“Whatever you left there?”
Kline went silent.
Detective Shaw’s hand moved toward his cuffs.
Owen stopped him.
“Not yet.”
Mariah respected that.
The temptation to rush was enormous.
So was the need not to.
If someone had tried to destroy a judge using manufactured evidence, the worst possible response would be an investigation equally careless in the opposite direction.
“Keep playing,” Owen said.
The footage showed Kline return to the desk a second time before leaving. He opened the same drawer, looked inside, closed it again, and finally exited at 1:45. The chambers remained empty until 6:16, when Mariah’s judicial assistant, Grace Hollowell, arrived carrying coffee and two stacks of case files.
Grace worked for nearly twenty minutes before opening the bottom drawer.
She stopped.
Reached inside.
And removed the pouch.
Kline immediately pointed at the screen. “There. She’s involved.”
Nobody answered him.
Grace held the pouch toward the overhead camera without knowing exactly where the lens sat. She placed it carefully on the desktop, took out her phone, and made a call. Four minutes later, Mariah appeared on screen wearing the same charcoal coat she had arrived in that morning.
Grace showed her the suspicious packet.
Mariah never touched it.
Instead, she took out her own phone.
Then pointed toward the ceiling.
Captain Pierce frowned. “You knew about it before we served the warrant?”
Mariah looked at him.
“I knew at 6:40 that something had been placed in my drawer.”
“And you didn’t call us?”
“I called courthouse security.”
Noah nodded. “Security director called me at 6:44.”
Owen’s expression tightened.
“What happened to the pouch?”
Mariah answered, “Security photographed it where Grace found it, documented the discovery, and removed it under their evidence protocol.”
Ethan looked toward the bag of cocaine taken from the briefcase.
“Then this isn’t the same package.”
“No.”
Everyone looked at the evidence.
A new problem had just appeared.
If Kline’s overnight package was discovered and removed before police arrived, how had another package of cocaine ended up inside Mariah Benton’s briefcase?
Mariah looked toward Ethan.
“That is the question you should be asking.”
Ethan picked up the search log.
His eyes moved slowly down the entries.
Then stopped.
“Who touched the briefcase before I searched it?”
Nobody answered.
Ethan looked at the notation.
Officer Travis Kline — courthouse liaison.
He lifted his eyes.
“You weren’t part of the evidence team.”
Kline’s jaw tightened. “I never searched the bag.”
“You weren’t part of the warrant team either.”
“I was liaison.”
“Then why were you standing beside Judge Benton’s desk before I entered?”
Kline did not answer.
Captain Pierce suddenly understood that the overnight footage might expose only the first half of what had happened.
He turned toward Noah.
“You said this camera archives continuously during alerts?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have this morning?”
“All of it.”
“Start when the warrant team entered.”
The footage changed from infrared to color.
Sunlight came through the windows.
At 8:11, officers entered Mariah’s chambers while she waited in a conference room down the hall.
Captain Pierce came in first.
Then Ethan.
Two evidence technicians.
An internal-affairs observer.
And Travis Kline.
Owen’s face tightened immediately.