Chapter 20
Shane Levick
July
Shane rolled down the driver’s side window just enough to allow the humid air to infiltrate the unmarked cruiser.
The sour, pungent odor of Sam’s egg sandwich had intensified in the confined space over the past ten minutes, turning his stomach more with each passing bite.
Despite the persistent drizzle that occasionally found its way through the crack and landed on his forearm, the alternative seemed far preferable to sitting in a sealed car with whatever combination of onion and processed cheese Sam had requested for breakfast.
“Can you eat any faster?” Shane asked, unable to mask the irritation in his voice. He kept his attention on the front entrance of a small boutique across the street, a women’s clothing store that wouldn’t open for another six minutes. “That smell is killing me.”
He took a sip of his convenience store coffee for a brief reprieve, but he only ended up grimacing at the bitter taste and the way the hot liquid aggravated the heartburn that had been smoldering behind his ribs since before dawn.
“Then you should’ve let me eat at the station,” Sam muttered around a mouthful of food. He almost certainly had crumbs in his mustache, which was reason enough for Shane not to glance his way. “Not my fault you were in such a hurry to leave.”
Shane jostled his knee against the steering column to expend some of the nervous energy that had been building since they’d pulled out of the parking lot.
He’d caught sight of Kinsley’s Jeep pulling into the station just as they were heading out, and he’d pressed the accelerator with more urgency than the situation warranted.
He couldn’t stomach the sight of her right now.
Couldn’t trust himself to keep his expression neutral if their paths crossed in a hallway or a stairwell, couldn’t guarantee that the anger wouldn’t surface in a way that invited questions he wasn’t prepared to answer.
A week had passed since he’d discovered what Kinsley had done.
Seven days of avoiding her, of timing his coffee breaks and witness interviews to ensure their paths wouldn’t cross.
He’d declined drinks at the pub across the street from the station in case she stopped in after work.
He’d rearranged his desk schedule so that he arrived early and left through the side entrance, reducing the overlap between their hours to the narrowest possible window.
Seven days and nights of the burning sensation behind his ribs that no amount of antacids could touch.
He reached up instinctively and rubbed at his chest, pressing his knuckles against the spot where the discomfort radiated outward. At this rate, he was going to develop an ulcer before the month was out.
“Antacids are in the glove compartment,” Sam said between bites. “Maybe you should see a doctor, though. My brother-in-law had something similar. Turned out to be his gallbladder.”
“It’s nothing,” Shane replied, dropping his hand back to the steering wheel. “Just need to lay off the spicy food.”
The rain picked up slightly, creating a rhythmic patter against the roof of the cruiser.
Drops collected on the windshield, distorting their view of the street into a watercolor blur.
Shane kept the engine idling to prevent the windows from fogging, the steady hum blending with the sound of falling rain and Sam’s methodical chewing.
The cramped space seemed even smaller with Sam’s large frame occupying the passenger seat, his knees nearly touching the dashboard despite having pushed the seat back as far as it would go.
“Decades on the job, and I still hate eating inside cars,” Sam muttered, finally wadding up the grease-stained wrapper and tossing it into the back seat. “Especially on days like this. Tell me again why you were in such a hurry this morning?”
“This woman’s doorbell camera is the only one on the block pointed across the street toward the Carlson driveway.” Shane wasn’t sharing anything Sam didn’t already know about their case. “We serve the warrant, get the footage, and make the arrest.”
The Carlson case had landed on their desks six days ago.
A mother and her sixteen-year-old daughter gunned down in their own driveway as they returned home from a volleyball tournament on a Saturday afternoon.
The teenager, Zoe, had died at the scene, her body crumpled beside the open passenger door of the family minivan.
Her mother, Amber, had made it twelve hours before dying in the ICU without ever regaining consciousness.
Two lives extinguished in seconds. A family destroyed in the time it took to pull a trigger.
“Almost makes you wish you’d stayed in vice, doesn’t it?” Sam said, brushing crumbs from his lap before wiping his mustache with a crumpled napkin. “At least the drug dealers usually kill each other, not innocent mothers and their kids.”
Shane didn’t respond. His mind had drifted back to the morgue photos of Amber and Zoe Carlson, images he’d studied for hours without getting any closer to being able to look at them dispassionately.
Two faces he’d never met in life, now committed permanently to his memory in death.
The father, Greg Carlson, had been inconsolable when they’d interviewed him at the hospital, barely able to form coherent sentences through his grief.
He’d kept asking if his wife had said anything before she died, and Shane had to tell him three times that she’d never woken up.
Shane’s stomach twisted, and it wasn’t just the lingering stench of eggs causing it.
Their jobs revolved around finding killers and putting them behind bars, a duty they performed with dedication because the alternative was a world where violence went unanswered.
The justice system had its flaws, flaws that Shane had witnessed firsthand during his years in vice and then homicide, but it was the framework that separated civilization from chaos. It was what they had.
And yet Kinsley’s choices cut deeper than matters of legality.
They reflected something fundamental about her character, a willingness to cross a line that Shane had always believed was uncrossable, and he struggled daily to reconcile that darkness with the woman who had once lain beside him, whose laugh he could still hear if he wasn’t careful, whose voice on the other side of a phone call had once been the best part of his evening.
The burning in his chest intensified, and he took another sip of coffee despite knowing it would only make things worse. When he’d first pieced together what had happened, he’d nearly convinced himself to report it without speaking to Kinsley.
Something had stopped him from picking up the phone.
Loyalty? The need to understand? Or something weaker and less defensible, like the fear of what reporting her would mean for himself, for the department, for the memory of whatever they’d been to each other before everything went wrong?
“You’ve got that look again,” Sam observed, breaking into his thoughts with the bluntness of a man who had never learned the art of subtlety. “Like something is crawling up your ass.”
Shane rubbed his eyes, doubting the pressure would do anything for the throbbing behind them. Sam was a good man, a mediocre partner who had never quite recovered from being passed over for sergeant, and irritating as hell on a good day.
This morning, he was pushing his luck.
“Trust me, this footage will give us what we need,” Sam said, retrieving his fountain soda from the cup holder and taking a long pull through the straw. “I’ve got twenty bucks that says the ex-boyfriend did it.”
The confined space of the car continued to press in on Shane from all sides. The burning sensation in his chest crept higher, settling at the base of his throat like something alive. He swallowed hard, trying to force it back down.
Lines had been crossed, and laws had been broken.
How was Kinsley able to justify her choice?
How did she walk into the station every morning and sit at her desk and open case files and interview suspects, fully aware that she had done the very thing she spent her career prosecuting?
The cognitive dissonance of it should have been unbearable.
And yet she functioned. She worked. She investigated a thirty-year-old murder with the same dedication she’d always brought to her cases, as though the blood on her own hands was somehow different from the blood on everyone else’s.
“Middle-class family, usual debts, nothing that stands out as unusual,” Sam continued, still working through the Carlson case aloud the way he always did, using Shane as a sounding board, whether Shane was listening or not.
“The only thing Greg Carlson could give us was that his daughter’s ex didn’t take the breakup well.
Kept pestering her. And you heard some of Zoe’s friends at the school. That kid has a temper.”
“That kid is eighteen years old,” Shane pointed out as he monitored a white sedan parking a few spots ahead of them on the street. “And while I’m not buying that his parents haven’t heard from him recently, he’s probably lying low somewhere. He’s got to know he’s our number one suspect by now.”
“That kid isn’t hiding because he thinks we suspect him,” Sam said, shaking his head in disagreement before taking another draw on the straw.
The soft drink had clearly reached the bottom, judging by the hollow slurping sound that filled the car.
“He’s in hiding so Greg Carlson doesn’t beat his ass to death. ”
“We’ve already warned the father not to take the law into his own hands.
” Shane shifted his gaze back to the boutique's front entrance as a male subject stepped out of the white sedan and walked in the opposite direction. Not their person. “Let’s hope he listens to reason. There’s a good chance this doorbell footage tells a different story. ”