The police officer threatening to arrest me had no idea that the evidence inside my briefcase could destroy his entire department.

The impact was concussive.

The freezing, silt-heavy water of the storm culvert slammed into my chest like a sheet of corrugated iron, knocking every cubic inch of oxygen from my lungs in a single, agonizing gasp.

Darkness swallowed me whole.

The current was terrifying—a brutal, high-velocity torrent of winter runoff that dragged my boots along the slimy concrete floor of the nine-foot conduit, tumbling me forward through the blackness like a discarded rag.

The water was thirty-eight degrees, cold enough to paralyze my muscles in less than thirty seconds, but my fingers remained locked around the leather handle of the briefcase with an iron, desperate rigor mortis.

Above me, through three feet of reinforced concrete and eighty feet of earth, I heard the faint, rapid, and rhythmic thud-thud-thud of Davies' .45 answering the high-velocity chatter of automatic weapons in the pump room.

Then... silence.

The current dragged me half a mile through the concrete throat of the city.

My shoulder slammed into a submerged debris baffle; my hip caught the edge of an iron maintenance ladder; but I didn't let go of the case. I kicked with my boots, fighting to keep my nose and mouth in the narrow six-inch pocket of air between the surging water and the curved ceiling of the pipe.

Then the concrete ended.

A blast of freezing, salt-tinged night air hit my face as the culvert vomited me out into the open basin of the Twelfth Street industrial canal.

I broke the surface, coughing violently, vomiting water and silt, my arms thrashing against the oily black chop of the river.

The canal smelled of creosote, road salt, and diesel fuel. On the western bank, two hundred yards away, the massive, sixty-foot pyramidal mounds of the municipal salt depot sat under towering amber floodlights, their white surfaces glistening like glaciers in the freezing drizzle.

I fought the current, dragging myself toward the rusted steel pilings of an abandoned barge slip.

My fingers, completely numb, clawed at the slimy timber until they found purchase on an old hemp mooring line. With the last reserve of strength in my shivering frame, I hauled my body up out of the river, rolling onto the gravel apron of the salt depot, collapsing onto my back in the freezing slush.

I lay there for two minutes, staring up at the slate-gray sky, gasping for breath, my teeth chattering so violently that my jaw ached.

Beside my hip lay the briefcase.

The heavy leather was soaked, caked in black river mud, but the brass tumblers remained locked.

I dragged myself upright, leaning against the timber piling.

Down the service road behind the salt depot, two sets of high-intensity headlights turned the corner, their beams cutting through the freezing mist.

The vehicle was not a police cruiser.

It was an unmarked, dark blue Ford F-250 pickup truck with government municipal plates and a heavy steel brush guard on the front bumper.

The truck slid to a halt on the wet gravel ten yards from where I stood shivering.

The driver’s door opened.

Stepping down into the slush, wearing a heavy sheepskin coat and holding a thermal wool blanket in his hands, was Marcus Cole—my former investigative partner, the man who had received the digital transmission from my briefcase while I was standing in Judge Carter’s chambers.

Marcus walked across the gravel, his boots crunching rhythmically, and threw the heavy wool blanket around my shoulders without a word.

"Did you get it, Elena?" Marcus asked, his deep, steady voice anchoring me back to reality.

I lifted the briefcase from the mud.