I asked, my fingers tightening against the arms of the oak chair.
"Sloan told me I’d leave the platform with broken ribs if I didn't hand over the envelope. He called it a safety tax. You heard it on tactical four."
"Tactical four is an internal frequency," Callahan answered grimly.
An audit had procedures. Even I knew that, though I had never conducted one outside a workshop inventory. You identified the person authorizing it, recorded the property, and left a trail that someone else could follow. Sloan had not asked for a receipt book. He had asked whether I understood what could happen to a man in an unmonitored stairwell.
Callahan pulled a blank form from the blue stack. There were spaces for the purpose of a seizure, the identifying officer, a witness, and the property taken. He put it beside the card Reyes had given me. The difference between an official act and a man helping himself was beginning to look less mysterious. A missing form alone could be explained. A threat, a false account, hidden money, and a missing form needed a more elaborate story.
I did not want an elaborate story to become enough merely because an inspector told it well. Callahan understood. He called the duty prosecutor and described the competing explanations. The lawyer on the other end asked that the recorded conversation, the pre-operation inventory, and the recovery record remain together. Originals would be secured, working copies identified, and every transfer logged. The captain repeated the instruction aloud so Reyes could hear it when he returned.
I asked whether an inspector could simply order Sloan moved. Callahan said a request was not the same as legal authority, and the custody officer had been told to verify it. There were people in the building who would do their work properly if the instruction reached them before the informal pressure did. That answer gave me more hope than the suggestion that every uniform belonged to the same corrupt arrangement. We needed honest people, not an excuse to dismiss all of them.
The captain looked at his watch. The night was becoming a set of deadlines: the next custody review, a statement needed for a warrant, a supervisor who had not yet returned a call. To me it was also a set of bodies. Teresa waiting for her train. Doyle trying to hold a teaspoon. My own knee swelling under cheap wool. Paper could make us invisible or make our presence unavoidable, depending on who wrote the entries.
I remembered the little key at the bottom of my bag. I had mentioned the abandoned booth before, but never the full reason I thought it mattered. We had been concentrating on a packet taken from a vest. The people protecting Sloan would concentrate on that too. I leaned forward and asked Callahan to listen to something that had happened on an earlier Sunday, when I had been waiting for a late train and pretending to read a newspaper.
He walked to the battered filing cabinet in the corner, unlocked the third drawer with a brass key on his ring, and pulled out a stack of blue carbon transfer slips.
"If Whitcomb claims Sloan was on an undercover procurement assignment, the precinct lawyer will argue the language was operational cover. They'll say Sloan was using street intimidation tactics to keep you from blowing his cover to other loiterers on the concourse."
"And the marked serials?"
"They'll claim he was bringing the bills directly to the precinct safe for registry," Callahan said, slapping the blue slips down onto the oak desk between us.
Callahan asked me to describe the threat once more without repeating the words he had supplied. I closed my eyes and returned to the bench in memory. Sloan's hand had been on my shoulder. The envelope remained inside my coat until he took it. His warning concerned what could happen if I made trouble. I gave the sequence slowly, then told Callahan which exact phrases I remembered and which I could only summarize.
He marked those differences. I had expected the exercise to make me feel doubted. Instead it gave my account edges. There were things I could stand behind without claiming the whole night belonged to perfect memory. If his lawyer found a small uncertainty, it would remain a small uncertainty. It would not require me to defend an invented confidence about every word.
"Unless we prove he broke procedure before he ever touched your shoulder on that bench."
"Look at his locker key," I told him.
Callahan stopped.
His head came up slowly, his pale gray eyes fixing on mine beneath the harsh electric glare.