George grinned broadly. “No, just a mother who is a judge, and two older brothers. I may have picked up a few tricks over the years.” He reached for the phone on his desk. “So while I’m trying to make nice with IA, what are you going to do?”
“The more questionable part.”
At George’s raised eyebrow, Andi shrugged. “Castain is a smart asshole. If we want to catch him, we need to start following him around. For that, we need to know where he is at all times.”
George whistled. “You want to put a tracker on him?” He furrowed his brows. “Wait a moment. Don’t we need the okay from the chief for that? Don’t tell me you’re going to Chief Norris without me! That’s probably the worst idea I’ve ever heard from you!”
Andi sighed. George really was innocent. He almost regretted tainting him. Almost. “Would you keep it down, please? You should know by now I avoid our darling chief like the plague. Of course I’m not going to ask her to put a tracker on the car of a man she so desperately wishes to be innocent.”
It took a few moments for George to catch up. Andi credited him for not freaking out loudly. “You want to go behind her back?” It was more a hiss than actual speech.
“Of course. I do that all the time.”
“Are you insane?”
Andi couldn’t resist. He waggled his eyebrows. “You’re asking me thisnow?”
George went back to his earlier staring mode, and Andi hurried to placate him before he did something stupid—like going to Norris and telling her everything. “Don’t clam up, partner. It’s for her own good. If she doesn’t know about it, she’s got plausible deniability, something people in power love. Not that I think she’s going to need it, because this case will be closed neatly by her two top detectives. Don’t you see the beauty of it? If we get Castain with the help of a tracker, there’s nothing she can do about it because we cracked the case. And if, by some miracle, he’snotour guy, she will never know. Win-win in any case.”
“Trackers need to be signed out. Somebody will notice.” George seemed to be intent on finding the proverbial fly in the soup.
“Remind me what Shireen does for a living?”
George’s eyes narrowed. “This is not the first time you’re doing this,” he accused. “And I thought you hated other people? For an antisocial grump, your connections within the force are surprisingly good.”
“I wouldn’t go so far. Shireen likes the thrill of doing something forbidden, that’s all.” Andi tried his best to sound nonchalant. Nobody needed to know about the favor he’d done Shireen to earn her lifelong gratitude. Nobody but him, her, that abusive rapist she had had for a stepfather, and the ants, worms, and maggots that had made him disappear. Andtheycouldn’t tell anybody but him.
He wasn’t sure if George bought it, but he didn’t press the matter further. “I’m going to call IA. You do your illegal thing and don’t tell me any more about it.”
“Sure thing. I’ll also ask Shireen to take a look at Detective Harris’s finances.”
“Yeah, yeah.” George shooed him off with an impatient gesture. Clearly he had accepted his defeat.
Andi went to find Shireen with an unfamiliar lightness in his heart. He couldn’t remember when he’d last had such an easygoing conversation with another human being—if ever. George brought out a side in him that terrified, awed, and amazed Andi all at once. He wasn’t sure what to make of it. Not at all.
Chapter 24—Tracking a Monster
FOR Aweek they’d been following Jake Castain, and George wondered if the man would ever crack. Putting the tracker on Castain’s car had been anticlimactic after the bullets George had sweated when he realized Andi had been perfectly serious about this questionable endeavor. All it took was driving by the city hall around noon, when practically everybody was having their lunch break, stopping in a small side street, slipping out for five minutes, and placing the magnetic tracker on the underside of Castain’s Tesla’s bumper. They had briefly discussed wiring his cell as well, but since he so far seemed to rely on burner phones for his illegal activities, the risk of getting caught far outweighed the potential benefits of listening in on calls that might or might not incriminate Castain. Plus, any proof they got that way wouldn’t be admissible in court because they didn’t have a warrant. Fun times.
Then there was Chief Norris, pestering them to get results as if they were magicians who could pull miracles from hats. They both knew they were running out of time, which made Andi even crankier than before and had George so amped up with nervous energy, he’d had to double his running routine. Currently they were waiting for Castain to come out of the city hall from a meeting with the mayor and some committee who wanted to do a fundraiser to place new benches in the various parks in Charleston—and yes, Shireen had hacked Castain’s tablet for them, another small favor that George didn’t know how they, or more specifically Andi, had earned. Andi and Shireen didn’t seem to be close; they certainly didn’t spend any time outside work with each other, and yet the hacker had gotten them the tracker and didn’t even bat an eyelash when Andi asked her to do an unsanctioned hack into the device of a public figure. George hated mysteries he couldn’t solve, but he knew better than to ask Andi for more information. The look on his partner’s face when he had carefully hinted at how strange it was for Shireen to be so forthcoming when it could jeopardize her career could have frozen lesser men down to their bones, and George made a hasty retreat while promising himself to let the subject drop for good. At least in front of Andi. What he thought in the privacy of his head was his own business.
“I just wish he would finally crack. Why does he have to be so in control?” Andi moaned into his peppermint tea. Another thing George had learned about his partner was just how little patience Andi possessed. George had known the man would never win any prizes in that regard, but his bitching after only a week sounded as if they’d been following Castain for months. Not that George didn’t want to get the bastard ASAP, but he was mentally prepared to stake him out for at least four more weeks—if Norris didn’t declare the case cold because they couldn’t bring in more evidence. So maybe Andi’s impatience was justified.
“He will. He’s playing it safe at the moment, but we both know he won’t be able to keep it up for long. He has customers to serve. Customers to whom loyalty is a word they have to look up in the dictionary and who will switch dealers without a second thought if he can’t deliver.” Even though this was a fact working in their favor, it was still depressing. It meant there were others out there who did the same things as Castain and hadn’t been caught yet. People they might never get for the hideous crimes they were conducting. Sometimes George wondered why he even bothered trying to make the world a better place. It wasn’t as if catching one heartless and soulless criminal was anything but a drop in the ocean, except for the people said criminal had hurt. For them seeing the person punished who had hurt them or their loved ones so badly could make a huge difference on the way to getting their lives back together. And if they stopped in their seemingly endless endeavor, more innocents would get hurt. It was a vicious cycle, and George wasn’t at all surprised by the high alcoholism and corruption rates among the force. If you were confronted with the worst of what humanity had to offer on a daily basis, you either got tainted, broken, or so jaded your heart might as well be made of stone.
George shook his head to get rid of his negative thoughts. Stakeouts tended to send him into a philosophical state of mind with a pessimistic view on practically everything. To distract himself, he turned to Andi, who was staring into his tea as if he could see entire worlds in it.
“How are your chitin-clad friends tonight?”
Very slowly, Andi raised his head to look at him. George knew him well enough by now to interpret his gaze. Andi was wondering whether George was serious or trying to be funny. George lifted his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “Just a question, man. I’m bored and thinking bad thoughts. I need a distraction.”
Andi cocked his head. “Bad thoughts?”
“You know, as in, ‘Why am I even bothering with all this shit, because even if we catch this particular bad guy, there’s ten more waiting in the wings to take over for him.’”
“Oh.Thosethoughts.” Andi played with the rim of his teacup. “Two streets from here there’s a house with two corpses under the basement. Well, they’re bones by now; they’ve been there for some time. As far as the larvae and centipedes show me, they’re entangled, so my guess is they died together, hopefully giving each other comfort in their last moments.”
When he didn’t speak on, George furrowed his brows. “If you meant to cheer me up, you failed completely. You just made my point even worse by proving there’s, like, a million cases we’ll never even know about.”
