Chapter 14
Ben
Donovan’s SUV had dark-tinted windows and a suspension that absorbed the mountain roads without complaint. We’d been following Shane Reeves for twenty-three minutes, two cars back, watching his taillights weave through the east side of Summit Falls like a man who knew exactly where he was going.
Reeves drove a silver Honda Civic, a few years old.
The type of car a young cop on a small-town salary would drive and not think twice about.
Nothing about it drew attention. Nothing about his driving did either—steady speed, proper signals, full stops.
A police officer’s habits dying hard, even off duty.
The night helped keep us hidden. September in a ski town meant enough tourist traffic that two sets of headlights behind you didn’t register as unusual.
The streets weren’t empty, but they weren’t crowded either—that middle ground where you could maintain distance without losing sight of your target.
Donovan drove with one hand on the wheel, his posture relaxed in a way that was entirely performance. His eyes never stopped moving. Mirrors, road, Reeves’s taillights, mirrors again.
“He’s turning,” Donovan said.
Reeves pulled into a small commercial strip on the east side—one of those single-building setups with a shared entrance and a row of businesses inside.
A pizza place, a dry cleaner, a few other storefronts with signs I couldn’t make out from across the road.
The parking lot held maybe ten cars, scattered under inadequate lighting.
Donovan pulled into the lot of a tire shop across the street and killed the headlights. Good angle. Clear sightline.
We watched Reeves park, get out, and disappear through the central entrance. No way to tell which business he was heading for once he was inside.
“Could be any of them,” Donovan said.
We waited. Five minutes later, Reeves came back out carrying a bag with handles. Impossible to tell what was in it. He held it carefully, the way you held something you didn’t want to drop. Got back in the Civic and pulled out of the lot.
Donovan and I looked at each other.
“Could be anything,” he said.
“Could be.”
We followed.
Reeves headed south, then east again, taking residential streets now. Donovan let a minivan slide between us for cover while I pulled up Reeves’s file on my phone. Jace had compiled it from department records and his own digging.
“Shane Reeves,” I read. “Twenty-five. Grew up in Glenwood Springs. Criminal justice degree from Colorado Mesa University. On the Summit Falls force eighteen months.”
“Evaluations?”
“Good. Supervisors note enthusiasm, solid instincts for a young officer. No disciplinary issues.” I scrolled further. “Lives in a modest apartment on the south side. The two phones and the irregular deposits are the only flags Jace found.”
“Nothing in there screams corruption.”
“No. It doesn’t.”
Donovan adjusted the rearview mirror. “Nothing ever does until it does.”
I set the phone down. He was right about that. The officers who got caught weren’t the ones with obvious tells. They were the ones who blended in, who kept their heads down, who made their supervisors write things like solid instincts and no disciplinary issues in their annual reviews.
Reeves turned onto a residential street. Older homes, smaller lots, front porches with lights that carved yellow circles into the dark. He parked in front of a single-story house with a chain link fence and a car already in the driveway.
We rolled past and pulled to the curb half a block down.
Through the mirrors, I watched Reeves get out with the bag, walk to the front door, and knock.
Someone opened it. A brief exchange—ten seconds, maybe less.
He handed the bag over. Nothing came back.
Then he was walking to his car, door closing behind the person inside, and the whole thing was done in under two minutes.
“Short contact,” Donovan said. “Specific address. In and out.”
“Looks like a drop.”
Neither of us said the word we were both thinking. A young cop making evening rounds to residential addresses, handing off bags he didn’t bring back—the pattern pointed in one direction, and it wasn’t community outreach.
Reeves pulled away. We followed.
Over the next two hours, the pattern kept building but refused to clarify.
A strip mall, then a residential street.
A parking lot where Reeves sat for twenty minutes with the engine running and dome light off, doing nothing visible.
Then another house. A convenience store where he was in and out in three minutes.
Then a longer stretch of driving that took us along the southern edge of town before he stopped at what looked like a Thai restaurant, spent maybe five minutes inside, and drove straight to another address.
Sometimes he sat in his car between stops for uncomfortable stretches—once close to thirty minutes—like he was on standby. Waiting for a call? A signal? When he moved, every contact was brief, efficient, and identical in structure to the ones before it.
We logged every address.
During one of the longer waits while Reeves parked on a side street, engine idling, doing nothing, I turned to Donovan.
“You seem more like yourself lately.”
His hands didn’t move on the wheel. “Meaning?”
“More engaged. The banter’s coming back. You’re actually laughing at things that are funny instead of just going through the motions.”
He let a beat pass. “Evidently, Summit Falls agrees with me. Clean air. Scenic views. Suspicious cops to investigate. What’s not to love?”
“I’m serious.”
“I know you are.” He checked his mirrors. Adjusted his grip. “I’m fine, Ben.”
I didn’t answer right away. On the street ahead of us, Reeves’s Civic sat dark and still. Beyond it, the mountains were black cutouts against a sky full of stars, and the silence was the particular kind that only existed in places where the nearest interstate was thirty miles away.
A car door slammed somewhere on the next block.
Not loud, not close. Donovan’s hands went white on the steering wheel.
His whole body locked—shoulders, jaw, the tendons in his neck standing taut for a full three seconds before he forced himself to unclench.
He didn’t look at me. Didn’t acknowledge it.
Just let his grip ease back to normal like it had never happened.
I’d seen it before. In the field, at restaurants, once at a gas station when someone dropped a metal trash can lid. The sound didn’t matter. What mattered was the split second when Donovan’s body went somewhere his mind couldn’t follow and the effort it cost him to drag himself back.
There were other things I’d noticed. The drinking.
Not falling down, never that, but the nightly self-medication of a man who’d found one reliable way to quiet his own head.
The way he looked in the mornings sometimes, eyes hollow, face tight, like he’d spent the night in a country he couldn’t talk about.
The walls that went up hard and fast anytime the conversation drifted toward Afghanistan or what had happened on his final deployment.
I didn’t push. Didn’t bring up any of it. He’d tell me when he was ready, or he wouldn’t.
“Ethan’s been talking about a situation in Kenya,” Donovan said. His tone was casual, forward-looking, the verbal equivalent of a shrug. “Security detail for an NGO or something. He needs someone with tactical experience and K9 knowledge for threat assessment.”
“When?”
“After this wraps. Month, maybe two.”
“And after Kenya?”
“After Kenya, there’ll be something else.” He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “That’s how the work goes. That’s how you guys talked me into drinking the Citadel Solutions Kool-Aid.”
It was how the work went, and it was why Citadel was a good fit for Donovan.
It was also how a man avoided standing still long enough to hear whatever was chasing him.
Standing still meant thinking. Thinking meant facing whatever had happened in Afghanistan that had taken the man I’d served with and put something heavier in his place.
“Well,” I said. “I’m glad you’re here now.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then, softer than I expected, he said, “Yeah. Me too.”
Reeves started moving again. Another house, another handoff at the door. I was logging the address when Donovan leaned forward.
“Hold on. That duplex he just hit—the brown one with the carport.”
“What about it?”
“I’ve seen that address before. Jace’s files on Porter. That’s one of his rental properties.”
I looked at the list of addresses on my phone. Seven stops so far. I couldn’t match them all from memory, but Donovan had spent more time with Porter’s property records than I had, and his recall for details like that bordered on photographic.
“You sure?”
“Positive. And I think the house on Maple was his too. The one with the chain link fence.” He was already pulling out his phone. “I’m sending the full list to Jace. Let him run them all.”
The reply came in under three minutes.
Donovan read the screen. His expression flattened. “Five out of seven.”
“Five out of seven what?”
“Addresses. Five of the seven locations Reeves has visited tonight are Porter properties. Rental houses, apartment units.”
The SUV went quiet.
Jonathan Porter. Real estate developer. Suspected financial backer of the drug syndicate Rawlings couldn’t prove a connection to. The man who owned so much of Summit Falls that his name showed up on every other deed in the county.
And now a young cop with a burner phone and unexplained deposits was making nightly rounds to addresses that bore Porter’s name.
“Collecting payments?” Donovan said. “Delivering product?”
“Either one fits. Two phones, evening hours, brief contacts at specific addresses, and five of those addresses trace back to the man Rawlings thinks is bankrolling the whole operation.”
“That sure as shit does not feel like coincidence.”