Chapter 11
Dozer
Kenzi finds it while she's doing something I would've called routine if I knew enough about forensic preservation to call anything about it routine. I’ve realized on this case I don’t know much about forensics. I know how to preserve a chain of evidence, but that’s about as far as it goes.
We've stopped at a rest area outside some town I haven't bothered learning the name of, long enough for her to check the evidence case and the samples she pulled at the morgue, sealed and logged with the kind of meticulous precision she's explained to me twice already because I asked, because understanding the chain of custody matters if I'm going to keep it intact with my life.
She has the case open on the trunk of the car, gloves on, her laptop balanced beside it, and I'm doing my usual perimeter check of a parking lot that has exactly one other vehicle, three light poles, a row of trees too thin to provide meaningful cover, and absolutely nothing I like about the place.
I circle the lot anyway. Habit. There are worse things than being predictable about the things that keep people alive.
I'm halfway around the far side of the vehicle when I hear it.
"Dozer."
Something in the way she says my name pulls my attention off the lot entirely. Not panic. Not fear. Something sharper.
I turn. She's holding one of the sample vials up to the light, turning it slowly between her gloved fingers.
Her entire posture has changed. Her shoulders are rigid, her head angled slightly, eyes narrowed behind the lenses of the glasses she wears whenever she works, and every trace of the woman who spent the first few hours of this mission filling my truck with commentary has disappeared.
This is Kenzi in work mode. I'm beginning to recognize the difference.
"What."
"This shouldn't look like this."
I'm beside her before she finishes the sentence. "Talk to me."
"The preservation solution is cloudy." She holds it up again, examining it from another angle.
"It shouldn't be cloudy. Not this fast. Not under proper storage conditions.
" She sets it down carefully, too carefully, like it might still be dangerous even sealed, which, for all either of us knows, it might be.
"Someone introduced a contaminant," she says. "Deliberately."
I look at the vial. Then the case. Then her.
"This isn't degradation," she continues. "This is tampering."
I run the timeline through my head, fast. The morgue. The evidence collection. The motel. The attack. The vehicle swaps. The parking lot. Every point where somebody could've gotten close enough.
"When did you last check it clean?"
"This morning. Before the motel."
"So somewhere between this morning and right now, somebody got close enough to our gear to poison evidence without either of us noticing."
She doesn't answer immediately. Her gaze stays on the vial, and I watch that same flat, working stillness settle over her that I saw at the morgue. This is the version of her that stops talking, her silence says a lot because this woman is almost never silent.
"This is bad," she says.
"How bad?"
She finally looks at me. "Someone knew exactly what they were doing.
" I wait. "They didn't just contaminate evidence.
They contaminated the chain of custody. If the lab sees compromised samples, everything connected to them gets questioned.
Defense attorneys will tear the entire case apart.
They'll argue the evidence was altered, mishandled, manufactured.
" She looks back at the case. "And if somebody understands that well enough to deliberately target the preservation solution, they understand forensic procedure. "
Which means the leak isn't just feeding our route to shooters. It's feeding someone technical enough to know precisely how to unmake the one piece of proof we're risking our lives to protect. I feel something cold settle low in my gut.
"How many?"
She checks the remaining vials. "Not all of them."
"How many are compromised?"
"I need to test them properly before I know."
"Do it."
She looks at me. "I need better equipment."
"You'll get it."
Her eyes meet mine again, and there's something there I recognize because I've seen it in operators staring down a mission that just changed underneath their feet. Determination. Not fear. Determination.
"I can salvage some of this," she says. "Maybe more than some."
"I believe you." The words are out before I think about them. She goes still, just for a second, then nods and gets back to work.
I pull my phone. Standard channel is compromised, we both know that now, so I use the backup line Hunter set up specifically for this scenario, the kind of contingency you build because you've been doing this long enough to know contingencies always eventually matter.
Hunter picks up on the second ring. "Talk."
"Evidence integrity is compromised. Somebody got close enough to introduce a contaminant to the samples. Kenzi caught it, but if she hadn't, we'd be delivering junk to D.C. and calling it truth."
There's a pause on the line. Not a long one, just the length of a man doing the same fast recalculation I've already done, weighing what this means against everything else already in motion.
"Options," Hunter says. That's the whole reason I trust him. Not, are you sure? Not, walk me through exactly what happened. Just options. Forward motion. The assumption baked all the way through that if I'm calling, it matters, and if Kenzi says it's compromised, it's compromised. Full stop.
"Kenzi thinks she can salvage part of the sample set. Won't know how much until she has real time with it. Not at a rest stop."
"Do you trust her assessment?"
"Completely." The answer comes without hesitation.
There's another beat of silence. I understand what Hunter is doing. He isn't questioning me. He's weighing the situation, deciding whether the contamination changes the mission enough to pull in a full team instead of letting the two of us keep moving.
"Keep moving," he says finally. "I'll get you a secure lab contact. Off the grid. Someone who owes me and doesn't ask questions."
"Copy."
"You're not stopping again until you're there."
"Understood."
"Dozer." Something shifts in his voice. Quieter. The register he uses for the handful of conversations that aren't strictly operational. "Whoever's doing this is close. Watch each other's backs. Both of you."
He hangs up before I can answer. Fine by me.
There isn't much to say beyond an agreement I've already been operating on since the motel door came in. We know the body isn’t the target anymore, our other team hasn’t come across a single hiccup.
It’s the evidence Kenzi has that they want and apparently will stop at nothing to destroy.
I look back at Kenzi. She's still working. Careful hands sort through the samples, separating what she thinks is compromised from what might still be clean. Her laptop is open, fingers moving across the keyboard between checks, and her mouth is doing that thing it does when she's thinking hard, it’s pressed into a thin line, lower lip caught briefly between her teeth. I know better than to distract her. I also know better than to pretend I'm not watching. She’s beautiful and I want to suck that lip out from between her teeth and press it to mine. I’m not sure when I started feeling this way, but I can’t deny the attraction between us.
She catches me staring.
"How bad is it?" I ask.
"Bad." She holds up two vials. "Not unsalvageable."
"Those clean?"
"As far as I can tell." She sets them apart from the rest. "Whoever did this either didn't have time to hit everything, or didn't know which samples actually mattered most." She looks at me. "Either way, we've still got something worth dying for."
"Nobody's dying for it."
"Figure of speech."
"Not really, given the last week."
Her mouth curves into a real smile this time, quick, small, but real. "Fair."
I watch her repack the case. Every movement is careful, deliberate.
She doesn't rush just because we're in a hurry.
She doesn't let urgency turn into sloppiness.
It's the same thing I saw at the morgue.
The same thing I saw when the convoy got hit.
She doesn't freeze when things go bad. She gets sharper.
That matters more than I want it to, because I've spent most of my adult life learning that competence is one thing and trust is another, and whatever is happening between Kenzi and me is starting to feel dangerously close to both.
I think about Hunter's voice. Watch each other's backs. It hadn't sounded like an order. It had sounded like something he already trusted was true.
He isn't wrong. I've been watching her back since the morgue. I intend to keep doing it, for as long as this job takes, and possibly, though I'm not ready to examine that thought too closely standing in a rest-stop parking lot with contaminated evidence between us, considerably longer than that.
Kenzi closes the case. "We're ready."
I nod. "We drive until the lab contact. No stops unless I say so."
"Copy that."
I almost smile. I don't let her see it.
She climbs into the passenger seat, and I take one last look around the parking lot before getting behind the wheel. Nothing moves. Nothing looks wrong. That doesn't mean anything anymore. We've learned that lesson the hard way.
I start the engine. Kenzi settles beside me, the evidence case secured between our seats.
Two clean samples. One compromised chain of custody.
A dead man who officially doesn't exist. A crime ring desperate enough to kill for silence.
And somewhere ahead of us, someone knows exactly what we're carrying. They are a step ahead of us, since we haven’t a clue as to what it is.
I put the vehicle in gear. This time, I don't just intend to get the evidence to D.C. I intend to find the person who tried to destroy it. And if they come after Kenzi again, they're going to learn something the hard way.
She isn't just part of my mission anymore.
She's under my protection.
And I don't abandon what's mine.