"Have I missed the mark, or, like true archer, do I strike my quarry?

Or am I prophet of lies, a babbler from door to door?"

- (Cassandra. Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1194).

The sudden rumbling of the boiler startled Judy, scattering the dark clouds of her thoughts. She shook away the doubts and confusion that had coalesced around her after seeing Nick being led to interrogation and continued her determined stride down the stairs towards Records.

She'd seldom been this far down into the depths of the police department – most of her time had been spent in the upper levels; working out at the gym, filling out paperwork at her desk, or waiting eagerly for her next assignment at the Bullpen. She was keenly aware of the fact that a Lieutenant ought to have been down to records much more than she had – a further testament to the speed (however politically motivated) of her appointment to that role.

The rabbit pushed open the stout oak doors to Records, and took a moment to soak in the sight.

The ZPD Records room was a long corridor, lined with four rows of shelves – double sided – that reached from the top of the room to the floor. Most of these shelves were filled with file boxes, labeled with alphanumeric characters that categorized their contents. The long row of shelves reached into the depths of the building, but near the front of the room lay a small common area on the right, and an L-shaped desk on the left – occupied by a beaver who was typing at a workstation.

Judy's entrance seemed to have gone largely unnoticed by the beaver behind the desk, who stared fixedly at a monitor while reaching blindly for a mug that read "Doesn't Give a Dam." The beaver – who Judy knew was the resident IT head– sipped noisily at the mug before placing it down and continuing type at the keyboard in front of her.

Judy stepped up to the beaver's desk and – after a long moment of silence – coughed to grab her attention.

"Hey LT, sup?" was all the beaver mustered, continuing to stare at the monitor.

"Oh hi there! Uh, I was hoping – er, I mean … how are you doing?" Judy said, summoning every ounce of cheer she had.

The beaver paused in her typing for a moment, "Meh … Overworked as hell. But you're not here for chit chat. What do you need, LT?"

Judy blinked at the beaver's brusqueness, and for a moment the clattering of the keyboard was all the echoed across the room.

"Uh, well … I need to see the incident reports from last night."

"Huh, shoulda' guessed." The beaver said as she typed a final cadence into the keyboard, punctuating its end with a dramatic tap on the enter key. She swiveled in place to reach down to a drawer built into her desk, opened it, and produced a thick folder bound with string.

"Folks have been askin' for this all day. Stopped trying to file it." The beaver said with a wry smile, before reaching down over the top of her desk to hand the folder to Judy.

"Thanks!" Judy said, turning quickly and bounding to the door.

"Hold on, LT!" The beaver called back, stopping Judy in her tracks. "Haven't gotten a chance to enter that into the database, so you've gotta read it down here."

"Oh, sure! Right …"

Judy glanced around, and – pointing at the common room – looked inquisitively at the beaver. The beaver shook her head and smiled, before giving the rabbit a half-hearted thumbs up and returning to typing at her keyboard.

Judy clambered up the leg of a couch in the common room that was clearly designed for much larger mammals, placed the folder on her lap, and began to unwind the string holding it closed. Opening the top, she removed a thick stack of papers from the folder and began to skim through it.

A dozen or so reports from responding officers painted a pretty clear picture of the chaos of the scene at the warehouse the previous night. Most officers had been abruptly called off their current assignments and marshalled to cordon off the warehouse and await the SWAT team. Several officers described confusion as from whom the orders were being given and whether the Chief had been apprised of what was happening. The arrival and execution of the operation by the SWAT team was described as rushed; in particular, Lt. Pennington made it clear in her report that she felt proper protocols were not being followed, calling the Captain's actions "rash" and "foolhardy."

Borov's report was conspicuously vague about the circumstances leading up to the execution of the raid. Leafing through the report, Judy stopped at the clinical description of how Nick and the wolf were subdued:

Remote Predator Suppression devices were employed until the suspects stopped resisting, at which point they were taken into custody.

Judy winced and looked down at the damning collection of reports in her paws. How could the ZPD be this sloppy? She'd been too caught up in the moment to notice last night, but these reports showed a singularly uncoordinated police force that bore little resemblance to the ZPD Judy was familiar with. It just added to the growing sense of unease in the rabbit's stomach. There was something wrong with this raid.

At last Judy found her own report and paused. While it didn't lack for her usual thoroughness, Judy felt a pang of guilt as she glanced over it. She became keenly aware of the weight of the carrot pen and badge in her pocket, key pieces of evidence she'd neglected to mention. Her paw had found its way into her pocket, and as she felt the contours of the fox's badge.

Judy shook her head – she couldn't afford to get distracted. Her eyes were drawn back to her report before they narrowed in confusion.

"What the …" Judy mumbled, glancing around for any stray sheets of paper that may have fallen out. Finding none, she looked back at the stack in her paws.

Her report was too short – there was no mention of the figure at the window, the blue splatters on the wall, or Nick's story about the 'Night Howlers'. Judy had made a point of detailing those and calling for a forensic analysis. And yet this report had none of it.

The unease in Judy's stomach had blossomed into something akin to dread.

Someone had edited her report.

Nick scrambled as he was roughly shoved back into the cell, failing to keep his footing. The cell door was shut with a screeching crash, and the deep thrumming of the electric grid suddenly filled the room. Nick moved to stand, before he felt a pair of paws on his arm.

"Easy there, pup." Mike said, helping the fox to his feet.

"Thanks." Nick said, rolling his shoulder and glancing around.

As crowded as before, most of the predators in the cell were staring at the fox and wolf. Mike gestured to the corner of the cell, and the two stepped to the side in an attempt to find some measure of privacy. The low murmur of conversation resumed.

"So, you're not dead. That's good." Mike noted.

"Not so sure about that … but no, not dead." Nick grunted in reply.

"What did they ask you?"

"They wanted me to roll for Koslov. Tried to throw the book at me and scare me into making a plea deal."

Mike's eyes narrowed into a questioning glance. "So … did you?"

Nick scoffed.

"Oh please, I didn't say anything. I'm not stupid."

"Good. If you have any hope of getting out of this in one piece, Koslov is the last mammal we need to piss off."

Nick slumped down the wall into a sitting position and nodded wearily. The wolf joined him, and the two sat in companionable silence.

"Think they made it?" Nick asked, staring blankly at the tile floor in front of him.

"I don't know," Mike sighed. "But your fennec friend seems resourceful, and the pack's been scattered before."

The wolf studied the fox carefully for a moment.

"What's eating you up, Wilde?"

Nick continued to stare blindly. Mike was about to ask again when Nick answered.

"I'm better than this. Zootopia's better than this …"

The fox turned to glance at Mike, anger and sorrow mixed in his eyes.

"At least, that's what I thought. Guess I was wrong, huh?"

Guess she was wrong, Nick thought.

Mike stared at Nick for a long moment, before bringing a paw to rub at his temples.

"I know how you feel. Trying to figure out if you were betrayed, or did the betraying."

The wolf sighed heavily.

"I wasn't straight with you before – I didn't just want to be a cop … I was one. Before predators started going savage, before the collars."

Nick raised an eyebrow and let Mike continue.

"Course, after everything happened they kicked all us preds off the force. 'Too dangerous' after all."

Mike laughed hollowly.

"All I wanted to do was to help mammals. But look at me now … I'm the leader of a 'criminal gang' with ties to the mob, arrested for assaulting an officer."

The wolf put a paw on the fox's shoulder.

"The world changed, Nick. I had to make a lot of compromises to survive – we all did. But I've never lost sight of what's important: doing the right thing, no matter what the laws say."

Nick shrugged off Mike's paw.

"Well that's the thing. I don't know what the right thing to do is … I don't belong here, Mike."

The fox sighed heavily.

"And now I might never get back."

Mike took a breath to reply when the door to the room opened. Two officers – a rhino and an elephant – led a third figure into the room. The cell door was un-electrified and opened, and when the figure stepped into the cell, the assembled predators seemed to recoil.

At over seven feet tall and clad in a finely tailored black suit, the polar bear cut an imposing figure. The cell was shut behind him as he scanned through the crowd.

At last he spoke, "Tell me. Where is Nikolai?"

"Nobody delivered a sample!?"

The prairie dog recoiled from the intensity of Judy's question. The two mammals stood just outside the doors to the ZPD's forensics department.

"I'm sorry Lieutenant, but this is the first we've heard of it. Nobody came by with a sample of this … serum you're talking about."

"But I specifically asked for a forensic analysis! And besides, didn't you notice it splattered all over that office?"

"Well … none of our techs found anything at the scene. Plenty of fur samples, but nothing like what you described. "

Judy blinked in disbelief. There was no way they could have missed it - the department wasn't capable of that level of incompetence.

None of this added up – Judy knew what she'd seen, remembered the whoosh of air as the pellets flew past, the fear in the fox's voice.

"Are you alright, Lieutenant?"

Judy blinked and looked back at the lab tech in front of her.

"Oh, sorry – I'm fine. I just, have to look into some things."

The prairie dog nodded and said, "Oh sure. I'm sorry I couldn't be of more help Lieutenant."

Judy turned and slowly made her way back towards her office, her thoughts racing towards the inevitable conclusion.

All record of the serum was missing.

First her report had been edited without her knowledge to excise any reference to the serum. Then she found that the photographs taken of the manager's office didn't show any sign of the blue liquid. And not just the ones in the case file; Judy had tracked down the original images on the very cameras that took them.

Her last ditch effort to find some evidence of the serum was to hope that someone had listened to her the night before and delivered a sample to forensics. Which, evidentially they had not.

There was only one explanation that made any sense to Judy: someone with access to the site and records had tampered with not only the crime scene, but the report that she submitted. Anyone with access to her report would have to outrank her at the least, and very few mammals had access to the manager's office before forensics arrived.

Judy knew she was onto something big, but if her suspicions were true if someone was actively tampering with this investigation and was leaking false information to the press …

If what Nick had said was true, if what she'd heard had been real …

The rabbit shuddered.

There was only one thing to do now.

Author's Note:



So, uh ... how about that 'joke' huh? Pretty funny, right?

This chapter was going to be much longer, but I figured it's been so long since I updated I should split this into two parts and release this now.

Thank you all for your patience! I promise you all this fic isn't dead.

See you all soon!