Out of Place

Sarah Lahey walked out of Interview Room Three with Louise Jeffries's file tucked under her arm and the unspoken weight of Louise's parting words still burning in her chest. The detour to Sergeant Claiborne's office was not, in the moment of making it, a decision. It was a file to drop off on the way back to her own desk.

The door was ajar.

Claiborne's office did not ordinarily permit unannounced entry, and Claiborne's office did not ordinarily permit a great many things. Every paper was squared into a stack with military precision, every pen lined along the edge of the desk like an instrument laid out for surgery, the vertical blinds held at the exact angle they had been held every other day Sarah had ever walked past this room. Nothing in the space was allowed to be wrong.

Sitting almost exactly in the centre of the otherwise perfectly ordered desk was a small crumpled scrap of notepaper.

Sarah recognised it. She had seen it not an hour earlier in her sergeant's hand, crumpled in his fist during the conversation across the scarred table in Interview Room Three, and apparently carried back here, smoothed out, and left on a desk that did not permit anything to be left on it wrong.

The rational part of her training listed, in brisk professional order, all the reasons she should leave the scrap where it was. The rest of her was already reaching.

She had crossed professional lines for months, but the ones she had crossed had all been quiet and personal and had lived inside her own chest where nothing had yet been noticed. What her hand was about to do was not that kind of line. It was the kind that left a mark.

Her fingertips closed over the paper. For the small fractional second it spent between the desk and her pocket, Sarah had the distinct impression that the overhead fluorescents had noticed.

Detective Glen Crosswell arrived in the doorway the instant after the paper disappeared into her closed fist, with a Battery Point burglary folder in one hand and an expression on his face that was trying, and not quite succeeding, to look disapproving.

Sarah's whole body jolted. Her knee caught the edge of the desk in a crack that would leave her limping for the rest of the afternoon, and the manila file tucked under her arm slipped and burst across the carpet in a scatter of Louise Jeffries's statement that spoke very clearly to anyone who knew how to read a room.

Sarah had worked alongside Glen Crosswell long enough to recognise the particular quality of a Glen Crosswell smile when he believed he had just been handed something. He had a mental filing system for these moments, and his mental filing system was meticulous. His Battery Point folder was his legitimate reason for standing in the doorway. The expression on his face was what he was actually doing with the legitimacy.

She recovered the way detectives recovered. She snapped at him as if his arrival had been an intrusion and not a disaster, and claimed her own errand at the in-tray to match his. She crouched to gather the scattered pages with hands she could not entirely keep from shaking. Glen stepped past her to drop his own folder into the in-tray, and in the half-second his back was turned, Sarah slid the smoothed-out scrap of notepaper into her pocket with the fluid motion of a woman who had never stolen anything before and had just, without any prior practice, stolen something anyway.

Glen made small talk about the audit next week. Sarah answered in syllables. Louise's file went onto the stack. They exited the office together, and Glen let the door fall back into the position he had found it in, because he knew better than to alter a detail of Sergeant Claiborne's environment.

In the corridor, Sarah walked beside him for as long as was necessary to appear normal and not a step longer. Glen turned off toward his own desk without looking back. The scrap of paper in Sarah's pocket pressed against her thigh with a warmth she could not convince herself was only her own body heat.

Behind her, two small things were now true that had not been true ten minutes ago. Detective Sarah Lahey had quietly stolen something from the office of a superior officer. And Detective Glen Crosswell had watched her do it, and had chosen — for reasons of his own — to say nothing.