The Original

None of us ever wanted to be cops. Not a single person employed at the station (myself included) asked for this job. And I think that was our mistake.

When the Whitewhale City Council was tasked with replacing the existing police force, they had a choice to make. Of course, they could have recruited the normal way, by announcing the openings and taking applications. But that was exactly what had caused the problems to begin with, what had left the city stuck with a bunch of trigger-happy wannabes, juicing for a little power and respect.

So this time, they took a different approach. They didn’t give us a choice.

This job eats you. It takes and it takes, and gives only rewards with back-end caveats. It is a job which requires you to document the death of your own soul, in excruciating detail. And if you never even wanted it to begin with, it is a special brand of torture.

Whitewhale is an island, situated less than a mile off the coast of the continent. General consensus is that this relative isolation was the catalyst which had allowed the Council to seize control. We have always sat apart, the black sheep, easy enough to ignore. Not worth the trouble. In all likelihood, our supposed countrymen on the other side of the bay had breathed a collective sigh of relief at the news that they wouldn’t have to deal with us any more. They pretended to care, like you’re supposed to, and there was a brief skirmish (really more like a single navel volley; it was reported that not a single person had died), but then they were all too happy to let us go our separate ways. City Council called it “succession.” Their propaganda posters called it “revolution.” But we all knew what it had been: a coup. A hostile takeover.

The Council is an anonymous organization, like the Illuminati, or the MPAA. For all most people know, they could not even exist. But their rule over Whitewhale is absolute. Beyond reproach. The first thing they did, after usurping the throne, was to stratify the government, placing multiple layers of protection between them and their constituents. There are the Council Agents, who operate like the SS, investigating the major threats to Council authority. Below them is Crowd Control, something like a mix between a SWAT team and a mercenary army, who the Council calls when they need some heads knocked.

Then there’s us, the Whitewhale Volunteer Police Department, the last line of defense. Not long after their “revolution,” the Council dismantled the police force and imprisoned every cop in the city. They framed it as a crackdown on police corruption, and in some ways, that’s exactly what it was. The old WPD was a notoriously cruel gang of ambitious hot-heads, almost universally hated by the city’s residents. I know that growing up, I would have gladly accepted a ride from a shadowy figure in a panel van before getting inside a squad car. But the Council’s solution didn’t sit any better with the people. They picked out their candidates and forced them to become officers of the law, in some cases literally snatching them off the streets and dumping them on the academy steps. I have no idea why I was selected, why they chose this particular urchin girl over so many others, and no matter how accustomed I get to the job, there will always be a part of me that wonders what kind of life I could have lived if I had been allowed to decide for myself.

The call came in just as I was arriving at the station for the day, and the cadet who had answered flagged me down before I even made it to my desk.

“Detective, I think you need to hear this.”

“What is it? Can’t I grab some coffee, or something, first?” I didn’t wait for his response, as I don’t answer to the kids in uniform. I lumbered over to the coffee machine and poured myself a cup.

The cadet followed me and gave his report anyway. “A body just washed up on Trash Beach.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right. That’s what they do. Gunshot wound?”

“Uh, no, but--”

“Stabbed?”

“No, listen--”

“Strangled?”

“I don’t think so. Detective--”

“Then why did they call us, huh? We’re homicide. We can’t be expected to deal with every dead body in Whitewhale.”

“It’s a cop,” the cadet spurted, before I could interrupt him again.

“What?” I said.

“Yeah. Person called it in, some hobo, said they found a badge in the right breast pocket of the coat.”

“What’s the number?” I was playing it cool, but I really wanted to yell at the kid for burying the lede so far beneath his police handbook protocol.

“Um, hold on, I wrote it down, right here.” He looked down at his notes. “One-two-six-eight-eight. Do you know who that is?”

I got chills. It couldn’t be. “Harker,” I said.

It didn’t make any sense. Harker was one of the best cops in the station. Like the rest of us, he had been thrown into police work without his consent, but, once he had accepted his fate, he took to it like a natural. He was both liked and respected on the street, which was virtually unheard of, and he actually had a pretty decent clearance rate. He seemed content, or at least slightly less miserable than most of the Whitewhale Volunteer Police Department.

As far as I knew, Harker didn’t have any major enemies (beyond the smattering of grudge-holding lowlifes every competent officer has in their collection), and accidental death seemed like a long shot. There was always suicide, but like I said, that didn’t add up, either. You never know what this city will throw at you, and you wake up every morning knowing it could be your last, but there’s a difference between understanding something on a hypothetical level, and seeing it with your own eyes. No matter how many years you’ve racked up, you never get used to dead cops.

I got there first, even before the beat cop we sent to secure the scene. There were a couple birds picking at the corpse, but thankfully no people. Only junkies and bums frequent Trash Beach, this early in the morning, and word had almost certainly already gone around the underworld that the stiff on the shore was WVPD. Not worth the risk to loot, even if he had been all decked-out in gold rings and the finest silks, and wrapped in a tapestry made of hundred-dollar bills. I flailed at the gulls until they finally flew off.

It was definitely Harker. Even in death, he had that half-smile that drove some of the ladies in the station wild. His face was approximately thirty percent chin, and it always sported a thick, rugged stubble that implied he had better things to do than shave. A five o’ clock shadow, working overtime. He had striking green eyes, like a cat’s eyes, and he was slightly taller than average. He was, if nothing else, recognizable.

I couldn’t move the body, not before the science guys got there, but I could rifle through his pockets, if I was careful about it. I popped on some gloves and got to work.

There wasn’t anything in the pockets of his pants, which either meant that he didn’t use them, or that the guy who found him had already cleaned him out by the time he discovered the badge. Which reminded me. Where was the badge? It wasn’t in the coat pocket, like the bum had said, and I couldn’t see it lying around anywhere. Kind of odd, getting spooked by something and then keeping it. But, these transients rarely behaved in ways that made logical sense.

I should know. I was once one of them, myself.

I pulled out my little book and scribbled a note to have the unis canvas the area for the missing badge. It probably wouldn’t answer any questions, but no cop deserved to get looted, like some hooker. Okay, maybe a few deserved it, but not Harker.

I checked the coat’s other pockets. In the left exterior one, I found a ring of keys. One was clearly the key to a car, though I had never seen Harker drive anything other than his squad vehicle. He took the train, like the rest of us. Another looked like it could have been a door key, probably to his apartment. I had no idea where Harker lived, but I knew that a few of my colleagues had been to his place. One of them would hopefully be able to tell me if this was his key. There was a third key, which didn’t look like anything in particular. It could have opened a door, but it also could have been to a padlock, or a storage locker. I would have to track down what it opened, if his death was ruled a homicide.

I had just started on the left interior pocket when the beat cop finally arrived. There was something in the pocket, something that, if it proved to be what I thought it was, brought up a few interesting questions, but I let it go, for now. The young patrol officer didn’t need to know too much about the case, and I didn’t want to spread Harker’s personal information around any more than I had to. I had him set up a cordon while I guarded the body. When he was done with that, I told him to go into the trunk of my squad car and take out the bag I had in there. In it was a forensic tent we would build around Harker, to protect him from the sea, and any prying eyes which might happen to be looming.

We had barely finished setting it up when Zelasnik, the pathologist, arrived, followed closely by the photographer, whose name I didn’t know. I unzipped the front flap and let them in.

“Jesus Christ, it really is him,” he said, by way of a greeting. “I didn’t wanna believe it until I saw it.”

“Yeah, it’s him, alright,” I said.

The photographer snapped a few pictures of the body, from different angles, then left.

“Now that he’s gone,” I said, “let’s see what we got here.” I crouched back down to retrieve the odd contents of Harker’s coat.

Like I had figured, it was a cell phone. This was strange, as Whitewhale had not had citywide cell coverage since the riots which had destroyed all the towers, three years before. No one really knew why the mobs of people had attacked the communications companies, but they had done a marvelously thorough job. In the aftermath, some of the cellular providers had attempted to rebuild, but the construction of each new tower only resulted in a new riot, during which they would be destroyed again. Finally, the telecom companies admitted defeat, and stopped rebuilding. If Whitewhale wanted to be cut off from the rest of the world, there was nothing anybody could do about it. Since then, there had been rumors of smaller, privately-run networks, transmitting from hijacked radio antennas, mostly used for illicit purposes.

The phone was on, and it appeared to have a signal. The background picture looked like an aerial photo of downtown Whitewhale.

“Woah, is that his?” Zelasnik said.

“Yeah, found it in his pocket. I wonder why he needed one of these?”

“Oh, don’t jump to any conclusions, Detective. Could be he has family out of town, and he likes to stay in touch.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. That was bullshit, and we both knew it, but we were at least pretending to give our fallen comrade the benefit of the doubt. None of us had any family, in Whitewhale, or anywhere else. It was one of the few things we all had in common, and, while we couldn’t get a straight answer from City Council, we had long-since assumed it was one of the criteria for getting the job. Harker’s cell phone was in all likelihood a sign of a less innocent life than anyone had figured. Not even dead a full day, and the poor bastard’s world was already crumbling around him.

I looked at Zelasnik, silently telling him to keep the phone close to his chest, and he nodded, without saying a word. It really is true how us cops stick together.

Zelasnik got to work examining what he could of Harker’s body, out here in the sand. He turned it and felt around for anything noteworthy, but seemed to come up empty.

“So,” I said, “how long until we can bring him inside? I imagine the salt air isn’t doing wonders for his complexion.”

“It should only take me a few minutes, to do what I can, in the field. At first glance, I can’t see any obvious wounds. And no huge bloodstains, either. If he was killed, I’d be willing to bet it was something more subtle. Poisoning, or forced drug overdose, or drowning. But I won’t know that until I get him on the table.”

I nodded and removed my gloves. “Okay, Z. Do your thing. I’ll be outside the tent. Just let me know when you’re done.”

“Alright, Detective Asta.” That’s my name. Nefertiti Asta. My father was a white guy from Sweden, and my mother was a Black Panther from right here in Whitewhale. They’re both dead, now. You can call me Nef.

As I stepped back through the flap of the forensic tent, I saw that there was a commotion brewing at the cordon the beat cop had set up. The news was out, apparently, and now the local residents were starting to get interested in what was going on. The cadet was having a rough time keeping the crowd in check, so I jogged over to give him a hand.

“Alright, everybody, back up. Give us some space to work.”

“You got space!” one man screamed. “You got the whole damn beach!”

“Oh, and do you have an appointment with the empty booze bottles and heroin spikes? Come on, back up. It’s just a dead body. You’ve all seen a dead body before.”

“How do you know that, huh?”

I sighed. “Because you live on Trash Beach. Because you live in Whitewhale. Gimme a break, pal.”

“Who’s the stiff?” somebody else inquired, from a few people back.

“None of your damn business,” I said. “Now, seriously. Disperse, before I call Crowd Control.” That shut them up. They didn’t want me to call Crowd Control. To be honest, I didn’t want to, either, as I’m not a fascist, despite what the general public might think of the police force. But Crowd Control was something of a boogey man, and invoking the name had its own sort of shamanic power. I didn’t have to actually call them for them to do their job.

“Asta!” The yell came from back on the beach. I turned around and saw Zelasnik waving his arms in a furious attempt to get my attention. “Asta! Get back here!”

I looked back to the beat cop. “You got this?” I asked.

He only nodded. I hurried back to Zelasnik, who had dropped to his knees and begun to hyperventilate. “What the hell is wrong with you?” I asked, pulling up next to him.

“No! It’s…no! I don’t….”

“Breathe, Z. What’s going on?”

“He…I didn’t see…just showed up.”

“Who? Who showed up?”

But Zelasnik could say no more. He curled up in the fetal position and shook his head. I looked behind him, to the forensic tent, and saw that he had left the flap open. There was someone else in there now, crouched with their back to the opening, examining the body. I stepped over Zelasnik and made a careful approach to the tent.

“Hey! You in there! Stand up, very slowly, and get the fuck out of that tent, before I count to three!”

The figure didn’t move.

“One!” I said, allowing my hand to rest on the gun at my hip. I really didn’t want to have to shoot this guy, whoever he was, but I would.

“Two!” I unclasped the holster and pulled the gun out halfway. “Seriously, man. Don’t be stupid.”

He didn’t get up, but he turned his head slightly in my direction. His face was obscured by the flap, but I could tell it was a man of about forty. “What…what does this mean?” he asked. His voice was oddly familiar.

I pulled my gun completely out of my holster. “Three!” I yelled, yanking the flap to the tent fully open. The man threw has hands in the air.

“Don’t shoot me, Nef,” he said.

I looked into his green cat’s eyes, and I saw a confusion that I had to assume was mirrored in my own face.

It was Detective Harker.

Harker stared into the two-way glass in the interrogation room, gazing at his own reflection. He reminded me of a kid I busted a few years back, who had killed his girlfriend in a fit of rage, and then snapped, his brain wiping any memory of the incident. Empty, alone, and confused. Yet I knew it wasn’t amnesia Harker was struggling with, but fear. The utter terror of someone confronted with the truly unexplainable. I felt for the guy. He was aware of everything that was going on, except for what was going on, if you catch my drift. Losing his grasp on reality would have been a blessing, in this case.

I had no idea what I was going to ask him, other than a few preliminary questions which I knew he would discard immediately. I could tell from his face, peering through the mirror, that he couldn’t comprehend why a copy of his own body, complete with clothes and accessories, had washed up on the beach, and if he didn’t have an answer, it was unlikely I would come up with one myself. But I at least had my training to fall back on, even if it most certainly never covered anything so surreal.

I decided to treat him as a person of interest in a murder case, as that was the closest analogue I could think of. He wasn’t under suspicion for a crime, but he was obviously a key player in this mystery. I chugged another cup of coffee and opened the door.

I sat down across the table from Harker, and Eaton, another of the station’s detectives, came in and leaned against the wall. I would lead the interview, and Eaton would provide support. For whom, myself or Harker, I wasn’t entirely sure.

Harker spoke first. “Nef, what the fuck is happening?”

“I was hoping you could help us with that, Grant.”

“Why would you think that?”

Eaton, still leaning in the corner, said, “Because it was your body that floated in with the tides, Detective.” That answered my question. Eaton was here for my benefit.

“Yeah, it was,” Harker said, “which is not something that I even pretend to fucking understand, let alone know about.”

I said, “Okay, let’s--”

“Asshole,” Harker muttered, not exactly under his breath.

“Come on, Grant. Take it easy. We’re here to help you.”

“Nef, I am out of my element. Nothing I can say will explain this.”

“Do you have an identical twin?” Eaton asked. A necessary question, no matter how obvious it might have seemed, but he probably could have been less blunt in his asking.

“No, I don’t have an identical fucking twin, idiot.”

“Hey, man--”

“And neither do my shoes, or my keys, or my coat. You got any other genius questions?”

“What about your cell phone?” I asked. This one I wanted to be blunt, to catch him off guard. Eaton wasn’t winning any points with Harker, but he was actually creating the perfect dynamic for the interview. Getting your blood up opens your defenses to attacks you would otherwise see a mile off.

“What?” Harker asked.

“Your cell phone. It was in your coat.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Well, we’re just trying to figure the situation out. What do you use the phone for?”

“That’s not your problem. And you’re gonna need a warrant to go through my pockets.”

Eaton chuckled. “Um, I don’t think we are, buddy.”

“That’s my stuff,” Harker said. “And this line of questioning is a violation of my privacy.”

“Dead people don’t have any privacy.”

“But I’m still alive, aren’t I? Nef, help me out, here.”

The good cop, bad cop routine was working well. Too well, in fact. Harker was one of us, and I had seen him and Eaton play this exact game together, from the same side of the table, too many times to count. It just goes to show what can happen if you lose focus, even for a moment. “Grant,” I said, “come on. You work here. You’ve closed more cases than I’ve even worked, and you know that the first thing you do with something like this is go through the victim’s pockets. Now, if you don’t want us looking in that direction, I think we can probably respect that, but then you’re gonna have to give us something else to go on.”

“I don’t have anything, Nef! When I woke up this morning, I didn’t exactly think I was going to be looking down at my own fucking corpse.”

“Why did you go to the beach?” Eaton asked.

“Huh?” Harker said.

“I mean, how did you even know to go there? The call had only just gone through to the station when Detective Asta arrived. The bum called from a payphone and then disappeared. When you got there, there were only a few people who even knew about the body. You didn’t take the call, so what gives?”

Harker closed his eyes and remained silent.

“Um, Grant?” I said. “It’s a valid question.”

His eyelids opened again, and they brought with them a new clarity. He was thinking straight for the first time all morning. “I want to speak with my lawyer,” he said.

“What?”

“I want to speak with my lawyer.”

“What for?” Eaton asked. “You’re not under arrest. I mean, hell, you’re the victim here. What is a lawyer gonna say, anyway?”

“I do not consent to a police search of my belongings without a signed warrant.”

“Oh, for cryin’ out loud,” Eaton said. He wanted to tear Harker a new one, but I put my hand in the air, and he stopped immediately.

I leaned in close and grabbed Harker’s hand. “Grant, if you know something about this, you need to tell us.”

Harker said, “Nef, I have no idea why that body floated up on the shore. Honestly. None.”

“Then tell us how you knew about it. Did someone call you, on your cell phone?”

Harker sighed. “Leave the phone alone. Please. It has nothing to do with this.”

“But--”

“I want to speak with my lawyer.”

Eaton walked to the door and opened it. “Call him yourself,” he said. “Like I told you, you’re not under arrest. You’re free to go. Come on, Nef. We’re done here.”

I wanted to argue, but the intuition I had developed through my years of police work told me to go along with whatever Eaton had in mind. I gave Harker’s hand a final squeeze and followed Eaton into the hall.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Not here,” Eaton responded. “Meet me out in the parking lot in like two minutes. And, um,” he glanced back at the interrogation room door, “make sure Harker doesn’t leave first.”

I did what he asked and found him in the parking lot, leaning against his squad car. Eaton leans a lot. It’s part of his aesthetic, the calm, cool, collected detective who already knows everything about the case before it even crosses his desk. I have to admit, it’s effective, even though I know it’s all an act. Eaton is just like the rest of us, constantly one thread away from snapping. The only difference being that he’s better at hiding it.

When he saw me, he got inside his car without saying a word. I followed suit and got in the passenger side. He started the car and pulled out of the parking lot, still silent, and drove around the side of the building so that we had a view of the front door. When he parked just down the block from the station and turned off his headlights, I got the idea.

“You wanna follow him?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Don’t you think he’ll see that coming? I mean, you just cut him loose in the middle of an interrogation.”

“Frankly,” Eaton said, “I don’t care if he catches on or not. He’s hiding something.”

“Obviously,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean it has to do with the case. He’s legitimately spooked, Eaton. You had to be able to see that. He has no idea how this happened.”

“Maybe not. But if that’s the case, why wouldn’t he answer any questions? About his cell phone, or how he knew to go to the crime scene?”

“He’s probably having some kinky affair, or milking a little drug problem. Which honestly, I don’t care about. He’s allowed his secrets.”

“Not if he wants our help, he’s not,” Eaton said. “Come on, Nef. You’re letting the fact that he’s one of us cloud your judgment. You know that if this exact scenario happened to some random bozo off the street, and they gave you the same answers Harker just gave us, this is exactly what you’d be doing.”

He was right, of course. Normally, nothing makes me more curious about something than a person saying, “don’t worry about it,” but I was reacting differently because I knew Harker. I think a part of me was scared that this might set some precedent in the station that could then be applied to me. Lord knows I have my own life, outside of work, that I don’t need Eaton or anybody else sticking their nose in. Until this moment, I had held on to the fantasy that the tenets of investigation didn’t apply to us cops. But that’s just what it was: a fantasy. We’re people, just like everybody else, and there really isn’t anything separating us, when you get right down to it, besides these arbitrary rules society shoves in your face. Eaton knew that if you wanted closure, you had to be willing to air your dirty laundry.

“You’re right,” I said. “I guess I just…”

“Hey, me too, Nef. You think I liked what went down in there? Grant’s my friend. He was a groomsman in my wedding. But the job’s the job, no matter what. And, if he wasn’t so screwed up at the moment, he’d tell you the same thing.”

“So, what are you thinking? That he’s gonna leave the station and head directly to an opium den or a basement full of child slaves? He’s gonna walk out that door, and lead us around town, like a couple stray dogs begging for scraps.”

Eaton smiled. “Of course, he is. Thats what I’m hoping for.”

“What?”

He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out Harker’s key ring. “While he’s giving me the run around, you’re gonna go check his place.”

“I don’t know, Eaton,” I said. “I hadn’t really thought about it until he brought it up, but I think we might actually need a warrant to use those keys.”

Eaton scoffed. “And what are we gonna tell the judge, huh? We picked these off of our buddy’s corpse, but then he told us we couldn’t have ‘em? He still has all of his shit, his phone, his keys, all that. We’re using the other ones.”

“Yeah, I agree it’s not exactly the same, but still, I feel like it’s skirting the rules a little.”

“Nef, you just learned that the basic rules of life and death aren’t even set in stone, and you’re worried about warrants? We’re playing a different game, now. I promise, whatever we find in Harker’s life that he wants to keep secret, as long as it’s not absolutely monstrous, we’ll let him have. But this is the only lead we’ve got.”

Not exactly the only lead, I thought. We could still try and find the hobo who had called in the body, see if he still had Harker’s badge. But that felt like a depressingly lost cause. The truth was, the badge was probably gone forever, along with the poor soul who found it. They don’t call it Trash Beach for nothing.

Harker exited the station and turned right. He looked around, proving that he knew we would be following him, and Eaton and I slunk down in our seats to avoid detection. Once he was about a hundred feet away, Eaton handed me the ring of keys. “Okay, this is good,” he said. “Harker’s place is west of here, in the Ashman building. Apartment number seven-forty-six. That’s the opposite direction of where he’s heading now. I’ll get out and tail him on foot. You can take my squad car and search his place. If I think he’s on his way home, I’ll try to stall him, but try to make it quick, anyway.”

He didn’t have to tell me that. I didn’t want to spend a second more in Harker’s home than I strictly had to.

Looking around the apartment, I got the impression that it had been staged, like Harker only kept the place to uphold the illusion that he lived there. Either the man was compulsively tidy, or he had somewhere else in the city where he actually stayed.

The dresser in his bedroom was full of laundry, all folded and organized by type and color. I rummaged through it all, but found nothing hiding in any of the drawers. That didn’t really surprise me, as stashing paraphernalia behind your socks was such a rookie move that Harker would have never even considered it.

I’m not sure what I was looking for, exactly, as again, Harker was not suspected of a crime. But Eaton had been right; the answers Harker had given us in the interview room were most definitely too awkward to ignore. He was keeping something secret from us, and I didn’t like it. I still wasn’t convinced that it had anything to do with the case I was actually working, but I had almost nothing else to go on.

There was only a few days’ worth of food in the fridge, and none of it had even been opened yet. I checked the sell-by dates, and they were all about a week out. Maybe he had just gone to the store the day before. The kitchen itself was spotless, and none of the other appliances showed any signs of use. What was this place?

I went and sat down on his couch. It helps sometimes to look at a place you’re searching from the perspective of the person who lives there. Though I was getting the feeling Harker didn’t actually live here, I did it anyway. I had tossed the place as thoroughly and discreetly as I knew how, and I had come up with nothing.

The walls of the apartment were sparse. No photographs of Harker or anyone else, no artwork. The only thing hanging up there was a framed copy of Harker’s Police Academy diploma, which kind of threw me off. I mean, sure, we all passed the academy, but it wasn’t like our graduation was the fulfillment of any of our lifelong dreams. We had been assigned the job, and were given no say in the matter. I didn’t know about the life Harker had lived before we “volunteered,” but, if it was anything like mine, it wasn’t all following rules and taking orders. It seemed odd that he would give his diploma a place of honor in his apartment, even if it wasn’t his everyday home.

I rose from the couch and walked over to the diploma. The first thing I noticed was that it stood out, ever so slightly, from the wall, as if something was applying pressure from behind the frame. But when I took it off its nail, there was nothing immediately visible there. The walls were all seemingly one solid piece, your standard plastered drywall, painted a bland, even shade of eggshell. I felt around on the area where the diploma had been hanging, feeling for a hidden panel, but found none. This wasn’t a case of the safe hidden behind the painting, like I had read in so many books as a child, wasting my school-less days at the now defunct Whitewhale Public Library.

But I was sure that I had stumbled upon a secret here. To find it, I would just have to look at the situation from another angle. I started knocking on the wall, beginning with the same area behind the diploma, and then spreading in each direction in an ever-widening radius. I couldn’t be one-hundred-percent sure, as my understanding of industrial acoustics is not actually that great, but I was eventually satisfied that there was a hidden room between the walls of Harker’s apartment.

I went back into his bedroom closet. I hadn’t found anything in there during my preliminary sweep, but I had been looking for objects, not secret doors. Sure enough, after only a few moments of poking around, I managed to pop open a hatch, leading to a crawl space just large enough for me to squeeze through. Running through the floor-plan of the apartment in my head for a second, I figured out where the diploma was hanging, on the other side of the wall. I turned left and saw, at exactly the same height as the diploma opposite, a shelf with a strongbox bolted to it. The box barely fit in the space allotted for it, and it was jammed up against the wall, making the drywall bend slightly out of its way.

It was locked, but I was starting to get the hang of things by now, so I simply took Harker’s key ring and unlocked the box with the heretofore unknown key. It turned smoothly, and the box opened without complaint. Inside was a ledger book, filled about halfway with some names and numbers. They meant nothing to me, but I copied some of them down in my notebook for reference. On the final page, Harker had written an address. I couldn’t place it exactly, but I recognized the street. It was a beat-down mess of crumbled concrete in the ghetto. I wrote the address and replaced the ledger in the box.

Beside the ledger was a paperback novel, some fantasy thing I had never heard of. It was called “The Saga of Mirror-Walker,” and from what I could tell by the summary on the back, it was about a blacksmith’s son who discovered he had the ability to travel great distances in an instant via a system of magically-interconnected mirrors. It seemed pretty cliché, and not the kind of thing Harker would be into. On the first page of the book there was a map of the fictional kingdom, with little symbols indicating the locations of the mirror portals. There were seven in all, and Harker (or someone) had written a number next to each one. Having no idea what any of this meant, I hastily copied the map, along with the numbered mirrors, into my notebook. I fanned through the book’s pages, hoping to find a hidden note. There was none, but on the inside of the back cover, there was written a single word: ANCHOR.

This was enough for now. I had been in the apartment for almost an hour, and while I trusted Eaton to keep Harker away for as long as I needed, I really wanted to get the hell out of there.

When I got back to the station, I was surprised to see Eaton there, waiting for me at my desk. When he saw me, he shrugged.

“He went back to the beach,” he said.

“He what? Back to Trash Beach?” I asked.

“Yeah. Walked right back to where his body had washed up and sat down. Gazed out at the ocean the entire fucking time I was there.”

“Do you think he knew you were following him? Like he was just running you around?”

“I don’t, actually. At first I thought so, until I realized where he was leading me. You were right, Nef. He’s spooked. I think he’s expecting more of him to float up, and he plans on being there when they do.”

“That’s…upsetting,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Who’s watching him now?”

“I had one of the patrols post up, told him to call me here if Harker moved. Kinda unnecessary now, though, since you’ve already left his place. Find anything?”

I told him about the secret passage with the hidden ledger and the mysterious book, and his face lit up. “See? I knew there was something fishy going on.”

“Eaton,” I said, “we’ve known that from the beginning. But I understand what you’re getting at. It’s good to have a mystery we can work like normal, even if it involves one of our own.”

“You can say that again. Anyway, it’s still early, and Harker’s still staring out at the water, so why don’t we go check on that address you got. I’ll drive. We’ll stop for lunch on the way.”

“Lunch” turned out to be bags of salty chips with a side of sodas and cigarettes, purchased from the corner store across the street from the station. It had been a while since I had worked a case with Eaton, and I had forgotten just how horrendously he treated his body. Not that you would know from looking at him. Eaton wasn’t the textbook image of a bodybuilder, or anything, but his frame in no way reflected his diet. He was a perfectly average-looking man, some might even say handsome. A little short, but not distractingly so. And I had seen him chase down and manhandle perps half his age and twice his size, a few times. Looks, I guess, can be deceiving, and sometimes wholly out of our control.

The address I found in Harker’s apartment was for a coffee shop in a part of the city predominately occupied by eastern European immigrants. City Council had stopped taking it seriously years ago, so almost no public money went to its upkeep. The streets were full of potholes, many of the buildings were damaged due to municipal utilities failures, and there were practically no emergency services to speak of. The residents never called the cops, of course, but even the fire department and paramedics only made the trip in the most dire of circumstances. These people were on their own.

Though neither Eaton nor I was in uniform, and our plainclothes outfits were not stereotypically police-chic, everybody in the street could tell were were cops the second we stepped out of Eaton’s unmarked cruiser. I recognized their stares as the ones I used to hand out to authority figures in my youth. An odd mix of anger and defiance, with just a little bit of fear peppered in for good measure. I had stopped taking offense to such glances some time ago, but I couldn’t ignore the irony. I may have been thrown into this position, but I had grown accustomed to being a cop. My teenage counterpart would vomit, if she heard me say that.

“Why don’t you let me do the talking?” Eaton whispered to me as he approached the door to the coffee shop.

“Sure,” I said. “What do you want me to do?”

“Watch my six, make sure nobody sneaks up and shoots me in the back of the head.”

I chuckled, but Eaton remained stern. “Wait, really?” I said.

“I had an operation here, a while back. Some of the people I fucked over have since been released from prison and are back in the streets. I can’t imagine I’m very popular in this district.”

I stepped in front of him, stopping him in his tracks. “An operation? How come I didn’t know about it?”

Eaton winked. “It was strictly need-to-know. Run directly by Stepford. Domestic terrorists.”

“Holy shit,” I whispered. “Did you at least stop them?”

He smiled. “That one instance, sure, but you know. There’s always another one.” He opened the door and we went inside.

It might have been called a coffee shop, but it operated more like a social club. A card game had been set up towards the kitchen door, and other people were sitting at booths, drinking coffee or beer and talking. Most of them ignored us, but a few more daring souls took the opportunity to glare. I stood next to Eaton as he scanned the room. It wasn’t a friendly atmosphere, but I didn’t notice any immediate danger.

“What do you want?” It came not from the young waitress who had approached us, but the tall, burly man sitting in the backmost booth, facing the front door. He got up from his seat before we could answer and walked to within a few feet of us. “You can go back to work, Tanya.”

The waitress nodded and scurried off. Eaton smiled and said, “Thank you, Tanya.”

“You don’t talk to her,” the burly man said. He was completely bald, as if he had started losing his hair early and had preemptively shaved it, like shooting a horse the second it slows its stride. He had a neck tattoo, just barely peaking out above the collar of his jacket. I couldn’t be certain, but it looked like it might have been of an anchor from an old ship. I flashed on the message in Harker’s book, and I could tell Eaton’s mind was working as well.

“Nice tattoo,” Eaton said. “What’s it mean?”

“It means none of your business, pig.” In an almost surely subconscious gesture, Baldy popped his jacket collar a little higher, obscuring the ink.

Eaton pretended like he hadn’t seen the maneuver. “Uh-huh. You know, you shouldn’t call us ‘pigs,’ if you wanna hurt our feelings. Pigs are actually really smart animals.”

“Maybe so,” Baldy said, “but they’re all dirty. Just like you.”

“Well, that’s actually not true. Pigs adapt to whatever environment they inhabit. It’s not their fault people throw them in shit, but they make the best of it. Reminds me of something, but I’m not sure what…” He looked around the deteriorating coffee shop and sighed. “Anyway, relax. Yes, we are a couple of pigs, but we’re not trying to start any trouble. We just have a few questions for you, then we’ll be on our way.”

“We’re not saying anything to you,” Baldy said. “So why don’t you and your little bitch fuck off back to where you came from.”

Faster than my eyes could really see, Eaton threw his hand upwards, making contact with the giant’s Adam’s apple. Baldy let out this wet, heaving cough and stumbled back a few steps. Eaton moved forward to match him, and kicked his opponent in the knee with a well-practiced downward thrust. I heard a loud pop before Baldy fell down on his ass. The guys playing cards got up from their table, but I pulled my gun and trained it on them. None of them had weapons, so I was confident they wouldn’t try anything. There were other customers in the shop, but they all seemed too transfixed with the action to move.

Eaton ignored everyone in the room except for Baldy, who was holding his leg and rocking back and forth in pain. As if shooing away a rat, Eaton kicked at Baldy’s hands until the injured leg was exposed. He stepped on it, and Baldy screamed out. Eaton pulled his gun and pointed it at Baldy’s face. He chuckled. “Anyway, pigs can also go feral remarkably fast. Some can even morph their own bodies out of necessity, basically transforming into hogs in just a matter of days.”

“Fuckin’ fascist,” Baldy rasped. I couldn’t exactly disagree with him, at the moment.

“Let’s cut the shit,” Eaton said. “I know you’re Ahab. Didn’t have to catch your tat to put that together. But, if you had waited for me to finish talking, before being rude to my partner here,” he applied more pressure to Baldy’s leg, “you would know that I don’t give a fuck about that, for the time being. Now, I know cops always say we just have a few questions, and usually, it is bullshit, but in this case, I was telling the truth. Don’t you feel silly now?”

“I’m gonna…kill…you,” Baldy managed, between painful cries.

“That’s probably not true. We’ve got a Crowd Control unit just a couple minutes out. And my partner and I are the only ones who can stand them down. So, it’s in everybody’s best interest to play nice.” Eaton looked up and addressed the room. “You get that? I know you all saw what just went down, but you need to forget it.” Nobody spoke, which I took to mean that they all agreed. “A body washed up on Trash Beach, early this morning.”

“What…else is new?” Baldy said.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. But something tells me you might know something about this particular body.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“Because it was a cop.” I winced slightly. Had I been asking the questions, I would not have tipped my hand so quickly. Then again, I wouldn’t have done any of what Eaton was currently doing.

Despite his pain, Baldy laughed. “That’s…great. A little sneak…peak of what’s in…store for you.”

“What do you know about it?”

“Fuck…you.”

The door to the kitchen flew open, and three men emerged, all holding shotguns. I moved my gun from the card table to them, and they all raised their guns to match me.

“Don’t!” someone yelled. It took me a second to realize it was Tanya, the waitress.

“Tanya, stay out of this, sweetie,” one of the shotgun guys said.

“They’ve got Crowd Control coming! They’re gonna kill us all!” I wanted to be pissed at Eaton for pulling the bluff, until I remembered that I had done it myself, earlier that day.

Another of the goons spit on the ground. “We don’t care about their fucking mercenaries. We’ll take them on, too, if we have to.”

“No,” Baldy said. “No. Stop. Go back in the kitchen. I’ve got this.”

“Fuck that, Oleg, we’ve got ‘em outnumbered!”

“Not for long, shit stain,” Eaton said.

Baldy looked up and made eye contact with the man who had spoken. “I said, go back in the kitchen.” The shotgun guys reluctantly retreated the way they had come. “All of you!” Baldy yelled, and the rest of the room followed. “I’ll talk. But you gotta call them off.”

Eaton looked at me and nodded. “Do it.” Without saying anything, I walked to the front door and waved my hands in a big “X” in front of my chest, pretending to stand down the non-existent unit. I waited a few seconds until it felt like long enough for Crowd Control to have vacated the area, then I went and rejoined the conversation.

“Well?” Eaton said. He relieved the pressure on Baldy’s leg.

“I heard about it, yeah, but I didn’t have anything to do with it. There’s always cops sniffin’ around. Come to think of it, have we met?”

Eaton laughed. “Yeah, maybe. I don’t remember. Continue.”

“Anyway, we had gotten warning from some of the other cells that there might be an operation running, some undercover shit. I didn’t see any of that. But then I hear, this morning, about the dead pig on the beach, and I figured he got found out. But it wasn’t me or any of my guys. I promise.”

“Yeah, your promises don’t mean much to me, Oleg, but you know what? I believe you.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, I do. Don’t we, Detective Asta?”

“Yeah, we do,” I said. “I believe him.”

“Me too. Honestly, I never thought you had anything to do with it,” Eaton said.

“Then why’d you fuck my leg up, man?”

“Wasn’t that obvious? Because you called my friend a bitch.”

I drove. Eaton rolled down his window and took in massive gulps of air. Now that we were out of danger, he had allowed his brain to switch back on, and he understood just how close to catastrophe he had taken us.

“Jesus Christ, Eaton,” I said. “What were you trying to do, get us killed?”

“Sorry,” he said, still gasping for breath. “That’s how you have to be with those people. They won’t respect you if you come in all pussy-footing around.”

“Sure, but there’s a huge difference between authority and authoritarian. We’re just lucky your bluff worked out.”

“Doesn’t it always?”

“Yes,” I said, “it does.” The truth of that statement made me sad. “Anyway, what the hell were you two talking about? Ahab, what’s that?”

“His tattoo.”

“Yeah, I saw. An anchor, like in Harker’s book.”

“Not quite an anchor. A fish hook.”

“Okay? What does that mean?”

“It’s their symbol, Nef.”

“Who’s symbol? What are you talking about?”

“It’s his organization. I thought he looked familiar.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I do know him. He was one of the guys I busted during my undercover assignment. He and a few friends were planning on assassinating the City council.”

I almost slammed on the breaks. “They were what?”

“Yeah. Got close to doing it, too. They gassed City Hall. Sent poison in through the vents. I stopped them, but just barely.”

“Then why is he walking free?”

“Pleaded guilty. Only served a few years. Ratted out his entire cell. And it looks like he took over, once he got out.”

“You’d think they would’ve killed him,” I said.

“They’re not like the mafia. They don’t go around killing each other. All they care about is pulling off attacks.”

“No, I meant the Council. I figured they executed would-be assassins, no matter how they plead.”

“The Council doesn’t take these guys nearly as seriously as they should. See ‘em as more of a nuisance. And to be fair, that’s usually accurate. Most of their attacks fail in the planning stage. That one I stopped was the closest they’ve ever come.”

“How close?”

Eaton turned and looked at me. “The meeting had already begun, and the gas was already in the vents. It took two minutes for the air to circulate into the room, and we got the Council out about a minute and a half into that.”

“Jesus. So that’s why I had never heard of it,” I said.

“Yeah. If people knew just how close City Council got to being eliminated, we’d be looking at more riots.”

Something occured to me. “Wait a minute. You said ‘we got them out.’ Did you…see the Council members?”

“I can’t talk about that, Nef.”

“But--”

“I can’t.”

We drove in silence for a while. I wasn’t sure how I felt about what Eaton had told me. I knew that no matter my personal feelings concerning City Council, assassination was not the answer. Besides the obvious notion that, you know, murder is wrong, I also know that historically, it has never solved any dicey political situation. All it ever achieves is escalation of the very circumstances that had rendered it necessary in the first place. I knew this, but I also couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed that Eaton hadn’t been thirty seconds slower that day. Before I could admonish myself, I slapped myself on the forehead. “Ahab. Cause they’re gonna take down the White Whale.”

“There she is,” Eaton said.

“But, in the book--”

“I doubt they’ve actually read it, Nef. But it is a pretty clever name, nevertheless.”

“So, what he said about the undercover operation, that has to be Harker, right?”

“I guess it’s possible Harker’s been working them. It won’t be on any official paperwork, though, if he is.”

I sighed. “Stepford.”

Eaton turned back to look out the window again. “Stepford,” he said.

It was early evening now, and most of the precinct was on their way home. It had been an incredibly busy day, and I wanted nothing more than to go back to my apartment, pour myself a few stiff drinks, and read until I passed out on the sofa. But we had one more thing to do, before we could call it a day: we had to talk to our Lieutenant, Lawrence Stepford.

Like everybody else in the station, Stepford had lived a different life, before City Council put him where he was. But while many of us resented our forced recruitment because we had a problem with authority, Stepford resented his because he wanted more authority than being a mere station chief would allow him.

He had been the CEO of a major telecom corporation based out of Whitewhale. It was the biggest money maker in the entire city, and Stepford had been something of a power broker, before the cell tower riots had thrown the company into bankruptcy. City Council gave him the station as a sort of consolation prize, but the move was clearly a step down. So Stepford oscillated between being a tyrannical jackass and not giving a shit daily, and it was impossible to tell from looking at him which one you were getting, at any given time. I did my best to just stay away from him.

But if Harker was involved in an undercover operation against Ahab, we would only be able to learn about it from Stepford. As I knocked on his office door, I realized that I hadn’t spoken to Stepford about the little issue of Harker’s double. From the second I saw Harker (the living one) on the beach, I had been focused entirely on the case. I think a part of me was unwilling to even consider what was going on, so I had tried to ignore anything I couldn’t completely control. I had done a pretty good job of that, apparently, but now I was afraid I would have to turn and face the strange.

“Come in,” Stepford said, through the door.

Eaton and I stepped in, closing the door behind us. Stepford didn’t have any papers on his desk, which I took to be a sign that we were dealing with the indifferent version, today. That was good, at least, as I was in no mood to get screamed at.

“Sit down,” Stepford said. We sat. “Detective Asta. Detective Eaton. What can I do for you?”

“Well, sir,” I said, “I assume you saw the report, about the…body from the beach?”

“What? Oh, that. Yeah, I heard something about some stiff on the shore, but I didn’t read it. It’s the playoffs.” He motioned to the small transistor radio on his desk. “I’ve kinda been…out of it, all day.”

I risked a quick glance at Eaton, who looked utterly dumbfounded. Could it really be possible that Stepford didn’t know about the doppelganger?

Not wanting to be the one to tell him, that being the case, I decided to take a more subtle approach. “Yes, well, we have reason to believe that the person had ties to Ahab. And we wanted to know if--”

“He’s Ahab? Well, then, good riddance. Case closed. I’ll see you both tomorrow.” He was already reaching for his radio’s on switch.

“Um, yes, okay,” I said. “Just one question, though.”

Stepford rolled his eyes. “What is it?”

“We think Ahab might be up to something, and we’re worried that this…person who washed up might have known something about it. Are there any undercover operations going on, that you’re aware of, looking into Ahab? I mean, if so, maybe we could coordinate our efforts, you know, take the bastards down, with the help of the field agent.”

“Huh? Oh, no, Detectives. There’s no undercover thing going on at the moment.” Eaton opened his mouth to speak, but Stepford cut him off. “And, yes, I know that that’s exactly what you would expect me to say, if there were, but there isn’t. And frankly, I don’t fucking care if there ever is again. City Council has abandoned us, Detectives. They kidnapped us, tore us from our lives, and left us here, in this station, to rot. Fuck ‘em. No, I say let the Council and Ahab duke it out. We can watch from the sidelines.”

Before I left, I asked the young cadet working the phone if he had heard from the officer we had placed on Harker.

“Um, yeah,” he said, “they called from a pay phone, about half an hour ago.”

“What did they say? Where’s Harker gone?”

“Nowhere, Detective.”

“Huh?” I asked. “What do you mean, nowhere?”

“He hasn’t left the beach. Been sitting there all day, just kinda…hanging out.”

“Well, he has to have gotten up, to eat, or use the bathroom.”

“Um, no.”

“Oh. That’s strange. But I can’t imagine he’s gonna sleep there. You here all night?”

“Yes, Detective.”

“Good. When they call back, tell them to stay on him. If Harker still hasn’t moved in two hours, send someone else to relieve the watch. I think he’s waiting us out. Hoping we get tired. Let’s not.”

The cadet nodded, and I went home.

I showed up at the station early the next day, only about six hours after I had left for the night. The same cadet was still sitting at the front desk, but he was running on fumes. His replacement would be there soon, so he would be able to get some well-deserved sleep. He perked up when he saw me.

“Good morning, Detective,” he said.

“Good morning. You have a peaceful night?”

“For the most part. Only a couple of calls.”

“That’s nice. Any news on Harker?”

“Um, no, actually. Last update I got, about forty-five minutes ago, he was still there.”

“There? You mean on the beach? Like he slept there?”

“Well, not really. The officer said that Detective Harker didn’t appear to have gone to sleep. At least he never lied down. He’s been sitting in pretty much the same position for going on twenty hours, now.”

“Oh. Is he…did it look like he’s….”

“No, he’s still alive. He moves around, you know, adjusts or whatever, but he hasn’t gotten up. Except for one time.”

“Yeah?” I asked.

“Yeah, a little after two in the morning, he apparently got up and walked into the water.”

“How far into the water? Did they think he was gonna--”

“No, he only went in up to his knees. Then he pulled something from his jacket pocket and threw it in.”

“In? You mean the ocean?”

“That’s right, Detective. The officer couldn’t see what it was.”

“Alright. Well, thank you, cadet. You did a great job. Just hold on, for a little bit longer, and we’ll get you outta here.”

The cadet yawned. “All in a day’s work, Detective.”

Even though I was early, Eaton had beaten me to the station by almost an hour. He was sitting at his desk as I entered the floor.

“I have a theory,” he said.

“About what?”

“About his cell phone. I think I’ve figured out how to unlock it.”

I pulled a chair up to his desk and grabbed the coffee cup he had gotten for me. “Okay. What is it?”

“You know that map you found in Harker’s place? The one with all the numbers written on it?”

“Yeah?” I said.

“I think it might be a legend, telling us how to open his phone. The background image on the phone is a satellite photo of Whitewhale, right?”

“Is it? I don’t remember.”

“It is,” Eaton said. “And, I know that the map from his book is for a made up place, but I’ve been looking at the little drawing you made, and I think I can see some similarities. Here, let me show you.” He pulled Harker’s cell phone out from a drawer in his desk and put it next to the page from my notes where I had scribbled the map. “See,” he said, pointing at the phone, “if you think of them as the same, and you position the phone so that it’s kinda sideways, like this, City Hall kinda matches up with this…castle? I think? I assume that’s supposed to be the capital of this world. Then, it’s obvious that the other places he circled correspond with locations in Whitewhale. See? That’s our station, that one, that’s the sports stadium, and like that. I think if you tap the image on his phone, at those points, in that order, it’ll unlock.”

I was impressed. “Jesus, Mr. Holmes, where did you come from?”

Eaton smiled. “It was a spark of brilliance, inspired by sleep deprivation.”

“Why haven’t you tried it yet?” I asked.

“I was just about to.” He leaned forward a little bit in his chair, so he could better see the screen of Harker’s phone. He tapped on the phone, with a confidence that told me that he had practiced it, before I had come in. He had been waiting for me.

After the seventh and final tap, the phone lit up, and we were in. “Eaton, you fucking genius.”

“And don’t you forget it.”

There wasn’t too much on the phone. No photos, no saved documents. There weren’t even any contacts saved to the phone’s memory, though Harker had used it to message the same number several times, in the past month or so. Every message was practically the same, with Harker requesting a meeting, and the person responding with an address and a time. Neither person ever used their name. The last one had been from two days before Harker’s other body was found.

“We should go ask Harker what this means,” Eaton said.

I shook my head. “I disagree. Whatever he’s been playing at, he hasn’t told us. Not even when what happened… happened. He won’t talk. But maybe he doesn’t have to.”

“What do you mean?” Eaton asked.

“Well, I mean, we have his phone. We can do the talking for him. I say we message this person, request a meeting, and see where that takes us.”

“I don’t know, Nef. That sounds pretty dangerous.”

“You mean like antagonizing a coffee shop full of domestic terrorists, dangerous?”

Eaton chuckled. “Touché. I guess I’m just tired of all this secrecy bullshit. We’re working the only case in homicide history where the victim can literally tell us what’s going on, and he refuses to.”

“I know. It’s frustrating. But I like Harker where he is, sitting on the beach. I have a feeling that if we talk to him, all he’ll do will be try to fuck our investigation.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right. And you are the lead on this case, so it’s your call.”

“And don’t you forget it,” I said. I grabbed the phone and opened the messaging thread Harker had had going. I typed in what he usually said, which was, simply, I need to meet.

I pressed “send” and held my breath. After an incredibly tense thirty seconds, we got an answer.

Who the fuck are you?

We don’t use names. You know that. But it’s me.

Prove it.

How?

What’s the codeword?

I looked at Eaton, a smirk on my face. He shrugged. He had no idea what the codeword was, but I thought I did.

Anchor.

Another long wait, and then:

I heard you were dead.

Not yet.

Things are getting too hot here. We need to back off.

We can’t stop now. But I can probably get the heat off you. I need you to meet with two associates of mine. They’ll help you out.

Why can’t you be there?

I’m underground for now.

The three dots telling us the person was typing popped up and stayed on the screen for over a minute. Eaton said we spooked the guy but I didn’t think so. Whoever this person was, they were in trouble, and they needed Harker’s help to get out of it. Eventually, they responded.

Ok. Brantley Park. One hour.

It was a good choice of location. Brantley Park sat at the convergence of five major roads in Whitewhale, each leading to its own distinct borough. Therefore, it had become something of a foot traffic hub, a nice place to rest your legs while hoofing it across town. It was always packed, school children stopping on their way home to play, business men giving tours to foreign clients, artists and poets laying in the grass, beseeching the universe to supply them with inspiration. It was one of the very few places in the entire city not actively falling apart. Nobody would think twice about three people meeting there in the middle of the day.

We got there twenty minutes ahead of time and did a quick sweep for surveillance. It was clean. Harker’s “friend” was acting alone, either through secrecy or authority. Not knowing who I was expecting, I simply sat down on a bench overlooking most of the park and pretended to read. We had stopped at a book store and I picked up a copy of “The Saga of Mirror-Walker,” hoping it could act as a subtle clue for whomever we were meeting. I figured this character wouldn’t be too hard to spot. The desperation I could infer from their text messages would likely bleed into their physical demeanor, and I had been trained to recognize such behavioral tells.

Almost exactly at the one hour mark, I spotted a woman, about ten years younger than Harker, shuffling nervously down the paved walkway, shoulders scrunched, hands shoved in her jacket pockets, and eyes shifting conspiratorially. She was about thirty yards away and headed in my direction. My plan was simply to watch her walk by and allow Eaton to intercept her down the sidewalk, but she made eye contact with me and shook her head slightly, then looked down to her feet and hurried her pace a little. When she got to my bench, she coughed twice, but didn’t acknowledge me. I turned a page in my book, taking a few seconds to look farther down the walkway. I saw two people, a man and a woman, wearing dark blue suits, walking with purpose beside one another. They were clearly Council Agents. I assumed they had been following Harker’s associate, but when they got to me, they stopped.

One of them, the man, put his hand on the top of my book and pulled it down to look me in the eyes.

“Detective Asta,” he said. “Do you mind if we talk for a minute?”

I motioned for them to keep their voices down. “I do, actually. I’m in the middle of an investigation,” I whispered.

The other Agent pointed behind me. I turned and saw her government vehicle, parked illegally on the street. “Not a real question,” she said.

As I reluctantly made my way to their car, I saw, from the edge of my vision, Eaton sidle up behind Harker’s mystery woman.

City Hall was like something out of a dream. No logical comparison could be made, between it and the WVPD station. Being ushered inside by the two Agents, I felt like a student on her way to getting reprimanded by the principal. Us cops like to think that we keep order in the city, that we’re all that stands between peace and anarchy, but we tend to forget (like everybody else) just how powerless we really are. It is the Council, and their several constituent arms, who are really in charge, and everything about City Hall, from its angular brutalist architecture, to its Orwellian system of security cameras, only serves to drive that point home.

Here, my badge meant next to nothing.

The two Agents, who had not even told me their names, let alone explained why they had abducted me from the park, made a point of parading me in through the front door, each one holding one of my elbows, like a street-level crook, for all to see. Being no stranger to the perp-walk, I was fully aware of its use as a psychological tactic, meant to lower my defenses against the interrogation to come. But I had never experienced it from this side, and I’m embarrassed to admit how well it was working. At that moment, I was much more intimidated than I should have been, and I probably would have told them whatever they wanted to hear. But they underestimated my resolve. By the time they plopped me in the chair in the interview room, I had regained a firm enough grasp of myself that I wouldn’t let them walk all over me. If I had had such mental fortitude before I became a police officer, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble.

They made me wait for about an hour, without even a glass of water. Another intimidation tactic that would ultimately prove fruitless. How little these people must have thought of me. The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. I had done nothing that should have drawn the Council’s attention. In fact, just about the only thing Eaton and I had managed, over the last two days, was to piss off a bunch of radicals who wanted to bring the Council down. Unless they knew more about Harker’s situation than I did, I couldn’t think of what they would want to talk to me about.

Finally, the two Agents came inside and sat down on the other side of the table from me. They tried getting the first word, but I cut them off.

“What the fuck is this about? Who do you think you are, to intrude upon an official WVPD investigation?”

They both smirked, knowing as well as I did that my attitude was meant to upset them, to throw them off the rhythm they had been hoping to establish. One of them, the old guy with graying hair, said, “We’re Agents of City Council. Therefore, all WVPD investigations fall under our jurisdiction. That we normally allow you people a relative amount of autonomy should not be seen as anything other than generosity. There is a level of trust, in our relationship, but please do not forget: you are answerable to us.”

The main problem with the manner in which I was made a detective is that there is no connective tissue between the life I lived before, and the life I live now. There are still two people inside of me, and they never got the chance to shake hands. When I’m being a cop, I’m a cop. No question about it. But there are times when my other self steps forward and takes control. And that chick does not take kindly to being talked down to. Her anger is not a rhetorical device, a move in a verbal chess match, but an animal force.

“You fucking prissy schoolboys all think you’re so tough. But that’s just a trick of the light. Slight of hand. There’s nothing special about you. Throw your badge away, take off your stupid fucking Dick Tracy trench coat, and talk to me like that outside these walls, and I’ll show you just who’s answerable to whom.”

The Agent who had spoken was a little shaken by this, but the other one, the woman, just laughed. “You seem to forget that you carry a badge too, Detective Asta.”

“Yeah, a badge you gave me, that I didn’t ask for. If you’re trying to scare me, try again.”

“We’re not trying to scare you, Detective. And please forgive my colleague. He’s old-school. No nuance, with these guys, you know?”

“Don’t need nuance, when you have respect,” the old guy said.

“Hey, come on now, Mark,” the other one said, “respect goes both ways. Detective Asta is on our side.”

I scoffed. “You dumb bitches are really trying to good cop, bad cop me? I pulled that move yesterday. Shit, even if I wasn’t WVPD, I’ve seen movies.”

“We’re not playing you, Detective. Just trying to see eye-to-eye.”

“Can’t see eye-to-eye with someone who has their head up their own ass. Enough of these games. You’re not gonna turn me. I’m not walking outta here with a new-found love for the Council, so just tell me what the hell I’m doing here.”

It was like a switch had flipped, and all emotion left both of the Agents’ faces. It was down to business, now. “Where are you on the Harker murder?” This from the old guy.

I very nearly blurted out that Harker’s situation could not really be defined as “murder,” but something told me to hold off. As unlikely as it seemed, I guessed there was a chance that they didn’t know that there was another Harker, alive and well, camped out on Trash Beach, gazing at the sea like the ending of a Truffaut film. After all, Stepford hadn’t known. But that was due to incompetence, on his part. Agents were many things, but incompetent was not one of them. Still, it was possible they were unaware of the situation. And if that was the case, it was a huge card I was unwilling to play, at the moment. “It’s coming along,” I said. “Would be a lot farther, if you two cock-holes hadn’t barged in. Harker had a cell phone. We got into it, established contact with an associate of his, and were attempting to meet them, when you showed up.”

“Have you found the cellular network he was using?”

“Again, no. There’s a good chance we would have, by now, if you hadn’t fucked things up for us. That was our one chance, and it’s probably lost forever. After your little stunt, they probably shut down and hit the road. So, thanks for that.”

“Don’t worry about that, Detective. The network is still very much up and running.”

“How do you know?”

The female Agent said, “Because we’re the ones running it.”

“You’re what?” I asked.

The Agent smiled, clearly proud of herself. “We have people everywhere, as you well know. We have only recently taken control of the network. Instead of shutting it down, we thought it would be more prudent to leave it as it was. It’s been a great source of information already.”

“Bully for you. It looks like you don’t need me, then.”

“No, you’re right, we probably don’t ‘need’ you. We’re more than capable enough to close the case, on our own.”

“Cool. I’ll just be leaving, then, pricks,” I said, standing up.

The older guy chuckled, finally showing at least a glimpse of a soul, beneath whatever it was he wore to work. “Except that there’s another little problem, on top of Harker’s murder, Detective,” he said, “as I’m sure you’ve put together by now.”

I didn’t know if he was talking about Harker’s double or not, but I had decided I wasn’t going to be the first one in the room to bring it up, so I remained silent.

The Agent didn’t react as if I had refused to answer his question, however, which told me that it hadn’t really been for my benefit. He continued. “There is a lot to link Harker’s murder to the terrorist organization known as ‘Ahab.’ In fact, now that he’s dead, I don’t see any reason to keep it a secret: Harker was working for us.”

“He was what?” I said. I sat back down.

“That’s right,” the other Agent said. “You might not know this, but your colleague actually applied to become a Council Agent. Oh, don’t look so surprised, Detective Asta. Not all of your clan is as anti-establishment as you. Harker had come to his senses, and he wanted in. He wanted to actually make a difference.”

I rolled my eyes.

She continued. “In fact, Detective Asta, I think you should consider joining up. I’ve gone over your file. Impressive. I see a lot of myself in your work.”

“I’m nothing like you,” I said.

“Just something to think about. Anyway, we didn’t hire him. At least not right away. His record was extraordinary, but we needed assurances he would be suitable.”

“So you pimped him out on some undercover job, as a way to earn his ticket in,” I said. It was disgusting.

“Such a harsh term, but basically correct. It’s no secret that Ahab has been a thorn in our side for quite some time. This is because of the way their group is set up. Each individual terrorist act is perpetrated by a single cell, with no official connection to the rest of the organization. That means that we can shut them down every day (which is pretty much the case) but never get any closer to taking them apart. Harker’s job was to ingratiate himself in the power structure of Ahab, until he learned the identity of its leader. We think he got close, and was killed for it. We want you to pick up where he left off.”

They offered to drive me back to the station, but I explained that I would rather drown than be seen with them in public, so they let me walk. I tried to dispute what they had told me, about Harker’s secret undercover investigation, but I couldn’t. It all added up: his hidden ledger of Ahab names and addresses, his cell phone (probably provided by the Council after their takeover of the illicit network), his reluctance to talk to me or Eaton. It was somewhat difficult to think of Harker as a boot-licking Council stooge, but it wasn’t impossible. More than any of my other coworkers, Harker got off on the minimal amount of power and respect he received as a police detective. He had really come into his own, after his recruitment. For once, the Council had chosen wisely.

But I wasn’t sure what I was going to do next. The Council had just recruited me to complete Harker’s job, but there was no way I would be able to insert myself into Ahab, even at the lowest level. Not after the little appearance Eaton and I had put in at the coffee shop, the day before. Our faces were probably plastered on the walls of every Ahab establishment, like wanted posters from the wild west. That would be a dead end.

I also didn’t want to bring Harker into it. The only thing I had on anybody with this case was the fact that the multiple parties involved didn’t know about each other. If I told Harker I was to be his replacement, we might be opening the door to dangerous complications. If the Council didn’t know there was another Harker, it was possible that Ahab didn’t either. They might send someone to finish the job, and then we would never know the truth about any of this.

So I decided to take myself out of it, for the time being. I wasn’t the only one working the case, after all. In all the excitement of the afternoon, I had almost forgotten about seeing Eaton pick up the tail on Harker’s contact, as I was being taken to City Hall. Maybe he had learned something from her, while I was indisposed.

We had planned beforehand that if we got split up during the rendezvous at the park, we would regroup not at the station, but at the little pub about a mile away. When I walked in Eaton was sitting at the bar, nursing a beer. He caught my reflection in the mirror behind the bar and raised his glass to greet me. Before I even sat down on the stool next to him, he finished his drink and motioned for the bartender to bring him two more.

Without saying anything, I sat down, grabbed my beer, and chugged most of it, in only a matter of seconds. It felt good going down my throat, cold, refreshing, and sufficiently against the rules. We were on duty.

“Holy shit,” Eaton said, “what happened to you?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just the Council poking their nose in our business. How did it go with our girl?”

“Jaime. Her name is Jaime, and she’s very upset about Harker. Says he will be sorely missed. She was a little peeved we pretended to be him, but I convinced her it was all part of his plan.”

“So she doesn’t know…”

“I don’t think so. How is that possible?”

“Well, the Council doesn’t seem to know, either. At least that’s the impression I got. What else did Jaime say?”

“She said that things are fucked, and that she thinks we need to stop, until it blows over.”

“Stop what?” I asked.

“She didn’t say. I only talked to her for a minute. Didn’t want to push it. We’re meeting again, somewhere safer, indoors, later tonight. I told her you were coming with me.”

“You just let her walk away? What if she runs?”

“I put a tail on her. Giving updates to the station every thirty minutes. I just called before you got here. Jaime went straight from the park to a shitty apartment in Martindale. Hasn’t left since.”

“Who do you think she is, this Jaime?”

“She’s Ahab, no doubt,” Eaton said. “She’s no tough, but I caught a glimpse of her fish hook tattoo creeping out of her sleeve. I think you were right, about Harker working his own investigation. Jaime is (or was) his Ahab contact. She called Harker ‘Cordham.’ Must have been his cover identity. It’s weird. Wouldn’t think of Harker as one to go vigilante.”

I chugged the rest of my beer and put up my hand to have the bartender bring me another. “He wasn’t going vigilante,” I said.

“What?”

“He was working for the Council. It was his job interview.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Eaton asked.

I explained what the Agents had told me, about Harker applying to become one of them, and their selfishly reckless way of making him audition for the part. Eaton was silent for a while, which was out of character. I couldn’t blame him, though. It was a shock. He ordered another beer too. His third, at least.

“Anyway,” I continued after the bartender had left, “the Council wants me to pick up his investigation. Find out who’s in charge of the organization. Apparently nobody knows who the top Ahab guy is.”

Sipping his new beer, Eaton chuckled.

“What?” I asked.

“Captain,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Captain Ahab.”

“Oh,” I said, “yeah. Ha.”

“How are you gonna do that? Find the Captain, I mean?”

“I don’t think I am. I don’t work for the Council.”

“Um, yeah, you do, Nef.”

“Okay, maybe I do, but I don’t fucking want to. I’m already working a case.”

“But don’t you think they’re probably connected?” Eaton said. “What if Harker, the dead Harker, was killed because he got close to the truth?”

“That’s what the Agents think happened. But…”

“But what?”

“But then where did our Harker, the living one, come from?”

He didn’t respond. Up until now, we had assumed that the corpse from Trash Beach was some sort of Harker duplicate. A clone, or perhaps something less explainable. Not the original. But what if we had it backwards? What if the impostor was the man currently hunched in the sand, waiting for another version of himself to wash up?

“I think that until we talk to Jaime, we need to leave the Council and Harker out of it. There are too many plates spinning, and I don’t want to knock ‘em over just yet.”

“I agree,” Eaton said. He finished his beer and gazed into space. It took me a second to recognize that he was staring at his own reflection in the mirror behind the bar.

Jaime had told Eaton to meet her at ten that night, in an old abandoned warehouse at the docks. If this was her idea of a safe location for a rendezvous, that said a lot about the life she led. Eaton hadn’t given her a name, for himself or for me, and Jaime hadn’t asked. Apparently that had been part of Harker’s (Cordham’s) contingency plan. Pretty smart, on Harker’s part. Even in death, he did what he could to keep the operation going. Jaime had been told to trust whomever approached her, and had done it. Eaton was right; this woman was no master criminal. But there was no doubt she was in Ahab. In the few hours we had to spare before our meeting, Eaton and I had gone back to the station and looked at her file. No record, really, as she had never been convicted of any crime, but she had been under Council surveillance for quite some time. It started when she was seen at an anti-Council rally, protesting Crowd Control and their authoritarian ways.

She was younger than we had thought, at first; only twenty-three. Like a lot of people just scraping to survive in Whitewhale, she had aged beyond her years, and it showed on her face. She had first attracted the Council’s attention five years ago, and sometime since then, she had become radicalized by Ahab. But she hadn’t actually done anything. Not yet. Just frequented a few of their hang out spots. Thankfully, she hadn’t been at the coffee shop, or she would have bolted the second she saw me at the park.

Considering the kid’s history, what Harker had been doing with her felt an awful lot like entrapment. Not that the Council would bat an eye at such tactics, but I had always considered something like that to be beneath him. I guess you never really know anybody. Maybe not even yourself.

It was hard not to recognize myself in Jaime. But for the Council’s odd recruitment technique, I could have ended up just like her.

Jaime had gotten there early, and had been pacing the floor in anticipation when we arrived. “This is bad,” she said, not even waiting for the door to close behind us.

“Just take it easy,” Eaton said. “All is not lost. We can get through this. We just have to be smart about it.” He gestured to me. “You remember my friend, from before?”

Jaime pulled out and lit a cigarette before responding. As she inhaled, she seemed to relax, slightly. “Yeah. Those were Council Agents following me, weren’t they?”

I shook my head. “They were, but they weren’t following you. They were looking for me.”

“Why?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “They tried to spook me, but they had nothing. I followed Cordham’s plan, and they had to let me go.”

She groaned. “Oh God, Cordham. Is it really true? You told me before, but I need to hear it again. Is Cordham…dead?”

“Yes,” Eaton said, with a confidence I didn’t feel myself. Not quite a lie, but still. “But he knew the risks, Jaime. And he didn’t own this thing. We don’t get to stop, just because he’s gone.”

It felt like just a matter of time before Jaime realized Eaton and I were talking out our asses. We were speaking in clichés and half-truths, entry-level invitations for her to incriminate herself. A more experienced terrorist would have sniffed out our bullshit immediately, but Jaime was riding this wave with us. There had to be a reason (besides mere gullibility) Harker had chosen this kid, but for the life of me, I couldn’t spot it.

“You know,” Jaime said, “I’m actually pretty glad to hear you say that.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I…did it, already. I went through with it.”

“Good,” Eaton said, “that’s good, Jaime. Tell us about it.”

Finally, I could see a glimmer of doubt in the poor kid’s eyes. Whatever else she was, she was a political dissident, and that carried with it a predilection for secrecy. But she took another drag of her cigarette and carried on. “I wasn’t going to. When I heard about Cordham, I was gonna split. Leave Whitewhale for good. And that’s still what I’m gonna do. But I’m gonna finish what we started first. Like Cordham said. Get it done, no matter what. So, about an hour ago, I called the warehouse and told them to go on with it. Tonight. We should be on the other side of things, pretty soon.”

I did my best to hide my growing excitement and play it cool. When I spoke, I had to try to do it between the strokes of my now thundering heartbeat. “Wonderful, Jaime. I know Cordham would have been proud of you. Now, just so we’re on the same page, tell us the plan. What’s about to happen?”

“You know I can’t just out and say it. Cordham told me to keep it a secret.”

I almost spoke, but Eaton jumped in ahead of me. “Look, Jaime. It is a secret. Between us. But we need to make sure you can make it outta the city, if that’s what you really want. We’re Cordham’s contingency plan. Your escape. That starts with having a cover story, on the off chance we’re stopped by the Council after everything goes down. Now, I’ll be honest with you, Jaime. You’ve been a vital part of all of this, but you’re just one piece of the machine. There’s a good chance that the two of us know more about what’s about to happen than you do. We don’t want to overwhelm you with a bunch of shit you don’t need to know. So you need to tell us your part, exactly what you did, so we can give you a believable alibi.”

I nearly gasped. Eaton had just called the mother of all hail marys. But time was apparently a factor, and he had gambled on Jaime’s naivete. The silence was almost unbearable, and it lasted for far too long. I thought we had blown it. Jaime finished her cigarette in a few more hungry gulps and let it fall from her lips and to the floor. She sighed.

And told us everything.

Harker was still holding guard on the beach. His surveillance had told me that he had only gotten up, to get something to eat from a hotdog stand down the road or use the rundown public restroom, a couple times in the past two days. From my vantage point in the alley, covered by the shadows not yet killed by the morning sun, he looked like a figure in a painting, a weeping maiden waiting for a husband whose ship would never return. It was truly unsettling.

I told the cadet he could go home. He wasn’t needed any more. He tried to protest, but I insisted. He finally agreed and walked away.

As I approached Harker from behind, he didn’t turn around, but his shoulders drooped a little, as if in defeat. I sat down next to him on the sand and took in the water on the horizon.

“Quiet night?” I asked.

Harker sighed. “Yeah, not too bad. You?”

“I’m still up from yesterday. Have you gotten any sleep in the past three days?”

“Off and on. An hour here, forty-five minutes there.”

“I met a girl, Harker. Name’s Jaime.”

“Of course you did,” Harker said.

“She did what you told her. Loyal, even though she never really knew you.”

“No, Nef, that’s where you’re wrong. She did know me. More than you, or Stepford, or any of you ever did.”

“Yeah, I’m starting to put that together. We stopped it, Grant. Pulled the van over, arrested the driver. Didn’t even put up much of a fight. I think without you to guide them, they don’t know what they’re doing. How long did it take you to take over Jaime’s cell?”

“Couple weeks,” Harker said.

“Impressive work. Pretty smart, having them bomb Crowd Control HQ, and not the City Council directly.”

“Thanks. Why is this happening to me, Nef? Why are you here, right now?”

“Because you flipped sides and joined Ahab,” I said. “Pretty obvious.”

Harker shook his head. “No, it isn’t. That’s the point. Why’d you go digging into my life, when the real case, the real reason you’re even here at all, is somewhere out there.” He gestured to the water.

“Because I don’t have an answer for whatever’s out there, Grant. I don’t know where that other you came from. There was nothing I could do about that.”

“If you can’t do anything, don’t do anything.”

“You know that was never an option.”

“No, I don’t know that. The fact is, we’ve been doing nothing for years, now. We work for the bad guys. We think that if we do it begrudgingly, with a shitty attitude, that makes it okay. But we’re complicit in everything the Council does. At best. In truth, we’re helping them.”

“So you become a terrorist? Come on, Grant. That’s bullshit. There are other ways to fight back.”

“I’m sure there are, Nef, but I’m not smart enough to think of them. All I know is that I couldn’t ignore it any more. I’m done pretending to be a victim.”

I didn’t want to get into a political debate with him, so I changed the subject. “What do you remember about the morning, two days ago?”

He turned to look at me. “Huh? What do you mean? That was when this happened.” He motioned back to sea.

I shook my head. We still had not established an answer to Eaton’s question. Why was Harker even there, that morning? How did he know? I exhaled, unsure of how to put what I was about to say. In the end, I just came out and said it. “Do you remember waking up, that morning? In your own bed?”

“Of course, I…” He paused.

I didn’t give him the chance to regain his momentum. “Do you really? How far back does your memory actually go? What can you tell me, on the short term, about your life, say in the last two weeks?”

“What are you saying, Nef?” He looked genuinely disturbed.

“I think your life began in that moment, here on this beach. Somehow, you…sprang into being, just in time to see Harker’s body. The original Harker.”

I was worried he would react violently to this, but he only shook his head and furrowed his brow. “I’m the original,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“I just do. And I know something else, too. I’ve known, since I saw that…my body, that you would figure out what I had been up to. I knew it, straight away. And I’ve sat here, knowing full well that you were closing in on me, but I haven’t been able to move. I have to understand what happened to me, Nef. That’s all that seems to matter to me now. I’ve been waiting. Not just for you, but for me. And I still haven’t shown up.”

“I don’t think there’s gonna be another one, Grant. I think…” I hesitated.

“What? It’s okay, you can say it.”

“I think what happened was the only way I was going to get you. You covered your tracks too well for us to stop your plan any other way.”

“That’s…” I could tell he was thinking, so I let him do it in silence. Finally, he shook his head. “No, that doesn’t line up with your theory. About me being the copy. If that corpse sitting in the coroner’s lab was the one and only Grant Harker, then you wouldn’t have needed me. You could have just proceeded with the investigation like you usually do. But if it was the double--”

“Then it was what gave me an excuse to look into your life. Shit, you’re right. You’re so good at this, Grant. Such a waste.”

“That’s the thing, Nef. It is a waste, no matter how you look at it. That’s what the Council has taken from us. Our purpose. You can’t do anything worthwhile by following their rules. But none of that matters to me any more. All that matters is trying to understand where that other me came from.”

“I’m never going to understand,” I said. “And neither are you. You need to find a way to accept that.”

“I don’t see that happening, Nef.”

The time had come for me to call my own hail mary. I didn’t think it would work, but I figured I owed it to Harker to at least try. “The Council doesn’t know about you.”

He turned to face me. “What?”

“They think you’re dead. That your other body was the only one.”

“Oh.”

“I know you were working for them.”

“Deep undercover,” he said.

“Ha. Yeah. Anyway. This means you have a chance.”

“To what?”

“To get away. I’ll tell them we stopped the bombing because of what we found on your cell phone, which is true. You didn’t play any part in my investigation, really. You might as well be dead. Leave the city. Don’t come back.”

“You…you would do that for me?”

“Yes.” I hadn’t been positive, until that moment. But I would. “But you have to help me get them off my back. Tell me who’s in charge. Give me Captain Ahab, and I’ll get you out.”

He looked back to the water. His eyes welled with tears. “I am.”

“No, you’re not. Don’t do that. Look, nothing happened. You’re in the clear. We stopped the bombing.”

“I didn’t want you to stop the bombing, Nef!”

“I know that, but come on. I’m giving you the only life boat you’re ever gonna come across. Who is Captain Ahab?”

He sighed, and I could tell he was considering his options. He said, “I’ve told you already.”

I took in the horizon for a few more seconds before I stood up. As I turned to leave, I put my hand on his shoulder and squeezed. Eaton appeared from the alley with his handcuffs. I stopped him before he got to Harker. “Try to make sure they give him a cell overlooking the water,” I said.