"Nobody in this building works for you anymore," he replied loudly enough for the clerks to hear. At the photocopier, a young woman with dark curls stopped feeding pages into the machine. Her name tag read IVY PENROSE, and she held a sheet motionless in both hands while Copeland continued. He described Monica as a woman he had found tearing apart a suspicious vehicle with a wrench in her hand, and said no reasonable officer would have guessed she was a federal commander. No one laughed at the story, but he seemed to find his own version increasingly entertaining.
"You might have guessed if you'd let me retrieve my identification," Monica answered. Copeland leaned toward her across the desk, lowering his voice until the surrounding clerks had to strain to hear.
"That gun had no paper, Shepard. No registered owner anybody was going to call, no trail. Nobody misses a gun with no paper." Monica kept her face still, though a cold sensation moved through her chest at the specificity of his words. She asked him whether he wanted that statement included in her next report, and he smiled without answering.
He tapped twice on her desk and walked out. When the door swung shut, the office manager resumed eating her granola bar as though nothing unusual had happened. Ivy fed one page into the copier, pulled it out again, and approached Monica's workstation. She laid a single printed sheet face down on the desk and returned to her machine without speaking. Monica turned the page over and found the document-destruction schedule, with the FRTF arrest-report box listed for Thursday under a request from Captain B.
A little later, Harriet called and listened while Monica described the missing box and Ivy's printout. Harriet immediately contacted the federal records custodian, identifying the arrest reports as potentially relevant to pending litigation, disclosure duties, and allegations of fabricated evidence. The custodian referred the request to agency counsel, who authorized a preservation hold while the matter was reviewed. By two that afternoon, the box had returned to a secure shelf with a red label reading LEGAL HOLD - DO NOT DESTROY. Monica photographed the label without touching the box.
That evening she reconstructed Copeland's visit on a fresh legal pad, recording his arrival time, the people who had been present, and the words she remembered exactly. The phrase "Nobody misses a gun with no paper" received its own line, because it sounded less like an insult than an explanation of how he believed he could get away with something. At 9:45 her phone buzzed with a voicemail from a blocked number. The voice was low, calm, and impossible to place by age or gender, and the message contained only five words and a place: "Cory Hariston. County jail. Thursdays."
Monica played it again and then called Ralph. She asked him to repeat the voice from the earlier telephone call, including its pauses, and he tried his best to describe the measured, unhurried way the stranger had spoken. He could not swear the voices were identical, but he thought they could have been. The connection unsettled him. "Whoever that is knows where you've been looking," he said, "and they're not calling a number they want you to call back."