4338.219 · August 7, 2018 AD
Five Chairs and a Sealed Door
When an institution can no longer trust itself, it sends for strangers. Two officers have flown from Melbourne to sit in a meeting room that looks like any other case conference in the building. Sienna picks up a marker and starts writing names on a clean whiteboard. Stout sits across from people he's never met and makes a decision about how much truth a room can hold before the room becomes dangerous too.
Three o'clock. Meeting Room Two. The same whiteboard, the same table, the same view of the car park. Sienna has wiped the board clean — Sunday's timeline gone, the connections erased, the surface returned to blank white. She's starting fresh because the audience is new and the stakes have changed.
Webb is tall and still and carries the handshake of a man who's met a thousand people in professional contexts and learned to convey competence without personality. Garrett has the kind of face that disappears in a crowd — the most valuable asset in his profession. Draper has been vetted by Professional Standards and confirmed off-site during the window when Karl's access card was reactivated. These are the people Sienna trusts because she's verified them against the specific failures of an institution she can no longer verify itself.
Stout sits opposite the Victorians with his folder open and an evidence bag pressing against his ribs that nobody in the room will see. He's made the calculation during the drive — a slow, careful assessment of trust and exposure and the distance between what he knows and what he can safely share inside a building where someone reactivated a missing detective's credentials and erased arrest records from the custody system. Everything he tells the room is true. He simply doesn't tell the room everything. The distinction feels precise and clean in his mind and sick in his stomach.
