A crash from inside. Then footsteps—heavy, running toward the back door. Cross braced himself as the door flew open.

Officer Alex Cross had run this scenario a hundred times in the training sim. But as he flicked on his lights and the Ford Explorer’s V8 roared, he remembered what his training officer told him: “In this job, every call is a simulation until the moment you step out of the car. Then it’s real.”

Cross pulled up the GPS history of every traffic cam in a two-mile radius from the time of the crash. Ten minutes of manual sifting later, he found it: the green Corolla turning onto Harrison Street, then pulling into the driveway of a blue duplex. The driver got out, walked around to the passenger side, and removed something from the trunk. A crowbar.

“On what evidence? A blurry bumper sticker and a hunch?”

Cross drew his service weapon. “Police! Open up!”

“They said the computer wrote me off,” Marcus said. “But you didn’t.”

“That’s not the protocol, Cross.”