At the front desk of the Morrow Creek Police Department, the sergeant barely looks up from the paperwork. "You must be the new one," he says, and points at the stairs up to the archive. That's your briefing. The night shift is yours, rookie.

Nobody has filed anything up here in years. Papers, photos, cassettes and evidence bags lie wherever someone dropped them. Each one belongs to a case.

Not every case number is easy to find. Some are under grime, some are in invisible ink, some are sealed inside a bag. Every case you close pays a little, and you spend it on tools like the brush, the UV lamp, the X-ray and the darkroom. Each new tool lets you read evidence you couldn't before.

When a file is complete, press it, stamp it APPROVED and pack it into a labeled carton. Then find the shelf for its year and slide the carton in.

There's no timer and no quota, and you can't fail. You decide when the night is over.