Miller didn't run. In the narrow sublevel of the Eighth Precinct, surrounded by twenty feet of reinforced retaining walls and two tons of federal transport steel, there was nowhere for a twenty-year veteran to run. He held out his wrists, his heavy fingers curling into tight, helpless knots as the cold steel ratchets clicked down against his pulse points.
As they guided him toward the passenger door of the lead Suburban, Miller stopped, turning his neck until his bloodshot eyes found mine.
"You think you won something, Marcus?" he muttered, spittle flecking his bottom lip. "You think you're walking back up to the squad room tomorrow to pick up your caseload? Every man on the third floor signed off on those overtime vouchers. Dennis had forty badges in his pocket. When that grand jury opens, the whole house falls down on your head."
"Then let it fall," I said.
The agent pushed him into the back seat, the heavy door slamming shut with a solid, airtight thud that cut off his voice completely. Vance stood by my car, watching the second agent secure the cruiser's rear gate.
"You're not done, Marcus," she said, extending her hand toward me. In her palm lay an official administrative summons, stamped with the red seal of the United States District Court. "The Magistrate wants the original logbook you kept in your service locker. Not the scans. The physical pages with the indented handwriting from the shift logs."
I looked down at the broken brass key resting in my palm, its sheared edges sharp against my lifeline. "The padlock on seven-fourteen is jammed with the tip of this key. It won't open without an oxyacetylene torch."
Vance reached into her windbreaker and produced a heavy set of bolt cutters, laying them flat on the hood of my car. "Then you'd better get upstairs before the morning shift arrives to see what's left of the department."
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
I gripped the tool by its hinges, tucking the long handles against my forearm. My ribs throbbed where Miller had rammed me into the trunk latch, a sharp, hot ache catching every third breath. I turned toward the fire exit beside the intake ramp. The heavy steel door was propped open with an unpainted pine wedge, the yellow paint on the push-bar worn down to bare iron by twenty years of patrol officers dragging wet raincoats and scuffed kit bags up to the locker banks.
The stairwell smelled of lime wash, floor wax, and damp coats. As my boots took the riser treads, the sound of the idling Suburbans below faded into a hollow mechanical drone. On the second landing, the air shifted. The scent of cheap industrial floor soap gave way to the sharp, acidic tang of burnt transformer insulation. A gray service breaker box hung half-open near the doorway to the squad room. Its door had been pried with a flat pry-bar, leaving two fresh gouges in the painted cinderblock.
Inside the box, two red auxiliary bypass fuses were seated into the circuit rails. They were brand-new, their clear glass barrels showing clean copper filament. Attached to the terminal screws was a white property tag from the Eighth Precinct maintenance shed, filled out in the rounded, left-leaning script I had seen on every inventory receipt for three years: Bay Four auxiliary cut-out. Authorizer: Miller.
Miller hadn't just waited in the basement. He had pulled the safety cutouts for the primary surveillance banks on floors one through three at four in the morning, plunging the central records hallway into local battery backup. The only system he hadn't known about was the magistrate’s optical line, bolted into the ceiling dome under an emergency inter-agency easement that bypassed the municipal breaker entirely.
I pushed through the third-floor fire door into the locker room. The overhead fluorescents flickered with an uneven, sixty-cycle hum, three of the long tubes dead in their sockets. The room was empty, fifty yards of olive-green steel cabinets standing in long, narrow aisles over green linoleum floor tiles. A single oscillating fan turned on the muster table, rustling a stack of yellow vehicle inspection logs that nobody had signed since Tuesday.
Locker 714 sat in the fourth aisle, sandwiched between a retired sergeant’s empty unit and the gear cage belonging to an evidence clerk currently out on medical leave. The hardened steel padlock hung twisted in the hasp. The keyway was blocked by the jagged brass stump Miller had snapped off thirty minutes earlier. The surface of the steel hasp was scraped raw where he had used a pair of channel-lock pliers to wrench the cylinder until the internal pins jammed into the casing.
I planted my right boot against the lower louver of 713, set the hardened cutter blades over the padlock shackle, and threw my weight into the rubber grips.
The steel groaned. The handles vibrated against my bruised ribs, driving a spike of pain through my left shoulder. I reset my stance, pulled my elbows in tight, and bore down until the hardened alloy gave way with a sharp, pistol-shot snap that echoed off the rows of green metal doors. The severed shackle clattered against the linoleum.
I pulled the locker open.
My spare patrol jacket hung on the wire hanger, smelling of winter rain and laundry starch. On the narrow upper shelf, behind an extra box of duty ammunition and an unwashed travel mug, sat a plain black canvas binder. It had no departmental seal, no serial barcode, and no city inventory sticker.