Chapter 6
The gray light of dawn was just beginning to filter through the rain-streaked windows of the downtown police precinct when Jax pushed open the heavy glass doors, holding Leo securely by the hand. The waiting room smelled of stale coffee, old paper, and floor wax. Behind the high wooden desk sat Detective Miller, a tired-looking veteran with silvering hair and deep bags under his eyes. Miller looked up as the tall, tattooed biker and the small boy approached.
"Jax? What brings you down here at six in the morning?" Miller asked, rubbing his jaw as he adjusted his glasses. "And who’s the kid?"
"Sit down, Tom," Jax said quietly, pulling out a metal folding chair for Leo before taking a seat himself. He placed his smartphone on the desk, unlocked it with a firm press of his thumb, and tapped the file containing the surveillance footage. "I’m here to report an attempted homicide. And I brought the security footage and the suspect."
Detective Miller raised an eyebrow, clearly skeptical of his old acquaintance walking in with a child and a digital confession. "Whose homicide, Jax? Yours?"
"Mine," Jax confirmed without a flicker of emotion. He slid the phone across the desk. "My live-in girlfriend, Sarah Jenkins, poisoned my birthday cake last night. This kid here—my son, Leo—caught her doing it on the kitchen camera and knocked the cake out of my hands before I could eat a slice."
Miller leaned forward, his professional skepticism instantly vanishing as he hit play on the video file. The small screen illuminated his face, showing Sarah expertly drawing the clear liquid from her vial into the syringe and injecting the batter. Miller watched the entire sequence in dead silence, then looked up sharply, staring from the video to Jax, and finally down at eight-year-old Leo, who sat quietly with his hands folded in his lap.
"Good lord," Miller breathed, tapping his keyboard to back up the file onto the station’s secure network. "Cyanide derivative. Fast-acting. If you’d eaten a slice of that, you wouldn't have lasted ten minutes."
"I know," Jax said grimly. "She bolted out the back door into the rain last night before I could grab her. But she took very little with her. Her car is still in the driveway."
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Miller immediately reached for his radio, calling out a priority dispatch to units in the North District to sweep Jax’s residential street and place a BOLO on Sarah’s silver sedan. As the radio chatter crackled through the precinct, Miller looked at Leo with newfound respect. "Smart kid you’ve got here, Jax. Saved your life."
"The best," Jax murmured, squeezing Leo’s small shoulder with quiet pride.
