign the evidence log under an internal integrity hold. You lose your post, Marcus. They’ll pull your commission pending a fitness hearing, and you’ll spend your last three years before pension sitting at home on half-pay while the city attorneys drag the grievance through arbitration."
He was telling the truth about Briggs. The department had buried three wrongful-termination suits in five years using the exact same administrative maneuver: seize the physical terminal records under the guise of an internal data breach, seal the docket from public records access, and wait for the complainant to run out of money for private legal counsel.
"What do you want, Miller?" I asked, keeping my voice dead even.
"The boot," Miller said, nodding toward cell four. "Give me the cell keys. Let me pull the drive Vance is carrying before Briggs gets here. We wipe the local mirror, we log him as an unverified arrestee held on field suspicion, and I walk him out through the sally port before daybreak. He goes back to Capital City with a clerical discharge, you keep your desk, and this precinct doesn't blow apart."
I looked down at the printer. The court’s transmission slip lay curled on the output tray, three inches of black-and-white print that tied my employee badge number to the permanent record of the state judiciary. Then I looked at Vance.
Vance was watching my hands. He didn't plead. He didn't remind me of my oath or threaten me with obstruction charges. He simply reached down with his right hand, slipped his fingers beneath the leather tongue of his left work boot, and pulled free a rectangular plastic casing no larger than a house key. He set it on the cold bench beside him.
"If Briggs gets that drive, Officer, the paper receipt doesn't matter," Vance said quietly. "A docket entry without the transponder data is just an uncorroborated allegation from a desk clerk. The city will call it a clerical malfunction and write it off as an input glitch. The only thing that proves the mileage logs were doctored is the raw hex code on that storage chip."
The precinct station clock on the far wall ticked over to twelve forty-eight. Outside, the headlights of a single vehicle swept across the frosted wire glass of the sally port entrance, throwing long, angled bars of light across the concrete ceiling.
A heavy diesel engine idled briefly in the alleyway, followed by the metallic click of a gate lock turning. Lieutenant Briggs had not taken the highway. He had already been in the precinct perimeter, waiting for Miller’s call.
Miller straightened up instantly, his shoulder squaring as he heard the rear security latch engage. The panic in his eyes hardened back into authority.
"That's Briggs at the sally port door," Miller whispered, his voice steadying. "Last chance, Marcus. Hand me the keys to cell four, or you explain to the shift commander why the intake cage is locked against his orders."
I looked at the key ring sitting on the rubber desk mat. The brass master key to the holding cells was worn smooth from fifteen years of routine turns, lockups, and releases. Behind me, the terminal monitor was already displaying an incoming administrative override prompt, the red banner at the top of the interface reading: REMOTE SUPERVISORY ACCESS REQUESTED BY UNIT 101.
Briggs was attempting to kill the station's internet trunk from the sally port reader.