If murder was committed in any district Kaylin patrolled, she’d be pulled from desk duty. Murder investigations trumped front desk work. The only downside was the Hawks weren’t incompetent enough not to find the culprit, which would mean Kaylin would be out of a job she mostly loved and in jail. Or worse.

For the most part, front desk duty involved a lot of listening and taking notes; it seemed like busywork to her, and she’d been trained by a Leontine who loathed paperwork, and often destroyed his desks by clawing his way through the wood when he was forced to actually do any of it.

Kaylin, absent both claws and rank, had dutifully taken out the front desk’s mandatory notepad. Records existed for a reason; the Records capture of these so-called citizen reports and queries—half of which were complaints—would be far, far more accurate than simple handwritten notes.

In theory the note-taking was supposed to give the people who came in with their various reports or concerns a sense of comfort; it meant the officer they were speaking with was actually paying attention. Kaylin had seen some of the notebooks others had left crammed in the front desk drawer. Attention. Hah. She wasn’t much of a doodler to begin with, and understood on a visceral level that drawing weird caricatures of people who had serious—if completely unhinged—reports was not actually doing her job.

She therefore had a pad that contained written words that could be repeated in public in front of her when Mrs. Erickson approached the desk.

Kaylin’s perpetual shoulder ornament had become almost invisible to the Hawks in Marcus’s office, because she never left home without Hope. On most days, Hope seemed content to idle across her shoulders like a very inadequate shawl. He evinced no interest in the day-to-day functions of the Hawks.

Only on a few occasions did he deign to lift his translucent head to take a look around, and on even fewer did he consider whatever he saw interesting enough he felt it necessary to actually support more of his own weight by standing. Teela called him a familiar, but even her initial sense of caution had faded with time. Hope was Kaylin’s—and like Kaylin, the older Barrani Hawk implied—was generally lazy unless the work involved was interesting or necessary. Necessary to Kaylin, that is.

For whatever reason, Hope lifted his head when Mrs. Erickson approached. To Kaylin’s surprise, he then muttered the equivalent of a mumbled complaint and pulled himself to his feet.