Inside, the task room is a hodgepodge of tables and small desks and gray chairs that squeak every time you move. Wooden bookshelves overflow with mildewed folders and a handful of yellowed paperbacks someone left ages ago, presumably when we weren’t understaffed, and people sat around waiting for the phones to ring. I’m convinced they’re all donations from the university, like the metal filing cabinets and framed map of old Athens. But whenever I suggest it, Truman grumbles about the administration, and I have the sense that one of us must answer to the other but am never sure who holds the keys to the city—the university opened its doors first, and here that counts for something.

Like an overeager student, I’m the earliest to arrive, but I’ve also got the most to prove. It’s a long story, but the gist of it is that Truman has a daughter a few years younger than me and they’re close in a cheesy, TV family kind of way. He has two younger children—boys—but Alice is his favorite. She’s always stopping by the station, bringing coffee and the clichéd doughnuts, and cracking jokes about how her friends think she’s a narc. And Truman’s decided, despite all my subtle and not so subtle efforts to show him otherwise, that he’s a father figure to me. He has gender-specific ideas of what this entails, which results in Teddy and Oliver getting the gang-related double homicides, the sadistic, random-victim hack jobs, and I’m assigned the easy-to-solve murder-suicides and domestics where the murder weapon is discovered before I even show up. The kind of cases that involve lots of paperwork, long statutory periods for discovery, and postponed trial dates, but the most danger I face is from banging my own head against the wall.

Just this morning, he handed one of my cases to Oliver. I was the investigating officer, the first on the scene, the one to notice the extra wineglass on the table when the victim was found alone. But the suspect got out on bail, and Truman was suddenly concerned about my preparedness for a trial on an open-and-shut case that had been dragging on since last December—essentially an HR-approved way for him to act on his irrational fears for my safety.