Chapter 26 · First Fire

"Somebody's in the loft panel." Knox's voice came out flat, but his jaw was doing that thing where the muscle jumps. "North wing keypad. Somebody's running codes against it right now."

I looked past him at the monitor bolted to the wash corridor wall. Green numbers scrolling, failing, scrolling again. Whoever it was knew the rhythm of his lock. Not guessing. Testing.

"Friend of yours?" I said.

"Nobody gets that close to my sequence unless they've had their hands on it before." He didn't look away from the screen. "That's somebody I trained."

My tablet buzzed against the steel tray in my hands before I could ask him who. I almost dropped the match stem bag. Chain of custody doesn't forgive shaking hands, so I set the tray down on the counter first, slow, the way you'd set down a glass that's already cracked.

The alert wasn't the loft feed. It was the tip line. Anonymous witness statement, routed through the department app because the seal has us locked out of anything that needs a warrant to open properly.