Chapter 4

The file room was at the end of a corridor that smelled like coffee and old paper. Vera's heels clicked on the linoleum. The door was propped open, and inside, the room was all metal shelves and fluorescent hum — a narrow aisle lined with boxes, files, the precinct's institutional memory organized by year and case number.

She found the drawer for 2024-1187 without trouble. She unlocked it with her own key card, pulled the file, and carried it back to the reading table in the center of the room.

The file was thin. An incident report, two witness statements, a property log, and a single chain-of-custody page — the page she already had in her pocket, or rather, a copy of it. The original was supposed to be in the file. The page she'd pulled from the trash was a duplicate, carbon-marked, the kind that gets filed in the secondary location.

She set the file down and opened the incident report.

The call had been logged at 1:52 AM: a noise complaint at 214 Seventh Street, apartment 3B. The reporting party was anonymous — a neighbor who hadn't left a name. Patrol units dispatched. Grant had arrived first at 2:05, logged the scene as "secure" at 2:17, and cleared at 2:37.

Then there was a gap.

The next log entry was at 2:58: The landlord, a man named Raymond Vargas, had entered the building with his own key. The entry didn't record who let him in.

Vera read the line again. Then she read it a third time.

The property log listed items recovered from the apartment: a laptop, a broken phone, a paper box of files. The witness list — Marcus Webb's list — was logged as "transferred to detective's office" at 3:10 AM.

But it wasn't in the detective's office. It was in the trash.