I'm back at the morning I'm named as a suspect on the news.

The air in the interrogation room didn't just go cold; it went thin, like someone had cracked a valve on a vacuum line.

Sergeant Greg Miller didn't move for five seconds. His pencil lay abandoned on the yellow pad, its lead point resting right beside the official case number: 26-CR-08812. He was an old cop—twenty-eight years on the road, eight years in property crimes, four years from a full county pension. He had seen bad arrests, dirty confessions, and lazy paperwork, but he had never seen an investigator look at a suspect with the wide, hollow-eyed terror that was currently eating through Bradley Vance's face.

"Brad," Miller said, his voice dropping an octave into a low, gravelly rasp. "What's he talking about?"

"He's lying, Greg!" Bradley snapped, his voice pitching high and sharp, the thin veneer of professional authority finally cracking down the middle. He spun around from the table, his arms waving in a jerky, frantic motion. "He's bluffing! It's a standard jailhouse shakedown! He knows he's going down for capital murder and he's trying to manufacture reasonable doubt before the arraignment! We had three units on his perimeter since midnight—nobody crossed that lane!"

"I didn't say someone crossed the lane from the road, Bradley," I said, my voice smooth and rhythmic, like water running over river stone. "I said they came through the woodline. From the old access road behind the gravel pit. Parked an unmarked county Explorer behind the cedar break at one-fifty-eight a.m. Walked in on foot with a flashlight on a red-lens filter."

Miller’s head turned toward Bradley like a heavy iron turret.

"The north gravel pit road is gated, Brad," Miller muttered. "Only people with keys to that padlock are the county road commission... and our shift supervisors."

"He's guessing!" Bradley shouted, stepping toward the table, pointing a shaking index finger at my face. "He knew we had the pit road locked down! He’s an engineer, Greg—he knows the terrain better than anyone in this township! Don't let this bastard run you in circles!"

"I don't need to guess, Bradley," I said.

I leaned forward, resting my cuffed hands on the cold steel of the table. I lifted my right foot, placed the heavy lug-soled heel of my work boot onto the edge of the lower bench support, and used the thumb of my left hand to peel back the heavy tongue of the leather.

Tucked into the interior lining, secured with two strips of black electrical tape, sat a slender, silver SanDisk solid-state drive—an ultra-high-speed encrypted thumb drive encased in brushed aluminum.

"You swept my pockets at the house, Detective," I said, looking down at the drive. "You took my keys, my wallet, and my cell phone. But you didn't take my boots. In fact, you told Deputy Kowalski to let me keep them on because the holding cells in the basement were freezing."

Bradley’s eyes dropped to the drive. For a fraction of a second, his entire body tensed, his shoulders dropping two inches as his weight shifted forward onto the balls of his feet.

He was going to lunge.

He was going to grab the drive, throw it onto the concrete floor, and grind it into powdered silicon with the heel of his service boot before Miller could reach across the table.

"Don't do it, Brad," Miller’s voice cut through the hum of the light like a whip-crack.

The old sergeant was already on his feet. He didn't draw his weapon, but his heavy right hand rested firmly across the leather thumb-break of his holster, his thumb already popping the steel snap loose.

"Step back from the table, Detective," Miller commanded, his voice cold, flat, and completely stripped of the casual deference he usually showed the sheriff’s golden boy.

"Greg, are you out of your mind?!" Bradley pleaded, his voice breaking into a ragged hiss as he backed away two steps, his hands raised in a half-hearted gesture of compliance. "You're taking the word of a murder suspect over your own partner?!"

"I'm not taking anybody's word, Brad," Miller said, reaching down with a pair of disposable nitrile gloves he pulled from his back pocket. He snapped them onto his thick fingers, leaned over the table, and carefully peeled the silver drive from the tongue of my boot. "I'm checking the chain of custody. If this is blank, Nathan Hayes goes into a holding cell until his bond hearing at two o'clock. If it's not..."

Miller didn't finish the sentence. He didn't have to.

He picked up his yellow legal pad, scooped the micro-cassette recorder off the metal surface, and walked toward the heavy steel door.

"Where are you going?!" Bradley yelled after him, his hands clenching into fists at his sides.

Miller paused with his hand on the brass door lever. He didn't look back at Bradley; he looked through the wire-glass observation window toward the squad room, where three television sets were currently broadcasting live coverage of Bradley’s morning press conference.

"I'm going to the IT forensics lab in the basement," Miller said quietly. "And I'm having Deputy Kowalski call the State Police Special Investigations Unit in Springfield."

"You can't do that!" Bradley lunged for the door, but Miller pulled it shut with a concussive, echoing SLAM that vibrated through the cinderblocks.

The deadbolt hissed into place. The solenoid clicked.