26. Penny
PENNY
I read it twice, coffee going cold in my hand. Morris gave his notice three weeks ago, and the council used every day of it to pick his replacement.
Johnson catches my eye across the bullpen and mouths, you know him?
I shake my head. Never heard the name Wexler in my life, and I’ve spent a decent amount of it in this county.
At nine, we file into the conference room like kids called to the principal’s office.
Wexler stands at the front in a uniform so pressed it looks like it came off a mannequin an hour ago.
Mid-fifties, silver hair parted with a ruler, the kind of posture that says he practiced looking authoritative in a mirror.
He’s got a folder in front of him, squared perfectly to the edge of the podium.
“Morning.” He doesn’t smile. “I know change is uncomfortable. I’ve reviewed the department’s clearance rates, budget allocations, and case management protocols over the past two years, and I want to be transparent. There’s work to do.”
Beside me, Johnson mutters, “Here we go.”
“Effective immediately, all field reports require supervisor sign-off before filing. All overtime requests route through my office, no exceptions. And any contact with outside parties in ongoing investigations—informants, civilian consultants, whoever—gets documented and approved in advance.”
My stomach drops a little. That last one feels aimed at me specifically, though there’s no way he could know. Unless Morris briefed him on the way out the door, which wouldn’t shock me.
“Questions?”
Nobody raises a hand. I don’t either, though I’ve got about nine hundred of them.
He dismisses us like we’re a classroom, and I head back to my desk trying to convince myself it’s fine. New broom, new rules. Every department goes through this.
Then Tuesday happens.
I catch the Doss case again on a routine records pull, the one from the Pemberton fallout, and there’s a loose thread.
Emily Doss’s older cousin, a woman named Katrina, mentioned to a caseworker back in the original report that she saw a black SUV parked outside the Doss house the same week Emily disappeared three years ago.
Nobody followed up. Everybody was too busy being paid to look away.
Katrina lives forty minutes away now, across the line in Sevier County. If I can get a plate, a name, anything, it might connect to whoever helped Pemberton move the girls before they were kept on his property. It might close a hole that’s been sitting open for years.
I draft a request to interview her and drop it on Wexler’s desk before lunch.
By three, it’s still sitting there. I knock on his open door.
“Chief, I wanted to follow up on the Doss interview request.”
He doesn’t look up from whatever he’s reading. “It’s in the queue.”
“The queue for how long?”
“Requests for interviews outside county jurisdiction require a memo to Sevier County liaison first, then my sign-off, then theirs. Standard interagency protocol.”
“This isn’t a jurisdictional dispute, it’s a phone call and a forty-minute drive. The witness isn’t a suspect; she’s a cousin who saw a car three years ago.”
“Protocol exists for a reason, Officer Carpenter.” He finally looks up, and waits as though the word protocol ought to settle it. “I wasn’t here for whatever happened with the previous administration. I’d like to think we can avoid repeating certain mistakes.”
The previous administration. Like Morris is a regime that got overthrown instead of a man who broke under the weight of what he knew.
“With respect, the mistake wasn’t moving too fast. It was moving too slow while kids kept disappearing.”
“And I’ve read the file. I’ve also read the complaint that got filed against this department for improper procedure during the Pemberton raid response.
” He taps a folder I hadn’t noticed sitting at his elbow.
“Evidence chain issues. Missing surveillance footage nobody can explain. I don’t intend to let this department get sued into the ground because somebody’s chasing a feeling. ”
My jaw tightens. “It’s not a feeling. It’s a pattern.”
“Then document the pattern, submit it through channels, and I’ll review it Thursday.”
Thursday. A woman who might have seen the car that took a six-year-old, and he wants to review it Thursday.
“Katrina Doss isn’t going anywhere,” he adds, already looking back down at his desk, “and neither is the truth, if there is one.”
I stand there another second, waiting for him to notice I haven’t left, but he doesn’t look up again. So I walk out before I say something that ends up in a different kind of file.
I sit at my desk for a long minute, staring at my copy of the request, four little boxes for signatures that don’t exist yet.
Somewhere out there, a girl is three years older than when she disappeared, and the person who might know who put her in that car is forty minutes away, living her life, waiting for nobody to ask.
This is what I signed up for. The badge, the chain of command, the idea that if you do it right, by the book, the book eventually protects people.
Except I watched the book fail Addison Miller while men who put on leather vests instead of uniforms did what I couldn’t.
I watched Morris cave to a rich man’s lawyers because the book told him to worry about lawsuits before little girls.
And now I’ve got a man who thinks protocol is a virtue instead of a tool, sitting in Morris’s chair, stacking boxes between me and every person who needs help faster than a memo can travel.
Johnson pokes his head around the divider. “How’d it go?”
“He wants a memo.”
“For what?”
“For everything.” I laugh, but there’s no humor in it. “I asked to interview a witness who lives forty minutes away and he told me it needs interagency sign-off.”
Johnson winces. “Guy’s a nightmare. Terri in dispatch says he made her redo the shift log because she used blue pen instead of black.”
“Of course he did.”
I look at my computer screen, at the case number blinking in the corner, at Emily Doss’s file still open in another tab. Three years old, and getting colder every day Wexler sits on a signature.
I think about Sasha, wrapped in that blanket the night I met her, and Addison, wrapped in one four months later.
I think about how the club got there before we ever could, how the club found the basement while we were still being told to wait.
How wrong that should feel, and how right it actually was.
I think about a version of my life where I don’t need Bradley Wexler’s signature to knock on Katrina Doss’s door. Where I don’t need half a dozen boxes checked to follow a hunch that’s kept me right more often than it’s kept me wrong. Where the law is a tool I use instead of a cage I live in.
I open a new tab and type before I can talk myself out of it: private investigator license Tennessee requirements.
The page loads. Applications, fingerprints, an exam. If I want to open my own agency, there’s a separate company license to sort out too. More paperwork, but this time it would get me somewhere.
I sit with the cursor blinking in the search bar for a long time, listening to the printer hum two desks over, Johnson’s voice on the phone with someone about a fender bender on Route 9, all of it going on as if nothing has changed.
I don’t close the tab.