Chapter 4
Dozer
The facility is a converted municipal building on the edge of a county that doesn't get much attention, which is the point.
Bodies that matter this much don't get held somewhere with cameras on every corner.
They get held somewhere quiet, where quiet can be controlled. Where everything can be controlled.
I like buildings like this with predictable sightlines, one real entrance and limited staff. A facility with maybe six people on a good day is easy to account for, easy to secure, and easier to move through if something goes wrong.
And something always goes wrong.
I have a team I hand-picked from Spartan Elite meet us there, and they have the perimeter locked down in four minutes.
Reyes takes the east door. Malloy runs comms from the van.
A two-man sweep clears the interior room by room in the kind of silence you only get from people who've done these enough times that talking would just slow them down.
Nobody radios unless something is wrong and nobody needs to.
I can read the whole operation off body language alone, which is how I prefer to read most things. Reyes touches two fingers to his ear, then drops his hand. Clear. Malloy gives me a quick nod through the windshield. The sweep team disappears around the corner.
Done.
Nice and clean.
Exactly how I like it.
Kenzi hasn't said a word since we walked in.
It's refreshing after she talked my ear off for the last three hours in the truck.
Although, if I'm being honest, I hadn't minded her chatter.
That realization has been sitting in the back of my mind since somewhere around mile marker forty, and I haven't figured out what to do with it yet.
I’m a man who likes quiet. I've always liked quiet. Quiet gives me room to think. Room to listen. Room to notice the things other people miss.
Kenzi fills the quiet like she has a personal vendetta against it. And somehow, with her, I didn't mind. I'll examine that feeling later. Maybe. Right now, I have a job to do.
My asset has gone quiet the way a professional goes quiet. She’s focused. Everything extra falls away but the mission at hand. I recognize it because it's the same quiet I drop into before a breach, the kind where everything unnecessary disappears and only the job is left.
I hadn't expected that from her. I didn’t think she knew when to be quiet and when to engage.
I should have. She’s surprised me in all the good ways today.
I'm not sure what I expected from her exactly.
Something closer to what the file suggested.
A consultant. Consultants are useful in theory, but best kept at a careful distance in practice.
Instead, I watch her circle the examination table without touching anything, her hands clasped behind her back like she's in a museum instead of a room that smells like refrigerant and formaldehyde. Her expression has changed.
The woman from the truck is gone.
There’s no more teasing smile with a running commentary. Gone is her bright-eyed observation about my questionable snack preferences and lack of music playlist.
She's studying the body without touching it. Her eyes are cataloging every inch, every detail of the man laying before us. We need to move this along, but somehow, I know what she is doing is important, so I don’t rush her.
She leans over the man's hands, close enough that anyone else in the room would probably call it too close and goes very still.
I watch her face instead of looking at the body, because something just caught her attention and I want to know what it is.
"That's wrong," she says.
Malloy, standing near the door, doesn't move, and neither does anyone else.
My team doesn't react to much, but I catch the flicker anyway, the collective decision to wait and see if the consultant knows what she's talking about before anybody wastes breath asking.
I step closer. "Define wrong."
"Lividity's inconsistent with the position he was found in.
" She says it like she's reading it off a page of a textbook and not like she's standing three feet from a corpse.
"If he died face-down, the blood pools in his face, chest, and the fronts of his thighs.
That's not what I'm looking at." Her voice is calm, almost clinical.
"Meaning?" I ask.
"Meaning somebody moved him after death, and I don’t mean to this building. I mean he was moved to the scene he was found at." She finally looks up at me. "This wasn't a clean death in a clean location like the evidence in the file showed. Somebody staged this."
Nobody in the room says anything. I don't either. I do what I always do when new information changes the shape of a mission. I recalculate. The entire operation. This means we aren’t as sure about the threat as we thought, or the timeline.
The body isn't simply evidence anymore. It's evidence somebody has already tried to manipulate.
Which means someone has gone to considerable trouble to control what we find.
And people don't go to that kind of trouble unless they're afraid of what someone might uncover.
"Can you prove it?" I ask.
"I can document it." She's already crouching beside her bag. "Photographs. A couple measurements. Give me five minutes." She pulls on gloves. "I need better light. And I need everyone who isn't cleared for what's actually in this file to be somewhere else."
The last part is aimed at the two junior staff hovering near the far wall. County employees who’ve been told this is a routine transfer. They have no reason to know otherwise. By now, I’m sure they know this is anything but routine.
Kenzi doesn't even look at them when she says it, she just knows they're there and exactly how much they're supposed to see. She handles it without breaking her rhythm.
I move one step sideways, then another. I angle my shoulder between the table and the two staff members' sightlines. Six inches, maybe eight. Enough that whatever she photographs next, they won't see.
She doesn't thank me; she doesn’t even look up. She's too deep in the work by then to notice. Or maybe she notices and files it the way I've filed her competence, quietly. Because commenting on it would make it bigger than it needs to be. I respect that more than I expect to.
Whatever else is going on with her; the boots, the stickers, the nonstop commentary, the way she somehow makes an armored truck feel three degrees warmer just by occupying the passenger seat, this matters more. She's not a liability standing between me and a clean extraction.
She's the reason we now know this is a different job than the one we walked into. I've worked with a lot of people I've trusted with my life. It's a shorter list for the people I trust with a mission going sideways in real time and still come out with better information than we walked in with.
Kenzi Sullivan just put herself on that list.
I don't know what to do with that information yet.
So I do what I always do. I keep watch while she works. She moves quickly, but not carelessly. She photographs the hands, the feet, and the neck. Takes measurements. Checks the position of the body against the original recovery photographs.
Every movement is deliberate, she’s filing the results somewhere behind those green-and-gold eyes.
She finishes in under five minutes and takes her gloves off.
She ejects the camera memory card and pockets it.
It’s like she’s done this a thousand times.
It dawns on me then, she probably has. She worked for the DOD for years.
"Someone wanted this to look like something it wasn't," she says. "Which means someone's already covering tracks." She looks at me. "Which means we're behind."
"We're not behind." I tell her and she studies me. "We just know more than we did ten minutes ago."
Her eyes stay on mine, and for a second, neither of us moves. "You believe that."
"I don't say things I don't believe."
"No," she says slowly. "I don't think you say anything you don’t mean."
The words land harder than they should. She doesn't know me. Not really. She knows what I've shown her. Which isn't much. Most people don't bother looking past that. Kenzi isn’t most people and she has. I don't answer, some things don't need an answer.
I nod toward the door, and she falls into step beside me. She’s quiet again. But it's a different quiet, it’s a comfortable silence. The kind two people fall into after they've decided, without saying so, that they can work together.
I hadn't expected to like the sound of it, but I do anyway. We make it halfway down the corridor before she speaks.
"Dozer?"
I glance at her. "Yeah?"
"You're going to want to see something."
My entire body goes alert. "What?"
She pulls the evidence pouch from her bag and holds it up between us. "There's something else."
I look at the pouch and then at her.
"What did you find?"
Her eyes meet mine. "I don't know yet. But I think our dead man brought us a message."
And just like that, the mission changes again.