Chapter 2: Interrogation Room Confrontation
The warehouse cold had seeped into Kamin’s bones, and the coffee from the precinct hadn’t chased it out. It was a deep, damp chill that felt permanent, matching the image burned behind his eyes: the woman on the dock, arranged like broken art, the careful, cruel geometry of her injuries. They’d worked the scene for twelve hours straight, a silent, efficient tandem. No personal words, just the shared language of evidence bags, photo logs, and low-voiced observations. It was easier that way.
Now they had him in the box.
The suspect’s name was Dale Ricks. Freelance dockworker. A prio for assault. His alibi was tissue paper, and fibers from his work gloves were a preliminary match to ones found near the body. He wasn’t a mastermind. He was a mean-eyed man with thick forearms and a sneer that hadn’t left his face since intake.
Kamin leaned against the wall by the door, arms crossed. Let Jade lead. Jade was better at the performance, the psychological chess. He sat across the scarred metal table, relaxed, almost bored, flipping through a blank notepad.
“So, Dale. Talk me through Tuesday night again. From the top.”
Ricks scratched at the stubble on his neck, the cuffs clinking. “Told you. Home. Watched the game. Slept.”
“Alone?”
“Yeah.”
“No one to vouch for you. No phone calls, no pizza delivery. Just you and the game.” Jade didn’t look up. “Quiet night.”
“I like quiet.”
“The woman on dock fourteen didn’t get a quiet night,” Kamin said, his voice flat. He pushed off the wall and took the other chair, his movement making Ricks’ eyes flicker toward him. “She got a long one. A painful one.”
“Don’t know nothing about no woman.”
Jade sighed, as if disappointed. He lifted his head finally, meeting Ricks’ gaze. The playful captain was gone. This was something colder, sharper. “Your gloves, Dale. We found them in your locker. Interesting place for work gloves, a locker miles from the dock you were supposedly working. The lab’s running them now. What do you think they’ll find? Salt water? Fish scale? Or blood and epithelial cells?”
A bead of sweat traced a path through the grime on Ricks’ temple. “You planted that shit.”
“We’re not gardeners, Dale. We’re cops.” Jade leaned forward, elbows on the table. The single flickering light overhead threw the angles of his face into stark relief. “You’re a strong guy. The woman was what, one-forty? One-fifty? Easy to maneuver. To position. Was it the positioning that got you off? Or was it the cutting?”
Ricks’ sneer tightened. His eyes darted between them, calculating. He was cornered, and cornered animals either cower or lunge. He opted for a lunge of a different kind.
His gaze slid over Jade, then Kamin, a slow, insolent drag. The sneer morphed into a leer. “You two always work as a pair? Pretty detectives. Like a matched set.” He let out a low chuckle, wet and unpleasant. “All that tension in here… you getting off on this? On me?” His eyes locked on Jade, then back to Kamin, knowingly. “Or on each other? Bet you are. Bet you’re fucking. That how you get your kicks before you come fuck with guys like me?”
The air in the room turned to solid concrete.
Kamin felt his muscles lock. He saw the change in Jade—a total, terrifying stillness. It wasn’t anger. It was something prior to anger. The relaxed posture vanished, replaced by a coiled potential that hummed in the small space.
Jade stood up. The movement was smooth, silent. He didn’t say a word.
He walked around the table.
“Jade,” Kamin warned, his own voice taut.
Jade didn’t hear him. He grabbed Ricks by the front of his shirt and wrenched him out of the chair. In one brutal motion, he slammed him against the one-way mirror. The impact was a sickening thud of body against glass. The frame rattled. Ricks gasped, the breath knocked out of him, his leer replaced by wide-eyed shock.
Jade leaned in, his face inches from Ricks’. His voice was a barely audible scrape of gravel. “Say that again.”
“Captain!” Kamin was on his feet, moving. This was a one-way ticket to a lawsuit, to IA, to disaster. He grabbed Jade’s arm, trying to pull him back. “Hey. Stop.”
Jade shrugged him off with a brutal twist, his focus absolute. He shoved his forearm against Ricks’ throat, pinning him to the glass. The suspect wheezed.
Kamin moved in again, this time wedging himself between Jade and the wall, one hand on Jade’s chest, the other still gripping his bicep. He could feel the frantic hammer of Jade’s heart under his palm, the heat radiating through his dress shirt. The scent of him—cedar, sweat, sharp adrenaline—flooded Kamin’s senses, a disorienting callback to the darkened bedroom.
“Let go. Now.” Kamin’s order was a desperate growl, meant for Jade alone.
For a second, they struggled, a silent, fierce contest of strength. Jade’s body was rigid against his, every muscle corded. Kamin pushed, and for a moment, they were pressed together from chest to thigh in the cramped space between the table and the wall. It was intimate and violent, a grotesque parody of their embrace hours before.
Jade’s head turned. His lips were a breath away from Kamin’s ear, his voice a hot, private whisper that sliced through the chaos. “Still think this is a mistake?”
The words were a lit match dropped into gasoline. All of it—the kiss, the feel of his hands, the cold walk home, the sterile coffee in the office—exploded behind Kamin’s eyes. He froze.
Jade used that fraction of a second. He shoved back, not at Ricks, but against Kamin, breaking his hold. He took one step back, his chest heaving. He smoothed his tie with a sharp, furious jerk, his eyes never leaving Ricks’ purple-tinged face.
The entire interaction had lasted maybe eight seconds.
Ricks slid down the glass, coughing, rubbing his throat, but his eyes were bright with a new, ugly understanding. He’d seen it. He’d hit a nerve he hadn’t even known was there, and the feedback had been seismic.
Jade turned, walked back to the table, and sat down. He picked up his notepad. His hand was perfectly steady. When he spoke, his voice was calm, dead calm, like the flat surface of a knife.
“Let’s continue, Dale. You were telling us about your gloves.”
The interrogation proceeded with a chilling, brutal efficiency. Jade was a scalpel, cutting away every lie, every evasion, his questions precise and unrelenting. He referenced details from the scene only the killer would know—the specific order of the wounds, the type of knot used to bind her ankles. He never raised his voice again. He didn’t need to.
Ricks, shattered and scared, confessed twenty minutes later. It poured out of him—a robbery gone wrong, then the rage, then the “fun” of it. He signed the statement with a hand that trembled.
Jade collected the papers, stood, and nodded to Kamin. They walked out, leaving Ricks to be processed.
The hall outside was quiet. The observer behind the mirror—probably Miller—had wisely vanished. The hum of the precinct felt distant.
Jade stopped at a water cooler, filled a cone-shaped cup, and drank it slowly. He didn’t look at Kamin. “Write up the confession. Lead with the physical evidence, then the statement. Make it indisputable.”
“What the hell was that?” Kamin’s voice was low, thrumming with a fury that was half horror, half something else he couldn’t name.
Jade crushed the cup and tossed it in the trash. “That was closing a case.”
“That was assaulting a suspect in custody! He’ll have bruises. He’ll claim coercion. He saw—”
“He saw nothing that matters,” Jade interrupted, finally turning. His eyes were dark pools, utterly unreadable. “He’s a murderer who’s now confessed. The case is closed. The city is safer. Do your job, Inspector.”
He walked away, his shoes clicking a steady, definitive rhythm on the linoleum until he turned the corner and was gone.
Kamin stood there, the scent of blood and coffee still in his nose, the ghost pressure of Jade’s body against his still burning on his skin. The whisper echoed, a loop in his mind.
Still think this is a mistake?
In the sterile, flickering light of the interrogation room hallway, with a signed confession in his hand and the map of a monster’s violence fresh in his head, he had no answer at all.
Back at his desk, he typed mechanically. The words flowed, professional and clear. He documented Ricks’ confession in meticulous detail, omitting only the thirty seconds of chaos. The report was a masterpiece of objective fact. It felt like a lie.
His phone buzzed. A departmental email. The subject line: Mandatory Use-of-Force Refresher – All Patrol and Investigative Staff.
He stared at it. Coincidence was a fairy tale.
As he was proofreading the final paragraph, Miller slunk over, dropping into the adjacent chair with a creak. “Heard you got the confession. Nice work.” He paused, choosing his words. “Things got a little… heated in there, huh?”
Kamin didn’t look up from his screen. “He confessed. That’s all that goes in the log.”
“Right. Sure.” Miller drummed his fingers. “Look, the guy’s a piece of shit. Everyone gets it. And the Cap… he’s got a thing about cases like this. The cruel ones. Takes it personal sometimes.”
“It’s not personal. It’s the job.” The words tasted like ash.
Miller just nodded, not believing it for a second. “Whatever you say. Just… watch your back, Kamin. That kind of heat, it splashes.”
He ambled away. Kamin finished the report, filed it, and closed his laptop. The clock read 2:17 AM. The bullpen was a tomb of empty chairs and glowing monitor lights.
He grabbed his jacket. The scent of cedar was faint now, buried under the day’s grim odors. As he passed the captain’s office, he saw a crack of light under the door.
He kept walking.
Outside, the city was different. Softer. The violence of the dock and the interrogation room felt sealed behind him, in a building of concrete and bad light. The night air was cool. He walked, not toward his apartment, but without direction.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. Not an email this time. A text.
J: Report filed?
Kamin stopped under a streetlight. He typed back.
K: Yes. Confession is logged. Case is closed.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Reappeared.
J: Good.
Then, a minute later.
J: It wasn’t a mistake. But it can’t happen again. Get some sleep.
Kamin read the words until they blurred. He didn’t reply. He put the phone away and looked up at the few stars visible between the buildings. The confession was in the system. The monster was in a cage. A direct order had been given, and then immediately contradicted in the same breath.
He started walking again, faster now, the physical action the only outlet for the storm inside him. The case was closed. Nothing else was.
Nothing else was. Sleep didn’t come. The four walls of his apartment felt like a holding cell. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the flat calm on Jade’s face after the violence, a mask welded into place. He heard the whisper, a brand on his mind. He smelled the cedar, buried under blood and bleach, but still there.
At 5 AM, he gave up. He pulled on running gear and hit the pavement. The impact of his shoes against concrete was a percussive therapy. He ran until his lungs burned and the cut on his side screamed in protest, a bright, clarifying pain. He ran until his mind was blank, a static of exhaustion.
The precinct at 7 AM was a different beast, buzzing with the day-shift gossip. Ricks’ confession was the talk of the bullpen. Kamin kept his head down, brewing a pot of sludge-like coffee. Miller glanced at him but said nothing. The unspoken rule held: what happened in the box, stayed in the box.
Jade’s office door was open. He was on the phone, his voice calm and authoritative. He glanced up as Kamin passed, his eyes lingering for a fraction of a second—a scan, assessing—before flicking back to his notes. Professional. Impenetrable.
Kamin’s desk had a new file. A burglary pattern in the North End. Paperwork. It was a message. Get back to normal. Do the small work.
He was deep into witness statements when a shadow fell across his desk. He knew the shape of it.
“My office. Five minutes.” Jade’s tone offered no argument. He was already walking away.
Kamin finished his sentence, saved the file, and took a slow breath. He walked in, closing the door behind him. Jade stood at the window, back to him, holding two fresh coffees.
“Close it,” Jade said, meaning the blinds.
Kamin did. The room sank into a grey, muted light.
Jade turned and held out a cup. “Here.”
“I have one.”
“This is better.” It was from the artisanal place three blocks over, the one Jade swore by. Kamin took it. Their fingers brushed. Jade didn’t flinch.
“The Ricks confession is solid,” Jade began, sipping his own coffee. “DA’s thrilled. Commissioner sent a congratulatory email.”
“That’s good.”
“It is.” Jade set his cup down and leaned against his desk, facing Kamin. He looked tired up close, a faint network of lines at the corners of his eyes that hadn’t been there a month ago. “What you saw yesterday… the thing with the suspect.”
“I didn’t see anything,” Kamin said, the rehearsed line falling flat between them.
“Don’t.” Jade’s voice was quiet, final. “Not with me. You saw it. It happened.” He pushed off the desk, taking a step closer. The space in the office seemed to shrink. “He was going to walk, Kamin. A good lawyer, the shaky circumstantial evidence we had going in… he’d have been out in six months. Now he’s never getting out. That’s the math.”
“The math is we almost lost the case because you put your hands on him,” Kamin countered, his own low voice tightening. “He could recant, claim duress. IA could—”
“IA won’t.” Jade cut him off. “Because you wrote a perfect report. And because the result is a vicious killer off the board. Everyone loves a clean win.” He studied Kamin’s face. “That’s not what’s eating you.”
The accuracy was a surgical strike. Kamin looked away, at the closed blinds, anywhere else.
“It was the whisper, wasn’t it?” Jade’s words were hardly audible. “Using that. Using us. In that room, with that animal. That’s what you can’t fit into your report.”
Kamin’s coffee cup felt dangerously fragile in his hand. The heat was the only real thing. “Yes.”
Jade nodded, as if confirming a theory. “It was effective. It broke his focus. It broke yours, which let me break him. It was a tactic.”
“Bullshit.”
The word hung there, raw and honest.
A slow, humorless smile touched Jade’s lips. “Okay. Fine. Maybe a part of it was just for me. To see if it was still there.” He took the final step, now well inside Kamin’s personal space. The scent of his shampoo, his skin, was unmistakable. “Is it?”
Kamin couldn’t move. The professional boundaries, the rules, they were just faint ink on paper, dissolving in the charged air between them. He remembered the feel of Jade’s heartbeat under his hand, a frantic bird against his palm.
“The city is full of rooms, Kamin. Not all of them have two-way mirrors.” Jade’s voice was a low current. “Some are just rooms. What happens in them… that’s a different kind of math.”
He reached out, not for Kamin, but for the coffee cup in his hand. He took it carefully and set it on the desk. Then his hand returned, his knuckles brushing just once, fleetingly, against Kamin’s. The touch was electric, a jolt that traveled straight to his spine.
“Your call,” Jade said, and his eyes were dark, yielding nothing and everything. “Always has been.”
He moved back, putting the desk between them again, the moment shattering like dropped glass. He picked up the burglary file from his desk and held it out. “The pattern in the North End. I want your eyes on it. See if it connects to the fencing operation we busted last fall.”
Kamin took the file, his fingers numb. The transition was so abrupt it left him reeling.
“Dismissed,” Jade said, turning his chair toward his computer monitor, the conversation clearly over.
Kamin walked out, the file in one hand, the ghost of that knuckle-brush burning on the other. The bullpen noise washed over him, meaningless. His phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out, expecting another text. It was a calendar notification.
Mandatory Use-of-Force Refresher – Today, 1400 hrs. Conference Room B.
He looked back at the closed blinds of Jade’s office. A tactic. A test. A different kind of math. The words swirled, a confusing storm. He had a file to work, a class to attend, a city full of rooms.
His call.
He walked to his desk, sat down, and opened the burglary file. He read the same line four times without comprehending it. The hum of the precinct faded into a distant roar. All he could hear was his own heart, pounding a single, relentless question against his ribs.
All he could hear was his own heart, pounding a single, relentless question against his ribs. The words from Jade’s office—a different kind of math—repeated in a dizzying loop, utterly dismantling his focus. He shoved the burglary file aside and stood, needing air that wasn’t recycled through the precinct’s vents.
The roof access door groaned on its hinges. The morning sky was a washed-out grey, the city sprawled below in blocks of concrete and glass. He leaned on the parapet, the cold stone biting through his shirt. The silence up here was vast, broken only by the wind and the muted orchestra of traffic.
“They usually assign this spot for brooding after you fuck up a case, not close one.”
Kamin didn’t turn. He recognized the footfall, the cadence. Jade came to stand beside him, not too close, following his gaze out over the skyline. He held two paper cups from the cart downstairs, steam curling into the chill.
“I’m not brooding. I’m thinking.”
“Worse.” Jade offered a cup. “Here. It’s tea. You look like you’ve mainlined enough coffee to vibrate through walls.”
Kamin accepted it. The warmth seeped into his hands. “You don’t like tea.”
“I’m full of surprises.” Jade took a sip from his own cup, his profile sharp against the pale sky. “The Use-of-Force refresher is this afternoon. I’ll be conducting it.”
“Of course you will.”
“It’ll be textbook. Dry as hell. No practical demonstrations.” He shot Kamin a sidelong glance, a ghost of his old smirk playing on his lips. “Unless you volunteer.”
Kamin kept his eyes forward. “Not a chance.”
“Wise.” Jade fell silent for a long moment. The wind tugged at his dark hair. “About earlier. In my office. I shouldn’t have… the thing with the file, the brush of the hand. It was unprofessional.”
“You don’t do things by accident.”
“No,” Jade admitted softly. “I don’t.”
The admission hung between them, fragile and heavy. A gull circled a distant building, crying out. Kamin finally turned to look at him. “What do you want, Jade? Really. Not the captain. You.”
Jade met his gaze, his dark eyes holding a surprising vulnerability. “I want to not have almost strangled a suspect yesterday because he implied I was sleeping with my best detective.” He paused, letting the raw honesty settle. “And I want to stop pretending that the implication is the worst part.”
The air left Kamin’s lungs. The directness was a physical blow, stripping away all the layered games. Below them, a siren wailed, fading into the grid of streets.
“You can’t just say that,” Kamin managed, his voice rough.
“Why not? The math is terrible, Kamin. The risk is catastrophic. I know the rulebook backwards. I wrote half the damn supplements.” Jade set his tea down on the parapet and faced him fully. “But there’s this other calculation. One where I watch you walk out of a room, and it feels like a tactical error I can’t afford.”
Kamin stared at him, the world narrowing to the space between their bodies. The city, the job, the consequences—they all seemed to recede into a dull roar. All that was left was the man in front of him, finally speaking a truth that mirrored the chaos in his own chest.
“So what’s the sum?” Kamin heard himself ask.
Before Jade could answer, the roof access door banged open. Miller stood there, blinking in the daylight. “There you guys are. Dispatch just patched through a call. A priority one. Body found in a rental car over in the Lansing Avenue garage. Female. Scene’s fresh.”
The spell shattered. The professional mantle slammed back down over Jade’s features so fast it was audible. He was already moving, grabbing his cup. “We’re on our way. Notify the ME. Secure the perimeter.”
He was at the door before he paused, looking back at Kamin. All the vulnerability was gone, sealed away behind the captain’s mask. But his eyes held a promise, a deferred answer. “Let’s go.”
The drive was a silent blur. Kamin drove, his hands steady on the wheel, his mind anything but. Jade spent it on the phone, his voice clipped, orchestrating the scene response. The tea sat cold in the cup holder.
The parking garage was a concrete labyrinth, already swirling with red and blue lights. The uniformed first responder looked young, his face pale. “Third level, sir. Silver sedan. It’s… it’s not like the dock.”
They took the stairs. The smell hit them first—coppery blood, yes, but underneath, the acrid, sweet smell of chemicals. Ammonia and something else.
The car was parked neatly in a spot. Through the driver’s side window, they could see a woman slumped toward the passenger seat. Her hair was fanned out, obscuring her face. The windows were fogged from the inside.
“No visible trauma from here,” Kamin murmured, his detective’s brain engaging despite the storm inside him.
Jade nodded, pulling on nitrile gloves. “Miller, get CSU up here. Kamin, with me.”
They approached the vehicle. Jade used a pen to carefully try the driver’s door. It was unlocked. He pulled it open.
The chemical smell rolled out in a thick, choking wave. The woman was young, maybe early twenties. She was dressed for a night out—a silky top, good jeans. No signs of struggle, no blood. Her skin had a strange, waxy pallor, and her lips were tinged a faint blue. On the passenger seat sat a small, unmarked brown bottle, lid off.
“Poison,” Kamin said quietly.
Jade leaned in, careful not to disturb anything. He didn’t touch her. His eyes scanned the car’s interior—the clean floor mats, the empty purse, the keys still in the ignition. He looked back at her face, at the peaceful, almost serene expression frozen there.
“This isn’t a crime of passion,” Jade said, his voice low and certain. “This is a delivery.”
He straightened up, his gaze sweeping the concrete pillars and shadowed corners of the garage. “This is a message. And we’re not the only ones here to read it.”
He turned, his eyes locking with Kamin’s. All the personal tension was gone, forged now into a single, focused beam of professional intensity. The unanswered question from the roof was still there, but it was buried under the immediate, palpable danger of the scene.
“Somebody watched her die,” Jade said, the words hanging in the chemical-tainted air. “And they might be watching us right now.”
Kamin felt the skin on the back of his neck prickle. He turned slowly, scanning the dim, endless rows of cars. Every shadow seemed to hold a shape. The garage, moments ago just a location, now felt like a cage.
Jade’s phone buzzed. He looked at the screen, his expression hardening. “The registration’s a dead end. Fake ID.” He pocketed the phone. “This was planned. This is the start of something.”
He moved closer to Kamin, his shoulder almost brushing his. His whisper was for Kamin alone, barely a breath. “Forget the math. This is the job. And I need you clear.”
Kamin gave a single, sharp nod. The pounding in his ribs wasn’t a question anymore. It was a drumbeat. He looked from the dead woman in the car to the dark maze of the garage, then back to Jade’s determined, flint-like eyes.
“I’m clear,” he said, and for the first time all day, it was the truth.