Chain of Evidence by Ridley Pearson

you—that’s how it works.” She cocked her head at him. “What is that look?”
    â€œNarco is empty by one in the morning. They’re all out working the streets or eating doughnuts or killing time at strip joints. By three, they go home. CAPers is up and running, but it’s down the hall. Thursday through Sunday the cleaners start at midnight. The rest of the week, they go eight to eleven.”
    â€œWhat they say about you and your research is true, isn’t it?”
    â€œI can’t watch the hallway and go for the files at the same time.”
    â€œNo way.” She didn’t hesitate a nanosecond.
    â€œIt can’t be done?”
    â€œNo, it can’t,” she confirmed.
    â€œNot without help,” he pressed.
    â€œMessage received. Now hear this: No way!”
    â€œYour office has a clean view of the hallway. With the door left open, you could see down that hall, could warn me. Sometimes there’s a late bust. Predicting traffic flow in and out of that division is never a sure bet.”
    â€œIt would make me an accomplice.”
    â€œWe carry pagers. They can be set to vibrate instead of beep, did you know that? If you were to program your phone to dial my pager number, then it would take only seconds to warn me. It takes exactly nine seconds to walk down the hallway and reach Narcotics once you’ve rounded that corner.”
    She shook her head, looking amazed that he had already timed it. “And whoever it was would recognize you.”
    â€œI’m dressed as a housecleaner. I wear a ball cap, glasses, and a press-on ’stache. I keep my head down. No one ever looks at the wombats. Not at one in the morning. I push my cart out the door, and I’m gone. Besides,” he offered, “that’s my risk, not yours. If I’m caught, I acted alone. You’ve done nothing more than pull an all-nighter. How unusual is that?” He spoke sotto voce. His heart was beating fast, and he was sweating. The vanilla was melting in front of him, untouched.
    She reached out, snagged the spoon, and guided it back between her lips. “I suppose you already know the order that housecleaning cleans in. Which offices are done first?”
    â€œI can do this alone,” he reminded, “but I thought I’d ask you first. I’m pressuring you, Abby, and I’m sorry. Let’s drop it.”
    She removed the spoon and pursed her lips. She looked at him quizzically, skeptically, squinting in a way that felt as if she were measuring him. Testing him. “You’re right about IA. Putting the request through them would probably take several weeks. But break into Narco’s files based on the testimony of a victimized twelve-year-old girl? Does that strike you as odd?”
    â€œDon’t look at me like that.” He toyed with the ice cream, but wasn’t hungry.
    â€œYou’re really pissing me off here, damn it.”
    â€œGood.”
    A tension had settled between them, uncomfortable and gnawing. “I think I’ve lost my appetite,” she declared.
    At 12:30 A.M. , Dart, wearing a fake mustache, blue jeans, and a dark blue ball cap, entered the department’s basement housecleaning closet, where he located both a cart and a navy blue smock that the service people wore. There were four workers assigned to clean the two-story building. Dart, heading upstairs, estimated that he had a little over an hour for a job he thought would only take a few minutes.
    He had rarely found use for the speed key given him by Walter Zeller some four years earlier. Zeller had claimed that no investigating officer could get by without one, despite their illegality. The speed key was shaped something like a small flat pistol. It magically picked most locks with the squeeze of a trigger and was the preferred tool of car thieves because of its simplicity—insert the tongue into the lock, squeeze and hold the trigger, rotate,