Page 4 of The Fighter
“But, Leo, sorting irrelevant files in the basement has nothing to do with real police work. I would much rather come along and see you in action.”
He was already walking away, signaling who could come and who couldn’t. Two of the men close to us looked as disappointed as I felt.
Hannigan, the man the Huntsmen had found, was believed to have killed three men in one night two weeks ago. He’d been on the run ever since and his capture was exciting to all of us.
“It’s not too late to change your mind,” I called after Leo, but he didn’t look back and just threw an answer over his shoulder.
“Stay here, Raven. It’s a fucking order!”
I made a mocking facial expression but was smart enough not to mouth back.
Station Seven fell quiet the minute Leo and the other lucky officers left.
Monroe, another young officer in training, looked over at me and the small smirk on his face annoyed me. “What are you looking at?”
Monroe stood by a large screen where documents from the case he was working on were open. “Shouldn’t you be down in the archives?”
“Shouldn’t you shut your mouth?” It bothered me that he got to be involved in real police work while all I got to do was categorize boring and inconsequential cases of first-time theft and fraud.
Walking with clattering steps like I could stamp out the unfairness of it all, I left the large room and took the back stairs down to the basement.
Cursing in a low mumble, I returned to the four large piles I had already made. The cabinet in front of me was just one out of twenty-two cabinets and it was still half full.
According to Leo’s instructions, I had divided the cases according to the level of crime and number of years the case had been unsolved.
He was just trying to find a way to keep me busy and make his life as my mentor easier, but it was pointless work. Leo had no intention of opening up any of these cases, and the worst part was that they were all digitized anyway. Why anyone insisted on keeping paper copies was a mystery to me, and the best explanation I could come up with was that it worked as a punishment to crush a person’s soul.
Picking up a handful of the files that I hadn’t yet looked through, I scanned the first page in one of them. “Theft of drone.” I placed it in the pile with the lowest priority.
The next one was a case from 2407 of assault, but the accuser had been drunk and didn’t remember any details about the man who allegedly attacked him and broke his nose. A forty-one-year-old case like that with no clues to work on was destined to stay archived.
With a sigh, I placed it on top of the last file and scanned the next one.
The category of the case had me frowning and reading aloud: “Death by suicide – huh!”
This case had been filed in the wrong place, but one detail caught my eye and made me stare: the name of the young woman who had died. “Dina Aurelius.”
With my head still in the file, I walked over to sit by a desk, my index finger trailing over every detail of the file to confirm my suspicion that this woman was related to our ruler.
Name: Dina Aurelius
Closest family: Daughter of Marcus Aurelius and Erika Aurelius. Sister of Khan and Magni Aurelius.
Date of birth: February 3rd, 2400
Date of death: March 18th, 2415
Status: Married
Cause of death: Suicide by fall from window.
I sat back in my chair, a small triangle forming between my eyebrows as I wondered why I had never heard about a sister to Khan and Magni.
Mila, my best friend since childhood, was the adopted daughter of Magni and because of that, I’d been a regular visitor at the Gray Manor, which housed the ruling family. I couldn’t recall seeing a picture at the Gray Manor of a sister.
According to this file, she had been dead for thirty-three years. Another glance at her status had me swallowing hard. Fifteen years old and married. Intellectually, I knew it had been the norm back then, but it was disturbing to think that a young woman seven years my junior had been married.
There weren’t many details in this file, but my fingers began tingling and my head was popping with questions.What if Dina didn’t jump from that window?
