"Sergeant Peters," Miller said, forcing his chest out, attempting to drape himself in the routine authority of a senior patrolman greeting an outside agency. "You're thirty miles outside your district boundary. We have a non-compliant suspect under active booking for reckless endangerment on Route 9. He became combative at the bench, assaulted Deputy Vance, and attempted to compromise the department's digital intake console. We were in the middle of securing him for transport to the county annex."
"Step back from the desk, Miller," the man in the civilian coat said. He was tall, mid-forties, wearing an olive-drab field jacket over a charcoal suit, with a Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General identification shield hanging from a steel chain around his neck. He didn't look at Miller’s face; his eyes went straight to the locked terminal on the counter. "Step back against the file cabinets. Now."
Miller swallowed, his chest rising and falling in tight, shallow hitches. For two agonizing seconds, his weight shifted forward, testing the room, measuring whether he could still bluff his way past the threshold. But the two troopers flanking the sergeant shifted their grips, their hands resting firmly on the butt of their tasers, their boots set wide in a tactical triangle that closed off the corridor.
Miller stepped back. His shoulders bumped the metal drawers of the personnel cabinet, his arms falling dead to his sides.
The federal investigator walked directly past Miller to the booking bench. He knelt down beside me, took a standard cuff key from his pocket, and inserted it into the single pawl of the peerless restraints. The steel teeth clicked open with a light, oily snap. The sudden release of pressure sent a hot, stinging ache through my forearms, and I had to lean against the wall for a second while the blood recirculated through my numbed fingers.
"You all right, Agent Davis?" the investigator asked quietly, checking the laceration near my temple with a gloved thumb.
"Bruised ribs from the initial tackle on the highway," I said, my voice hoarse from Miller’s forearm against my throat. "Temple took a scrape on the counter bracket. Nothing broken. The chain of custody on the watch is intact."
The investigator nodded, stood up, and pulled a sterile evidence bag from his jacket pocket. Using a pair of stainless-steel forceps, he lifted the broken field watch from the property tray.
Miller’s eyes widened slightly as the investigator held the watch up to the fluorescent light.
"You told Deputy Vance this was an unregistered digital recorder, Miller," the investigator said, turning the timepiece so the shattered sapphire crystal caught the glare. "You thought if you crushed the crystal against the steel lip of the intake scales, you could claim it was damaged during a roadside scuffle, log it as broken property, and drop it into the disposal chute. You should have read the regional equipment bulletins that came through your department mail six months ago."
The investigator used the tip of the forceps to point through the hairline cracks in the watch face. Beneath the analog hands, nestled into the secondary register at the six o'clock mark, was a minuscule optical lens and an integrated circuitry pin no larger than a grain of sand.
"This isn't a recording device, Miller," I said, pushing myself up from the wooden bench and standing squarely on my feet, wiping the dried streak of blood from my brow. "It’s a remote optical sync. It doesn't store data locally. The moment your front cruiser activated its overhead bars on Route 9, the frequency trigger opened an encrypted data tunnel between this watch and the regional relay in Spokane. The audio from your squad car, your conversation with Vance about staging the taillight violation, and your refusal to accept my federal credential card were all streamed directly into an off-site evidentiary file three minutes before you ever pulled into this sally port."
Miller’s face went entirely slack. The color that had been draining from his skin vanished completely, leaving his cheeks a pale, waxy gray. "The stop was clean," he whispered, though the words lacked conviction, sounding like a rehearsed line from a script that had lost its meaning. "Your left tail lamp was fractured. The law gives us the right to conduct a field inventory."
"You weren't conducting an inventory," I said, pointing toward the counter. "You were looking for the certified dispatch logs from the Kettle Falls timber warehouse. The fire three weeks ago that destroyed sixty thousand board feet of unregistered timber wasn't an electrical short, and you knew it. Your brother-in-law's hauling company ran four flatbeds through your county checkpoint an hour before the alarm sounded, and you wiped the weigh-station logs from the local server."
Miller took a step forward, his fists balling up, but Sergeant Peters immediately blocked his lane with a heavy forearm across his chest. "Stand fast, Miller."
"Harris," I said, turning toward the young desk clerk who still sat motionless in the corner. "Open the bottom drawer of the shift supervisor's desk. The gray fire-safe beneath the filing rack."