Chapter 16
Ryan drained the last of his stale coffee and tried not to wish it was something else.
The serum in his blood had burned off sometime during the last four hours of interrogation, and now he was fighting the shakes as the addiction kicked in.
His mouth was dry, his head was pounding, and he wanted, wanted, wanted anything that would make it end.
Damn the woman for injecting that shit into his veins. And yet he couldn’t really blame her if the other option had been death. Still, the need was stripping him raw just when he needed to keep it together.
He was sitting in the interrogation room of the precinct that covered the grizzly territory.
He knew most of the guys here, but those weren’t the ones who had grilled him for the last four hours.
No, he’d been under the spotlight of the stars of the Detroit PD, the ones handpicked to catch the villains who had poisoned the city.
They didn’t know him from the lowest drug dealer on the street, and they’d treated him with equal disdain.
In their defense, they didn’t seem to think he’d been the one who’d poisoned the city.
But he was named on that damned sign-in page, so he was involved somehow, and they wanted to know why.
He gave them everything he could, including Raoul Wolf.
He just didn’t speak about people changing into animals.
Or that he’d slept with one of the lead suspects.
Then the door opened, and his captain walked in. Ah, shit. Ryan had watched the man talk to suspects. He had a way of cutting a person open so that his or her secrets were exposed. He did not relish being on the receiving end of one of Captain Abraham’s interrogations.
He sighed and looked up. “Ready to cut me loose?” he asked. It was a vain hope, but he had to give it a shot.
The older man smiled as if Ryan had just made a joke and then passed him a water bottle. “You look like shit.”
“It’s the coffee.”
“Don’t think so.” His eyes narrowed as he studied Ryan.
He’d been Ryan’s mentor since the day he’d stepped into the gang department, and Ryan hated lying to the man who had taught him the ropes and showed him just how to gain people’s trust. It was by talking honestly, heart to heart with people.
And that’s what he did now. “You on something?”
Ryan nodded. “Drank the water. It’s made me…” He shrugged. “Reckless, I think.”
“You were the one warning us about the water. How’d you forget?”
He sighed. He’d gone over this with the other guys. “I figured out about the water afterwards.” He wiped his hand across his forehead and was ashamed at the sweat that had beaded there. “This is withdrawal.”
“Are you in a relationship with Frankie Wolf?”
Hell if he knew. Had last night been a one-time moment of playing house? Or a prelude to something more? “What does she say?”
“Nothing. We haven’t found her yet.”
Ryan controlled his reaction. He knew she’d skipped from the crime scene, but he’d held out a silly hope that she’d come back.
She’d declared to one and all that she was his “friend” inside the storage room.
But then when he needed her to corroborate his statement, she was in the wind.
She’d abandoned him, and damn his heart for hurting from that.
She’d never made any promises to him. Her loyalty was to her pack and he was a bear.
And yet her disappearance cut him deeply. She’d declared them friends and then bailed.
She was probably confronting her brother. Or at least trying to stop her father from going to war with the Griz. But both of those paths were suicide without backup. He could have helped her, but she hadn’t stuck around long enough to see that.
Meanwhile, Captain Abraham held up his phone and read off the screen.
“The Wolves aren’t a gang in the traditional sense.
They’re a powerful family trying to build a community.
Francesca is the force behind those efforts.
Emory is the glad-handing mayor, and Raoul the quiet nerd.
She is the power behind the throne and our efforts should focus on her.
” Captain Abraham looked up from his phone. “Remember when you wrote that?”
Ryan nodded. It was part of his report on the shifter “gangs” in Detroit, though no one in the department knew they were shifters.
“Were you seeing her then?”
“No.”
“But you tracked her, watched her, knew what she was up to.”
“That was my job.”
“And you do throw yourself a hundred percent into your job,” he drawled.
Ryan didn’t like his captain’s tone, nor did he appreciate the sleazy inference the man was making.
He hadn’t written that report because of some relationship with Frankie.
He’d done it because it was the truth. And because he was the only one on the force who could track the shifters in Detroit and who knew exactly what each species was up to.
It had nothing to do with a relationship then or now.
“I’m just trying to find the asshole responsible for the Detroit Flu.”
Abraham nodded, his expression compassionate. But when he spoke, his words were anything but kind. Still, his tone was gentle, and that made it a hundred times worse.
“Interesting that you say ‘asshole’ in the singular. Like one person could have pulled off poisoning an entire city.”
It was possible given werewolf pack structure. He just hadn’t figured out if it was Emory or Raoul who was the ultimate culprit.
“Want to know what I think happened?” Abraham asked. Ryan didn’t, but he was about to hear anyway. “I think you were getting close to figuring things out. I think you took sick time in order to do some private investigating, and that led you to Frankie Wolf.”
“She came to me,” he said. In fact, she’d saved his life.
“I’ll just bet she did. She probably spun this whole damsel-in-distress tale and how she needs your help to expose Raoul.”
Ryan lifted his chin. “Frankie’s the opposite of a damsel in distress.” If anything, she was too damned independent for her own good.
His captain kept going as if he hadn’t spoken. “She’s pretty, she’s been doing good things in the neighborhood, so you believed her.”
“I do believe her.”
“But you’re not stupid. You’re not just going to take her word for it. You need evidence. So she takes you to that storage facility where your name is written on everything. Then she disappears, leaving you neatly tied up here and out of her hair.”
Was it possible? He was a good judge of character, but his captain spun a convincing picture. Especially since he knew wolves were devious, political creatures. But Frankie wasn’t like that. “She wanted to hide the paper with my name on it. She knows it was a lie.”
He snorted. “She also knows you’d never hide evidence even if it lined you up for the electric chair.”
Ryan didn’t answer. Instead, he grabbed the water bottle and started chugging. He felt weak and antsy at the same time, and he didn’t like where this discussion was going.
“She drug you before or after you slept together?”
He choked, sputtering as he gaped at his superior.
“You didn’t accidentally drink any of the water. It got poured into you or shot straight into your veins. Do you know who did it?”
Of course, he did. But Frankie had been saving his life.
“You’re smarter than the average junkie. You don’t addict that fast. She couldn’t control you with the drug, so she went for sex, for damsel in distress, for any one of the many ways Mata Haris trick us dumb men.”
“She’s not some devious female spy.”
“No, but she is a princess in an organized crime family.”
He bolted upright at that. “They’re not organized crime. Their businesses and their money are legit.” He planted his hands on the table as he leaned forward. “We both saw the report on their financials. They’re clean.”
“Not if they poisoned Detroit. Not if they’ve declared some sort of territory war against the Griz and mean to go killing people in the streets.”
Ryan swallowed. That was true, and that was exactly why he’d gotten involved to help Frankie. And yet here he was, tied up with the police and absolutely unable to do anything but sit and feel useless. And doubt every decision he’d made in the last twenty-four hours.
Captain Abraham leaned back in his chair. “What’s the one rule of all gangs?”
Ryan didn’t answer. He didn’t want to follow this line of thought.
“Come on. First thing I taught you when you came onto my task force.”
“Don’t involve the cops.”
Abraham smiled. “That’s right. Do everything you can—lie, cheat, steal…” He leaned forward. “Poison or seduce. Anything you can to keep the cops out of it. The gangs take care of the gangs, and they’ll do anything to keep the cops away.”
Ryan gripped his half-empty bottle and tried to get hold of his emotions.
It was hard. The addiction was riding him, making him sweat and ache all at once.
And the captain’s logic was eating at his confidence, throwing everything that had happened into a bad light.
Had he been played? He sure as hell had been abandoned, and that carried so many emotional echoes that it was hard to think beyond it.
“She came to me. She involved me. Why would she do that if she wanted me out of the way?”
“Did she? Or did you stumble onto her and she had to cover?”
He arched a brow and Ryan felt his face heat. Damn it, she’d come on him being shot and had saved his life. But he couldn’t say that because then he’d have to explain how he took two slugs to the chest and there was no sign of it now. And still the man kept hitting him with logic.
“Maybe she’s the best of a bad lot. Maybe she’s trying to do good here, but everything she’s done has been to get you out of their business.
And look, she succeeded. You’re burned out from the drug, you’re trapped here getting interrogated, and when she could be right beside you adding her voice to yours, she’s gone. And that Brady guy, too.”