“Okay,” Sheriff Gorman muttered as he limped into his office and surveyed the damage. “What the hell's going on here?”
“Sorry to have to wake you so late,” replied Karyn Lucas, the deputy who at that moment was brushing the door
handle for fingerprints, “but as you can see, there's been a break-in.”
“Evidently,” Gorman remarked, heading to his desk, where all his papers and files had been rifled through and left
to spill over onto the floor. With a sigh, he set his cane against the wall and looked down at the chaos. “This is the ClarkAbeson
County Sheriff's Department, for God's sake. Are you seriously telling me that someone broke into my office
without being seen?”
“I was thinking we should keep it quiet,” Karyn suggested. “It'd be pretty embarrassing if people knew the truth.”
As Gorman began to make a token attempt to bring some order to the mess, surrounded by trashed files and tornapart
folders, a torrential night-storm continued to howl outside, sending rain crashing down onto the skylight above.
Nearby, a radio crackled into life as one of the deputies called in some information about a fallen tree on one of the backroads,
but nobody bothered to reply.
“All the available officers were out on a call,” explained Joe, standing in the doorway, glancing nervously at Karyn
before finally meeting Gorman's unimpressed stare. “There... Uh, well, there were reports of a shooting. Multiple victims,
and something about an infant being held hostage. We all headed out to Rosary Road to see what the hell was going on. I
mean, hell, from the call alone it sounded like a bloodbath. There was this woman crying hysterically on the phone and we
could hear stuff going on in the background, if you'd heard her... We had no choice, Ben, we had to all get out there as fast
as possible.”
“And?”
“And nothing. It was a false call, turns out it came from a payphone. Looking back at it now, it's pretty clear that
someone wanted to get us away from the office.”
“There's a rule. You always leave one officer behind to man the desk.”
“I know, but it sounded so bad. Like, one of those once-in-a-lifetime emergencies where you need all hands. We... I
made a judgment call.”
Sighing again, Gorman peered through to the reception area, where the front desk was suspiciously unmanned.
“Where the hell was Elizabeth in all of this?” he asked.
“When we went out to Rosary Road,” Joe continued awkwardly, clearly aware that he wasn't exactly being covered
in glory by the tale, “we... Well, we figured Elizabeth could hold the fort by herself for a little while. Turns out, someone had
slipped something into her coffee. She was out like a light just a few minutes after we left.”
“Huh,” Gorman replied, frowning for a moment before turning to look back at his desk. “And let me guess. The
security cameras were all -”
“Functioning as normal,” Karyn told him before he could finish. “Most of the time, anyway. There was some kind
of electrical disturbance that shorted them out for about ten minutes. After that, it passed and they were fine again, but by
then...” She paused as she examined the door handle. “There are no prints here,” she added finally with a sigh. “There are
no prints anywhere. Whoever did this, they were good.”
“They'd have to be,” Gorman muttered, “to break into my office.”
“They left the rest of the building pretty much untouched,” Andy continued. “Whatever they were doing here,
whatever they were looking for... They knew it was in this room.”
“Is that right?” Gorman asked, wandering around his desk before stopping and picking up one of the damaged
folders. “It's gonna take a while before I can work out if anything was removed.” He glanced briefly at his safe in the corner
of the room. “There's no -”
Stopping suddenly, he felt his blood starting to run cold as he saw that the safe's door was hanging wide open. He
stared for a moment, convinced that somehow he was mistaken, but gradually a sense of fear began to creep up his back and
wrap its fingers over his shoulders.
“And there's that,” Karyn said finally. “Boss, like I told you, this person really knew what they were doing. It's
almost like a professional job.”
Without saying a word, Gorman limped across the room and – ignoring the pain in his right hip – he knelt in front
of the safe. Inside, assorted documents were all laid out more or less as he remembered them from the previous time he'd
opened the thick metal door. With a growing sense of fear in his gut, however, he reached down to the bottom shelf and
began to cautiously sort through the various envelopes and files. His hands were shaking, and finally he got to the bottom of
the little stack and checked one more time, just to be certain.
“It's gone,” he whispered.
Outside, the storm was getting stronger by the second.
“Boss?” Karyn continued, as she and Andy watched him. “Is anything important missing?”
“I...” Gorman paused, unable to stop staring into the safe, unable to sto