Chapter 2: The Interrogation Room Reversal

　　There are two ways to survive when a fiercely proud homicide detective realizes she’s holding planted evidence: you either jump out the nearest window, or you hand her the handcuffs yourself. In Loop Four, I had tried the window and broken both my legs before her backup gunned me down. Today, I simply held out my wrists, making sure the three-inch iron-hook scar on my left forearm caught the gaslight, and gave Detective Sera Voss a lazy wink.

　　"Lock me up, Detective," I whispered as the boots of Internal Affairs thundered up the lower stairwell. "And drop that shiny fake token into my right breast pocket while you pat me down. Unless you fancy sharing a cell with the criminals you put away."

　　Sera’s jaw clenched so hard a muscle feathered along her cheek. She hated taking orders, especially from a twenty-three-year-old South Bank drain inspector covered in a dead magistrate’s blood.

　　For two agonizing seconds, her pride warred with her survival instincts. Then, with brutal efficiency, she spun me against the mahogany bookcase, kicked my boots apart, and slapped the cold steel cuffs onto my wrists. As her gloved left hand swept harshly down my chest in a textbook frisk, I felt the subtle weight of the unblemished brass game coin slip neatly into my jacket pocket.

　　"You have a mouth on you, sewer rat," she hissed into my ear, hauling me backward by the chain just as Captain Vance of Internal Affairs burst through the doorway behind Deputy Chief Garrow.

　　"Detective Voss!" Vance barked, waving a parchment signed in fresh ink. "Step away from the body. We got an anonymous tip that the Old Harbor Butcher is wearing a silver badge tonight. Empty your pockets. Now."

　　Sera didn't even blink. She shoved me roughly toward her young partner, Officer Gavin, who had just jogged up the stairs looking thoroughly bewildered, and spread her dark trench coat wide with both hands.

　　"Go right ahead, Captain," Sera said, her voice dripping with arctic disdain. "Search me. And when you don't find a damn thing except spare speed-loaders and mints, you can explain to Chief Lucius Voss why you’re wasting my homicide unit’s time while I’m dragging the prime suspect to the basement."

　　Vance’s men patted her down, turning her empty left pocket inside out. Garrow, standing pale and sweating by the corridor, looked at me in sheer terror, terrified I would open my mouth about his casino debts again.

　　When Vance came up empty-handed, Sera didn't wait for an apology. She grabbed my collar with her dominant left hand and dragged me out of the study, past the fuming Internal Affairs unit, and straight down to the armored police transport.

　　Twenty minutes later, the heavy iron door of Interrogation Room B slammed shut inside Greyport Central Precinct.

　　Before the lock even clicked, Sera bypassed the steel table entirely. She grabbed my lapels, slammed me back against the damp brick wall, and pressed the cold muzzle of her service pistol straight beneath my chin. She didn't bother turning on the overhead gas lamp, leaving us bathed in the flickering blue shadows of the courtyard streetlights outside.

　　"Talk," she breathed, her thigh pressing hard between mine to pin me in place, right where her snub-nosed backup revolver rested against her garter. "No riddles, Venn. Who slipped that coin into my coat, and why didn't you let Vance find it on me?"

　　"Because if Vance arrests you, you get suspended, and a dead girl walking is no use to me," I said calmly, looking down at her parted lips. "And take half a step back, Sera. In about five seconds, that cheap station coffee you drank at four o'clock is going to trigger an acid spasm in your stomach, and I’d hate for your finger to twitch on that trigger."

　　"Stop calling me Sera, and stop pretending you know—"

　　She cut off abruptly, a sharp intake of breath hissing through her teeth as her right hand flew instinctively to her upper abdomen. Her knuckles whitened against her ribs.

　　"Bottom drawer of the filing cabinet behind you," I instructed softly, shifting my bound wrists to point toward the corner. "Gavin keeps a bottle of bismuth tablets hidden behind the old arrest logs. Chew two. The water from the precinct tap tastes like canal rust."

　　Sera stared at me, the arrogance in her dark eyes fracturing into genuine, cold unease. Keeping her gun trained on my chest, she backed up two paces, yanked open the bottom drawer with her free hand, and pulled out the exact amber bottle I’d described.

　　"That’s a neat parlor trick," she said, though she didn't take the pills, slamming the bottle onto the metal table. "You bribed a precinct clerk to learn Gavin’s habits. You stalked me to learn about my knee. Who’s paying you? Councilman Davian Heth? Or the dockside syndicates?"

　　"Nobody in this city has enough money to hire me, Detective. Though Judge Hall just left me fifty million pounds without knowing it." I walked casually over to the interrogation chair, sat down, and propped my scuffed boots up on the edge of the steel table. "And I didn't stalk you. I just know you better than you know yourself."

　　"You don't know a damn thing about me, gutter rat."

　　"I know you drink lowland whiskey when you’re celebrating, and highland scotch when you’re trying not to cry," I said, ticking the points off on my cuffed fingers. "I know you deliberately shoot half an inch to the left on the police firing range so the instructors won't realize how terrifyingly good your left-handed draw actually is. And I know about the false back in your cedar wardrobe at your North Highland apartment."

　　The temperature in the room plummeted ten degrees.

　　Sera didn't just aim the gun this time; she thumbed back the heavy steel hammer. The metallic click echoed like a gunshot in the cramped concrete box.

　　"Say one more word," she whispered, her voice dropping to a lethal purr, "and I’ll tell Chief Voss you tried to take my weapon."

　　"Fourteen red strings pinned to a corkboard," I continued evenly, meeting her murderous gaze without blinking. "Connecting the Old Harbor fire twelve years ago to six sealed municipal coroner reports. Right above a faded photograph of Arthur and Clara Alden—your real parents. You didn't join the Major Crimes Unit to uphold the law, Detective. You put on that silver badge to get high-level clearance so you could drag your adoptive father, Police Chief Lucius Voss, straight to the gallows."

　　For three heartbeats, I genuinely thought Loop Seven was about to end three hours early.

　　Sera lunged across the table, knocking my boots off the metal edge, and jammed the barrel of her pistol directly against my lips. The cold iron tasted like cordite and machine oil. Her chest heaved, her face inches from mine, furious and wild and devastatingly beautiful.

　　"If you work for Lucius," she breathed, her eyes glistening with a murderous light, "he’s going to have to scrape your brains off this wall to find out what you told him."

　　"If I worked for Lucius, you'd already be in a cell next to me," I murmured against the gun barrel, lifting my cuffed hands to gently wrap my scarred fingers around her trembling wrist. "Let me show you why they framed you tonight."

　　Keeping my movements slow, I used two fingers to fish both brass tokens out of my jacket pocket and dropped them onto the steel table between us.

　　Clink. Clink.

　　"Look closely," I said. "The coin on the left is the one I pulled from under Judge Hall’s rug two minutes before you kicked the door in. Notice the hairline thermal cracks along the rim? The black sulfur soot baked into the grooves from the Old Harbor fire twelve years ago?"

　　Sera’s eyes flicked down, her detective instincts momentarily overriding her rage.

　　"Now look at the coin on the right—the one I took out of your coat pocket," I continued, tapping the gleaming brass disc. "Unblemished metal crystals. Zero heat expansion. Zero human sweat oxidation. Whoever planted this on you didn't get it from a survivor of the fire. They pulled an unused, discontinued minting straight out of the municipal evidence vault."

　　Sera slowly pulled her gun back from my mouth, picking up the pristine token with her gloved fingertips. "Only three people have the dual-key clearance to access the sealed Old Harbor evidence vault after hours. My father, Councilman Davian Heth... and the precinct's former tactical instructor."

　　"The one who supposedly died in the line of duty three years ago," I finished for her, leaning back with a cold smile. "Except he’s very much alive, he’s left-handed just like you, and Davian Heth uses him as a personal cleaner to murder anyone digging into the fire—while wearing a dark trench coat that matches yours on every street witness report."

　　Sera stared at the two coins, the horrifying architecture of the trap clicking together in her mind. She wasn't just being framed to stop her private investigation; she was being groomed as the ultimate scapegoat for a string of political assassinations.

　　"Why tell me this?" she demanded, looking up at me sharply. "What does a South Bank drain inspector want out of a war between the City Council and the Police Chief?"

　　"My sister Mira works at the North Tower Research Institute," I said, the humor vanishing from my voice for the first time. "She vanished forty-eight hours ago, right after she sent me this pocket watch. The same cleaner who planted that coin in your pocket knows where she’s being held. I need your badge and your gun to rip his throat out. In exchange, I give you the men who burned your family alive."

　　Sera studied my face, searching for a lie. Finding none, she reached to her belt, pulled out a brass key, and unlocked my handcuffs.

　　"If you cross me, Venn," she said coldly, tossing the cuffs onto the table, "I won't bother framing you. I'll just shoot you myself."

　　"Trust me, darling, I’m intimately familiar with your aim." I rubbed my wrists, glancing down at my brass pocket watch. Nine-fourteen PM.

　　My smile froze.

　　In Loop Five, at nine-fifteen sharp, the Cleaner hadn't waited for Internal Affairs to fail. He had decided to eliminate the loose ends inside the precinct himself.

　　"Get down!" I roared, lunging across the steel table and tackling Sera off her feet.

　　At that exact millisecond, the main electrical transformer in the precinct courtyard exploded with a deafening BOOM.

　　The gas lamps sputtered and died, plunging the basement into pitch darkness. Out in the main corridor, heavy silenced gunshots—thwip, thwip, thwip—punched through the reinforced glass of the watch commander’s office, followed by the wet, choking scream of young Officer Gavin.

　　Sera hit the concrete floor beneath me, her snub-nosed revolver already drawn in her right hand, her primary pistol in her left. "Gavin!" she hissed, trying to shove me off to charge into the hallway.

　　"Stay down!" I pinned her shoulders to the floor with my body weight as a burst of submachine-gun fire raked across the upper half of our interrogation room door, showering us in splintered iron and pulverized brick. "It’s the Cleaner! He’s wearing military-grade thermal goggles and he’s got a tactical hit squad locking down the stairwell!"

　　"We’re trapped in a concrete box!" Sera snarled in the dark, her warm breath hitting my neck as another heavy grenade blast shook the ceiling dust down on our heads. "There’s only one door out of the basement!"

　　"For cops, maybe. Not for the guy who cleans the drains beneath your toilets."

　　I rolled off her, kicked away the heavy iron ventilation grate behind the filing cabinet—the one that connected straight to the main South Bank storm sewer—and then sprinted toward the splintered doorway instead.

　　"Venn, what the hell are you doing?!" Sera whispered fiercely, aiming her guns into the smoke-filled corridor as I yanked the ruined door open three inches. "The sewer grate is behind us!"

　　Out in the dark hallway, fifty feet away, the armored silhouette of the Cleaner was retreating up the main stairs after planting a white phosphorus charge on the basement bulkhead. And lying just outside our doorway, bleeding out from a severed carotid artery, was Officer Gavin.

　　He had died less than ten seconds ago. And right before the Cleaner had slit his throat, Gavin had ripped a piece of paper from the assassin's tactical vest—the target manifest for tonight's purge.

　　"Cover me for three seconds!" I barked at Sera, diving out into the smoke-choked corridor.

　　I didn't reach for Gavin’s gun, and I didn't reach for the paper—it had already burned up in the flare of a dropped magnesium torch. Instead, as bullets sparked off the flagstones inches from my boots, I slammed my bare palm directly onto Gavin’s cooling neck.

　　The pocket watch against my chest burned like a branding iron.

　　Ninety seconds.

　　Gavin’s dying terror flooded my veins, my throat constricting with the phantom slice of a serrated combat knife. Through the young cop’s blurring, tear-filled eyes, I saw the Cleaner lean down in the dark—and I saw the glowing green reflection of the tactical tablet strapped to the assassin’s forearm.

　　Two lines of text burned into my memory before Gavin’s vision went black: PRIMARY TARGET: LINA SERR — DOCKSIDE BLACK MARKET AUCTION, 10:00 PM. SECONDARY PROTOCOL: DETONATE SOUTH BANK REGULATOR.

　　I ripped my hand back, coughing up the phantom taste of copper as Sera grabbed the back of my collar and yanked me bodily back into Interrogation Room B, firing three blind shots down the hall to force the gunmen back.

　　"Are you insane?!" she yelled over the ringing in our ears, shoving me toward the open sewer shaft as the white phosphorus charge on the bulkhead began to hiss violently. "You nearly got your head blown off just to check his pulse! He was already dead!"

　　"I wasn't checking his pulse, Detective," I rasped, wiping a trickle of blood from my nose as I dropped into the rushing black water of the storm drain below and held up my arms to catch her. "I was reading his mail. Come on—we have forty-four minutes to rob a black-market auction, or your entire witness list is going up in flames!"