"Tick tock, Detective," Daniels interrupted, tapping his cuffed fingers on the table in a slow, agonizing rhythm. Tap. Tap. Tap. "Thirty-five minutes. You're wasting time interrogating a brick wall. And while you're sitting here trying to play good cop, bad cop, the real players are walking right out the front door."
I stared at him for three long seconds, realizing he was right. I wasn't going to break him. Not in thirty minutes. Not in thirty hours. He had made his peace with his fate.
I turned and walked out of the room, letting the heavy door slam shut behind me.
Miller was pacing the observation room, his phone pressed to his ear. "Get me the duty captain at every precinct," he was barking. "I want a lockdown on all major evidence lockups. Nobody goes in, nobody goes out." He hung up and looked at me. "Well?"
"He's terrified of whoever is pulling his strings," I said. "He won't talk. And Miller, if they are moving something tonight, they already have the inside track. Locking down the precincts won't work if the call is coming from inside the house."
"What are you saying, Vance?"
"I'm saying Daniels isn't a mastermind. He's a blunt instrument. A distraction. Whoever orchestrated this knew exactly how IA operates. They knew exactly how many units we’d deploy for a sting on a high-profile target. They knew our response times." I looked at my watch. "Thirty-three minutes. We can't rely on the patrol guys. We need to figure out what Daniels was doing before he got on the highway tonight."
Miller hesitated, his institutional instincts fighting against the ticking clock. "Vance, you're asking me to launch a wild goose chase based on a cryptic text message. We have Daniels dead to rights on the setup. Let's process him. Let the major crimes unit handle the rest."
"If we wait for major crimes, the package is gone," I argued, my voice rising. "This is our case, Captain. He planted that fake dust on me. He used us. I am not letting this go."
Miller glared at me, the veins in his neck pulsing. "You have thirty minutes, Vance. You and Jenkins. After that, you stand down and you write your report. Understood?"
"Understood."
I didn't wait for him to dismiss me. I jogged back to the tech room, where Jenkins had pulled up a map of the city on the main monitor. It was overlaid with a spiderweb of red and blue lines.
"I pulled Daniels' cruiser GPS data for the last forty-eight hours," Jenkins said, her eyes glued to the screen. "Look at this. He's a patrol officer. His sector is the North End. But look at where his car has been spending its off-hours."
She clicked a button, and the blue lines—representing his patrol route—faded. Three bright red dots remained, all clustered in the industrial district on the south side of the city. Miles outside of his jurisdiction.
"What is that location?" I asked, leaning in.
"It's a dead zone," Jenkins said, frustration bleeding into her voice. "An old, abandoned textile mill. The city condemned it two years ago. But his cruiser was parked in the alley behind it for two hours yesterday afternoon, and another hour this morning."
"Is it a stash house?"
"I ran the property records," Jenkins said, shaking her head. "It's owned by a shell corporation registered in Delaware. A total dead end. But Marcus, look at the timing. He left the textile mill at 10:45 p.m. tonight. He drove straight to Route 9, parked on the shoulder, and waited for you."
"He was meeting someone," I said, the pieces slowly beginning to shift in my mind. "He was getting his final instructions. Or... he was picking up the fake evidence."
"Exactly," Jenkins said. "But here's the micro-hook. The thing that doesn't make sense."
She brought up a new window. It was a digital inventory log.
"When we arrested Daniels on the highway, we stripped him, right?" she said. "We logged his duty belt, his taser, his sidearm, his backup piece, his radio. Everything."
"Yeah. Standard procedure."
"Look at the evidence manifest, Marcus." Jenkins highlighted a single line of text on the screen.
Item #14: One (1) heavy iron key, non-standard issue. No identifying markings. Found in suspect's left breast pocket.
"A key," I murmured. "To what?"
"I don't know," Jenkins said. "But why would a street cop carry a heavy, non-standard iron key in his breast pocket during a routine patrol shift? And more importantly, why didn't he ditch it before he pulled you over? If he knew he was going to be arrested, why keep a mysterious key on his person?"
"Because he wasn't supposed to get arrested," I said, the realization hitting me like a physical blow in the chest. "Think about it, Sarah. The text message. 'The decoy is secure. Move the real package.' They didn't burn Daniels on purpose. Daniels was supposed to pull me over, plant the drugs, arrest me, and take me to county holding. The IA sting was a surprise to him. He thought I was just a civilian."
Jenkins stared at me, her eyes widening. "He didn't know you were IA."
"Exactly. He was just doing a routine frame-up to create a distraction. He thought he’d be tied up in booking for four hours doing paperwork on a civilian arrest. He kept the key because he needed it after his shift."
I grabbed my jacket off the back of a chair. "Where is that key right now?"
"Evidence lockup, basement level," Jenkins said, already standing up. "Under Martinez's supervision."
"Let's go."
We hit the stairwell, bypassing the slow elevators, and sprinted down three flights to the basement level. The air down here was cold and smelled of damp concrete and ozone. We burst through the double doors into the evidence intake area.
Martinez was sitting behind the wire mesh window, sipping a Red Bull and looking thoroughly exhausted.
"Martinez! The personal effects from Officer Daniels," I barked, slapping my palm against the wire mesh. "I need item fourteen. The iron key."