Free The Evidence Room: A Mystery by Cameron Harvey

here, you know? Dealing with this stuff gets kinda … you know. Heavy.” He clicked off the paint-splattered boom box. “So this is your first time here, huh?”
    “Yep,” Josh said. “I worked narcotics. Not a lot of cold cases.” Except my own , he added to himself.
    “Where you came in, that’s where law enforcement comes if they want to request any evidence we might have. Then we have two days to find it. That’s the fun part.”
    “Is there an automated system?” Josh hadn’t passed anything resembling a computer.
    “Sure is,” Samba said, tapping his wrinkled forehead with his index finger. “It’s all up here. We have almost two thousand pieces of evidence housed here, and I’ve organized it into categories.”
    “But what about the state? Don’t they make you log everything in a database?”
    Samba frowned. “I don’t trust those state guys,” he said. “I’ve been cataloguing evidence for thirty years. I know how to preserve things right and how to find them. I don’t need a computer. They can send me all the nasty letters they want, I’m not changing.” He lowered his voice, as though afraid someone might be listening. “Fuck the establishment.”
    Behind them, Josh heard the high-pitched bleat of a cell phone. Samba ignored it, leading Josh in the other direction.
    “Is that your phone?”
    Samba laughed. “No. That’s from our electronic evidence aisle. There’s always something chirping over there. You’d be surprised; sometimes these old machines still have a spark in ’em.”
    Samba led them down a row of enormous yellowing refrigerators, all buzzing at different frequencies. “This is all the biohazard stuff,” Samba said. “But if you decide to bring lunch—and I know every man’s got his own preference for barbecue, I myself am partial to Piggy Jim’s on the corner—you can put it in the big silver one on the end.” Josh stepped over a puddle of stagnant green liquid seeping from beneath one of the refrigerators. Samba had placed a plastic CAUTION sign next to the spill. Who was he warning, Josh wondered. Did anyone else even work here?
    “So how often do you get a request for evidence?”
    “Oh, you know, every so often,” Samba said. “I think the last one was two months ago, May. You know, the newer evidence stays with the property clerk of the PD for about a year before they bring it to me here. There’s less demand for older stuff, but I make sure everything is where someone can find it.”
    “How long do you keep the evidence here?”
    “Eighty years is what the statute says,” Samba confided. “Plus they ask us to dump out anything that’ll get you drunk or high. Those cops are no fun. But I’ve never thrown anything away, and I don’t think the guy before me did either.”
    Samba reached the end of the row and plopped down on the arm of an overstuffed paisley sofa with its entire midsection cut out, right down to the foam. “Everything we have in here—every piece of evidence—well, to me it represents an injury to somebody. Just ’cause it’s old, that doesn’t mean you forget about it. It’s never too late to get justice. Believe me, I should know.”
    Josh nodded. Here was a person who cared about his job, a custodian of tragedies, his own and others’—a guy who thought that maybe the system didn’t have all the answers. A guy who worked in a warehouse full of unsolved crimes and somehow still believed in justice.
    Josh’s second cell phone, the throwaway, began to vibrate in a circle on his abandoned table.
    “One of your girlfriends, I bet.” Samba winked, and Josh reached for the phone.
    “ Bonjour, Josh.” Pea.
    Josh ducked behind one of the rows of boxes. “Hey. I’m at work. I can’t really—”
    “I have a lead on Liana.” He heard her quick intake of breath, a split decision not to finish the sentence.
    “What is it?” The desperation was naked in his voice. Pea was free; he had nothing left to barter with, and