Heavy boots scuffed the iron steps leading down from the sally port. Deputy Vance pushed through the spring-loaded door, shaking rain off his nylon patrol jacket. He was younger than Miller, built like a high-school linebacker, with the raw, nervous energy of a junior man who had committed himself to a scheme before understanding where the floor fell out.
"Wrecker dropped the sedan behind bay three," Vance said, slapping a pair of heavy work gloves against his thigh. He stopped two steps inside the bullpen, his eyes catching the strange red glow bathing Harris's workstation. "What’s with the lights? Why haven't you run his prints yet?"
Miller didn't answer him. He walked slowly around the booking counter, stopping three feet from where I sat cuffed to the floor ring. Up close, I could smell the stale black coffee and tobacco on his breath.
"You're Department of Transportation," Miller said, his voice dropping into a low, menacing rasp. "An auditor. You don't carry a field weapon. You don't have tactical backup within two hours of this valley."
"I don't need tactical backup," I told him. "I need my property returned to that counter, and I need the regional office patched through to that desk phone before that counter hits zero."
Miller reached out and snatched my broken watch from the gray plastic bin. The steel casing was bent, the hairline crack across the crystal jagged and sharp against his thumb. He turned it over, his thumb dragging across the seam where the metal case met the band. He wasn't stupid. He had worked twenty years in patrol, and he knew when a piece of gear carried weight beyond its face value.
"What's in the bezel, Vance?" Miller asked, his eyes narrowing into cold slits.
"My grandfather gave me that watch thirty years ago," I said calmly. "The only thing inside the bezel is twenty-one jewels and a mainspring your boot knocked out of alignment. But the telemetry fob stitched into the spare key Vance left in my ignition? That's transmitting forty-second burst packets over the regional public safety band. Every time your wrecker bumped a pothole between Route 9 and the rail siding, the coordinates were logged to a secure server in Olympia."
Miller’s face hardened. He looked from the watch to Deputy Vance, whose mouth had gone slack.
"Miller," Vance said, taking a step backward toward the exit stairs. "He told me on the shoulder the car was marked. I thought he was bluffing. You said out-of-county plates never carry tracking."
"Quiet!" Miller snapped.
Under the red header, a new dialogue box snapped open. A string of remote commands scrolled downward in monospace text: REGIONAL OVERRIDE ACCEPTED. TERMINAL ISOLATED. PENDING ADMINISTRATIVE INQUIRY 44-B. LOCAL AUTHORITY RESTRICTED TO CUSTODIAL MAINTENANCE.
The precinct's administrative hold was dead. But in a basement room eighty miles from the nearest federal office, a system lock is only as safe as the man holding the jail keys chooses to make it.
Miller slowly set the broken watch back on the counter. Instead of his clipboard, he reached down to the ring at his belt, unhooked the master brass key that bypassed the digital booking cells, and looked at Deputy Vance.
"Take him down to cell six," Miller said quietly.
Harris jumped out of his swivel chair. "Miller, no! Cell six isn't on the intake camera loop. If Spokane opens a video feed—"