Her desk was a spread of folders and legal envelopes that had started the evening in tidy stacks and had slumped into uneven piles. Case numbers lined the tabs. Medford sat on top because she kept dragging it back there even after she told herself to put it away. She pulled the folder closer and read her own handwriting from two days ago, a date circled at the top, a line beneath it that she had underlined and wished she had not said out loud at the café.
Lab backed up.
Jamie had not pushed in the moment. Erin could see the way Jamie’s pen twitched, could see her swallow the question and tuck it away. The restraint had earned a quick promise,off the record, and Erin had believed her. That was the part that unsettled most. Belief sat too close to trust, and trust had a way of loosening her tongue.
She set the Medford file beside two others she had pulled from Records. All three shared notes that lined up when she wrote them side by side. She used a yellow highlighter and drew careful lines in the margins.Suspect insists they were drugged. Witnesses report confusion and a sudden change inaffect. Tox shows traces that do not map cleanly to anything in the state panel.In each file there was the same line from the lab, a bland sentence that translated towe do not know yet. Erin read it again and felt the same tight pull low in her ribs.
Someone in another unit laughed, short and tired, and then the elevator doors closed and took the sound with them. She leaned back and rolled her shoulders until the muscle near her neck eased. The room beyond her cubicle row was a field of dim monitor glow and chair backs pushed in neat lines. Her monitor cast a thin reflection on the framed photo that lived near the base of her lamp. Leo looked out from a patch of winter sun with his head cocked, one ear inside out, a dog who didn’t care about anything she brought home from work. Erin reached for the frame and then let her hand fall. Tonight she didn’t want the contrast. Tonight she wanted to stay inside the work until she made the decision she knew was waiting.
She pulled the second folder open and reread the witness interviews. She had a habit when she was tired. She whispered the quotes under her breath like repeating them might reveal a seam she had missed.He said he didn’t remember the drive. She said her hands felt far away. He said a voice told him to go right, then left, then stop.Erin wrote a small question mark beside that one and looked up at the ceiling as if the blank tiles would give her a pattern. There was a pattern, just not one she could explain yet. Three incidents in three neighborhoods, none of them obvious copies, all of them wearing the same strange fingerprints.
Her phone buzzed against the desk and made her jump. The screen lit with Jamie’s name. Erin’s stomach gave a quick turn that annoyed her. She turned the phone over and sat back while the preview line built itself. Jamie’s reply to the message she had sent after the café.
I’m so sorry again. Please let me make it up to you.
That was what she had written, fast outside the station doors before she could talk herself out of it. She had regretted the wording all afternoon. Too personal for a reporter. Too personal for anyone she needed to keep at arm’s length. She unlocked the screen anyway.
Name the time and place.
Simple, neutral, but it landed with more weight than it should have. Erinread it twice, then read it again, and then she set the phone face down. The line between work and whatever this had become was already thinner than it should be. She could decide what to do with that answer later. Right now she had a job to do.
She pulled up a spreadsheet she had started the night before. Columns for date, location, victim, suspect statement, lab note, officer of record. She added a line for a case from six months back that had not fit anywhere at the time. The suspect in that file had used different words, but the shape of the story was the same. A lapse. A blank space where the decision should be. An insistence that something foreign had crept under their skin and steered for a while. Erin checked the address against a street map and drew a neat circle with her mouse. Three circles already overlapped in the middle of the city. The fourth sat a few inches away like a planet that had not been pulled into orbit yet.
She flipped back to the lab responses and read the footnotes. One mention of a compound that showed weak affinity in a screen, then a caveat that the sample had degraded in storage. One mention of an outside consultation that never landed because the backlog had reached a tier where nonpriority work stayed in a queue. Another caveat about a machine that had been down for a week and a half waiting on a part. She rubbed her temple with the side of her thumb and felt the beginnings of a headache settle there.
The television in the corner cut to weather footage on silent. She caught only the crawl and a looping clip of a soaked sidewalk in Back Bay. The meteorologist’s arm moved across a map that glowed blue and green, a neat pattern of colors that looked far cleaner than anything on her screen. She picked up her mug and made a face. Cold coffee, the thin kind she poured when the good pot in the break room had already been cleaned. She stood, walked to the sink, rinsed the mug, and stared out the small window while the water ran.
When she sat again, she adjusted her chair closer to the desk and opened a new document. She let her hands rest on the keys for a long breath and listened to the building around her. Janitor three doors down, a copier waking up somewhere, the low hum of air through a vent. Her cursor blinked at thetop of a blank page like a metronome.
She hated the thought that formed next, but the shape of it was already there. It wouldn’t get smaller. It wouldn’t go away if she closed the files and went home. The pattern was too big, too slippery for one lab, too messy for one department. She swallowed once and began to type.
Recommend immediate escalation of Medford homicide and linked cases to federal level for further investigation.
The sentence looked orderly and impersonal, which was the point. She added a paragraph that summarized the shared elements without leaning into speculation. She listed the case numbers, the dates, the responsible detectives, the current lab status. She didn’t try to write it like a press release, and she didn’t dress it up to make herself look careful. It was careful because the work was careful. It was brief because she didn’t want to give anyone a reason to send it back for edits while time drained away.
She read it once from top to bottom and felt the small resistance that comes after you finish a thing you have been trying not to start. She clicked send and watched the message leave her outbox. The screen didn’t flash. No one applauded in the hallway. Nothing in the room changed except the quiet satisfaction that came when you finally made the call you didn’t want to make.
She leaned back and let her head tip against the chair. The ceiling tiles were a grid that had never once comforted her, but tonight the order of them worked on her like a slow breath. When she sat up, the ache in her shoulders returned, so she stretched one arm and then the other and gathered the files into a stack that fit into her bag. She moved slower than usual, in part because she didn’t want to admit that the day was over, and in part because the next step now lived outside her hands. The feds would answer in their own time. Her captain would call her in for questions. She would stand in front of reporters and repeatinvestigation ongoingwhile her mind ran ahead.
She turned off her monitor and the lamp and let the darker room come forward. She locked her drawer, slid her bag strap across her body, and walked the long hall toward the back exit. The vacuum had stopped. The television still looped the same weather video, a sidewalk that looked wetbut not violent. She pushed the metal bar on the heavy door, and it opened with a soft groan.
Outside, the air had that cool, damp smell that sits before a system moves in. The pavement held a sheen from the last pass of drizzle, but no drops fell now. The streetlamps turned the lot into neat circles of light with long bays of shadow between them. She crossed through one, then another, the sound of her steps flat and sharp on the concrete.
Her car sat where she had left it, two rows out, nose toward the exit. She unlocked it and slid into the driver’s seat, the door shutting with a firm seal that made the rest of the world quiet. For a moment she sat without moving, hands loose on her lap, listening to the tick of the cooling engine in the car next to hers. The stillness asked for a choice.
She reached for the phone in the console and hesitated with her thumb above the screen. She could tell herself it was only courtesy. She could tell herself it was a clean way to close the loop on an apology. She could tell herself a lot of things, and some of them might even be true. What was also true was the small tug she had been fighting since the café, the one that had nothing to do with case numbers or press lines. It wasn’t smart. It didn’t belong in the careful box she kept for work. It was still there.
She unlocked the phone and opened the thread without letting herself think. The keyboard waited. The response formed fast.
Tonight?
Or is that too soon?
Eighteen
The booth was narrow, but Jamie didn’t mind. Erin sat across from her, jacket tossed beside her, hair still a little messy from the drizzle outside. For once, Erin looked nothing like the clipped, collected PIO she showed the world. She looked like a friend unwinding at the end of the day, beer half-finished, reaching across the table like she owned the fries.
Jamie laughed as Erin swiped another one. “You’re unbelievable.”
