6. Chapter 6
Andre hadn't slept. He'd tried, briefly, around four, gotten as far as lying on top of the covers with his shoes still on, and then his brain started running the numbers again on its own, without asking permission.
Forty cots. Forty people who'd been warm enough to leave a shape in the air behind them, gone before anyone with the will to help them ever got the chance to try.
He made coffee instead of tea, because tea was for mornings he still believed in the version of himself that drank it. He drank the coffee black, too hot… and didn't taste any of it.
Marcus's last text was still open on his phone, hours old now.
Not your fault. Doesn't make it hurt less.
I know that too. Andre had read it maybe thirty times since two a.m., the way a person checked a wound to see if it was actually as bad as it felt the first time he looked. It was. Every time, it was.
He knew, in the part of him that still functioned like a cop even at five in the morning on no sleep, that the timeline wasn't his fault.
He'd flagged a credible threat through the correct channel.
The correct channels… had failed, catastrophically, in a way that had nothing to do with him personally and everything to do with someone he'd probably shaken hands with at a conference once.
Someone who smiled and had a family they loved.
All while they helped a monster like Drakov take others from their families and sell them into something worse than a nightmare.
It made his stomach turn and he had to take a deep breath to keep the coffee from coming back up.
None of that touched the other math, the one that didn't care about jurisdiction or intent.
He'd made the right calls. Followed the rules.
Forty people had been in that building. Now they weren't, and somewhere between those two facts sat a line he couldn't stop walking back and forth across, no matter how many times the first version of the math told him not to.
For the first time in a long time… he wondered if this was how Marcus had felt.
If this, right here, this feeling and agony, was what had drivben the man he loved from his faith in the law… and made him decide to beomce it.
His phone buzzed against the counter.
He looked at it a long moment before he picked it up, already knowing it was Marcus even after six years of trying not to remember every detail about the man.
"You didn't sleep," Marcus said, before Andre even got a greeting out.
Not a question. Andre didn't insult either of them by pretending otherwise. "No."
"Coffee or tea?"
"Coffee. Couldn't make myself want the other." He didn't explain why. He didn't have to. Time hadn't touched how well Marcus could hear the things Andre wasn't saying, and this morning he was too tired to mind that anymore.
Silence on the line, but not the careful kind they'd both clung to across a steel table days ago, not the kind either of them managed on purpose. Just two men breathing on either end of a phone at five in the morning, both of them awake for the same forty reasons.
"I keep doing the math," Andre said finally, because somebody had to say it out loud or it was going to keep living in his chest instead.
"Every version of it. The one where it's not my fault.
The one where forty people are still missing because I made a phone call.
I can't get either one of them to actually beat the other. "
"I know that math," Marcus said. Quiet. Certain. "I've been running a version of it for years. It never actually settles. You just get better at carrying it without it showing."
"That supposed to make me feel better?"
"No." A pause, and something in it that sounded almost like the ghost of a smile, worn thin by everything underneath it. "It's supposed to make you feel less alone. That's the only part I can actually give you."
Andre closed his eyes. The kitchen light was too bright for how little he'd slept, and he hadn't noticed until just now.
"Six years," he said, and didn't finish the sentence, because there wasn't a version of finishing it that wouldn't have meant something neither of them was ready to hear out loud, not yet, not over a phone call about a warehouse full of empty cots.
"Six years," Marcus agreed, like he understood exactly which sentence Andre hadn't let himself say, and wasn't going to make him say either. "Eat something today. Not just coffee."
"Yes, sir," Andre said, and the words came out almost gentle, almost like they used to.
"Andre." Marcus's voice caught on something before he let it go again. "I'm glad you're the one who answers when I call."
The line went quiet after that, both of them too aware of everything just underneath the surface to trust themselves with anything else.
Andre hung up first, because if he hadn't, he wasn't sure which one of them would have said the thing they were both very carefully not saying.
Not for the first time in so many long, lonely years, he wondered if he'd made the biggest mistake of his life walking away.
He'd believed in his principles, in the system to which he'd dedicated his life.
Even when it failed, because nothing made by the hand of man was perfect, he retained that belief.
Now… with a list of names and empty cots… he couldn't really make that worth it.
Okafor called before he'd finished the coffee that should have been something more substantial. Marcus knew him too well. He was standing at the window when his phone buzzed against the counter.
"I've read your liaison request four times now," she said, no preamble, the voice of someone who'd spent a long night doing exactly that.
"You flagged this location, this timeline, this exact shipment.
Then somebody cleared it out before Coast Guard ever got there.
Walk me through how those two facts aren't connected. "
"Because I don't know how they're connected either, and that's the part that should worry you more than me.
" Andre kept his voice level, the same register he'd have used on a witness stand, because in every way that mattered this was one.
"I flagged a credible threat through the correct channel.
That channel failed. If you're asking whether I leaked my own investigation to sabotage it, you already know the answer's no.
If you're asking whether somebody with access to that same request leaked it to the people running the operation, that's a question you should be taking to your own people, not mine. "
Outside, a garbage truck was making its way down the block, hydraulics groaning at each stop. Silence on the line long enough that Andre knew he'd made his point. "You think it's someone inside Coast Guard liaison?"
"I think forty people vanished in under two hours after one call went through a system with your name on the routing as much as mine. I'm not accusing anyone. I don’t have enough information for that. Yet. I'm telling you where I'd start looking if I were you."
She didn't have an answer for that, not one she was ready to give him, it seemed. There was no way she missed his threat, though. He watched the truck disappear around the corner. The call ended without either of them pretending it had resolved anything.
Reyes was worse because she actually liked him, and that affection sat like a stone in her throat when she had to ask the things that needed asking.
She stood in his doorway, arms crossed, the worn leather of her duty belt creaking as she shifted her weight.
She didn’t step inside, didn’t sit, this wasn’t that kind of visit.
The smell of stale coffee hung in the air between them.
"Coast Guard's asking me things I can't answer," she said, her voice low, almost weary. "Give me something I can tell them that keeps my task force out of an internal affairs inquiry."
Andre watched the way her knuckles whitened where she gripped her own elbow.
"Tell them exactly what happened. I flagged a threat.
Official channels moved too slow to act on it.
Somebody else acted instead, and whatever was still there by the time they arrived is on me too, because I couldn't stop them regardless of how hard I tried to. "
Reyes studied him, her eyes narrowing the way they used to years ago when he was green enough that she still had to measure every word he said against the tells she’d cataloged, the slight tightening at the corner of his mouth, the way he never quite held a stare for too long. "That the whole truth, Jefferson?"
"It's the part of the truth that's mine to give you."
She held his gaze for another heartbeat, her expression unreadable beneath the fluorescent lights, then something in her shoulders eased almost imperceptibly.
He knew she trusted him. She had been there when he’d survived the first go around with Drakov.
Had watched him give every moment of his life to protecting others and stopping the trafficking networks that used Michigan, Detroit in particular, to vanish people over the boarder.
He knew she didn’t suspect him, just like he understood she suspected there was a hell of a lot he wasn’t telling her.
That trust bought him her quiet now. "Get some sleep. You look like hell."
"Yes, ma'am."
She turned without another word, her boots echoing softly down the hall.
Andre sat there afterward, alone in the sudden quiet, with the distinct, unpleasant feeling of someone who'd just survived something by the skin of a lie that wasn't quite a lie, and knew exactly how many more of those he had left in him before one of them finally caught.
Dray found him in the break room an hour later, staring at a coffee maker that had long since finished brewing, the warming plate ticking faintly in the silence. He didn't look up until he heard the second cup being pulled from the cabinet.
"Rough one," Dray said. Not a question. He poured unhurried, like he had nowhere else to be, though Andre had never once seen him in this building without somewhere else to be. "Reyes chewed you out?"
"Reyes was gentle. That's how I knew it was bad."
The homicide detective wasn't exactly a friend, but their paths had crossed plenty of times.
Andre had seen him at the Policeman's Ball a few months back, the Merritt Foundation's annual thing, chandeliers and open bars and men in dress blues, with a boyfriend who was young and blond and moved through that room like he already knew half the people in it.
Like he'd been in rooms like it before. Several of the men he'd drifted toward were men Andre knew Dray ran with, men who had money and power, which was another kind of information.
Dray huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh, almost black eyes keen in his handsome face, his dark brown skin healthy, and leaned against the counter, close enough to be friendly, far enough to still be professional.
Mid-thirties, DPD through and through on paper, the kind of easy competence that made people trust him in a room in about four seconds flat.
Andre had worked two joint operations with him over the years and walked away both times with the vague, unexamined sense that Dray knew things he had no obvious way of knowing.
"Word's already moving that Coast Guard's asking questions about last night," Dray said, stirring sugar into his coffee with a spoon that had definitely not come from this break room's drawer—silver, heavier than it needed to be, the kind of thing you carried on purpose.
"If you need eyes on who might've had access to that liaison request, I know people who move faster than internal affairs ever will. "
Andre looked at him for a second too long. "What people?"
"People who'd rather this stayed contained than turn into a headline.
" Dray's smile didn't change, but something underneath it did, a door closing quietly in a room Andre hadn't known was open, brief and gone before he could name what it had been.
"I'm not asking you to trust me with anything you're not ready to hand over.
I'm telling you the offer's open if you ever are. "
It was a strange thing to say to a fellow officer about a Coast Guard leak.
Andre's whole career had trained him to notice exactly how strange, the same reflex that had once flagged a man's alibi two full days before anyone found the hole in it, the same low-frequency wrongness, like a note played just slightly flat.
"I'll keep that in mind," Andre said, which was true in the sense that he absolutely would, and not at all in the sense Dray probably meant it.
Dray nodded like that was exactly the answer he'd expected, set his cup down on the counter rather than the sink, and left without ever quite explaining who the people were, or how he'd known to offer before Andre had said a word to anyone about needing them.
Andre stood there a long moment, turning the whole exchange over the way he'd have turned over a piece of evidence that photographed fine and still felt wrong in his hands.
He didn't have an answer yet, just a feeling.
He set the question aside with everything else he couldn't solve on the first pass, and went back to work, because the day wasn't done needing him to function like it hadn't just handed him one more thing he didn't understand.
Somehow… he had the suspicion that Marcus would. That maybe there were more parts moving in the shadows than even he understood. And maybe… maybe… they were becoming his only option if he wanted to truly serve and protect his city and its folk.