The dry delivery had one corner of my mouth kicking up. “Always.”
Silence settled again, heavier this time. The kind that buzzed with unsaid things.
“You did good out there, with Carson. You protected the scene; you were clear on the timeline. You kept him from railroading us into an interrogation room because his favorite suspect happened to be on the premises when a body turned up.”
Her gaze cut to mine, sharp and incredulous. “I… did my job. My old job. Muscle memory.”
“Sure,” I said. “But it mattered. Having you there mattered.” More than I’d realized it would.
She looked away, throat working. “You mean having someone else there mattered. Someone whose name isn’t synonymous with ‘unsolved murder’ in these parts.”
She wasn’t wrong, but that wasn’t all of it.
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “That too.”
She swallowed more whiskey before setting the glass down with exaggerated care. “We found a dead man. A man who was supposed to help us find a missing woman. And the chief of police would rather we disappear than admit he should have been paying attention to either.”
“That about sums it up.”
Her lips trembled, barely. She pressed her lips together until it stopped.
The crash was coming in fast now. Color draining, shoulders sagging. I could see the fight between hold it together and I can’t do this anymore happening right behind her eyes.
“Madden.” I leaned forward, bracing my elbows on the table rather than reaching for her hands as I wanted. “Talk to me.”
She shook her head once. “You don’t want to hear what I have to say.”
“I’m pretty sure I do.”
Her laugh scraped out again, rougher this time. “What if it makes you hate me again?”
That hit me in the sternum. Because at some point I had stopped hating her. “I’m not really in the habit of hating people who help me find the truth. Even when they’ve been wrong about me before.”
She flinched as if I’d struck her. “That’s just it. I’m starting to realize exactly how often I’ve been wrong. And how many people paid the price for it.”
Ah, here we were.
I sat back, gave her space, but kept my voice steady. “California.”
Her fingers tightened around her glass. The amber liquid rippled. “Yeah. California.”
“You wanna talk about it?”
“Honestly, no.”
“Then why are we having this conversation?”
She stared at me across the table, eyes dark and tired and raw. “Because you keep showing up. You keep doing what I always told myself I did—chasing the truth, no matter how ugly it is. And because I saw yet another person die around the margins of a case where the system should’ve protected them. And if I don’t say this out loud, it’s going to eat me alive.”
I nodded once, because that was a sentiment I understood. “Okay.”
“In California,” she started, fingers tracing the condensation ring on the table, “I had a case. Big one. High profile. The kind of thing careers are built on—or wrecked by.”
She rolled her shoulders like she could shrug off the memory. It clearly didn’t work. “I was a wet-behind-the-ears newbie and definitely not lead on the case. I was the grunt. But a week before trial, the senior lead had a stroke. Rather than risk requesting a continuance so additional counsel could be brought up to speed, the DA let me take it on. I bulldogged it. Got the conviction. A monster got put away, and we’d made the world safer.”
She took another sip of the whiskey. “Fast forward to a few months ago. A civil rights attorney decided to examine old convictions handled by the lead detective on that case. She found… inconsistencies. Patterns. Witnesses who recanted under oath, saying they’d been pressured to identify a suspect they weren’t sure of. Alternate leads that were never followed. Reports that never made it into the file.”
The muscle in my jaw ticked as I worked out the implications. “He buried exculpatory evidence.”
