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Cop Punched a Black FBI Agent — Then Every Door in the Station Locked

Cop Punched a Black FBI Agent — Then Every Door in the Station Locked

Chapter 7

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Kittredge stood at the door with his hands still raised, not moving, the corridor light blinking red above him in a rhythm that matched almost exactly the pulse visible now at the side of his throat.Behind him in the lobby, Doyle finally asked the question nobody else had said out loud yet: "Sarge... what's actually in that ledger?"Kittredge didn't turn around. He stood facing a door that wouldn't open in a building that wasn't listening to him anymore, and said nothing at all.Kittredge came back from the corridor and went straight to the desk phone, dialing from memory. "This is Sergeant Kittredge, badge 441. I need an emergency override on the Oak Street facility lock. Authorization pending." A pause. Then a voice, tiny through the receiver, loud enough that Ruth heard it too: "That request requires clearance above this office. I can log it; I can't clear it.""Log it," Kittredge said, and hung up before the woman on the line could ask him why he needed it that fast.He tried the chief's extension next, then a four-digit override code he recited from memory—the kind of number a man only remembers because he's used it before. The screen behind Ruth didn't so much as flicker. He tried it again, slower, like the machine might have simply misheard him the first time, his hand not quite steady on the receiver."Every one of those just went into the file," Ruth said, not looking up from her monitor. Each attempt had appeared as a new line under the red banner: Access Attempt Denied – Logged. "You're building the record you're trying to stop."Kittredge set the receiver down carefully, the way a man sets down something he's afraid might go off, and crossed to her instead of answering the phone again. Quieter now, the performance gone out of his voice: "Thirty years, Ruth. You've got what, eighteen months to your pension? Think about what this does to that.""I have thought about it," she said. "Every one of the eleven times I logged a complaint on him." She nodded once toward Doyle, who was close enough to hear it and didn't argue. "I'm not taking any of it back."Because she said that, Kittredge turned to the one person in the room he thought he could still reach: Hollis.Doyle crouched near the bench where the retiree sat, voice pitched low, almost gentle. "You were right there. He came up fast, didn't he? Reaching for something. That's what it looked like from where you were sitting."
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Cop Punched a Black FBI Agent — Then Every Door in the Station Locked

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