Relief hit me harder than I expected. I hated keeping secrets from the one man who’d stood by me in every mess.
And now Frank was stepping into my world. But he wasn’t running. I ended the call, then took a few breaths. “Want to see?” I asked, and wide-eyed, Frank nodded.
“Levi!I have so much to tell you,” Caleb said as soon as we stepped out of the private elevator. “Hello, Detective Mullins, nice to finally meet you.” Frank held out a hand, and Caleb shook it with energy. “I’m a big fan of how you put up with Levi’s shit,” Caleb added, for which I slapped him upside the head.
Meanwhile, Frank let out a low whistle, wide-eyed as he took in the wall of glowing monitors. “Jesus… this is like the deck of theEnterprise!” he muttered, half impressed, half overwhelmed.
“Star Trekfan?” Caleb grinned. “Original?”
“Watched it with my dad — the one thing we never argued about.” Frank gave a slight, almost sheepish shrug. “Kirk first, but I have a soft spot for Picard.”
Caleb’s eyes lit up. “Same. Original for nostalgia, Picard for everything else. Guy practically redefined what a captain should be.” Then he was back to the data. “So, we’re looping him in on everything?” he asked me.
I nodded as Frank noticed the board with the stupid sign and the pictures of the hole in the hill and the bodies. “Crime scene photos,” he murmured. “And this is the dump site case?”
“We have some potential names, and we’d linked them to the older Dryden-Wells.”
“Before the LAPD did?”
“Yep.” I motioned to Caleb. “Do you have any updates?”
“Yep, Lyric—you haven’t spoken to him yet, Frank—flagged some interesting data about Doc, AKA Alejandro.”
I winced. Shit, I wasn’t expecting intel on that specifically, and the mention of it hit too hard. Too direct. Too soon after last night. “What about him?”
“Who is Doc?” Frank asked and glanced at me.
“Medic for hire,” Caleb said. “Might well be connected to this dump site case in more ways than one, and also he’s Levi’s boyfriend.”
I spluttered. “He’s not my boyfriend?—”
“Okay, casual fuck buddy then.” Caleb opened his laptop and turned the screen toward me. “Lyric found another file—sealed, partial, but enough.”
Frank edged closer, the earlier wide-eyed awe fading as he narrowed his gaze at the data. His shoulders squared, posture shifting from visitor to investigator. “Levi is having sex with a suspect. Hell, what is he a suspect for?” he asked and threw me a confused glance.
I sighed. “It’s a long story,” I said, “we can talk after.”
“Oh, you bet your sweet ass we’re talking.”
Caleb watched us talking and smirked, then settled down to whatever he wanted to tell us. “Metadata puts Doc or whatever his name is with a cartel.”
“Which one is he working for?” I didn’t have to ask; I already knew the name that Caleb would say. My world imploded. I knew I should have listened to my gut and not gone anywhere near Doc.
“Águilas, but not workingforthem, no.” He pointed at a line of text on the screen.
“Then what?”
He shot me a glance as if he couldn’t understand my impatience. Of course, he couldn’t;hewasn’t sleeping with the enemy.
“Okay, so cartel information. Águilas is in their second iteration, but Alejandro, AKA Doc, was there during the first. It was wiped out when every top-level leader was massacred fifteen years ago. Anyway, Alejandro would have been a kid back then. Not a fighter. Not a trafficker. Not cartel muscle—he was a child in a cartel death camp.” He paused to let that sink in, and the horror of it nauseated me. “There’s something else, though: I hit an old, unsecured mirror in the Sonora Sheriff’s archive. Cross-referenced with DEA and Border Patrol intel breadcrumbs, and I think he’s on there, aged fourteen. Not deep, but enough.”
My mouth went dry. “Possible witness relocation? Maybe Alejandro turned on the cartel?” A flare of hope warmed me—maybe he wasn’t a bad guy, perhaps I could justify having sexand getting all these feelings inside whenever I thought about him.
Caleb hesitated. “New life up here? Seems possible. But if it were WitSec, no handler would let him do what he does now.”
“What exactly does this Alejandro do?” Frank asked.
“People pay him to fix injuries, keep them alive, that kind of thing, on the down-low.”
