“You want to tell me why one of your friends is dead on a kitchen floor?”
Never heard the name.That’s what he’d said ten minutes ago.
I kept my body still, kept my hand on Jolly’s collar, kept my eyes pointed at the parking lot.
“I told you I can’t keep doing this.” His jaw clenched hard enough that I could see the muscle jump from where I stood. “Call me back. I mean it.”
He pulled the phone away from his ear and stared at the screen for a long second. Then he shoved it in his pocket and stood there, both hands on the railing, head dropped forward.
This wasn’t Briggson being angry at the world the way he always was. This was the thing thatmadehim angry at everything else. His voice had been hoarse, almost shaking,stripped of every bit of the bluster he wore like part of his uniform.
I stayed in the doorway. Jolly sat beside me, patient, watching a pigeon on the far side of the parking lot.
My mind started turning.
You want to tell me why one of your friends is dead on a kitchen floor?
Briggson was talking to someone connected to the drug world. That much was clear from the “one of your friends” line. That wasn’t a cop talking to a source. That was a man talking to someone he cared about.
And the “I can’t keep doing this.”
Doingwhat?
I’d been operating under the assumption that the case was finished. We had our perp. Martinez, rest his soul, had been the unintentional fountain of information.
But Seth Briggson was standing outside a dead woman’s apartment, calling someone connected to the drug trade, using language that pointed to a relationship that had been going on for what sounded like quite a fucking while.
Holy shit.
What if Martinez hadn’t been the problem after all? Yeah, he’d been a leak, but he couldn’t even remember what he’d said at his games when drinking so much.
What if the real dirty cop had just taken advantage of that?
Jolly shifted beside me, resettling his weight. I scratched behind his ear without looking down.
The pieces rearranged themselves, and they fit in ways I didn’t like.
Briggson’s hostility from the first day. The territorial aggression every time Donovan and I got close to department operations. The resentment that flared whenever we accessed records or sat in on briefings.
Rawlings himself had waved it off.That’s just Seth.And I’d accepted it because it was easier than the alternative, because the man’s attitude was consistent and matched the profile of a cranky veteran cop who didn’t like outsiders telling him how to do his job.
But what if every time Briggson pushed back against us, every time he made a scene about protocol or jurisdiction, it had been to keep us looking past him. Not at aquietcop covering his tracks, but at a loud one nobody bothered to examine because his behavior was so predictably abrasive that it became background noise.
It was smart as fuck; I had to admit. How many times had Donovan and IwishedBriggson were the bad guy so we could help take him down and rid the department of its resident asshole?
We’d been aware of our own bias and had cut Briggson more slack because of it.
Jace had run financials on every officer in the department. Briggson’s had come back clean. More than clean. The man donated more to charity than anyone else on the force. At the time, it had been one more data point confirming that Briggson was exactly what he appeared to be.
But now, I was wondering if a man smart enough to run a long-term compromise inside a police department might also be smart enough to keep his bank statements spotless.
Fuck.
What if we’d closed the case too early with Martinez, and someone was still selling out this department?
Briggson didn’t come back to the group.
He straightened up from the railing, pocketed his phone, and walked past the officers at the perimeter without a word. Not a glance back at the apartment, not a check-in with the detectives running the scene.
