“No.”
Davis didn’t react. He just leaned back, folding his arms, and a cold prickle crawled up my spine.
“People are going to talk,” he said. “IA might start sniffing around you with anything MC and Cartel where you’re part of the team.”
I swallowed hard. My hands wouldn’t stay still, so I pressed them against my thighs. “They can do what they want. I’m not my father.”
He grunted his agreement. “If something hits too hard, come to me first, not after you snap and wring Stanton’s neck.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Anything you need to tell me at this point?” he asked.
I know he meant the case and my fellow cops, but it was Alejandro in the dark, his lips on mine, his hands gripping my hips, that was on my mind.
“No,” I said, steady despite everything inside me unraveling. “Nothing.”
He nodded once and let me go.
I stepped out, and the bullpen buzzed around me like static. Stanton glanced up at me and grimaced, but I focused on Frank standing by my desk, pretending to scroll through his phone.
“You good?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said—another lie. But as I sat down, trying to breathe, I knew that I wasn’tgood. And the worst part was, after everything that had happened last night… I wasn’t sure I wanted to be.
“We’ve got the hospital,” Frank announced when we headed out. He held up a thin folder. “St. Patrick’s pulled the archived medical records—full surgical notes, pre-op scans, the works. Lannon’s knee plate matches their implant stock from ‘97.”
The name hit hard. St. Patrick’s. My dad’s old battleground. A hospital whispered about even back then—secret transfers, missing charts, surgeries logged with half the details they should’ve had. A place I used to hear about from the top of the stairs, listening to arguments I wasn’t supposed to hear. I might have only been nine, but I was a kid in a house that wasn’t happy, and I remembered that shit every single day.
I kept walking, faster this time, but Frank fell easily into step beside me. His voice dropped. “They’ve boxed up the files for us. Records office wants us there in the next half hour.”
“Let’s go,” I said, although every part of me wanted to do anything but.
St. Patrick’s Hospital sat on a hill overlooking the city, built of brick with newer extensions bolted on over the years. Inside, the air smelled like disinfectant, and the walls were that washed-out cream color every hospital seemed to use.
The records clerk was waiting for us behind a reinforced glass window, a stack of folders on a cart at her side. There seemed to be a lot there for one person. “Detectives? The Lannon files and related paperwork as requested. Everything from intake to surgical follow-up.”
“Related how?”
She peered at the form. “Other knee operations, other intakes worked on by the same surgeon, and so on.” She slid the clipboard toward me. “Sign here.”
I signed, and we wheeled the cart into a small consultation room—the kind meant for grief or bad news: two chairs, a narrow table, lighting that hummed overhead. The administrator followed, sat on the sofa, and supervised us asshe filled in a pile of forms, humming every so often. Frank sat down, opened the first cardboard folder, and picked up the file for our knee guy.
“Looks as if he had a full ortho workup,” he said, flipping through scans. “Came off his bike during a pursuit. Knee shattered. Lots of soft tissue damage.” We sifted through the files. Surgical notes. Post-op prescriptions. Follow-up visits. He’d been into the hospital on more than one occasion, post-fights, a knife wound in ’94, burns in ’95.
Then Frank frowned. “Hmm… take a look at this.” He tapped a line halfway down the page, dated August 20th, and read it out loud. “Patient discharged against medical advice.”
“He discharged himself?” Nothing about that was odd. “Patients do that all the time.”
“Yeah, but this isn’t his signature…” He pulled out another sheet of paper, copies of insurance paperwork. “This is his signature, but whoever signed off on the AMA didn’t leave a full name. Just a scribble. Initial maybe. Looks like it could be O and D? Overdose?” He flicked back to a surgical report from the surgeon, “Wait, an Oscar Dryden-Wells was the surgeon? Yeah, that could be an O and a D, his initials.”
“The surgeon signed him out?” I glanced over at the administrator, who was watching our progress with interest. “Does that happen? A surgeon signing a patient out on AMA?”
“No. Without the patient’s signature, the hospital would be wide open legally.”
“Weird, right?” Frank asked as he flipped pages. “Think it’s nothing?”
“No idea, maybe.”
