A Thin Blue Line

[Reltzik]

The floor is dark wood and old. There's a cheap knit throw rug in a cream-and-red Navajo-esque pattern covering most of the floor.

Thad refills the food and water and finds nothing in the litter save a few droppings. The hamster promptly stuffs half of the food into its cheeks.

Thad finds what looks like a closet door with a skull-and-crossbones sketch taped to it, captioned with the warning "abandon all hope ye who open me". Opening it nearly crushes Thad under a fold-out closet bed which is a bit too eager to deploy. No periwinkle blue bedsheets.

The printouts seem to be some sort of roster or database printout. There's no labels for the columns. Thad can figure out that some of the entries are names and some are dates, but he can't figure out what those dates represent. There's also some long sequences of numbers that are the wrong length for social security numbers or phone numbers, but could be credit card numbers, case file numbers, or probably a thousand other things. It's ordered by that column. Another column could be social security numbers or badge numbers. "Adamson" appears a few times in one of the "name" columns. Someone's been through the printouts making notes, crossing out some entries, circling others, and adding comments in the margins. The notes are just as abstract as the rest of it, mostly more names, nothing to give a hint about what they mean.

One library book seems to be about rape in the military, judging from the title. Another is a biography of Che Guevara, and a third is a history of the Rodney King case. The kinda-published report turns out to be a master's thesis by someone named Guadalupe Almeida, titled "On The Annexations of Michaelsburg", published by the local University's PoliSci department and checked out from their library. The other three are from a local branch library.

The art supplies look like real art supplies. You find a post-it pad and shade it with a charcoal stick to reveal the imprint of a scrawled address, in 8th precinct's territory, near both the University and High Park. Actually, right where Herman's SUV was towed from.

Thad's just about to start flipping through the sketch pad when he hears voices in the hall (the common area of the apartment building) and a key rattling in the lock.