Chapter 27 #2
Vance glanced over his shoulder toward the group of officers near the door. “Victim’s ID says Ashley Moran. Anybody know her?”
Briggson stood with his arms crossed and his weight back on his heels. He shook his head. “Never heard the name.” He said it flat, already looking past Vance toward the parking lot. “Just another tourist who couldn’t handle her high.”
Nobody else spoke up.
I nodded at Vance. “I’ll work Jolly through the apartment. Keep the foot traffic clear of wherever he’s searching.”
“You got it.”
I crouched beside Jolly and unclipped his working lead, replacing it with the longer search line. His body was already taut with focus, ears rotated forward, weight shifting onto his front legs.
I ran my hand along his flank and checked that the naloxone was in my vest. There didn’t seem to be any loose product visible. The drug was in the victim’s system, not on the surfaces, but I’d keep Jolly’s sweep controlled and watch for any sign of a reaction.
“Seek,” I told him, and he went to work.
The apartment didn’t offer much. No stash, no paraphernalia beyond what the evidence techs had already tagged and photographed.
Jolly had done his job perfectly, thorough, controlled, precise, and it didn’t matter because the damage was already done.
The drug had done its work somewhere else, and this apartment was just the place where it ended.
I called Jolly back and gave him his reward, a brief tug session with the rope in my vest pocket. His tail hammered against my leg. For him, the job was the job. Clear the room, find or don’t find, get the reward. He didn’t carry the weight of what the room meant.
I coiled the search line and found Vance near the kitchen. “Jolly’s cleared the apartment. Passive alert near the kitchen but nothing actionable. Let the detectives know you’ve got everything we can give you.”
He nodded and let out a tired sigh. “I was afraid of that. I hate this fucking Drift shit.”
“I don’t blame you, man. This shit is brutal. Hopefully it won’t be long until you take Jonathan Porter and his cronies down for good. I’ll see you for training next week.”
“Yeah. See you.”
I clipped Jolly back to his working lead and headed for the door. The exterior corridor was mostly empty now, a couple of officers still milling near the stairwell. I turned toward the parking lot.
That was when I heard Briggson’s voice.
Not his words. Just the register. Low and tight and nothing like the way Seth Briggson usually sounded in a room full of other cops. I stopped.
He was at the far end of the corridor, maybe twenty feet away. Phone pressed to his ear, body angled toward the wall, shoulder blades pulled together like he was trying to make himself smaller. His free hand was braced against the railing, knuckles white.
Officers took calls on scene. It wasn’t unusual. But something in his posture held my attention. The rigid set of his spine, the way he’d positioned himself so that no one walking past could see his face.
I kept Jolly at my side and let myself look like a handler waiting for his dog to settle. Not watching. Just standing.
Briggson’s voice carried in pieces. Not because he was loud. He was trying to keep it down. But his control was slipping.
“You want to tell me why one of your friends is dead on a kitchen floor?”
Never heard the name. That’s what he’d said ten minutes ago.
I kept my body still, kept my hand on Jolly’s collar, kept my eyes pointed at the parking lot.
“I told you I can’t keep doing this.” His jaw clenched hard enough that I could see the muscle jump from where I stood. “Call me back. I mean it.”
He pulled the phone away from his ear and stared at the screen for a long second. Then he shoved it in his pocket and stood there, both hands on the railing, head dropped forward.
This wasn’t Briggson being angry at the world the way he always was. This was the thing that made him angry at everything else. His voice had been hoarse, almost shaking, stripped of every bit of the bluster he wore like part of his uniform.
I stayed in the doorway. Jolly sat beside me, patient, watching a pigeon on the far side of the parking lot.
My mind started turning.
You want to tell me why one of your friends is dead on a kitchen floor?
Briggson was talking to someone connected to the drug world. That much was clear from the “one of your friends” line. That wasn’t a cop talking to a source. That was a man talking to someone he cared about.
And the “I can’t keep doing this.”
Doing what?
I’d been operating under the assumption that the case was finished. We had our perp. Martinez, rest his soul, had been the unintentional fountain of information.
But Seth Briggson was standing outside a dead woman’s apartment, calling someone connected to the drug trade, using language that pointed to a relationship that had been going on for what sounded like quite a fucking while.
Holy shit.
What if Martinez hadn’t been the problem after all? Yeah, he’d been a leak, but he couldn’t even remember what he’d said at his games when drinking so much.
What if the real dirty cop had just taken advantage of that?
Jolly shifted beside me, resettling his weight. I scratched behind his ear without looking down.
The pieces rearranged themselves, and they fit in ways I didn’t like.
Briggson’s hostility from the first day. The territorial aggression every time Donovan and I got close to department operations. The resentment that flared whenever we accessed records or sat in on briefings.
Rawlings himself had waved it off. That’s just Seth. And I’d accepted it because it was easier than the alternative, because the man’s attitude was consistent and matched the profile of a cranky veteran cop who didn’t like outsiders telling him how to do his job.
But what if every time Briggson pushed back against us, every time he made a scene about protocol or jurisdiction, it had been to keep us looking past him.
Not at a quiet cop covering his tracks, but at a loud one nobody bothered to examine because his behavior was so predictably abrasive that it became background noise.
It was smart as fuck; I had to admit. How many times had Donovan and I wished Briggson were the bad guy so we could help take him down and rid the department of its resident asshole?
We’d been aware of our own bias and had cut Briggson more slack because of it.
Jace had run financials on every officer in the department. Briggson’s had come back clean. More than clean. The man donated more to charity than anyone else on the force. At the time, it had been one more data point confirming that Briggson was exactly what he appeared to be.
But now, I was wondering if a man smart enough to run a long-term compromise inside a police department might also be smart enough to keep his bank statements spotless.
Fuck.
What if we’d closed the case too early with Martinez, and someone was still selling out this department?
Briggson didn’t come back to the group.
He straightened up from the railing, pocketed his phone, and walked past the officers at the perimeter without a word. Not a glance back at the apartment, not a check-in with the detectives running the scene.
He cut through the parking lot, shoulders set, jaw locked, moving like a man with somewhere to be that had nothing to do with the dead woman inside.
Someone who’d just left an important voice mail that nobody answered, and whatever he was going to do next couldn’t wait.
The decision to follow took about three seconds.
I walked Jolly across the parking lot, loaded him into the truck. I closed the door and climbed behind the wheel.
Briggson’s vehicle was already out of sight, but I knew the direction he’d gone. I started the engine.
I’d thought the job was done.
It wasn’t.