“And I’m pretty sure he didn’t.” Andi sounded very matter-of-fact. George shot him a glance before concentrating on traffic again.
“You heard her. He complained to somebody who then told her.”
“Exactly. Did Castain strike you as somebody who would be satisfied complaining to some low-level cop when he could air his feelings with the chief herself?”
George froze. Now that he thought about it… “You think he didn’t complain?”
“I think that whoever stole Vance’s phone saw another chance to keep us from investigating. A golden one at that. It also cements my theory that it has to be somebody who knows the precinct and the people in there very well. I bet there’s not even written proof for the complaint. Whoever ratted us out knew the chief dislikes me enough to latch on to anything that makes me look bad. The way I see it, both we and the chief have been played.” Andi paused. “Unless the chief is the mole, but I doubt it. As much as I dislike her and the fact that she’s breathing the same air as me in the precinct, she hasn’t been here long enough to be a useful mole.”
George couldn’t say anything against this logic. It all made sense, and he was still too enraged about losing the case to think straight and try to find the holes in Andi’s reasoning. So he went with what he could control at the moment.
“Where are we going?”
“My place, if it’s okay for you. We have lots of thinking to do, and that I do best in a familiar environment.”
“Where you know the insects?” George asked.
Andi nodded. “It’s always stressful to adapt to a new building, and with all the adrenaline pumping in my veins at the moment, I wouldn’t be of any use.”
“I understand. Your house it is.”
They made a detour to the deli and bought enough food to last them for at least two days. George made vague plans to drop by at his apartment sometime later that day, but it was clear Andi wasn’t going to let go of this case. George wasn’t too sure about endangering his career even further, the thought like a constant needling in the back of his head. Leaving Andi alone wasn’t an option, though. They might not have been willing partners when all this started, but George felt obligated to solve this case, even if it meant going against every self-preserving instinct he had. Knowing Andi wouldn’t stop working no matter what George decided to do was another incentive to stay with his partner. If Andi decided to do something stupid, George would be there to maybe prevent it or at least protect him.
At Andi’s house, they rearranged the furniture in the living room to make the table there their workplace. Andi pinned a map of South Carolina on the wall and put the file about Harris and the tablet he’d gotten from Shireen on the table. Then he went and got his laptop, which had been sitting on the kitchen counter.
“Didn’t know you had two devices.” George eyed the laptop.
“I don’t. This tablet is going to give us access to all the police files we need, hopefully without alerting anybody to our snooping.”
George felt his mouth gaping open. “Do I want to know why Shireen would give you one of her toys?”
Andi shook his head. “No, you don’t. And before you keep asking, I’m also not telling you.” He showed a grim smile. “Just be glad we have it and leave the rest to me. Ignorance is bliss.”
“I’m beginning to see that. At least when working with you.” George took the tablet and powered it up. “Password?”
Andi leaned over and typed it in, a combination of numbers and letters George couldn’t make heads or tails of.
“Thank you.” George hesitated. He needed to say it. At least once, just so he could tell himself he had tried. “You really want to go through with this? Even though we’re on unpaid leave? You know the chief is just waiting for us to make a mistake.”
They locked gazes for a long time, Andi’s eyes so full of different emotions, George was almost sorry he had asked. The stress in his partner’s expression cut him deeply. When Andi finally spoke, it sounded pained.
“If you don’t want to do this I understand. Well, not really, but I think I can relate to you not wanting to endanger all your plans for the future even more than you’ve already done. Me, I can’t turn my back on this case. It’s part of who I am, I’m afraid. As for the chief—you know what I think of her.”
Andi looked so vulnerable, so lonely, and George realized something he would have never thought possible—Andi needed him. He’d been alone for too long, had carried the burden of hisgeschenkfor too long, had kept everybody and everyone at bay for too long. He needed somebody in his corner, somebody who had his back. George knew without a doubt that he could be that somebody. No, that heneededto be that somebody. The realization settled deep in his bones, seemed to hum in his blood. Knowing full well what a nosedive his career could take when he stood by the words he was going to say, George went on regardless. “I’m with you, Andi. I’m going to have your back, I swear.”
The way Andi’s eyes widened only strengthened George’s resolve. He would and could do this. And hadn’t he read somewhere that the really great careers never developed in a straight line?
“Now, where do you want to start?”
THREE DAYSof not going home to his apartment, eating takeout all the time, and taking naps on Andi’s couch later, they were finally starting to see a pattern. An ugly pattern, granted, but a pattern they could work with. The map of South Carolina had been replaced with city maps where the poorest districts were full of pins with differently colored heads, those heads enhancing the aforementioned ugly pattern. A pin with a red head for a detective who had an unproportionally high number of abduction or missing person cases in his or her district and blue pins for all the persons—mostly children and young adults—who had not been found and whose cases were considered cold. Pins with green heads represented missing persons whose cases had landed on the desks of other detectives, and pins with yellow heads—those were so rare George wanted to scream in frustration—showed cases where the missing person had been found. In all the bigger cities of South Carolina, there were clusters of blue pins around one or sometimes two red ones. Their search for incriminating connections between Harris and Castain had led them to the discovery of ties Harris had to a detective or police officer in every city where children had been kidnapped. Some of those ties were obvious—snapshots on Facebook, pictures from seminars Harris had attended—others they found when they realized what was going on and started doing backward searches as well. In every city and town where children vanished, they found somebody they could trace back to Harris. It was both a frightening and shocking web of corrupt members of the police who obviously had no qualms about preying on the weak and defenseless. Seeing how those men and women abused their power and ignored the oath they had taken made George sick.
Without Shireen they weren’t able to hack the accounts of the cops in question, but George had no doubt whatsoever what they would find once they got the chance to do so.
“I still can’t identify Harris’s contact here in Charleston. It has to be somebody in our precinct, because how else would Castain and Harris manage to sabotage us? But the cases of missing children are so spread out, I can’t find a single person with a cluster. Damn it all to hell!”
Andi was frustrated and George could relate. The evidence before them was clear and damning and still only circumstantial. Charleston was also the only city where there was no clear cluster of blue pins around a red one. They didn’t have a red one here, and knowing there had to be and that they weren’t able to identify the person was annoying as all hell.
“Do you think we should tell Merrigold and Vargas?” The words tasted bitter on George’s tongue, but he had to put the idea out there. Andi shook his head.
