8. Chapter 8
The warrant application sat open on Andre's second monitor for the third hour running, cursor blinking in a field that wanted a probable-cause narrative he hadn't finished writing.
The intel from the brokerage had come in clean: a new registered address on Gratiot, an LLC out of Lansing, a filing date that put the whole relocation two weeks ahead of anything either of them had done.
Good information. The kind that used to move quick, back when Andre was twelve years newer at this job and still believed that was how it worked.
He'd had the address to the ADA's office by nine that morning.
By eleven, an email came back: solid circumstantial pattern, no direct link yet to the address itself, and Whitaker wouldn't sign without one, not after the last search got tossed on a technicality neither of them had seen coming.
Andre had argued for twenty minutes and lost. He typed the pattern into the file anyway, three paragraphs Whitaker hadn't wanted to hear, in case the next judge did.
Captain Reyes leaned into the doorway, coffee in a chipped mug, and knocked once on the frame out of habit rather than need. "Whitaker again?"
"Whitaker again."
"You want me to try Delgado instead?"
"Delgado won't touch anything Whitaker's already looked at once.
Makes it look like judge-shopping if it ever gets challenged.
" Andre rubbed at the bridge of his nose.
The fluorescent overhead had been buzzing at a pitch just under hearing since Monday.
Most days he stopped hearing it by nine. Today he hadn't.
"So what do we do with it?"
"Sit on it. Build the case somewhere Whitaker's signature isn't required: financial records, the SEC side instead of a search warrant.
" That much was true, and it was also the only answer Reyes was going to get.
What Andre left out was the part he had no plan to ever put in a report: an address that didn't officially exist, one he'd spent years now pretending he'd never learned.
Reyes studied him a second longer than the answer needed. She set the chipped mug down on the corner of his desk without asking, then went back to her own side of the bull pen.
Andre picked up the pen he kept beside the keyboard, turned it once between two fingers, and didn't write anything.
His mind drifted to a building across town where a man he had loved…
maybe never stopped loving if he allowed himself to be honest for five seconds, was working to accomplish what all of the legal and political machienary at his disposal…
could not. Not for the first time… it wondered if maybe Marcus hadn't been the correct one all those years ago.
And if he was, could Andre live with that now in a way he couldn't done.
By the time Andre left the precinct, the light outside had gone the flat gray of early evening, streetlights not yet on.
He checked the date on his phone out of habit before he pocketed it, though he already knew what it said.
He'd known all week without letting himself think about it too much.
Doing so would only make him spiral and he couldn't afford that right now.
He didn't drive home. He took Woodward north instead, out past downtown, toward the cemetery he could have found with his eyes closed.
Grass had grown long between the rows since the last cut, gone to seed along the edges where the mower didn't reach close to the stones. Andre parked on the gravel shoulder and walked the rest. He'd never once pulled the car closer, not even the first time he'd come here, cold and hurt.
He found the row without looking for it. His feet still knew the count from the maple at the corner.
The flowers were already there.
Not wilted. Not the kind that had been sitting through a week of weather, petals curling brown at the edges.
These were fresh, a day old at most, stems still holding water from whatever they'd been carried in.
White chrysanthemums, tight-headed, mixed with orchids and gardenias.
Not what his mother sent. Evelyn's were always the same order from the same florist on Livernois, loose garden roses in whatever pastel the season had, and she called him the week before every time to tell him she'd done it.
She liked him to know. Grief without an audience felt to her like it hadn't happened at all.
She hadn't called this year. Not yet.
Andre crouched at the headstone anyway and brushed a few stray blades of grass off the base of it, out of habit more than need. The chrysanthemums sat upright, facing the sun, set down with some care. Somebody who'd done this before. Somebody who knew which direction the stone faced.
It sat with him for a second; Deon still had people out there, a name that meant something to someone besides the two of them.
A friend never mentioned. Somebody from before.
Andre couldn't bring to mind who might have send the flowers, which of Deon's friends from before…
there were too many. He'd been the life of any party.
There were things about his brother he'd stopped expecting to know a long time ago.
This felt like one more of them, small and almost kind.
He stayed a minute longer than he needed to, then stood, brushed the grass from his knees, and rested two fingers against the top of the stone on his way past.
The gravel felt longer going back than it had coming in.
The precinct lot was mostly empty by the time Andre got back, the last few stragglers pulling out, brake lights fading around the corner in both directions. He turned the car off and sat there, one hand still resting on the keys.
The air inside had gone stale, heater blowing flat, the familiar cold that came with March in this city working its way in through every seal that didn't quite meet anymore.
He could taste it, the cold, the metal of it, the particular working-class ugliness of an American car at the end of winter.
The ache in his throat could have come from any of it: the air, the moment ten minutes ago when he'd caught himself wondering how long his brother's grave had had more people looking after it than him and his mother.
He'd known the answer once. He'd stopped counting after the first year, stopped noticing the day when the calendar came back around. He'd taught himself not to look, and it had worked, until it hadn't.
The car ticked, settling. A siren made its way across the city somewhere in the distance behind him, and he couldn't tell which direction it was traveling, whether it was coming toward him or not.
He put his thumb on the keyring, traced the raised letters on it, the grooves worn almost smooth with use.
Three years was a long time for anybody to carry a grief that didn't belong to them.
He didn't know a lot of people who had that kind of quiet in them.
He wasn't sure he'd ever known more than one.
He didn't let himself think about who it was. If he did… he'd have to be willing to crack his chest open and examine his own beating heart for the name on it that had never faded. Not since the day he'd left.
He got out of the car and went back inside. There were fourty people lose in a trafficing pipeline run by a man who had bested him once. He wasn't going to let it happen again.