Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Keller had stayed behind after the meeting broke up.
Sam noticed him lingering by the door as the others filed out, folder still in hand. When the squad room settled back into its working rhythm, Keller stepped back into the office and closed the door behind him.
"Chief. Got another minute?"
Sam settled back in his chair, reading Keller's expression. The grief was still there—it had been days since they'd found Cooper's body, but the weight of it hadn't lifted from Keller's shoulders. If anything, it seemed heavier.
"What's on your mind?"
Keller shifted the folder in his hands. He didn't drop it on Sam's desk the way some federal agents would—demanding attention, asserting dominance. He just held it, like he wasn't sure how to begin.
"I need to ask for something," Keller said. "And I know how it's going to sound, so I want to explain first."
Sam nodded, giving him space to talk.
"Cooper was close to something." Keller's jaw tightened.
"He'd been working this case for eighteen months.
Building connections, following money trails, identifying the people at the top of this organization.
And then someone killed him." He paused, collecting himself.
"I owe it to him to finish what he started. "
"I understand that," Sam said carefully.
"The syndicate Cooper was investigating—they've been operating in this region for over a decade.
Which means some of their activities may have touched cases your department handled in the past." Keller opened the folder and handed Sam a formal request form.
"I'm asking for access to your archived case files. Ten years back."
Sam took the form, scanning it. His jaw tightened slightly. "That's a lot of files, Agent. Hundreds of cases."
"I know." Keller's voice was quiet. "And I know how this looks—federal agent walking in, demanding access to everything. But I'm not trying to dig through your department's dirty laundry. I'm trying to find the thread that got my partner killed."
Sam set the form down, studying Keller's face. The man looked exhausted. Not slick, not calculating—just tired and grieving and desperate for answers.
"What specifically are you looking for?" Sam asked.
"Honestly? I'm not sure yet." Keller spread his hands.
"Cooper mentioned connections to old cases in this area.
Witnesses who disappeared. Investigations that went cold.
He thought there might be a pattern, but he didn't get a chance to show me what he'd found.
" His voice roughened. "If I had something specific, I'd tell you. But right now I'm working blind."
Sam was quiet for a long moment. He understood the request—understood the grief driving it. But ten years of files included some cases he'd rather not have federal eyes on. Cases where the lines had gotten blurry, where he and the team had made calls that wouldn't look clean under a microscope.
"I can't give you blanket access," Sam said finally. "But I can work with you. You tell me what patterns you're looking for—missing witnesses, cold cases, anything connected to organized crime—and I'll pull what's relevant myself."
Keller nodded slowly. It wasn't everything he'd asked for, but it was something. "That's fair. I appreciate you working with me on this, Chief."
"Cooper deserves answers," Sam said. "We'll find them. Just... through proper channels."
"Understood." Keller stood, tucking the folder under his arm, gave him a tired nod and walked out.
Shaw was still at Wyatt’s desk, pointing out patterns in the search results, when Keller emerged from Sam’s office.
She noticed immediately. Wyatt saw her eyes track Keller as he crossed the squad room and headed for the exit, folder tucked under his arm.
“He was in there a while,” Shaw said quietly. Her tone was casual, but something underneath it wasn’t.
Jo got up from her desk and headed into Sam’s office. A minute later, she came back out.
Shaw straightened in her chair. “What was that about?”
Jo glanced toward the door Keller had just walked through. “He wants access to the archives. Ten years of case files. Thinks there might be connections to Cooper’s murder in old local cases.”
“Ten years?” Kevin looked up from his desk. “That’s a lot of fishing.”
“Sam’s not giving him blanket access,” Jo said. “They’ll work together, pull specific files.”
Shaw’s expression didn’t change, but Wyatt caught something flicker across her face. Displeasure? Suspicion? Whatever it was, she covered it quickly.
“Interesting,” Shaw said. She stood, pushing back from Wyatt’s desk. “I should get going. Follow up on some things.”
She was gone before anyone could respond, Shadow falling into step beside her.
Wyatt watched her leave, then turned back to his screen. His hands weren’t moving on the keyboard anymore.
Ten years. That window included the case numbers his father had sent him. The files he was supposed to modify.
“You okay?” Jo was watching him now.
“Yeah.” He forced his hands to start typing again. “Just thinking.”
The pressure was tightening from both sides. His father pushing him to destroy evidence. The FBI pushing to access it. Sam standing in the middle, not knowing he was the only thing keeping both wolves at bay.
Lucy padded over and pressed her nose against his leg. He reached down automatically, scratching behind her ears, but his hand was shaking.
If Sam gave Keller access, the FBI would find whatever his father was trying to hide.
If Wyatt destroyed the files first, he’d be obstructing a federal investigation.
Either way, people were going to get hurt.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He didn’t look at it. He already knew what it would say.
That night, Wyatt sat in the dark of his apartment, laptop open on the kitchen table.
He’d written the monitoring program years ago—back when paranoia was just good sense, back when he’d first started working for a police department and wanted to know if anyone ever came looking for his real identity.
The program was elegant in its simplicity: it flagged any searches through law enforcement databases that touched certain keywords.
His name. His mother’s name. The town they’d fled from.
And now, the case numbers his father had sent him.
He hadn’t expected it to ping tonight.
But it had. Twice.
Wyatt pulled up the alert log, his stomach already sinking. Someone had been searching the archived case files. Running queries on names and dates that overlapped with his father’s list.
He drilled down into the metadata, tracing the searches back to their source.
The first one was routed through a VPN—three layers of it, actually. Whoever this was knew how to stay hidden. But what most people didn’t know was that Wyatt had built a geolocating tag into the database. The VPN masked the IP address, but the tag pinged back a physical location anyway.
Somewhere in the suburbs. A residential area. He couldn’t get more specific than that without further investigation, but someone was digging through old case files from their home, late at night, trying not to be seen.
Wyatt’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. He could see the search history laid out in front of him—court transcripts, DEA reports, witness testimonies. All of it pointing toward the same organization his father worked for.
He started deleting.
It felt like cutting pieces of himself away. Each file he erased was another betrayal of someone who might be trying to help. But if they found what they were looking for—if they connected the dots back to Wyatt’s father, back to Wyatt himself—
He couldn’t let that happen.
The second alert made him pause.
Different source. Different location. This one wasn’t even trying to hide behind a VPN.
The geolocation came back clear: Motel 8. Room 116.
Wyatt stared at the screen. Motel 8 wasn’t a place cops stayed. It was cheap, run-down, the kind of place people used when they didn’t want to be noticed.
His father’s people?
He pulled up the access log for that location, examining the queries. Whoever was searching wasn’t just looking at the case files—they were mapping the entire database structure. Probing the system’s architecture. Testing permissions.
But they weren’t changing anything.
Wyatt checked the access level. Read-only. Whoever this was could see everything in the system, but they couldn’t modify a single record.
The realization hit him like cold water.
If they can hack in, why do they need me?
Because they can look but can’t change. That’s why they need me.
His father’s people could read the files. They could see what was there, identify the threats, find the witnesses who might talk. But they couldn’t alter the records. Couldn’t erase the evidence. Couldn’t scrub the connections that might lead back to the syndicate.
That’s what Wyatt was for.
He was the one with write access. The one who could make changes that would look legitimate, that wouldn’t trigger audit flags or raise suspicions. His father hadn’t just put a body in his trunk to scare him—he’d chosen Wyatt specifically because Wyatt could do what his hackers couldn’t.
The thought made him sick.
He turned back to the suburban searches, mechanically deleting files as they appeared. A court transcript vanished. A DEA report disappeared. A scanned document about witness protection flickered and went dark.
Somewhere out there, someone was watching their research evaporate, wondering who was watching them.
Wyatt couldn’t think about that. Couldn’t afford to.
He had to protect his mother. Had to keep the team safe. Had to find a way out of this that didn’t end with everyone he cared about dead.
The Motel 8 searches continued in a separate window—patient, methodical, mapping every corner of the database. Whoever was there, they were thorough. Professional.
His father’s people, preparing for whatever came next.
Wyatt closed the laptop and sat in the darkness, the weight of it all pressing down on him like a physical thing.
He was running out of time.
And the walls were closing in from every side.
Across town, Kevin sat in the dark of his kitchen, the only light coming from his laptop screen.
He'd set up the way he always did when he wanted to stay invisible—VPN routed through three different servers, private browser, no cookies, no history. Old habits from a time he didn't talk about. Skills he'd picked up working undercover, back when staying hidden meant staying alive.
The Binding Chain.
He'd started with basic searches and gotten nowhere. Whatever this organization was, they didn't have a website or a Wikipedia page. But Kevin knew how to dig deeper than surface-level searches. He knew where the information lived when people didn't want it found.
An hour in, he started finding fragments.
A court transcript from a RICO case in Massachusetts—witness testimony redacted, but the phrase "binding chain" appeared twice in the margins.
A DEA report from Rhode Island referencing an "organized crime signature" involving a broken chain symbol.
A ten-year-old news article about a witness who'd agreed to testify against a regional syndicate, then recanted two days before trial.
Kevin bookmarked each source, saving copies to his local drive. The picture emerging was ugly. Multi-state operation. Deep roots. The kind of organization that didn't leave loose ends.
He found another article—a follow-up on the witness who'd recanted. Six months after the trial collapsed, she'd disappeared. Listed as a missing person for three years before the case went cold.
Kevin sat back, rubbing his eyes. This was bigger than he'd expected. Way bigger. If Bridget had been connected to these people, even peripherally...
He clicked on another saved file—a scanned document from an old federal database, some kind of internal memo about witness protection protocols for organized crime cases.
The file opened.
Then it closed.
Kevin frowned, clicking again. The document flickered on screen for half a second—long enough to glimpse redacted paragraphs and the phrase "disposal procedures"—before the window vanished.
His desktop was empty where the file had been.
Kevin's pulse spiked. He clicked on another saved document—a PDF of the court transcript he'd downloaded minutes ago.
Gone.
He watched, frozen, as a third file icon blinked once and disappeared from his screen.
Someone was deleting his research. In real time. While he watched.
Kevin yanked the ethernet cable from his laptop, killing the connection. His hands were trembling as he slammed the lid shut and sat in the sudden silence, heart hammering against his ribs.
Someone was watching.
Someone with access. Someone good enough to track him through a VPN, find his local files, and delete them remotely.
His mind raced through possibilities. Who had that kind of skill? Who had the access and the motive?
Kevin sat in the dark, laptop closed, internet dead, and felt the walls of his apartment press closer.
He'd stumbled into something much bigger than a symbol on an earring. Bigger than Bridget's past, bigger than a dead FBI agent in the woods.
And now, whoever was on the other end of this thing knew he was looking.