other. The waiting bored and irritated her—the confined space, the lack of movement. She would have preferred to be handcuffed to a treadmill so at least she could run while she waited, run until her mind let go of Osman’s face, and everything else. Instead, her leg continued to bounce.
She stopped at the sound of the door opening. Detective Li and a blast of noise from the station beyond pushed into the small room, silenced when the door swung shut. Li balanced a coffee mug and a couple of evidence bags on a prior-generation tablet wrapped in a bulky, police-issue case, like a ballistic vest for consumer hardware.
Li moved leisurely to the other side of the table, put the tablet down, and lowered himself into the chair. He sipped his coffee, set the mug aside, and removed the two evidence bags from atop the tablet—one contained Enda’s bullet-riddled phone, the other held Tiny.
Li unlocked the tablet and scrolled through reports of the event. The soft white glow beneath his face made the already thin man appear gaunt.
“You really stepped in the shit this time, Enda.”
“No ‘Hi, how are you?’ ” Enda said.
“I know how you are; you’re in the shit.”
Enda smiled. She lifted both hands so the chain between her handcuffs rattled against the steel loop embedded in the table. “Cuffs are a little tight.”
Li huffed, but he leaned forward and loosened each of the steel bracelets. Enda pushed the cuffs up her hands, away from the raw skin of her wrists.
“Who’s Natalya Makhanyok?”
“Why?”
“She’s called the station every hour on the hour, offering to pay your bail.”
“She’s a colleague.”
“The officer at the front desk thinks she’s a pain in the ass.”
Li picked up the evidence bag containing Enda’s phone, the bottom of it filled with glinting grains of glass, silicon, and metal.
“I suppose you did this?” Li asked.
“Finger slipped.”
“You know how it looks, don’t you? To the people that don’t want to believe you?”
“I take my privacy, and the privacy of my clients, very seriously,” Enda said.
Li blinked slowly, and Enda was certain it was the only thing that stopped him from rolling his eyes.
“How are things, Yang-Yang?” Enda asked.
“I have a dead kid on my hands, and illegal weapons on the streets; how do you think I’m doing?”
Relief loosed a sigh from Enda’s lips: the attacker whose skull she’d cracked had lived. She didn’t need another body on her conscience. “I didn’t kill the kid.”
Li nodded. “I believe you, but the chief wants to charge you and let the courts sort it out.”
“That’s bullshit, Li, and you know it.”
He tapped on Tiny, and the plastic evidence bag crinkled. “Then for your sake, you better hope this drone saw something.”
Li unlatched a recessed panel on the back of the tablet’s case, revealing a collection of wires. He picked one out, set it aside, and closed the compartment. Next he fished in his jacket pockets and produced a pair of black latex gloves. He put them on, opened the evidence bag, and connected Tiny to the tablet with the length of wire.
Enda watched the footage reflected in Li’s glasses, too small to make out detail—just flurries of violence and flashes of gunfire so bright they washed out the image. The detective grunted as the footage stopped. He wound it back, and turned the tablet around to face Enda.
“Who is this?”
It was the redhead, blurry with motion, pointing his gun at Enda, squinting in preparation for the blast. Hardly a professional.
“I don’t know.”
Li’s eyebrows rose above the rim of his glasses.
“I swear, Yang-Yang. I know what you know, but in higher resolution. Red hair, Caucasian, aged between fifteen and twenty-two, 3D-printed Glock. Have the others talked?”
“No,” Li said. “The one you shot will live, by the way. Not sure if he’ll keep the leg. You’re lucky they’re not pressing charges.”
“They’re lucky the kid can’t,” Enda said, surprised by the edge of anger to her voice.
“Who is the deceased?”
“Osman, Khoder.”
“Who is he to you?” Li asked.
Enda didn’t answer.
“The department’s machine intelligence division has surveillance data that suggests Osman was involved in a ‘job’ on the night of the World Cup. The same night of the apartment break-in that you’re investigating.”
“You don’t have anything on him, do you?”
“If the kid was alive, I’d have enough to scare him, maybe make him talk,” Li said. “He’s dead, but I still have questions, and you’re going to answer them. Who was Osman?”
Enda clenched her teeth and exhaled loud through her nose. “Kid was a hacker, and