POV: Briar

Police-station coffee tasted like an apology written by the guilty officer.

Briar took one sip and pushed the cup toward Ronan.

He smelled it. "This may qualify as evidence."

"Of what?"

"Cruel and unusual punishment."

They sat in the basement records office at eleven forty at night, waiting for the department's information-technology contractor to restore an archive Mercer claimed had never existed.

Above them, the station continued pretending it was normal. Phones rang. Boots crossed tile. Officers lowered their voices when Briar passed.

Mercer was still technically a sergeant. Grant was still technically an officer. Technicalities had protected both men longer than facts had protected Evelyn.

Ronan leaned back in the metal chair. His leather vest and large frame looked designed to offend government furniture.

"You always glare at beverages?"

"Only when they disappoint me."

"That explains how you look at me."

"You haven't disappointed me. That would require expectations."

He placed a hand over his heart. "Ward, there are less painful ways to flirt."

The contractor coughed to hide a laugh.

Briar ignored the heat moving up her neck.

They were here because Darla's false custody petition had entered through Mercer's account. The login record should have been easy to preserve. Instead, the station server showed a six-minute maintenance window beginning seven minutes before the petition was uploaded.

During that window, three folders disappeared.

Custody requests.

Body-camera exceptions.

Mountain Road dispatch.

"That's not maintenance," the contractor said. "Someone ran a deletion script from inside the building."

"Which terminal?"

"Records room three."

Briar stood.

The contractor raised both hands. "I can retrieve fragments, but the local backup drive is physically stored in that room."

Ronan picked up the coffee. "Then we visit room three."

"You stay here."

"Because I'm a civilian?"

"Because you're wearing six knives."

"Five. One is decorative."

"That sentence did not help."

Ronan laid the knives on the desk one by one. Two at his belt, one inside each boot, one at his back, and a narrow silver blade strapped beneath his left forearm.

Briar pointed at the sixth. "Decorative?"

"It complements my eyes."

"Your eyes are brown."

"You've noticed."

The contractor turned very deliberately toward his monitor.

Briar sealed the knives in an evidence drawer and wrote Ronan a receipt.

"You itemized them," he said.

"That's how property works."

"No one has ever respected my knives this much."

"Walk."

He followed her into the corridor smiling, but the smile disappeared when a uniformed officer came through the stairwell and stopped too suddenly at the sight of them.

Officer Denny. Night shift. One of Mercer's former patrol partners.

"Records floor is closed," he said.

Briar displayed her authorization. "Not to public integrity."

Denny looked at Ronan instead of the paper. "Why is he inside a secured facility?"

"Because he identified the deletion pattern on the clubhouse network. He's a technical consultant."

Ronan's eyebrows rose.

"A heavily supervised consultant," she added.

Denny's radio crackled. He did not answer it. "Mercer said no one enters room three without him."

"Mercer is the subject of the inquiry."

The officer's jaw worked. For a moment Briar saw how corruption survived without envelopes of cash or secret meetings. A respected sergeant gave an order. A younger officer obeyed. By the time anyone questioned it, obedience had become identity.

"Step aside, Denny."

He did.

But as Briar passed, he sent a message from the phone hidden beside his thigh.

She saw the screen reflected in the dark glass of a framed commendation.

ROOM 3. NOW.

That was why they found the fire already burning.

She made him surrender all six before they entered the secured corridor.

Room three stood behind a keypad door at the end of a hallway without windows. Briar's temporary public-integrity authorization opened it on the second attempt.

The smell reached her first.

Hot plastic.

Someone had placed the backup unit in a steel trash bin and poured solvent over it. Blue flame crawled across the casing.

Briar grabbed the wall extinguisher.

Ronan caught her shoulder. "Wait."

A thin copper wire ran from the bin to the underside of the door.

She had stepped over it without seeing.