The Recording
Warden Samuel Price was not a dramatic man.
That was what made the moment so terrible for Briggs.
Price descended from the tower with two outside investigators and a woman in a dark blue suit carrying a slim equipment case. By the time they crossed the yard, the gates had already locked down. No one in or out. The entire prison seemed to shift around the exercise yard like a machine reversing direction.
Briggs tried his old voice on the warden. “Sir, this inmate is agitating the yard with fabricated—”
“Enough,” Price said.
He did not raise his voice.
He did not need to.
One of the investigators—Internal Affairs, judging by the badge clipped inside his coat—stepped forward with a small digital recorder sealed in an evidence bag.
Nina recognized it instantly.
Her shoulders tightened.
The recorder had belonged to Tom Arledge, her husband.
It was scratched along one edge where she had once dropped it on a motel parking lot in New Mexico. She had bought it for him because he still trusted devices more than notebooks. He used to say machines told the truth more faithfully than frightened men.
The investigator held it up. “This was recovered from a storage unit rented under a false name linked to Lieutenant Briggs. It contains an audio file from the day of the convoy breach.”
Briggs went white.
The warden looked at him once, then nodded to the investigator.
The yard went silent.
The file played through the small speaker, thin and crackling in the open air.
Wind. Engine noise. A woman’s voice—Nina’s—saying, “Route’s wrong.”
Tom answering, “I know. Briggs changed it.”
Then another voice, unmistakable.
Briggs.
“Take the case. Leave the bodies. If Serrano survives, put her in the burn unit under another name until transfer. Crowe’s crew will clean up the rest.”
The recording stopped.
No one in the yard moved.
It was one thing to suspect corruption.
It was another to hear a man arrange murder in his own voice.
Briggs looked around at the faces—guards, inmates, warden, investigators, Nina, Gareth—and seemed to understand all at once that authority had abandoned him. He bolted.
He made it three strides before Gareth caught him.
Not with a punch.
Not with revenge.
He simply seized Briggs’s wrist, twisted the taser free, and drove him face-first onto the concrete.
Two guards piled on. Internal Affairs snapped cuffs over the lieutenant’s wrists. He shouted curses. Then threats. Then excuses. Then names.
He kept talking long after no one cared.
Nina watched without triumph.
Some losses do not lighten because the guilty man is finally forced to the ground.
The investigator in the blue suit stepped to her. “Ms. Serrano, we can move you to protective custody immediately.”
May you like
Nina’s eyes stayed on the recorder in the evidence bag. “I’m done hiding.”
The woman studied her for a moment and nodded. “Then let’s finish it the right way.”
