Steam and Chain of Command

"Promotions don't cure hangovers. Neither does a cold shower, but at least it gets a man vertical."

I left Louise in Interview Room Three with a promise I'd return shortly. She didn't protest. Didn't ask where I was going or how long I'd be. Just sat there with her hands folded in her lap, conserving whatever reserves she had left, hoarding her energy the way you do when you know the real fight hasn't started yet. The fluorescent light hummed above her head, casting that sickly pallor across her features, indifferent witness to her contained desperation. I'd seen that look before—on the faces of parents waiting for news about children, on spouses sitting in hospital corridors, on people who'd already started bargaining with a God they weren't sure they believed in. The look of someone holding themselves together through sheer bloody-minded will, knowing that if they let go for even a second, they might not find their way back.

The corridor outside was quiet—that Saturday stillness again, pressing against my ears like something physical. I was heading back toward the main floor when I spotted Sarah ahead of me, moving with purpose toward the stairwell. She hadn't seen me. Her shoulders were set, her stride quick and tight, the walk of someone who'd rather be doing anything else but had no choice in the matter. I followed.

Down two flights, my knee protesting each step with that grinding complaint. Through the fire door, its hinges squealing in the empty concrete stairwell like something dying slowly. Along the lower corridor past storage and the old evidence room, where the air grew colder and carried the particular smell of basements everywhere—damp concrete, dust that had settled into permanence, the musty breath of forgotten paperwork mouldering in boxes that nobody would ever open again. She walked like someone who knew exactly where she was going and wasn't happy about having to make the trip.

She stopped at the door marked MEN, glanced both ways with the quick calculation of someone about to cross a line they'd rather not cross, then pushed through without hesitation.

I slowed my pace. Gave her time. Counted to thirty in my head, feeling the exhaustion settle behind my eyes like silt after floodwaters recede. Thirty-odd hours without proper sleep now. My hands weren't quite steady when I held them out in front of me. My thoughts moved through something thick and resistant, each one requiring effort to form and hold. But I'd worked cases in worse states than this, back when I was younger and stupider and thought the job couldn't touch me, and I'd do it again because the alternative was letting Louise Jeffries sit alone in that room while her son and brother stayed missing.

When I reached the door, I eased it open just enough to slip through, keeping myself in the shadows by the entrance where the steam hadn't quite reached. The air hit me like a wet flannel—thick with humidity, carrying the smell of cheap institutional soap and chlorinated water and something underneath that was purely male, the accumulated musk of a thousand showers that no amount of cleaning ever quite erased. The tiles were that particular shade of institutional green that had been out of fashion for decades but never quite got replaced—cracked in places, the grout lines darkened with years of accumulated grime that had turned them from white to grey to something approaching black. A locker clanged somewhere in the steam, the sound bouncing off hard surfaces and coming back distorted. Voices, muffled, words I couldn't quite make out.

Karl stood dripping by an open shower cubicle, looking like a man who'd been dragged backwards through several bad decisions and left to dry in a ditch. Pale beneath his usual colour, his skin carrying that greyish cast that comes from alcohol sweating out through pores, the body trying to purge what the liver couldn't process fast enough. Unshaven—unusual for Karl, who normally kept himself groomed with the kind of attention that bordered on compulsive, every hair in place, every crease pressed flat. The stubble made him look older, rougher, less like a detective and more like someone who'd wandered in off the street looking for a place to sleep it off. Shadows under his eyes that spoke of a night he probably couldn't fully remember and a morning he'd definitely rather forget. This was the man who'd passed his Senior Detective exam two days ago, the man I'd bought whisky for at Salamanca before slipping away to Wrest Point and watching Beatrix Cramer vanish through a portal to somewhere I couldn't follow. Right now, he looked less like a newly promoted detective and more like something that had washed up on a beach after a storm—waterlogged, battered, not quite sure how it had ended up where it was.

Sarah stood a few feet away, arms folded across her chest, every line of her posture radiating impatience thick enough to cut with a knife. She'd positioned herself with her back to the lockers, giving the room what privacy geometry allowed, but the fact remained—she was standing in the men's change room, and that took a particular kind of brass. The kind that could look good on a performance review or get you hauled before a disciplinary panel, depending on who was doing the looking and what mood they were in.

I watched her hold her ground. Part of me admired the sheer determination of it—walking into a space she had no business being in because the job required Karl and Karl was in here and she wasn't about to let something as trivial as protocol stand between her and getting the work done. That was Sarah all over. Part of me thought she'd be lucky if this didn't end up on someone's complaint form by Monday, some offended party deciding that the principle of the thing mattered more than the context. Protocol existed for reasons, even when those reasons were inconvenient, even when following them meant leaving a hungover detective to his own devices while a woman sat upstairs waiting to tell us about the people who'd vanished from her life.

Detective Glen Crosswell was there too, making his presence felt in the way he always did—the way some men do in spaces they consider their own, marking territory like dogs pissing on lampposts.

I watched him shuffle past Sarah, close enough that she'd have felt the air move against her skin. Watched him drop his towel with the casual indifference of a man in his own space—which, to be fair, it was. Then he waddled into the neighbouring shower cubicle with that particular gait of a man who's let himself go soft around the middle and doesn't much care who notices, and drew the curtain behind him with a theatrical flourish.

Sarah had walked into the men's change room. If she didn't like what men did in men's change rooms, she probably should have waited in the corridor and sent someone else to fetch Karl. Glen wasn't subtle about making that point—Glen had never been subtle about anything in his life—but the point itself wasn't entirely unreasonable. You don't walk into someone else's space and then complain about what you find there. That's not how it works.

Karl muttered something I couldn't make out, the words lost in the steam and the distance. Sarah shot back a response, sharp enough that I caught the tone even without the words. Disgust. Real and unfiltered, the kind you can't fake. Whatever she'd seen or smelled or had to deal with in the process of dragging Karl back to functionality, it had cost her something.

She thrust a towel into Karl's chest hard enough to make him stagger back a step, said something about hurrying that carried the edge of someone whose patience had run out several minutes ago, then turned and strode toward the exit. Her heels clicked against the wet tiles, sharp and deliberate, each step an announcement that she was done with this particular bullshit and moving on to the next. I pressed myself back against the wall as she passed, making myself small in the shadows, but she didn't look. Her focus was already elsewhere—on the case, on the woman waiting in Interview Room Three, on whatever calculations were running behind those guarded eyes of hers.

The door swung shut behind her with a hiss of displaced air.

I stayed where I was. Waiting. Feeling the steam settle on my skin like a second layer of sweat I didn't need, the damp cold of the tiles seeping through the soles of my shoes and into the bones of my feet. My shirt was starting to stick to my back. Somewhere deeper in the room, a tap dripped with the kind of maddening regularity that would drive you spare if you had to listen to it for more than a few minutes.

A soft clack broke the silence. A bar of soap slid out from beneath Glen's curtain, spinning across the wet floor in a lazy arc before coming to rest a few inches from Karl's bare feet.

"Piss off, Glen," Karl muttered.

Glen's laughter followed—wet and grotesque, echoing off the tiles like something that belonged in a drain. Schoolboy humour. The kind of thing that stopped being funny sometime around 1995 but persisted anyway in spaces where men gathered and maturity was optional, passed down through generations of coppers who thought the height of wit was making another bloke uncomfortable. I'd heard worse in my time—Christ, I'd probably laughed at worse when I was young and stupid and trying to fit in with the older officers—but right now it grated on nerves already worn raw by exhaustion and the weight of everything that was piling up on my desk.

I stepped forward, letting my shoes announce my presence against the wet tiles.

"Glen again?"

Karl's head snapped toward me like I'd fired a shot. Whatever he'd been expecting when he dragged himself into work this morning—coffee, aspirin, maybe a quiet corner to die in—it wasn't his sergeant emerging from the shadows of a steam-filled change room. His jaw tightened, tendons standing out in his neck, and for a moment I saw something flash across his face—guilt, maybe, or the particular shame of being caught at your worst by someone whose opinion actually matters. The look of a man who knows he's fucked up and is waiting to find out how badly.

"He's all yours, Sergeant."

I studied him properly now, taking my time about it, letting him feel the weight of my attention. The state of him. Hair plastered to his skull in wet clumps. Water still dripping from his chin, his shoulders, pooling around his feet on the tiles. The slight tremor in his hands that could have been cold or could have been the shakes that come from trying to sober up too fast. This was our newly promoted Senior Detective—the man I'd toasted less than twenty-four hours ago, the man I'd clapped on the shoulder and told he'd earned it, the man I needed sharp and focused for whatever else Louise Jeffries was about to unload on us. Instead I was looking at someone who'd clearly spent the night pickling himself in celebration and was now trying to pass off a cold shower as rehabilitation. Like putting a fresh coat of paint on a house with a cracked foundation. Like pretending the damage wasn't there because you didn't want to deal with what fixing it would cost.

Part of me wanted to dress him down right here, in the steam and the stink and the dripping silence. Remind him what the badge meant, what the promotion meant, what I expected from officers under my supervision and what happened to the ones who disappointed me. I'd done it before, with other detectives who'd let the job or the bottle or both get on top of them. It was never pleasant, but it was sometimes necessary—the verbal equivalent of grabbing someone by the collar and shaking them until they remembered who they were supposed to be.

But there wasn't time for that conversation. Not here, not now, not with Louise Jeffries sitting in Interview Room Three with her composure cracking at the edges, waiting to tell us about her missing son and her missing brother and the partner she'd never trusted. The dressing-down would have to wait. Right now, I just needed Karl functional enough to sit in a chair and listen to what she had to say.

"Get your clothes on, Detective Jenkins. Detective Lahey is right. You're going to want to hear what this woman has to say."

I let the words settle, watched them register behind his bloodshot eyes. No details. No context. Just enough to make clear this wasn't optional, wasn't a request, wasn't something he could beg off because his head was pounding and his stomach was turning somersaults. Just enough to let him know that whatever he'd been planning for his Saturday morning—sleep, hydration, the slow and painful process of becoming human again—those plans had just been cancelled by someone who outranked him.

I turned to leave, then stopped.

Glen's cubicle. The curtain drawn, steam still rising, the sound of water running in a steady stream. The soap joke had been aimed at Karl, not at me, but Glen had a habit of pushing his luck. Testing where the lines were, seeing what he could get away with, the way some men do when they think nobody's paying attention. Usually harmless enough—crude, tiresome, the sort of bloke you tolerated because he was competent when it counted and the paperwork for anything more wasn't worth the headache it would cause. But I wasn't in the mood for it this morning. Not after Beatrix vanishing through that portal. Not after Louise Jeffries and her missing family. Not after thirty-plus hours without sleep and a case that was already growing arms and legs I couldn't see, reaching in directions I couldn't predict.

I rapped my knuckles against the partition. Sharp. Deliberate. The sound of authority making itself known.

"Detective?"

My voice dropped a register—the tone I'd learned decades ago, back when I was still in uniform, still figuring out how authority worked and what it meant to wield it. The tone that bypassed argument and landed directly in the part of the brain that understood consequences, that triggered the same response in grown men that a parent's voice triggers in children who know they've been caught.

"Yes, Sergeant?" Glen's voice came back strangled, the earlier smugness steamed out of him like grease from a pan. Amazing what a shift in tone could accomplish. Amazing how quickly bravado collapsed when it met something harder than itself.

"You have precisely two minutes to get your arse parked at your desk, or so help me, it'll be graveyard shifts for the rest of the week. Understood?"

Silence. Then frantic rustling from behind the curtain—the sound of a man suddenly finding motivation he hadn't possessed thirty seconds earlier, the slap of wet feet on tiles, the clatter of something being knocked over in the rush.

"Y-Y-Yes, sir!"

I allowed myself the ghost of a smirk—brief, private, gone before anyone could have seen it even if they'd been looking. Glen wasn't a bad copper, not really. Did his job, cleared his cases, didn't cause more problems than he solved. But he needed reminding occasionally that there was a chain of command, that the chain had weight to it, and that the weight could come down on him if he forgot where he stood in the order of things. Everyone needed that reminder sometimes. Even me.

I turned back to Karl, who hadn't moved, who was standing there dripping and shivering and looking at me with an expression I couldn't quite read.

"Now hurry up, Jenkins. I wanted you in that interview room ten minutes ago."

I didn't wait for a response. Didn't look back to see if he was moving, if he was reaching for his clothes, if the message had landed where it needed to land. Just walked out with the same measured pace I'd walked in, leaving them to sort themselves into whatever shape the morning required. They'd manage. They always did. That was what coppers did—they managed, they adapted, they showed up even when showing up was the last thing they wanted to do. And if they didn't, they found another line of work.

The corridor felt colder after the steam of the change room, the air hitting my damp skin and raising gooseflesh along my arms. Quieter too, the silence settling back in like it had been waiting for me to return. I checked my watch. More time had passed than I'd thought. Louise Jeffries was waiting. Had been waiting. Jamie Greyson was missing, along with her son Kain. And Luke Smith's name was out there now, spoken aloud in an interview room, connected to disappearances I couldn't explain and secrets I couldn't share.

I walked back toward the stairs, feeling the weight of it all pressing down on my shoulders like something physical. Running on fumes and caffeine and the stubborn refusal to stop moving that had gotten me through worse days than this one. Chasing threads I couldn't quite see, trying to find the pattern before the whole thing came apart in my hands.

Somewhere in this building, Karl Jenkins was pulling himself together. Somewhere else, Sarah Lahey was waiting to brief him on what he'd missed. And in Interview Room Three, Louise Jeffries sat with her hands folded and her composure fraying, ready to tell us things that would make everything more complicated than it already was.

Just another Saturday morning.