30. Colin
Colin
“Where’s Micah?” Alex jumps when I enter the conference room, crossing to where I’d been zoning out last night. I grab the picture of Lily up off the desk, pausing only long enough to stare at my partner.
“Called in sick.”
“Sick?” Micah’s never been sick the entire time I’ve known him. I’d been hoping to catch him before Captain Barrett came in and run my hypotheticals past him first, because thus far, he is the only person—besides Chloe—who has seen the other side of me. My darker side, and he has never judged me.
Say that you knew someone was a murderer. You’d been trying to find proof for years, and then you accidentally fell in love with them, but also got your confession. What would you do?
That’s the type of hypothetical I’d been planning to run by Micah. Maybe his response would be the deciding factor on whether I brought this to my captain at all. That’s off the table now. The hypothetical scenario I feed to my captain will have to be slightly more censored.
Alex shrugs, turning his attention back to his laptop.
I glance around the room, noting the absence of two more colleagues. “Where are Daniel and Lucy?”
“Daniel’s taking a break. Lucy is apparently following a lead she is certain will take her to Chase.”
“Alone?”
Another shrug, but he lifts his gaze from his screen. “Seems like a dead-end to me. And it’s not as important as this.” He nods toward his laptop.
“Which is what?” I ask impatiently.
“I think there’s a snake in the department.” My spine goes rigid, because there is still the issue of someone planting Max’s DNA, and Chloe claims it wasn’t her. I cross the room to him and stand behind his chair, eyeing the screen that just appears to be a document with notes on it.
“Explain, Alex,” I urge him, nerves jittering throughout my body, my skin tingling with impatience and confusion.
I feel like I’m being fed pieces of a story. Like everyone knows one thing about something, but no one knows the full story. No one has all the clues to solve the mystery, and I’m the one gathering hints and trying to make it all make sense.
I take a step back when he spins in his chair to face me. “It’s just, after I found out the DNA was planted and Lucy and I interviewed Lily again, I thought the interview was a waste of time.”
Sorry.
“But there was something about the way she responded to our questions that didn’t sit right with me.
You know that night you and I went over there, she was a wreck.
By the time we left, I saw some of that lifting, like her husband being gone had cleared up so many problems for her and her kids. Like she knew she was safe again.”
I raise my eyebrows. “And?”
“And she didn’t seem relieved at all when Lucy and I were there.
She still seemed...” he trails off, scrubbing a hand down his face.
“I don’t know. Scared? Nervous? She mentioned that in the days before Grayson’s disappearance, someone came by and rang the doorbell.
Her husband answered before she could and urged her away from the door, but she’d noticed three men on the porch and a woman in the car. ”
“Okay. Sounds like our guys, but who’s the woman? And why do you think this means there’s a snake on the team?” I glance toward his screen again, trying to read the little letters on the document and figure out what he’s not saying.
“I thought it was the three men at first, but Lily mentioned that one of the four people looked vaguely familiar. Said she might have seen one of them in some news article the police department had in the paper in the last month or so.”
“The Peak puts out a crime column every week.”
“No.” He shakes his head, turning to his laptop and pulling up another screen, this one a website of online archives of The Peak newspaper. “She said the person was wearing a uniform.”
My phone vibrates in my pocket, and I pull it out and read the text from my captain that he’ll be here in five minutes. “I’ll be right back,” I tell Alex. I’m curious about the thread he’s pulling at, but I’ve got competing priorities on my plate right now, and Chloe’s web of lies takes precedence.
Exiting the conference room and continuing through our main office, my gaze carries over the cubicle walls, wondering if someone seated behind one of them is fucking with me. Fucking with all of us. Planting evidence and throwing us off track. But why?
Captain Barrett’s door is cracked, and I push it open, slowing when I enter the cool room. My blood is heated, and the cold air is welcome. I set the photo of Lily on my captain’s desk and lean over it, closing my eyes and letting my head hang.
I briefly thought that perhaps Micah is the snake. He’s got the tools and the skill level to fuck with evidence. But what would his motive be?
This is all connected to the trafficking ring out of Mt.
Lance. This all kicked off when Richard Soffett was pushed from that cliff a little over a month ago.
Lily Tyler said she saw something the department had announced in the newspaper in the last month or so.
What happened a month ago? I wasn’t even back in town yet.
I squeeze my eyes closed tighter, trying to slow down enough to make sense of all the pieces in my busy mind.
Before we knew Max’s DNA had been planted, we’d assumed that he and his buddies came down here to take out Richard and Grayson.
We know they’re all connected to the trafficking ring.
But maybe…Max, Logan, and Chase came down here to stop Chloe from taking out their men.
Chloe had suggested they were after her and her friends because they were their next targets, and now I realize she was feeding me bullshit.
She knew exactly why they were after her—and she was hoping to take them out first.
But someone still killed Logan and planted Max’s DNA.
I push a deep breath out my nostrils and let my eyes drift open. I stare at the photo of Lily and picture the photos of Caroline. The photo I’ve been convinced was Chloe.
And then my eyes trail off the photo and toward the edge of a paper sticking out from a pile of folders. Something about it is familiar, and I’m moving behind the desk before I realize what I’m doing, tugging the paper out from beneath the stack.
It’s a letter, multiple pages long with crease marks lining it, like it’s been folded up in an envelope. The words on the paper are slanted, and black smudge marks litter the entire thing.
My focus is pulled in so many different directions as I frantically absorb details of the letter. The room begins to feel hotter, the walls closing in around me, my collar tightening around my neck.
The date written at the top right corner is right around the time Caroline Stark was sentenced to prison. I recognize the handwriting as hers, because I saw it in her letter to Chloe. She’s left-handed and drags her fist across the ink as she writes.
Captain Barrett mentioned Caroline Stark threatening to press harassment charges against me. Perhaps she did so in a letter to him. But as I continue reading, the floor feels like it falls out from underneath me.
Through the smudges, there are two words that stand out. Two words that cause my eyes to dry out because I stare at them for so long. I can’t bring myself to blink in case the letter evaporates from between my fingers.
Our daughter.
I finally blink, and the letter is still there. So I blink again, and again, making sure this is real. And as realization floods my body, I still find myself wondering, why is this here?
You’re her only chance now. She’s a good person. You have to protect her.
The door to the office clicks closed, and the quiet sound ricochets through my body as I slowly lift my head from the paper and stare at Captain Barrett’s body idling near the doorway.
“She’s not a bad person.”
My posture stiffens, the words of my captain drawing a shivering chill down the center of my spine.
I shake my head in response, in denial, turning my face back toward the desk and shuffling the papers in front of me aimlessly, wondering if I’m misinterpreting them and they’ll piece themselves together if I move them around enough.
“I don’t understand,” I mumble, but the lie tastes sweet on my tongue. It tastes like her. Like everything about her is coming into focus. Or like everything about her has been in focus this entire time, and I’ve ignored it.
My phone vibrates in my pocket, and I manage to fumble it out, desperate for a distraction.
Barry’s name flashes across the screen, but I can’t bring myself to answer it even though I told him to call if Chloe left her house.
I wouldn’t put it past her to rip the drawer out of the cabinets and wander around Devil’s Peak with it hanging at her side.
Right now, I can’t seem to care.
“Colin…” Captain Barrett says lowly.
I squeeze the phone in my hand, knuckles turning dangerously white. “Are you fucking with me?” I growl, unable to lift my eyes and look at him.
“I’m sorry,” he says, though there’s something in his voice that doesn’t sound sorry at all. I snap my head up to finally meet his stare.
“For which part? Covering for your daughter when she murdered three men? Or chewing my ass when I wasted an entire year of my life trying to prove it?”
“I was protecting her.”
“You have been in law enforcement for almost two decades, and you’re a criminal?
Whose side are you on, exactly?” I stand straighter, willing myself to keep calm, but I throw my phone across the room.
Captain Barrett barely flinches when it dents the wall behind him.
My fingers crumple the pages of the letter spread out under my hands, and the breaths in my chest feel so incredibly inadequate for the amount of oxygen I feel I need to stay standing.
“I am on the side of the victims, Colin.” He raises his palms into the air like I’m a wild animal he’s preparing to restrain.