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in the habit of picking people up for suspicious activity, whether there were legitimate grounds to do so or not. Connor made sure his people didn’t keep incriminating evidence on them, since they never knew when they might be rounded up and searched.
     
    Kelvin didn’t answer, and Connor could see a muscle rippling in his jaw.

    That was when it hit Connor—the impact so intense it was visceral. He jerked out of his chair. “Brook had taken Ammie’s place today. He has all the correspondence for the north side.”

    “Yeah,” Kelvin said. “They’ll find it when they search him.”

    Moving immediately into crisis mode, Connor strode toward the office door. “Who do we have over there now?”

    “No one on duty. We’re short-handed because Ammie is sick and Valance is out of—”

    Connor didn’t bother to let him finish. “Contact Torrence at police headquarters. She should be on shift now. Tell her to be prepared to do anything she necessary to keep Brook from being searched when he arrives.” He stopped at the elevator for a moment and saw that it was on the bottom floor. The creaky elevator was too slow to wait for, so he pushed through the door to the stairs and started down them two at a time.

    Kelvin, already working on the touchpad of his phone, kept in step with him. “I will. And I’ll send Marius over. He’s not too far away.”

    “Good.” Connor cleared the last of the stairs and burst out onto the city street, the dirty humidity of the late afternoon slamming into him like a blow. His glasses fogged up slightly after the cool of the building. Glancing at his watch, he saw it was nearly five o’clock. “Jenson’s in that neighborhood. He’ll be getting off work. I’ll use him. We might have time. If not, tell Torrence and Marius to be prepared.”

    Without waiting for Kelvin to respond, Connor jogged down half a block to where his car was parked. The door rattled slightly as he slammed it, but the engine rolled into life as he turned the ignition. Like everything else he owned, the car was unpretentious, of good quality, and had seen better days. He pulled out into traffic and pressed the accelerator, trying to estimate how long it would take him to get to the north side at this time of day.

    Barely sliding through a traffic signal, he grabbed his phone and called Jenson.
     
    He prayed they wouldn’t be too late.
    ***
    Twenty minutes later, a police van plowed violently into the back of Connor’s car.

    The impact was loud and jarring, and the airbag in front of him deployed with another burst of sound.

    Connor was momentarily swallowed by the airbag—winded and disoriented by the brutal motion and the momentum of the crash.
     
    If he hadn’t been expecting it, then it would have been worse.

    Even so, the sudden impact and the grating noise of his car being mangled nauseated him. The skin of one side of his face burned, probably scraped up by the air bag. He’d taken his glasses off before the accident, so at least they were intact. As the airbag deflated, Connor sat behind the wheel and breathed deeply, assessing his condition and composing himself.
     
    His job here wasn’t over yet.

    Putting his glasses back on, he tried the driver’s side door. It opened with a little more force than normal so Connor was able to get out.
     
    The damage was mostly to the rear end of the car. It had been crushed by the much larger van, and the sight of it inspired an intense pang of regret.

    He’d liked this car, and it wasn’t going to be easy to replace.
     
    Some things were more important than that, though, so he concentrated on what he still had to do. The two police officers on patrol were disembarking from the van. One of them approached Connor while the other went to the back to inspect the rest of the damage.

    Jenson’s car had come out best. It was his sudden swerving that had caused the accident, and he’d done it very adeptly—managing to side-swipe the police van,