Page 22 of Take the Fall
I had no claim on the man. I’d saidwaitto his face two hours ago and meant it. What Reid was or wasn’t feeling about a colleague was not my business, and the fact that something in me had opinions about it anyway was a problem between me and the next five minutes, not Reid’s.
“He’s taking the week I think,” I said. “Internal Affairs still has him on paper.”
Reid’s expression went. “That’s still running?”
“Still running.”
“It’s not right.” Simple as that. “You can’t fake what he does in an interview room. Anyone who’s watched him work knows it. That’s not a performance.” He caught himself and dropped back. “If there’s anything he needs. From me specifically, probably nothing. I know he’s got you. But just. If there’s something.”
“I’ll let him know.”
Reid took the answer, gave me a nod, and went off across the floor. He stopped at Saunders’s desk and said something that made Saunders almost smile, which was a trick I’d been at this station two years without once pulling. I stood there and watched it and knew exactly what I was doing with my attention and chose not to stop.
Get a hold of yourself, Hawley.
I went to my desk.
The envelope was under the blotter, plain, no markings. My man in Records sent things this way when he’d rather the sending never happened.
One page inside. An access log.
I read it from the top, nothing skipped, no conclusion reached before the last line. Then I set it flat and looked at it.
It was the read-history on the sealed disclosure file from the Nguyen operation. The raid out of 52 Division, the one that had cost Carlson his posting, left Daniel beaten in a stairwell, and pointed every comfortable finger in the building at the detective standing in the easiest spot to reach when blame went looking for an address.
Most of the log made sense. The original investigators. The prosecutor’s office. Then a run of recent reads, last week and this, that lined up with Internal Affairs reopening his file. Reviewers doing their reviewing. Each one signed in under his own name, because that is how the system makes you do it.
One line didn’t belong with the rest.
A few days ago, in among the reviewers, a single access under a general administrative credential. The kind a dozen clerks share and nobody logs back to one person. Seven minutes. Open, read, closed. Not a reviewer. Not anyone who’d put his own name to it. Somebody who wanted to read that file without being one of the people allowed to read it, and who knew the building well enough to borrow a face on the way in.
I already had the other half. I’d found it the week before, going back through the Nguyen file one page at a time, which is what you do when a man hands you a folder and tells you the thing is bigger than it looks.
Buried in it was Daniel’s own debrief. His statement, taken down at the time, put him as made a full week before the raid went in. One week. The targets were already cleaning house when Carlson filed the intelligence that supposedly burned them. You can’t leak a thing that’s already loose. Nobody had ever lined the two dates up, because nobody who’d read that file had been looking for a reason Carlson was innocent. They’d been looking for the reason they’d already decided on.
Two halves of the one shape. A man framed, and somebody three days earlier wearing no name into the room to be sure the frame still held.
I sat with it a minute. Not second-guessing, just being sure, because the trouble with a shape you’ve been hunting is that the eye will hand it to you whether it’s there or not. So I built the innocent version. A clerk on a shared terminal pulling the wrong file. A reviewer too lazy to log in as himself. Daniel scared and wrong about his own dates, the way a man’s memory goes after the worst night of his life.
The innocent version explained any one of the pieces. It didn’t explain all of them sitting in the same place at the same time. And I’d tried to make it, because taking this upstairs meantpushing on a thing that wasn’t only mine to push, and I didn’t do that until I was sure.
I was sure.
I folded the page and went up.
Inspector Murphy’s office had a window that faced a courtyard nobody used. The plant on the sill had gone mostly brown, holding on out of stubbornness or neglect, depending which of them you asked. The desk was government gray, files stacked neat on the right, one form in the tray on the left.
He was on the phone when I knocked. He raised two fingers without looking up and finished the call in the register he kept for ranks above his level, giving away nothing. He hung up.
“Hawley.” He looked at me properly. “You’ve got that face. Shut the door.”
I shut it. Sat. Took the page out and laid it on his desk, turned the right way, and let him read it. He found his glasses and took the rosary by his side, moved a bead along the string while he read, without knowing he did it. Set the glasses down. Looked at me.
“Your words,” he said. “All of it. Slow.”
“That’s the access history on the sealed file from the Nguyen operation. Most of it’s what you’d expect. The old investigators, the prosecutor, and the reviewers who’ve been in it since Internal Affairs reopened his case last week. All of them signed in under their own names.” I put my finger on the line. “Except this one. A few days ago. A read under a shared administrative credential. No name attached. Seven minutes, in and out.”
“People pull files under shared logins. It’s lazy, it’s not sinister.”
