Henderson backed away toward the door, his mouth opening and closing without producing a sound. Finally, he turned and hurried down the corridor toward the cellblock.
Marcus took a deep breath, picked up his briefcase, and walked out of the briefing room.
The squad room had gone from silence to a hushed, nervous murmur. Detectives were pretending to read files; two patrolmen were whispering near the coffee pot. Marcus ignored them all, took the iron stairwell at the end of the hall, and descended into the basement.Advertisement
Level Two had no windows. The air down here was thick with the smell of wet concrete, rusted iron, and forgotten paper. A single sodium-vapor bulb hummed in the low ceiling, casting a sickly yellow hue over rows of locked metal cages.
At the far end of the corridor stood an unmarked steel door reinforced with a heavy deadbolt and an external padlock.
Marcus inserted the largest of Henderson’s brass keys into the padlock. The tumbler resisted, stiff from disuse, then yielded with a heavy snap. He turned the second key in the deadbolt, pushed the door open, and reached inside for the light switch.
Fluorescent tubes flickered to life with an angry buzz.
The room was not a standard narcotics annex. There were no evidence tags on the shelves, no barcode stickers, no blue chain-of-custody envelopes. Instead, two long folding tables were lined with cardboard banker’s boxes labeled with faded black markers: Riverside Industrial Park - Fire Review 2021, Riverfront Development Land Titles, Municipal Transit Bond Inquiries.
Marcus walked to the first table and pulled open the top box.
Inside were not official police reports, but financial records. Bank statements from private offshore holding accounts. Real estate purchase agreements bearing the names of three sitting city councilmen. And at the bottom of the stack, bound in a red folder, was an internal affairs dossier Marcus had thought had been destroyed four years ago in the capital.
The name on the tab was Detective Arthur Vance.
Marcus opened the folder. The first page was an autopsy report from an incident five years prior—an undercover state trooper named David Morris, who had died during a botched warehouse raid on the docks. The official report had called it friendly fire during a chaotic crossfire with local smugglers.
Marcus turned to the second page. Stitched into the margin was a crime scene ballistics analysis that had never been entered into the state database.
The bullet recovered from Trooper Morris’s chest had not come from a smuggler’s weapon. It had come from a department-issued .40-caliber Glock with a specific firing-pin notch.
Marcus closed the folder, his pulse remaining steady, though his jaw set hard.
He pulled his phone from his jacket to call the Special Investigations unit in the capital. But before his thumb could tap the screen, the iron door behind him swung shut with a deafening slam, and the heavy bolt turned from the outside.
Chapter 4: THE WRONG ROOM TO HIDE IN
The steel door hit the frame with the sound of a closing safe. Marcus didn't flinch. He didn't run to the door or throw his weight against the iron panel. He slowly closed his phone, slipped it back into his breast pocket, and walked over to the reinforced threshold.
"Vance," Marcus said through the three-inch steel seam.
A short, ragged breath hissed through the gap near the lock.
"You shouldn't have gone down there, Chief," Detective Tom Vance’s voice came back, muffled and tight with panic. "You were supposed to stay in the corner office and shuffle paperwork until the county elections next fall. That was the agreement the city manager made with the commissioner."Advertisement
"The commissioner didn't make an agreement, Tom," Marcus said, keeping his tone measured, almost conversational. "Your uncle told you he did so you wouldn't run when the state auditors started pulling invoices."