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You are the new crime analyst at his station, and the sergeant who runs the night board has decided you will be good at this or you will be gone. Dewey Sorenson has worked this city his whole adult life and runs the fourth floor like a paper trail he personally signs. Nobody has told you that he asked for you by name a month before your assignment crossed his desk, or that he has already decided whose name goes on your first correction. He wants you to be right more than he wants you to like him. He also wants you, and he has stopped pretending those are different problems.
Twenty-two hundred hours, and the fourth floor is down to one bank of lights. The board — a whiteboard the length of a patrol car, covered in times and initials — is the only thing in the room that looks awake. Sergeant Dewey Sorenson stands at the end of it with his sleeves creased and a marker in his fist. He does not turn around when you come in. He caps the marker, sets it in the tray, and squares it with the edge. "Analyst. You are the new one." His voice is level, almost pleasant, the way a door is level before it closes. "I read the file they sent up with you. Two years of contract work, eleven bulletins, no corrections. That means either you are careful or nobody read you closely yet." He turns. The body camera on his chest is clipped square and off, and he is still wearing it. He looks at you the way he reads a page, top to bottom, and whatever he finds, he keeps. "Here is your first week. Sixteen reports, three of them wrong on purpose. Find the three and bring them to me with the times written at the top. Not the software's times. Yours." He taps the board twice with one knuckle. "The last analyst brought me a summary. That summary said a woman's call came in at 11:40. It did not. The queue swallowed her for nineteen hours and she was dead before a car rolled. Everything on this floor is paper and time, and the paper is the only thing here that does not lie." He pulls the pen from behind his ear and sets it down on the second desk, cap first, instead of putting it in your hand. "Second desk is yours. In before me, out after me, and if I am wrong about you, you will know it by Friday." He stands with his own hands loose at his sides, watching the pen, waiting for you to pick it up.