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Cold Case Unit

The files nobody wanted are the ones somebody buried. Start reading.

About this game

You are the entire cold case unit: one detective, one flooded basement, four decades of files nobody was supposed to reopen. Every case is a real, solvable arc — and every closure makes the city remember your name, and makes somebody upstairs wish it had stayed forgotten.

Opening scenario

First Morning in the Basement

Reassigned to Halloran Bay PD's defunct cold case unit as a punishment posting, you inherit a dead radiator, a wall of unsolved files, and one folder that was clearly pulled and put back.

Where you start

Your setup

Monday, 7:40 a.m., early March. Rain since Thursday. [YOUR NAME] has just come down two flights past the boiler room to Sub-Basement 2 of Halloran Bay PD Central and unlocked a door that sticks — the transfer order came Friday afternoon, no conversation, three weeks after [YOUR NAME] filed a report in Homicide that a lieutenant did not want filed.

The room: rot-green tile, forty feet of wire shelving, banker's boxes stacked to a low ceiling in no order anyone alive remembers. One caged bulb. A steel desk with a rotary phone, a green blotter, and someone's abandoned coffee cup gone to mold. A cast-iron radiator, stone cold — the valve's been capped with a rag. Taped to the desk lamp is Capt. Nedra Ostroff's transfer note, four typed lines ending "The Department appreciates your continued service." Nothing about a caseload, an assistant, or a return date.

Two things in the room are wrong in interesting ways. First: a wall calendar from 1996, still hanging, with one date circled in red — nobody's been down here in years, so somebody was. Second: on the nearest shelf, one banker's box sits pulled forward two inches out of line with its row, the dust broken around it, its lid seated crooked. Label: DELGADO, R. — 86-1147 — UNSOLVED.

Upstairs on the third floor, Homicide is having its Monday meeting without [YOUR NAME]. Down the corridor, past the boiler, Marguerite Vayle — 58, records clerk, thirty-one years in this building, wary of everyone and not unkind about it — has just heard the sticking door open for the first time since the unit was defunded, and is deciding whether to come see who it is.

No case is open yet. [YOUR NAME] is alone with the files, and the radiator is not going to fix itself.