Flight

screamed “Stop!” when the shooting began.

Her partner escaped, leaving her behind, so Old Faithful was still good for an arrest. When she was taken into custody, she was questioned about her role, but she didn’t say a word. She wasn’t, as was first believed, exercising her right to remain silent — in the dozen or so years since the robbery, she hadn’t said a word to anyone. Vince put a second mortgage on his house to pay for a good attorney for her, and the court found her to be incompetent to stand trial.

Again Frank considered the financial burdens Vince had faced at the time of the Randolph murders. And reaching his destination, the property room, Frank wondered if Vince’s ex had spent time there. Ten years ago, the current property room had been the city’s women’s jail, and the property room had been in the basement.

Now women who were arrested were kept at the LPPD only very briefly, in holding cells downstairs, until they could be transported to a nearby county facility.

No attempt had been made to hide the signs of the current property room’s past. Although bigger and brighter than the underground area it used to occupy, this wasn’t exactly a cheerful setting. At the moment, on one side of the blue bars of case-hardened steel, a uniformed officer was arguing loudly with property room workers about a problem with his paperwork. On the other side of the counter, behind the network of bars, the two women who were working the desk almost appeared to be incarcerated — and seemed to be enjoying the experience about as much.

As he drew closer to the counter, passing under the watchful eye of several surveillance cameras, Frank saw that Flynn, the sergeant who was in charge of the area, had put a new sign over the front desk: Evidence Control. He remembered that Flynn was trying to get everybody to leave off calling it the property room and to start calling it by this new name. He wished Flynn luck. It would be easier to teach an elephant to figure-skate.

The sign looked as if it had been printed by a computer and laminated at a local copy shop. Probably at Flynn’s own expense.

Frank didn’t envy Flynn. The guy was under a lot of pressure and never got a hell of a lot of support. He had to ride almost everybody to get them to follow procedures, and that created a certain level of resentment. Controlling guns, drugs, money, and valuables such as jewelry — against thieves both inside and outside the department — presented constant challenges in security. Legal requirements for keeping and controlling evidence were complex and ever-changing. Less than five percent of the items held in evidence would ever be used in court. All the same, defense lawyers knew that evidence control was often where a police department was most vulnerable — one sloppy entry in chain-of-custody paperwork could blow a case apart.

Frank shook his head. Given its importance, you would have thought Flynn would get whatever he asked for. But only someone who didn’t understand the politics of law enforcement would have supposed such a thing. The chief knew that city hall and the voters were happiest when they saw lots of black-and-whites on the streets, so by the time patrol cars and rookies were paid for, there wasn’t a hell of a lot left for paying for detectives, electronic equipment, and crime labs — and there sure as hell wasn’t much allotted to Flynn’s area.

Which was why Flynn, a veteran of twenty years on the force, most of them on the city’s toughest streets, now spent his days in an abandoned women’s jail. Pete sometimes razzed Flynn by calling him a sailor dying of thirst, a reference both to Flynn’s naval career and to the fact that Flynn guarded all sorts of valuables while his own budget got cut again and again. Frank figured it was more like being a minimum-wage teller in a big bank. You could handle a million dollars, but none of it was yours — and let a dime of it go missing, you were the one who had to come up with the answers.

Frank looked in at the oddball assortment of desks and filing cabinets behind the front counter. Flynn, a former naval supply officer, was a master at obtaining equipment on the cheap. He watched the newspaper for notices of businesses closing facilities or going belly-up, and then contacted their owners begging for desks and office equipment.

The area still smelled like a lockup, a mix of disinfectant, insecticide, and all the ripened scents on possessions taken from the people who were in custody. Unlike the clean and healthy specimens of humanity who got hauled into jail on Dragnet, in real life a lot of the people who got arrested weren’t in such fine condition. A drunken man arrested for assault, for example, might piss in his own pants and follow that up by puking all over himself — if you were lucky, he did this after he was out of the patrol car. When such folks exchanged their garments for jailhouse garb, Flynn and his workers were required to keep their personal property safe for a certain period of time, or until it was claimed by them.

Flynn stepped out of his office now, his scowl enough to quiet the protesting officer.

“Tell you what,” Flynn said to the patrolman. “You know so damned much more than any of us, I’m going to ask your boss to transfer you down here so we can all benefit from your enlightenment.”

He received a hasty apology from the horrified officer, who quickly walked away.

“Harriman!” Flynn said, seeing Frank. “How’s it going?”

“Fine,” he said. “How about for you, Flynn?”

“What the hell happened to your voice?”

“Mild laryngitis.”

Flynn studied him for a brief moment, then said, “Glad you decided to humor me and come down here to check out that new freezer. Big improvement over the old one.” He pushed a sign-in sheet on a clipboard toward Frank. “Save your voice, just sign in and I’ll take you back to see it.”

Frank managed not to show surprise. He smiled and nodded as if thanking Flynn for being so considerate, signed the sheet, and waited while Flynn unlocked the gate into the office area.

“All the monitors working?” Flynn asked the women. When they said yes, he said, “Then you know how to find me if you need me.”

Frank wondered if this was Flynn’s way of reminding him that there were surveillance cameras throughout the area.

He followed Flynn past another set of clerks doing computer work. Most of them, he knew, were getting ready to leave for the day. As they went through the next room, he saw a worker engaged in disposing of some unclaimed personal effects. Although it was warm in the room, she wore coveralls, a mask, safety glasses, long gloves, and a scarf tied over her hair.

They walked down the concrete corridor, past a long row of cells with open doors.