Chapter 1 - The Passenger in the Rain
The click behind Sergeant Daniel Mercer sounded too small to belong to danger.
It was only the rear door of his patrol car unlocking. On any ordinary night, the sound would have meant a faulty latch, a restless detainee, or the careless movement of a partner reaching for equipment. But Daniel was alone, and the black cruiser had been empty when he had left the station nineteen minutes earlier. The injured man inside the coffin had closed his fingers around Daniel's wrist with the strength of terror and whispered, “Don't turn around… he's inside your car.”
Daniel did not turn. Rainwater slid from the edge of his cap and struck the dead man's satin lining between them. The man was in his forties, perhaps, with gray beginning at his temples and a narrow wound above his left eyebrow. His lips were almost colorless. Yet his frightened gaze was fixed past Daniel, toward the wet reflection trembling on the coffin lid.
In that reflection, a shape rose behind the rear window.
Daniel kept his right hand near his holster and pressed his left thumb against the transmit switch on his shoulder microphone. “Dispatch, Unit Twelve. Officer needs assistance. Birch and Halpern. Unknown suspect in my vehicle.”
Static answered him. Beneath it, for less than a second, he heard a breath that did not belong to the dispatcher.
“Do not use the radio,” the man in the coffin whispered. “They can hear everything.”
The cruiser door opened another inch. Its hinges gave a damp groan.
Daniel made three decisions at once. He released his microphone, drew his pistol, and pulled the injured stranger out of the coffin by the back of his coat. They rolled together over the far side just as a suppressed shot punched through the coffin lid. A tuft of white lining burst into the air. Daniel landed hard on his left shoulder, raised his weapon above the wooden edge, and aimed toward the cruiser.
The rear door stood open. No one was there.
He heard shoes strike water near the front bumper. A black-clad figure moved low, using the flashing car as cover. Daniel fired once at the pavement beside the moving shadow—not to hit, but to force the stranger away from the houses. The figure vanished behind a hedge. A gate banged. Then there was only wind, rain dripping through bare branches, and the slow electronic pulse of red and blue light.
Daniel waited five seconds, listening. A dog barked behind one of the dark houses. Farther away, an engine started, revved once, and faded toward the county road.
He checked the man beside him. “Can you move?”
“Not far.”
“Name.”
The stranger hesitated. Daniel saw calculation pass beneath the fear. “Elias Voss.”
Daniel knew the name, though it took him a moment to place it. Dr. Elias Voss had been the county medical examiner until six months earlier, when he had resigned without explanation. His photograph had appeared beside official reports for years: suspicious deaths, industrial accidents, drownings, one notorious triple homicide. Daniel remembered a quieter face and wire-rimmed glasses. The man lying in the rain had neither glasses nor the calm authority of those photographs.
“Why were you in a coffin?” Daniel asked.
“Because I was supposed to be dead by morning.” Elias tried to sit and nearly collapsed. “And if you called this in through the normal channel, they already know you found me.”
Daniel looked at his cruiser. The front passenger door was locked. The equipment cage had not been disturbed. The stranger must have hidden in the rear before Daniel left the precinct garage, which meant he had passed cameras, coded gates, and officers who knew every unfamiliar face. That possibility was worse than the gunshot.
Daniel holstered his pistol only long enough to take out his phone. There was no signal. A red symbol showed that the device had lost its network connection, though reception on Birch Street was usually strong. He walked backward to the cruiser, watching the hedge, then opened the trunk. His medical bag was gone. So was the road-flare case. In their place lay a small gray box with two antennas and a green light.
“Jammer,” Elias said. “Portable. Military grade.”
Daniel tore the wires free. His phone recovered one bar, then three. Before he could dial, the screen displayed an incoming call from Captain Owen Rourke.
Rourke was Daniel's commander, mentor, and oldest friend in the department. Twenty-three years earlier, when Daniel had been a rookie frozen by the sight of his first fatal crash, Rourke had put a hand on his shoulder and said, Look at the living first. The dead will wait. Daniel had carried those words into every hard night since.
He answered. “Captain.”
“Mercer, where are you?” Rourke's voice was sharp but controlled. “Your locator dropped.”
Daniel watched Elias react to the voice. The medical examiner's whole body tightened.
“Birch Street,” Daniel said. “Obstruction in the road.”
“What kind?”
“A fallen object. I need an ambulance and two units.”
There was a fraction of silence. “Is the object a coffin?”
Daniel felt the night change around him.
He had not described it over an open channel. His first radio report—Dispatch, I found a coffin in the road—had been swallowed by static before the dispatcher acknowledged him. Perhaps enough had gone through. Perhaps a resident had called. Yet Rourke's question had arrived too quickly and too precisely.
“Who told you?” Daniel asked.
“Dispatch heard part of your transmission. Stay where you are. I'm coming personally.”
Elias shook his head with desperate force.
Daniel said, “Understood,” and ended the call.
“If he comes, we die,” Elias said.
“Careful.” Daniel's voice hardened. “You are accusing a police captain.”
“I am accusing the man who ordered my murder.”
A siren sounded in the distance.
Daniel lifted Elias and guided him toward the nearest house with a porch light. The stranger stumbled, one arm clutched around his ribs. The house was a narrow blue bungalow belonging, according to the mailbox, to someone named Kline. Daniel knocked, announced himself, and received no response. The door was unlocked.
He did not enter. An open door after gunfire was an invitation to make a fatal assumption. He moved to the side window and saw a lamp burning above a tidy living room. A mug steamed on a table. A television showed a weather forecast with the sound muted. No person was visible.
“Mrs. Kline?” Daniel called.
Something scraped inside.
Daniel raised his pistol and pushed the door inward with his boot. An elderly woman sat on the kitchen floor, her wrists bound with plastic ties. A strip of tape covered her mouth. He crossed the room, checked the hall, then cut her free with the rescue hook on his belt.
“He had a mask,” she gasped. “He came through the back. He said I wouldn't be hurt if I stayed quiet.”
“Did you see where he went?”
“Out the front, just before you came in. He took my car keys.”
The distant engine Daniel had heard belonged to her beige station wagon. Whoever had been inside his cruiser had prepared more than one escape.
Mrs. Kline stared at Elias, who was leaning against the wall and leaving a dark smear of rain and blood on the paint. “Good Lord. Is he the man from that box?”
“Yes,” Daniel said. “You need to leave through the back and go to a neighbor. Don't call the police until you are inside and the door is locked. Ask for county deputies, not city units.”
She searched his face. “Aren't you the police?”
“Tonight that is the problem.”
After Mrs. Kline disappeared across the adjoining yard, Daniel found towels, a blanket, and a first-aid kit. Elias had two broken ribs, a shallow cut at his temple, and puncture marks in the bend of his arm. His pupils were responsive, but his movements were sluggish.
“They sedated me,” he explained. “I woke in a funeral preparation room. I heard two men arguing. One wanted to cremate the coffin immediately. The other insisted on putting me where Mercer would find me.”
Daniel stopped wrapping the ribs. “He used my name?”
“Yes.”
“Why would someone want me to find you?”
“I hoped you could tell me.”
Blue light swept across the curtains. The approaching siren went silent.
Daniel turned off the lamp. Through the window, he saw two city police vehicles stop behind his cruiser. Captain Rourke stepped out of the first. He was broad-shouldered despite his sixty years, silver-haired, immaculate even in the rain. Officers Lena Ortiz and Paul Haskins exited the second car. Daniel had trained Ortiz. Haskins had shared Christmas dinner with Daniel's family after his own divorce. Seeing familiar faces should have brought relief. Instead, Daniel studied the angle of their hands and the places they looked.
Rourke inspected the open coffin, then the bullet hole. He did not appear surprised.
“Stay here,” Daniel told Elias.
“He will make you come closer.”
“I know how arrests work.”
“This won't be an arrest.”
Daniel stepped onto the porch with empty hands visible. “Captain.”
All three officers turned. Ortiz's relief seemed genuine. Haskins immediately drew his weapon.
“Hands on your head, Sergeant,” Rourke ordered.
“On what grounds?”
“A weapon registered to you was used in a shooting at Saint Catherine's Funeral Home tonight. An attendant is dead. A witness saw your cruiser leave the alley.”
Daniel's service pistol was in his holster, but he owned a second department-approved handgun, kept in a locked cabinet at home. He had last checked it two weeks earlier. His house alarm had reported no entry.
“Where is the medical examiner?” Rourke asked.
The wording was another mistake. Daniel had never said the person in the coffin was Elias Voss.
Ortiz looked at her captain. She noticed it too.
“Captain,” Daniel said slowly, “how do you know who I found?”
Rourke's face remained still. “Step off the porch.”
“Answer him,” Ortiz said.
Haskins swung his pistol toward her. “Lena, don't.”
For one suspended moment, nobody moved. Rain tapped the metal gutter. In the living room behind Daniel, Elias tried to suppress a cough.
Rourke sighed. “This has already gone farther than it needed to. Mercer, surrender your weapon. Ortiz, lower yours.”
She had not drawn it yet. Now she did.
Haskins fired first.
The shot shattered the porch post beside Daniel. Ortiz returned fire, striking Haskins in the thigh. Daniel dropped behind the railing, drew, and shouted for everyone to stop. Rourke took cover behind his vehicle. Haskins fell against the cruiser, cursing, his weapon skidding under the chassis.
Then the lights on the entire street went out.
The houses, streetlamps, and police vehicles died together. Even the emergency bars stopped flashing. A second jammer, Daniel realized—this one paired with an electromagnetic pulse device or a deliberate strike on the neighborhood transformer. Darkness erased uniforms and loyalties.
Someone moved inside the bungalow.
Daniel spun. The back door slammed. Elias was gone.
He ran through the kitchen and into the yard. A narrow beam of light appeared beyond the fence. Elias was being dragged toward the alley by the masked attacker, who had doubled back while the police confronted one another. Daniel vaulted the fence. His left shoulder screamed from the earlier fall. He caught the attacker's coat, but the man twisted with professional speed and drove an elbow into Daniel's jaw.
They went down in wet leaves. Daniel felt the cold rim of a suppressed pistol touch his vest. He trapped the attacker's wrist with both hands as the weapon coughed. The bullet passed beneath his arm. The stranger wore a black half-mask, but Daniel could see a pale scar crossing his chin.
“You weren't supposed to survive the car,” the attacker hissed.
Daniel struck him with his forehead, tore the pistol free, and rolled away. Ortiz reached the alley, flashlight in one hand, weapon in the other. Her beam caught the attacker climbing into Mrs. Kline's station wagon. Daniel fired at the rear tire. The rubber burst, but the car lurched forward, scraped a brick wall, and vanished around the corner on its rim.
Elias lay face down beside a garbage bin. He was conscious.
“Why did he leave you?” Ortiz asked.
“He didn't,” Elias said. He opened his fist. A slender metal capsule lay in his palm. “I took this from his coat. He chose escape over recovering it.”
Haskins groaned from the street. Rourke called Ortiz's name and ordered her to return. She ignored him long enough to shine her light on Daniel.
“Tell me this isn't what it looks like,” she said.
“I don't know what it looks like yet.”
“It looks like our captain knew Voss was here. It looks like Haskins tried to kill us. It looks like someone framed you for murder.”
“And it looks like you shot a fellow officer.”
Her expression flinched. “He fired first.”
“I saw it. The question is who else will believe us.”
Backup sirens multiplied in the distance. Whatever had disabled the block was fading; a porch light flickered back to life.
Elias gave Daniel the capsule. Inside was a tightly rolled strip of transparent film covered in microscopic numbers. Daniel could not read it in the rain, but he recognized a chain-of-custody code printed along one edge.
“Evidence archive microfilm,” Ortiz said. “We stopped using that twenty years ago.”
“Some records were never digitized,” Daniel replied.
Elias struggled upright. “That strip is why people have died.”
Rourke appeared at the mouth of the alley, his weapon lowered but ready. “Daniel, listen to me. State police are on the way. Give me Voss and the evidence. I can still keep you alive.”
The offer sounded almost compassionate. That made it more frightening.
“Did you kill the funeral attendant?” Daniel asked.
“No.”
“Did Haskins?”
Rourke looked toward the injured officer. “Paul made a mistake.”
“Was the man hidden in my cruiser yours?”
“Not mine.” For the first time, Rourke's control cracked. “You don't understand the number of people involved. You think this is a corrupt cop taking money from criminals? It is bigger than the department, bigger than this city. Hand me that capsule, and I can negotiate.”
“With whom?”
“The people who placed the coffin where you would find it.”
Ortiz whispered, “Captain, you knew.”
Rourke's eyes moved to her. “I knew enough to be afraid.”
State police sirens were less than a minute away. Daniel understood that once uniformed strangers arrived, Rourke would control the first version of events. Daniel would be the armed suspect accused of murder. Ortiz would be the officer who had shot Haskins. Elias, officially missing and perhaps already declared dead, could disappear in custody before dawn.
There was a drainage passage beneath the alley, large enough for storm-water crews. Daniel had crawled through it during flood rescues. It emerged near an abandoned textile mill six blocks east.
“Go,” he told Ortiz. “Take Elias.”
“What about you?”
“I will delay them.”
“They will arrest you.”
“If I run, Rourke owns the story. If I stay, at least he has to explain why I'm alive.” Daniel pressed the capsule into her palm. “Find retired archivist Miriam Hale. She worked evidence control when those numbers were used. Trust nobody else.”
Rourke advanced one step. “Daniel, don't make me choose.”
“You chose before you arrived.”
Ortiz got Elias into the culvert just as headlights flooded the alley. Daniel stepped into the open, placed his pistol on the pavement, and raised his hands. Rourke stared past him toward the culvert but did not fire. That hesitation told Daniel something important: whatever Rourke had done, some part of the man Daniel once trusted was still resisting.
State troopers surrounded the alley. Daniel was forced to his knees. Captain Rourke personally fastened the handcuffs.
As he leaned close, he whispered, “Your daughter is not at her apartment.”
Daniel's blood went cold.
His daughter, Claire, was a thirty-year-old investigative reporter for the Ledger. They had spoken that afternoon. She had teased him about forgetting to buy coffee and promised to visit Sunday. He had heard traffic and church bells behind her, ordinary sounds from downtown.
“What did you do?” Daniel asked.
“Nothing. I tried to warn her.” Rourke tightened the cuffs as troopers watched. “She started this, Daniel. She sent Voss to you.”
Daniel was placed in the back of a state police vehicle. Through rain-streaked glass, he watched officers gather around the coffin. Crime-scene lights illuminated its wet wood and torn white lining. The object that had first seemed like a grotesque obstruction now looked like a message addressed specifically to him.
At headquarters, Daniel was separated from Rourke and questioned by Lieutenant Mara Keene of the state police. Keene was lean, direct, and famous among local officers for distrusting every department equally. She recorded the interview, photographed Daniel's injuries, and listened without visible reaction as he described the coffin, Elias, the hidden attacker, Haskins's shot, and Ortiz's escape.
“You expect me to believe Captain Rourke announced information he could not have known?” she asked.
“Officer Ortiz heard it.”
“Officer Ortiz is missing after shooting her colleague.”
“Haskins shot first.”
“Captain Rourke says Haskins reacted when you drew on him.”
“Rourke is lying.”
Keene folded her hands. “A funeral-home employee named Jonah Bell was killed at nine forty. Ballistics preliminarily match a pistol registered to you. Camera footage shows your cruiser in the alley at nine forty-three. Your vehicle locator was disabled six minutes later. At ten twelve you reported a coffin. Do you see why your account requires evidence?”
“Check the cruiser. Someone hid in it.”
“We found blood on the rear seat.”
“Not mine.”
“The rapid test says it is.”
Daniel stared at her. Whoever planned the frame had access to his blood, his weapon, his car, and department systems. He remembered giving blood during the city drive three weeks earlier, held in the precinct gymnasium. Haskins had organized it.
“The sample was planted,” Daniel said.
Keene did not laugh. That was the first hopeful thing that had happened. “Your daughter was investigating Saint Catherine's Funeral Home.”
Daniel leaned forward. “How do you know?”
“A draft article was recovered from her work computer. She alleged that the funeral home falsified cremation records and transported unidentified bodies under legitimate burial permits. The draft named Dr. Voss as a confidential source.”
“Where is Claire?”
“We don't know.”
The door opened. Rourke entered with the city attorney and a written demand that Daniel be transferred to municipal custody. Keene refused. Their argument moved into the corridor, voices low and hostile.
Daniel looked at the mirrored observation window. His reflection showed a tired fifty-two-year-old man with rain-dried blood at his jaw and a bruise rising beneath one eye. Beyond the glass someone was watching. He wondered whether it was a trooper, an investigator, or the person who had sat up inside his car.
The room lights flickered.
A paper cup rolled from beneath the table. Daniel had not noticed it before. On its underside, written in blue ink, were six words: YOUR DAUGHTER LEFT YOU A KEY.
He turned the cup. A tiny brass key had been taped inside.
The interview room door opened again before he could hide it. A uniformed trooper told him to stand. Keene had blocked Rourke's transfer request, but a judge had signed an emergency warrant placing Daniel under arrest for Jonah Bell's murder. He would be taken to the county detention center.
As Daniel passed Rourke in the corridor, their eyes met. Rourke looked at the paper cup still sitting beneath the table, then at Daniel's closed fist. He had seen the message. Yet he said nothing.
The transport van left headquarters near midnight. Rain had softened to mist. Daniel sat alone in a steel compartment, wrists secured to a waist chain. Two state troopers rode in front. They took the standard route north until a fallen tree blocked the highway. A road crew directed them onto an industrial detour.
Daniel felt the van turn twice. The second turn was wrong.
He stood as far as the restraints allowed and looked through the narrow rear window. They were heading toward Saint Catherine's Funeral Home.
The van stopped in a service alley. One trooper opened the rear door. He wore the correct uniform but no nameplate. Across his chin ran a pale scar.
Daniel drove both feet into the man's chest. The trooper fell backward. Daniel lunged out, but the waist chain caught on the door bracket. The attacker recovered and raised a syringe.
A gunshot cracked from the roofline. The syringe flew from his hand.
Lena Ortiz appeared above the alley, raincoat over her uniform, aiming from a fire escape. “Sergeant, move!”
The second trooper rushed from the front. Elias Voss struck him with a tire iron from behind a parked hearse. Daniel twisted the chain around the scarred attacker's wrist and pulled him into the van frame. The man lost his pistol. Ortiz climbed down, cuffed both impostors, and took their radios.
“Real troopers?” Daniel asked.
“Drugged at a diner,” Ortiz said. “Keene found them five minutes ago. She sent us the van route, but the message was intercepted. We guessed Saint Catherine's because Voss remembered the preparation room.”
Elias unlocked Daniel's restraints with keys taken from the impostor. “We need to go inside.”
“My daughter first.”
“The key she left you opens something inside.”
Daniel showed him the brass key. Elias recognized the stamped number: 317.
Saint Catherine's had been closed by police, its front entrance sealed. They entered through the crematory loading bay. The building smelled of disinfectant, damp flowers, and the faint mineral odor of ash. Rows of empty gurneys waited beneath fluorescent lights. Daniel could hear the low hum of refrigeration.
Locker 317 stood in the employee changing room. The brass key opened it. Inside lay Claire's red scarf, her press identification, and an old cassette recorder wrapped in plastic. Daniel pressed play.
His daughter's voice filled the room.
“Dad, if you are hearing this, I couldn't risk calling you. Dr. Voss found proof that forty-seven unidentified people passed through Saint Catherine's under false names during the last eighteen years. Some were witnesses. Some were informants. Three were children officially reported as runaways. The permits were approved through a network inside city government and the police department. I thought Captain Rourke was running it. I was wrong. He took money, altered files, and protected someone, but he is not the person at the center.”
Daniel closed his eyes briefly. Claire sounded controlled, but he knew the small catches in her breath. She had been afraid.
“The center is called the Custodian,” the recording continued. “Nobody I interviewed knows the real name. Voss says the original records are on microfilm because the Custodian cannot erase what was never put online. I arranged for Voss to bring the strip to you inside a coffin from the funeral home. It sounds insane, but the smugglers would assume the coffin belonged to their own operation. I paid Jonah Bell to drive it to Birch Street, where your route would take you. Jonah was supposed to call when Voss was safe. He never did.”
Elias looked stricken. “She planned the coffin.”
“She saved your life,” Ortiz said.
The tape clicked, then resumed.
“One more thing. If Rourke tells you I started this, believe him. If he tells you he is trying to protect me, do not. He believes he can bargain with the Custodian, and that belief has ruined every good thing left in him. The microfilm contains a number connected to Mom's death. I am sorry, Dad. I know what that will do to you. But Mom did not die in a random collision. Her name is in the archive.”
Daniel stopped breathing.
His wife, Rebecca, had died fourteen years earlier when a delivery truck crossed the center line on a wet county road. The driver had been intoxicated and died at the scene. Daniel had arrived before the ambulance and held Rebecca's hand through shattered glass until it went still. The loss had nearly destroyed him and Claire. Rourke had sat with them at the hospital. Rourke had arranged the funeral at Saint Catherine's.
The cassette ended with Claire saying, “I love you. Remember what you taught me: fear is information, not an order.”
A mechanical thud sounded below them.
Elias pointed toward the crematory floor. “The lift.”
They moved down the corridor. A platform used to raise coffins from underground storage was ascending. Daniel aimed at the closed metal doors. When they opened, Captain Rourke stood on the platform with blood on his collar and his hands raised.
“Don't shoot,” he said. “Claire is alive.”
Daniel crossed the distance and slammed him against the wall. “Where?”
“The old memorial hospital. Sublevel C.”
“Who has her?”
“I don't know his real name.”
“Custodian?”
Rourke's eyes confirmed it.
Ortiz kept her weapon trained on him. “Why should we believe anything you say?”
“Because he tried to kill me when I refused to deliver Daniel.” Rourke turned his head, revealing a deep graze behind his ear. “Haskins worked for me. The masked man did not. There are two groups moving tonight, and both think the other has the film.”
“You framed me,” Daniel said.
“I let Haskins borrow your pistol. He said he would stage a nonfatal incident to force you off duty. I did not know he would kill Jonah. I did not know they had your blood.”
“You knew enough.”
“Yes.” Rourke did not look away. “I have known enough for fourteen years.”
The confession landed harder than any blow.
Before Daniel could answer, the building alarm began to ring. Smoke poured beneath the preparation-room door. Someone had ignited accelerant in the records wing.
They ran. Flames moved along the corridor with unnatural speed, fed by chemicals and old wood. Elias led them toward the loading bay while Ortiz called Keene from an unregistered phone. Rourke stopped at the crematory controls.
“The underground archive,” he said. “If the fire reaches it, the ventilation system will carry heat through every vault.”
“Then help us open it,” Elias said.
“There isn't time. Take Daniel and go.”
Rourke pulled a manual suppression lever. Nothing happened. The line had been cut.
Daniel seized a fire extinguisher and fought toward the stairwell. He hated Rourke, but hatred could wait. The dead could wait. Look at the living first.
Together they reached the archive door. Rourke entered a six-digit code. Inside were shelves of ledgers, film canisters, burial permits, and boxes bearing dates that went back three decades. Elias found a watertight evidence case and swept the oldest index books inside. Ortiz photographed shelf labels. Daniel located the film reader and fed the transparent strip into its slot.
Rows of coded entries appeared. Elias translated the columns: intake name, actual identity, authorizing officer, final destination. Daniel searched Rebecca Mercer.
Her name was there.
Beside it was the date of her death and a notation: AUDITOR—DISCOVERED ROUTE 6 TRANSFERS. ACTION AUTHORIZED. VEHICLE SUBSTITUTE FAILED TO RECOVER DOCUMENTS.
The authorizing code was OR-01.
Owen Rourke stood behind him.
Daniel turned with the extinguisher in his hands. “Your initials.”
Rourke looked at the screen. Smoke rolled across the ceiling. “Yes.”
Ortiz whispered, “Captain…”
“I signed the order,” Rourke said. “But I was told it meant surveillance. I learned the truth after the crash.”
Daniel struck him.
Rourke fell against the shelves, blood brightening his mouth. Daniel pulled him up and struck him again. Fourteen years of grief narrowed into the face of the man who had sat beside Claire at the funeral, who had carried Rebecca's coffin, who had told Daniel that some tragedies had no meaning.
Elias caught Daniel's arm before the third blow. “If he dies here, the truth dies smaller.”
The ceiling cracked. Burning plaster fell between them.
They dragged the evidence case out. Rourke, dazed, guided them to a service tunnel connecting the funeral home to the abandoned convent next door. They emerged as the roof collapsed. Fire engines arrived from three directions, but two engines were delayed by false calls elsewhere. Lieutenant Keene pulled up in an unmarked vehicle and took custody of the impostors.
Daniel handed her the evidence case, but kept the microfilm. “Make three copies before anyone knows you have it.”
Keene studied Rourke. “Captain, you are under arrest.”
“You can arrest me after we recover Claire Mercer,” he said.
“You lost the privilege of giving orders.”
Daniel looked at the burning funeral home. He wanted Rourke locked in the deepest cell available. He also wanted every piece of knowledge Rourke carried about the old hospital.
“Put a tracker on him,” Daniel told Keene. “Let him take us there.”
Keene's gaze sharpened. “You are a murder suspect, not the incident commander.”
“Your impostors tried to deliver me here. The real killer framed me. You know that now.”
“I know enough to keep listening.” She ordered a trooper to secure Rourke with a waist chain rather than take him away. “But I lead.”
They had just begun planning when Elias collapsed.
At first Daniel thought his injuries had worsened. Then Elias started convulsing, one hand clawing at his throat. Ortiz found a fresh needle mark through the fabric of his coat. The masked attacker had injected him during the struggle in the alley after all.
Elias forced out one word: “Delayed.”
Rourke recognized the symptoms. “Neurotoxin. He has perhaps twenty minutes.”
“Antidote?” Keene asked.
“At Memorial Hospital,” Rourke said. “Sublevel C.”
The same place Claire was being held.
Daniel knelt beside Elias as paramedics supplied oxygen. The former examiner opened his eyes with effort. “Film,” he whispered. “Miriam Hale. She knows the codes.”
“You will tell her yourself.”
Elias's fingers closed around Daniel's sleeve. “The Custodian does not destroy evidence. He collects leverage. That is why the originals survived. He will offer your daughter for the strip.”
May you like
“Then he will get a strip.”
Keene understood. They could duplicate the microfilm, but Rourke warned that the Custodian would inspect its chemical aging and edge marks. A modern copy would fail. Daniel proposed cutting the original: keep the section containing identities and send the coded index segment as bait. Elias objected that either half alone might be useless.
