4338.209 · July 28, 2018 AD
The Gaps Between
There's a window between when you learn something and when the paperwork starts. Ellen Lowe has worked this building for thirty years, long enough to know where the real filing system lives—the one that doesn't show up in any audit, the one built from trust and silence and debts that never get written down. She's been sitting on something. Waiting. And Louise Jeffries walking into the station this morning was the moment she'd been waiting for.
July 28th, 2018. Hobart CIB. The corridor outside Interview Room Three.
Charlie Claiborne has minutes before Karl arrives. Minutes before this becomes official—before the forms and protocols and documented chains of custody lock everything into place. Minutes to decide what kind of copper he is, and whether that answer has changed since the last time he asked himself the question.
Ellen Lowe appears like she always does—not waiting, exactly, but positioned. Thirty years of working this building has taught her where information needs to flow and when. She passes something small. Folded paper. No origin. No audit trail. Just a name that connects to threads Charlie can feel but can't yet see.
Some things you don't read in corridors. Some things deserve a closed door and whatever expression your face needs to make without anyone watching.
Louise is waiting. She's been waiting for ten years, carrying questions no one would answer. Now Charlie's carrying something too—a name that might matter, passed through channels that don't exist, in the space between what gets written down and what actually happens.
The official investigation is about to begin. But some debts get paid off the books.
