Briggs's office had been built with glass walls on two sides, a design presumably intended to communicate transparency. Under Briggs, the glass functioned differently. It was a display case.
At 12:04 a.m., James watched Sergeant Gary Tatum enter the office carrying a brown paper grocery bag. Tatum set it on the desk without ceremony. Briggs reached in and pulled out the contents: thick stacks of bills banded in the way that cash from multiple sources gets organized when someone has been consolidating it. 20s, 50s. The stacks were substantial.
The two men went through the cash together with the ease of a domestic routine. The relaxed, almost companionable quality of two people dividing money they had accumulated through method and repetition. Tatum pocketed his share. Both men exchanged something that might have been a smile.
James watched through the wire mesh with eyes that were recording rather than feeling—cataloging positions, the quantity of the cash, the specific drawer into which the bundles went.
Then something on Briggs's desk caught his attention. A manila folder sitting to the left of the blotter, its tab visible from the mesh at an angle that required careful positioning. The tab was handwritten in block capitals. James could read two letters clearly and infer the rest from 18 months of case files: Okafor T.
James stared at those two letters for a long moment. He thought about a wide-open face, calloused hands, a photograph at a grand reopening, a man standing in a doorway believing he was part of something.
He settled back against the bars and waited for Briggs's boots to come down the corridor.
Briggs arrived at cell 4 at 12:35 a.m. He came alone. This was always a private conversation by design. He carried a prop, the cheap ballpoint pen between his fingers, a habit that let him occupy his hands. He walked with the unhurried rhythm of a man who considered himself to hold every advantage the situation contained, which at this moment he still genuinely believed was true.
He stopped in front of the bars, looked at James with the expression of a professional appraiser reviewing an item he has already decided the value of. Then he reached out and tapped the bars twice with the pen. The sound was absurdly gentle, like a small bell given what came next.
"So," Briggs said. "David, is it? We ran your plates. Rental car, Illinois address, no local connections." He let the implications sit in the air between them. "You're a long way from home sitting in my jail with a bag of cocaine that has your prints on the center console it came from. That's a mandatory minimum. Years in a state penitentiary. It's a harsh place for a man who wears a good watch."
He delivered this with the casual confidence of a man for whom fabrications had long since stopped registering as lies.
James looked at him steadily from the bench. "What do you want?"
Captain Briggs' face arranged itself into an approximation of benevolence. He clasped the clipboard behind his back and leaned forward, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial register as if the two of them were sharing something private and mutually beneficial.
"What I want," Briggs said, "is to help you out. The criminal justice system is a complicated machine. Paperwork gets lost. Cases get complicated. Sometimes a man makes a mistake—an honest mistake—and I find myself in a position to help that mistake disappear for the right administrative fee."
James let a beat of silence develop, then slowly and clearly, projecting every syllable toward the transmitter against his ribs: "Are you asking me for a bribe, Captain?"
Briggs chuckled, a sound with no warmth in it whatsoever. "That's an ugly word. Think of it as a localized fine. $15,000 cash. You make a phone call. Someone brings the money to a location my sergeant provides, and that bag of white powder goes missing between here and the evidence lockup. The door opens. You walk out. And we never see each other again. These things happen. Files get misplaced." He spread his hands in a gesture of bureaucratic sympathy. "Nobody wins in a courtroom."
"And if I refuse?" James asked.
The benevolence evaporated. Briggs's face settled into its harder register, the one beneath the performance, the one that had always been there waiting.
"Then I ruin your life. I file the report. I make sure it hits the papers. And I guarantee the judge who handles your arraignment understands I'm asking for remand." He paused, letting the next part land the way he intended it to. "The man who signs my paperwork in this county has been doing so for a long time. You will lose everything." Another pause. "And believe me, the time inside is less comfortable when a police captain has made a personal recommendation about your threat level to the facility administration."
"You would destroy an innocent man's life," James said clearly, each word its own deliberate offering to the microphone, "for $15,000."
Briggs's expression didn't shift. "Nobody's innocent," he said. The word came out with a quality that suggested it was one of the few things he had ever actually believed. "And to me, you're just another paycheck."
James looked at him. He looked at the man behind the bars, the clipboard, the cheap pen, the captain's bars on the collar of a uniform that had become over 24 years less a symbol of public service than a license for private predation. He looked at this man who had written the word handled next to Thomas Okafor's name and gone home that night and slept without difficulty.
And then something changed in James's face. Small. A slight shift in the eyes. A barely perceptible loosening at the corners of his mouth. Not a smile. Something quieter than that. The expression of a man who has been waiting a very long time for a very specific moment and who feels in this moment the particular stillness of a door about to open.
"I think," James said, his voice dropping to something almost gentle, "you should go ahead and fill out that report, Roy."
Briggs blinked. The use of his first name—casual, without prefatory title, as if they were old acquaintances and the bars between them were a minor inconvenience—landed in the air between them and took Briggs a full half second to process. His face moved through confusion, then cold, specific fury.
"What did you say to me?"
"Fill out the report," James said. He held Briggs's gaze without blinking. "Because you're going to need all the paperwork you can find to explain what happens next."