CHAPTER EIGHT
Kate was still smiling when she pushed through the precinct doors.
The weather had taken an upward turn — the rain like tiny silver needles through the weak sunshine — and the patter of it had followed her all the way from the diner. It sat in her chest, too, like a rhythm: soft, expectant. For the first time in days, she felt almost light. Gabe had that effect.
She carried the warmth with her up the stairwell, one hand trailing along the rail.
The building smelled the way police buildings always did — old paper, spilt coffee, lunches long past edible.
When she reached the temporary office she shared with Marcus, she was rehearsing how she’d tell him about Gabe’s suggestion: the preparatory networking Cox could have done in prison.
She was halfway through the imaginary conversation when she saw their door.
It was closed.
That, in itself, wasn’t unusual — but the light beneath it was a dull, uncertain gold, like a candle under a lid. And something in the air—some shift in energy—stopped her just long enough to register it.
She turned the handle.
Inside, the temperature seemed to drop a few degrees.
Marcus was at the desk, his posture wrong — not his usual forward lean but slouched, almost apologetic, as if he’d been caught in someone else’s room, hand in the drawer.
Torres stood near the window, arms folded tight, her expression unreadable.
Kate blinked. “Okay,” she said lightly. “Who emptied the cookie jar?”
Neither of them answered.
“I was joking,” she added. “I thought.”
Marcus’s mouth twitched, but he didn’t quite smile. “Hey.”
“Hey,” she echoed. “What’s with the faces? I was just with Gabe. He says—”
“Kate,” Torres interrupted, voice low. “Maybe sit down.”
Kate’s pulse gave a small, instinctive lurch. “Why?”
Marcus opened his mouth, closed it again. His eyes flicked toward the corridor.
That was when she heard it — laughter. A woman’s laugh, smooth, deliberate, too loud for the setting. A man’s baritone followed, saying something about the Yankees, then more laughter again.
Kate froze.
She knew that laugh.
The door opened behind her.
“You’re back,” Victoria Winters said.
Kate’s boss looked as if she’d stepped out of a different universe entirely — immaculate charcoal suit, silk scarf knotted at her throat, expression halfway between amusement and warning. Captain O’Hare loomed at her shoulder, red-faced from grinning.
“Kate,” Winters said, in that flat New England register that could make your own name sound like a charge.
Kate forced her spine straight. “Ma’am.” She glanced involuntarily at Winters’ companion, Torres’s boss whom she’d met, briefly the day before, though ‘met’ wasn’t really the right word. He’d passed by in a blur and a handshake.
Winters smiled at him with political warmth. “Captain O’Hare and I go back a long way. When was it, Jack? Quantico conference in 06?”
He chuckled. “That’s right. You gave a talk about interagency communication. Scared the whole room straight.”
“I aim to please,” Winters said, then turned her gaze back to Kate. “I’m in town for a Bureau liaison meeting. Thought I’d drop by and see how my people were doing.”
Amid the clutter of half-drunk coffees, open files and blown-up photographs, her eyes sought out one single thing.
The drawer.
Kate felt the blood drain from her face.
Gift-wrapped in see-through plastic, it crackled as Winters turned it over in her hands. The underside gleamed faintly under the fluorescent light. And the two words stared up like a curse.
Green Gables.
Winters’s tone sharpened. “You can imagine my surprise when I find one of my agents investigating a highly sensitive homicide, already of national media interest, and discover that she’s once again personally connected, by the presumed killer, to a key piece of evidence.
And that this connection has not, until now, been disclosed. ”
Kate tried to speak. “Ma’am, I—”
Winters lifted a hand. “Don’t. I’ve already spoken with Captain O’Hare, who was kind enough to show me the evidence log. And with Agent Reid, who—” she gave Marcus a faint, razor-edged smile— “did his best to explain.”
Marcus stared at the floor. Kate’s chest constricted. “Ma’am, he didn’t—”
Winters sighed, and with it, the mask seemed to drop.
When she next spoke, it was in the voice of the other, more-frequently seen Winters: humane and reasonable.
“I know he didn’t,” Winters said. “What concerns me, Kate, is the pattern. Every time Elijah Cox surfaces, you’re somewhere near the ripple.
He makes it about you. And every time that happens, you insist you can manage it.
That’s when you bother to include me in the conversation,” she added.
“I can manage it,” Kate said, voice steady, but quiet. “It’s two sides of the same coin. No one knows Cox better than I do. That’s why he’s taunting me — he wants a reaction. And if we cut me out, we lose the best chance of drawing him in.”
Winters’s smile didn’t reach her eyes. “We do not use our agents as bait.”
“I’m not—”
“You are. Whether you mean to be or not. And that’s exposing you to an unacceptable risk. I can’t countenance that as a human being, let alone as your commanding officer.”
Though spoken almost warmly, the words landed like cold water. Behind her, Torres shifted uncomfortably, but said nothing. The silence pressed.
Winters set the drawer back on the desk.
“I’m going to give you a choice, Kate. You can return to the Portland field office, where there’s a case in need of experienced analysis — something involving forged colonial manuscripts.
Or,” she added, “you can take the leave you’re owed. Effective immediately.”
Kate’s jaw clenched. “You’re pulling me off the Brennan case.”
“I’m saving you from it,” Winters corrected. “And saving the Bureau from what happens when this killer decides to turn his little morality play into a vendetta. It’s plain that Cox wants to pull you into his orbit again. We’re not going to oblige him.”
Kate felt the world tilt, just slightly. “With respect, ma’am, it’s not as simple as pulling me into his orbit. I wish it was. That piece of evidence there… he wants me to believe that he knows everything about me. And if I pull out, he’s going to think I fell for it.”
Winters’s eyes hardened again. “You seem to think this is a negotiation.”
A pause stretched between them — brittle, electric.
“That is a risk,” Winters conceded. “But Cox might equally feel you ‘fell for it’, as you say, if you continue to pursue the case. One option keeps you safe. The other option keeps you in danger. So there is no contest. Sorry.”
Kate exhaled slowly, forcing the tension from her shoulders. “Then I’ll take a few days,” she said. “And when I’ve cleared my head, I’ll report back to the field office.”
Winters gave a single approving nod. “That’s wise. Get some rest, Kate. You look like you need it.”
O’Hare was in the doorway by this point, hovering. Winters turned to him, smiling again. “Jack, it’s always a pleasure. Would you walk me out?”
They left in a breeze of expensive perfume and old authority. The sound of their voices echoed down the corridor, light and careless.
For a long moment, nobody spoke.
Kate stared at the desk. The drawer. Her hands were trembling, and that made her furious.
Finally, Marcus said quietly, “I’m sorry.”
Kate looked up. His face was pale, guilty. “For what?”
“She just… walked in,” he said. “O’Hare was showing her around. She saw the evidence board, then spotted the drawer sitting out. Before I could move, she was reading it aloud, then asked me to explain the significance. I wasn’t quick enough to… y’know.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to lie for me, Marcus. Besides, you couldn’t know she’d react that way.”
“Have you got a history of going off the reservation?” Torres asked.
“No,” Kate said. Marcus said “Yes” at exactly the same moment.
“It’s happened,” Kate admitted.
"Three written warnings, one reprimand," Marcus added, sternly. "All concerning her sketchy regard for protocol in the pursuit of Cox."
“Well not this time,” Kate replied.
“Kate, I’m sorry—"
“Marcus.” Kate’s tone was even, deliberate. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not. I should’ve—”
“I said it’s fine.” She gave a thin smile. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
But something in his eyes — the quiet relief that flickered there — made her chest tighten. Because she realized, with sudden clarity, that part of him agreed with Winters. Part of him thought this was for the best.
When he spoke again, that suspicion became fact. “Maybe she’s right,” he said softly. “You’ve been running on fumes, Kate. You’re too close to this. We both know what Cox can do to you.”
Her hand clenched around the coffee cup. “You think I don’t know that?”
“I’m saying—”
“I know exactly what he can do.” Her voice rose, sharp enough that Torres glanced at the door.
“I know it better than anyone, and that’s why I’m the one who should be out there, not sitting in some office cataloguing old manuscripts.
Jesus, Marcus—don’t you see? If we back off now, we hand him the narrative. ”
He winced. “I’m just saying—”
“No, you’re not,” she snapped. “You’re agreeing with her.”
The air between them felt suddenly thin. She could feel the pulse hammering in her throat. Torres opened her mouth, thought better of it, and turned toward the window, giving them space.
Kate shoved back her chair. “I need to get out of here.”
“Kate—”
“Don’t,” she said. “Not now.”
She snatched her coat from the back of the chair and left before either of them could follow.
Out in the corridor, the hum of the precinct swallowed her.
Phones rang, printers clicked, someone shouted across the bullpen — all the ordinary sounds of order in motion.
But for her, it was all wrong. The rhythm that had carried her up the stairs an hour earlier had turned against her, cold and hollow.
The optimism from her meeting with Gabe — gone, as if it had never existed.
At the end of the hall, the stairwell yawned open, dim and quiet. She took it without thinking, boots echoing on the concrete. By the time she reached the street, the rain had thickened to a steady fall.
She stood under the awning, breathing hard.
Across the street, traffic blurred through the wet. The city moved as it always did — indifferent, relentless. Somewhere in its sprawl, Elijah Cox was watching. Waiting. And she could feel it again, like a thread pulled tight between them.
She reached into her pocket for her phone, thumbed it once, then stopped.
No. Not yet.
She needed to be angry. To stay angry.
Anger, at least, was a kind of clarity. And she knew just where she was going to take it.