“Why target her at her old station, all of a sudden?” His fingers still on his thigh, the tapping ceasing as the thought solidifies. “She’s been at that department for over a decade. Highest performance ratings in the district. Crime elimination statistics that other cities benchmark against. And then—out of nowhere—a sealed internal investigation materializes with her name on it, and she’s reassigned to a town that most GPS systems probably can’t find?”
He shakes his head slowly, the motion carrying the weight of someone who has disassembled too many frame jobs to accept this one at face value.
“The timing doesn’t add up.”
Oakley leans forward again, his playful energy receding into something sharper. The kid is irritating, but he’s not stupid—when Alaric shifts into analytical mode, even Torres knows to put the jokes on hold.
“You really think she’s being set up?”
I scoff.
The sound is reflexive, automatic—the competitive dismissal that my brain defaults to whenever Hazel Martinez and sympathy enter the same sentence. “Maybe karma finally came to bite her in the ass. She’s not exactly known for making friends in high places. Woman’s got the interpersonal warmth of a glacier and the diplomatic skills of a brick through a window.”
The words taste wrong leaving my mouth.
They taste wrong because they’re not true, and I know they’re not true, and the fact that my first instinct is still to dismiss her—still, after all these years, to position myself as the skeptic, the antagonist, the one who refuses to acknowledge what’s obvious—says more about my own unresolved bullshit than it does about her situation.
Alaric slowly shakes his head.
The motion is deliberate, patient—the headshake of a man who has heard the wrong answer and is choosing education over correction.
“I did a background check on her.”
The statement lands in the cruiser like a grenade with the pin already pulled.
“Detailed,” he adds, and the word carries the specific weight of Alaric Venezuela’s version of detailed, which means he probably dug deeper than most federal investigations and did it faster. “Her record is completely clean. Not ‘clean enough to pass inspection’ clean.Immaculateclean. Not a single disciplinary action. Not a single formal complaint that survived review. Not one blemish in over a decade of service.”
He turns his head, meeting my eyes with an expression that dares me to argue.
“In fact, her ranking at that station is the best they’ve had in generations. She didn’t just maintain the department’s standards—she rebuilt them from the ground up. Crime rates dropped. Case closure rates doubled. Officer retention improved across every metric they track. She turned a hemorrhaging department into the standard that the entire metropolitan district measures itself against.”
Silence.
The kind that fills a vehicle the way water fills a sinking vessel—completely, inevitably, leaving no room for the dismissive commentary that I’d been preparing.
Because I knew.
Of course I knew.
I’d tracked her career the way former rivals track each other’s professional trajectories—through departmental bulletins, industry publications, the occasional conference program where her name appeared as a keynote speaker on topics I’d attend just to see how far she’d climbed. I’d watched her ascend withthe same mix of pride and resentment that has defined my relationship with Hazel Martinez since the first morning she outscored me on a written exam and I realized that this Omega was going to be a permanent fixture in the architecture of my competitive psyche.
I knew she was exceptional.
I’d just been hoping someone else would say it first so I wouldn’t have to.
Alaric crosses his arms, settling deeper into his seat with the posture of a man who has delivered his evidence and is now waiting for the jury to reach the conclusion he’d arrived at three steps ago.
“Her coming here has to be either a distraction,” he continues, his voice dropping into the lower register he uses when hypothesizing—careful, measured, each word selected from a vocabulary sharpened by decades of investigation, “or someone wants her to connect dots to something hidden in this town.”
The implication detonates through the silence like a controlled charge.
Someone sent her here on purpose. Not just to get her out of the way—but to put her in the way of something specific.
“How can you be so sure?” I ask, and the question comes out less combative than intended, the argumentative edge eroded by the weight of his analysis.
He shrugs.
“I’m not.” The admission is delivered without defensiveness, because Alaric has never needed certainty to operate. He works in probabilities, in patterns, in the accumulated instinct of a man who has spent his career proving that what looks like coincidence is usually choreography. “But there has to be some sort of goal or intention behind the sequence of events. A department that’s performing at record levels doesn’tsuddenly generate a sealed internal investigation against its highest-ranking officer without someone engineering it. And a reassignment to a town with a suspiciously perfect crime record doesn’t happen by accident.”
