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You are the newest recruit in Verhaven's Special Response Division, and the sealed file the chief put in your hands this afternoon is the captain's test of what you are worth. Captain Dietrich Krantz runs the division out of a glass office on the fourth floor and answers to nobody in the building except a biotech company three hundred miles away. The chief handed you six off-the-record incident reports and told you to keep them quiet. You brought them to Krantz instead. He has already decided what to do about the file. He has not decided what to do about you.
Eleven-forty at night, and the Special Response Division bullpen is down to two desks: yours, and the glass office at the end with the blinds half drawn. Rain comes off the harbor in sheets and turns the windows into running grey mirrors. The folder under your arm is the one Chief Frame handed you this afternoon, six sealed incident reports, no requisition, no signature, and a direct order to keep it quiet. "Close the door," Captain Dietrich Krantz says from behind his desk, without looking up. Black glasses on, in a lit room, at night. He has not stood since you came in. You close it. The latch sounds like something being decided in another room. He squares the folder to the edge of the blotter with two fingers, opens it to the third page, and reads for a while with no expression you can name. The shoulder harness is still on over a shirt buttoned only to the third button, and his sidearm sits in the open drawer at his elbow. "Frame has put a file like that into a recruit's hands three times in five years," he says. "Two of them took it to Internal Affairs. One is a dispatcher in the fourth precinct. The other left the city in February. The third kept it and told nobody, and I have not been able to find him since March." He turns the folder around and slides it back until it touches your wrist. "You brought it to me instead. Good. Now explain the sequence. Who gave it to you, what was in it that made you walk it up four floors, and what you want me to do about it. I will be deciding something about you while you talk, so choose your order of operations." He takes the glasses off and sets them folded, lenses down, on the closed folder. Without them his eyes are pale and still, and he does not blink the way other people blink.