4338.213 · August 1, 2018 AD
The Third Time Through the Window
Returning to investigate your own crime scene requires performance skills they don't teach at the academy. Sarah announces her official presence, climbs through familiar broken glass, and navigates rooms that should feel new but don't. Then she finds Gladys Cramer sitting motionless on the couch, eyes vacant with shock. Some witnesses destroy you by talking. Others destroy you by what they've already seen and will never forget.
Some lies require you to call in a handyman. To arrange window repairs at a crime scene you're supposedly investigating for the first time. To secure traumatised witnesses in the back seat of your patrol car whilst simultaneously destroying evidence of your illegal entry. To perform the choreography of professional duty whilst every movement compounds your crimes exponentially.
Sarah drives to Luke's house alone, having lied to Claiborne about bringing backup. She announces her presence for the neighbours, climbs through the broken window for the third time, moves through rooms that remember her boot prints in blood. Expecting nothing except the horror she left behind.
Then she finds Gladys—motionless, shocked, staring at distances only trauma can see. The witness. The person who could destroy everything with a single sentence. The complication Sarah can't arrest her way out of, no matter how tightly the cuffs bite into wrists or how carefully she recites Miranda warnings.
Now Sarah has twenty minutes of driving time to determine what Gladys knows, what she'll say, and whether the phone call arranging emergency window repairs is damage control or just perfectionism whilst the ship goes down. Because fixing broken glass means nothing when there's a corpse cooling beneath the stairs.
