Chris Campbell studied the kid in front of him. Tom Graves had pale skin, brown hair, and a frankly exotic face complete with brown eyes that seemed to appear brighter at times, orange or gold in the right light. Easy on the eyes, but Chris couldn’t place his ethnicity, which was odd, given his decades of experience as a detective. Recognizing ethnicity at a glance was one of the tools in the toolkit a detective was expected to have, as it could give clues to a suspect’s motivations, what they found disarming, where they might try to hide, or any of a million other little things.

Tom was also six foot five and skinny. It remained to be seen if he’d fill out with muscle and become an Adonis in his twenties, or just continue to be a beanpole the rest of his life.

High school dropouts don’t normally get a second glance, but this particular one had been a straight-A student, on the road to being a contender for valedictorian, until he’d fallen off the school’s radar. Chris had done some asking around and discovered the kid’s adoptive father had gotten sick right around the same time he’d knocked up a fellow senior, putting immense pressure on him to start making an income. The perfect storm of life-derailing bad luck.

So: hardworking, smart enough to get good grades, cared about his family. Disciplined, but not disciplined enough to pull out on time. Not smart enough to use a condom, either.

So maybe an IQ of a hundred and fifteen or so, and hardworking?

This particular high school dropout had been involved in two gunfights in the last three days, and he was a person of interest in the deaths of two officers in this very station.

The connections were as such:

The boy’s girlfriend had a stash of gold in her car which had disappeared from its place in Evidence the night of the event.

Witnesses of the second gunfight claimed to have seen a trained mountain lion involved. The investigators involved laughed it off at first, but seeing the mountain lion on the security cameras lurking around the station the night before, when Stan Smith and Carlos Hernandez had been gunned down in cold blood by a fucking ghost...

That shut some people up.

Some idiot kicked the fucking hornet’s nest last night. In light of two officers’ deaths, the brass had released details of Lily Smith’s gold to every cop in the city, who were out on the street doing the footwork right now, shaking every possible tree to see what fell out.

There was surveillance footage of Tom Graves acting really goddamn suspicious at University of Chicago Medical Center across town at the exact time of the attack, so it was generally assumed that the kid hadn’t done the deed.

But there was a good chance he knew who was after the gold.

You don’t get attacked that frequently by people you have no contact with. Someone thought that Tom had the gold. Or that he had more. It was possible, maybe even likely, that the guy who’d attacked Tom Graves twice was the ‘Ghost’ who’d waltzed past nearly every security camera save the edge of one of the parking lots, killed two cops, stolen forty pounds of gold and a kilo of cocaine.

And he’d never even opened the door to the evidence room.

That was the real kicker. That door kept track of exactly who opened it and when, in addition to a camera pointed at the door and another inside the evidence room itself.

All they caught was the blurry edge of a balaclava and a shoulder.

Everybody thought they were gonna be the ones to nail this bastard to the wall. The eggheads were sure the cameras and door had been tampered with, and the mountain lion was just a red herring.

I.A. thought it was an inside job, and dismissed the huge fucking wildcat in the middle of Chicago entirely.

The beat cops thought they could trace the stolen cocaine back to the murderer by shaking down all the distributors.

And Chris? Chris thought the kid sitting in front of him could point him in the right direction. He had a cougar.

The captain wasn’t putting much faith in Chris’s theory, but he’d long since found that letting Chris do his own thing generally worked out better for everyone involved. Still, he was breathing down everyone’s neck for results, so Chris couldn’t afford his usual tactic of warming the kid up for an hour or so before he dropped the bomb.

Instead, he slammed the binder on the table, startling the kid out of his slack-jawed stupor.

“I’m working on it!” Tom said, lurching out of sleep with some disoriented blinking. People who fell asleep in the interrogation room fell into two categories: people who truly didn’t give a shit, and people who hadn’t slept in days.

The kid’s expression as he looked Chris up and down was fearful, nervous and cautious. He was definitely the second type, but there was a glimmer of anger there. Sleep deprivation was good. It made it harder to lie. Chris plucked out the picture of the lump of gold in the back of the truck he’d been driving around in.

“What do you know about gold?” Chris chose to open with the gold. He was going to save the Aggravated Discharge of a Firearm for his trump card. It wasn’t the sort of thing that would carry a serious penalty, especially given the mitigating circumstances, but the kid didn’t know that.

He wasn’t a hardened criminal, and yet he was carrying an obscene amount of cash in the back of his friend’s truck.

“I know I want a lawyer,” Tom said, clamming up immediately.

Damnit.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

It wasn’t a bad move, but it took determination to stay clammed up indefinitely, and it was why Chris hadn’t led with criminal charges. He wanted wiggle room to get the kid talking.

“Relax kid, you’re not under arrest.”

“Oh?” Tom Graves asked, standing up and heading for the door.

That’s odd, Chris thought standing up and putting his beefy arm in front of the door. Most people ask for permission to leave instead of just going for it.

This kid’s sending mixed messages. Chris’s well-tuned weirdness detector was going off in the back of his head.

“You’re not under arrest, but I can hold you for two days. You’ll get out a lot faster if you cooperate.”

The kid stared down at Chris’s arm for a moment, seemingly weighing his options before sitting back down. “Still want my lawyer.”

“You don’t get a lawyer unless you’re charged with something. We don’t have public defenders on tap. There’s a process to this.”

“Cool,” the kid said. “So I have to wait two days to get my lawyer?”

Chris’s eye twitched.

“I’m actually investigating the people who attacked you yesterday and two days before that. I really don’t care where you got four hundred thousand dollars in cash and gold coins in the back of your friend’s truck, I just want to know who else knows about it.”

Tom’s eyes narrowed. “Is this conversation being recorded?”

Ah, recording-shy. He’s paranoid I’m gonna come after him. That explains some of his stonewalling. It also offered Chris a way to get him talking.

“Actually, it is,” he said, taking out the recorder in his pocket, then motioning to the one-way mirror behind him. “A couple different ways. I tell you what kid, why don’t I leave the recording devices here and we can go get some lunch?”

Chris rubbed his belly. “I’m a little peckish, anyway.”

“You’re allowed to just…take me somewhere?”

“Well, you’re not under arrest, so yeah. Chinese, Mexican…Mongolian?”

“Mongolian. As long as Mongolian isn’t code for being executed on my knees in an alley somewhere.”

“Jeez kid, you act like we’re out to get you.”

Tom raised a brow and opened his mouth, but didn’t speak.

Damn, almost got him to say something, Chris thought, giving the kid a practiced friendly smile and motioning him through the door.

***Tom Graves***

“I gotta say, kid, you’re a tough nut to crack,” Chris said as he guided Tom back down the hall toward the holding cells.

Until Tom was absolutely sure this dude wasn’t in league with Kenneth Peterson, he was going to keep his mouth shut.

Although, getting held here for a couple days is less than ideal, he thought sourly.

“I got a free meal out of it, so…” Tom shrugged.

“Cost me eighty bucks, too,” the detective muttered.

A flash of yellow out of the corner of his eye caught Tom’s attention. It looked like one of the halls was marked off with police tape…in a police station.

What the hell?

Tom faked a stumble, loosening Chris’s grip on his shoulder, then he took the opportunity to lunge to the side, sprinting for the hall.

Tom’s sneakers squeaked to a halt in front of the police tape, revealing the entire tucked-away hallway to him.

People covered head-to-toe in weird plastic bags, looking like the bad guys from E.T. were taking pictures of blood smears in the hallway. Large swaths of it were scorched by fire.

That’s weird, Tom thought a moment before Chris caught his neck in his meaty grip and steered him back toward the holding cells.

“Little shit,” Chris muttered, much of his good humor lost.

“What was that all about?” Tom asked. “Something you were playing close to the vest?”

The grey-haired detective gave him a calculating look, then sighed. “Well, you’re gonna be here for another couple days, so you’re not gonna spread anything. Two of ours got killed last night.”

Tom’s brain filled in the blanks.

The questions about gold, about Lily, about who knew about it, and her. Combined with these two dead cops, meant that someone had walked in, stolen Lily’s Crypts, then walked away, and they wanted to know who.

The detective was playing things pretty close to the vest. He hadn’t given Tom any information about the gold itself, and he hadn’t mentioned the murdered cops until Tom knew something was up.

The irony of the cops having the thing they stole from him stolen from them was too delicious. Tom couldn’t help himself, even though he knew better.

“Wow, what happened? Did someone with more power than you steal something that belonged to you and then falsify the report about it so you wouldn’t even know it was gone? So weird.”

Tom regretted the words the instant he said them, as it revealed way, WAY too much about how much he knew. Still kinda worth it.

Chris’s beefy hands grabbed Tom’s collar and slammed him up against the wall. A few of the officers in the station glanced up, then deliberately turned their attention away from the altercation.

Bastards.

“You know what they took, don’t you? How? Did you stage it?”

“Still wanting a lawyer over here.”

“Two cops are dead!” Chris hissed into his face. “We’re gonna find the son of a bitch responsible, and we’re gonna put him in a fucking ditch! Now if you’re protecting someone, consider that you might wind up sharing the ditch.”

Tom raised a brow, re-evaluating the situation. Maybe the police could work for him, in a shocking turn of events.

“You…wanna kill him?”

The detective’s eyes said everything they needed to say.

“Quick question,” Tom said, holding up a finger. “What happens if it’s one of your guys who did it? Do you find a patsy and sweep this under the rug? Because I’m not interested in being a scapegoat.”

“One of ours?” Chris whispered, his expression turning slack.

“That’s your freebie. If you want more, I would very much like to not spend the night in jail.”

A bit of motion over Chris’s shoulder caught Tom’s attention.

Kenneth Peterson was sitting at his desk, casually flipping up a piece of paper with his grampa’s license plate printed in large blocky letters, almost looking like he was fanning himself to the casual observer.

Threaten my family, will you? Time to go with the nuclear option.

“He did it,” Tom said, pointing.