Amber twisted the key on the ring between her fingers and sighed. “Clean up the basement. Got it, chief.”
She stood and walked toward the door.
“Officer Cross,” the chief said, “That’s not the whole assignment.”
Amber turned around to see the chief wearing an odd expression. The look of a man revealing to his wife that he’d had an affair. Guilt was written across the man’s face.
“I’m listening, sir.”
“Dig up the oldest case files first.”
“The oldest ones. Yes, sir.”
She waited for him to say more, but he apparently needed prompting. “Okay, and when I find them?”
He licked his lips and rubbed his hands together. “I need you to go through them and write a follow-up report. Lot of big files, probably twenty or more.”
“Yes, sir. Is there something going on with these cases?”
More hesitation.
“Just throw together a report that summarizes the important points in the case. Reiterate the validity of what we’ve already done and call it a day. Summarize it, scan it, and get the box on the truck. I need those cases closed.”
Amber could tell something was bothering the chief. He wasn’t telling her everything.
“What’s this all about?” She asked.
“Federal funding.” Decker leaned back in his chair, which squeaked so loud that it made the hair stand up on the back of Amber’s neck. “They don’t want to keep paying us if we have too many unsolved cases growing mold in the basement.”
“And so, we’re doing a new report?” Amber asked. “To close some of them? But isn’t that a bit unethical?”
The chief slammed his fist down on his desk so hard that his coffee cup fell over, spilling out the black ooze left over from his morning coffee. “I am the chief of this department and you will do as I say or you will be looking for another job, Miss Cross. Am I clear?”
Amber felt her bottom lip quiver. She bit it from the inside to hold it steady. “Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”
She stood and hurried toward the door so he wouldn’t see the tears stinging her eyes. When her hand touched the door, he said, “Amber, look … I’m sorry. It’s just that … well, some powerful people are leaning on the Governor to clear our case load. It’s all about funding. What I need is a report for a few of these cases that shows we did our job and we did all we could. Don’t reinvent the wheel here.”
She nodded and walked into the hall without a word not knowing that her whole world was about to change.
4
Into the Rabbit Hole
The basement was worse than Amber feared. It wasn’t a lower level office built underground. No, it was a concrete block cellar. The putrid smell of must and mold was as thick as the fog that rolled down the Savannah River every morning at dawn. A single, yellow bulb, that looked as if it was on its last flicker, sent beams of sickly, pale light dancing between inky black shadows throughout the unfinished room. Along one wall stood a sentry row of rusted, steel filing cabinets. On the walls to the right and left of them, someone had built Jenga-worthy stacks of long cardboard boxes with ancient Sharpie marker inscriptions on the ends. It reminded Amber of the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the holy relic containing the Ten Commandments is wheeled into a massive warehouse overflowing with wooden crates and buried again.
She used the flashlight on her cellphone to check out the boxes closest to her. One was missing its top and she leaned over to look inside. Something about the size of an apple and fuzzy scurried out of the box, leaped onto her hand and ran across her shoulders. She screamed as it jumped to the rail beside the stairs and raced up into the light and disappeared.
“Mouse,” she whispered, fighting to control her breathing and slow her pulse. “Just a mouse.”
She shook the box hard to scare away any more creatures hiding inside and when she was satisfied there weren’t anymore, she peered over the edge. The mouse had made a nice nest inside the box, using the shredded documents for its bed. So much for digitizing those, Amber thought.
She waved her light across the ends of the boxes and figured out that the scribblings on the end were a code of dates and case numbers jammed together. It took some time studying the inscriptions, but she finally deduced that the number 2015320-RC-14-983787 referenced the date of March 20th, 2015, for Rusty Collierville, case number 14-983787. She also found that the larger files were kept in the boxes, while the smaller ones were jammed haphazardly into the filing cabinets. Even with thorough examination, she could not find any sort of system of organization for any of the files.
She spent the better part of the day just pushing boxes back and forth, into stacks roughly based on what year the case was filed, and then alphabetically. The room had been chilly when she had come down earlier in the day, but now it was growing hot and the air was thick. Her lungs ached and she wondered what kind of long-term damage she might be doing to them in the rank basement file room.
She glanced down at her watch. “Christ, its already after four o’clock?” Her stomach growled in complaint and she realized she hadn’t even taken a lunch break. She pulled herself up from the floor, her back and knees resisting in painful knots. The room lurched and spun as she did. The edges of her vision went dark and threatened to close in around her.
When she woke up, she found that she wasn’t in the basement anymore. She sat up abruptly. She also wasn’t in the police department either. In
