“Stay,” I told Jolly. He looked at me with an expression that said he disagreed with this decision, but he stayed.
I crossed the lot. The motel was quiet. No one around. No one at the office window. Just the hum of the vending machine and the distant sound of traffic on the highway.
My hand stayed near my weapon, but I kept it holstered. Drawing on a cop, even one I suspected, would change this from a conversation into something that couldn’t be walked back.
I reached unit seven and stood to the side and listened.
Briggson’s voice came through the thin door. I couldn’t make out the words, but I didn’t need to. The tone was wrong. Everything I knew about Seth Briggson’s voice—the bark, the bite, the permanent edge—was gone. What came through was low and strained and almost unrecognizable.
Then another voice. Female. Most of the words running together in a way I couldn’t follow. But three of them came through clean.
“…please, Uncle Seth…”
I froze.What the fuck? Had she just said UNCLE Seth?
I went in.
The door wasn’t locked. It swung open on a room that was exactly what the exterior promised. Stained carpet, a bed with a polyester spread, a lamp on a pressboard nightstand casting weak light. The television was off. A fast-food bag sat on the dresser, barely touched.
Briggson was on his feet before I’d cleared the threshold. He planted himself between me and the girl on the bed, shoulders squared, blocking her from view completely, his hand going to his hip.
“Get out.” His voice had dropped into something dangerous. “Right now, Garrison. Turn around and get out.”
I held my ground. My hands were visible, my posture open, but I didn’t step back.
Behind him, I could partially see the girl sitting on the edge of the bed. Young, maybe eighteen, maybe not even that. Dark hair tangled at the ends, a hoodie two sizes too big with the strings chewed ragged.
She held a cup of water in both hands, gripping it near the rim with her thumbs hooked over the edge, the way a child held something they were afraid of dropping. She looked at me with hollow eyes that tracked too slowly.
She wasn’t restrained. She wasn’t injured. She was sitting on the bed the way a person sat when they’d stopped having the energy to do anything else.
And she’d called him Uncle Seth.
“What’s going on, Briggson?” I kept my tone calm. No accusation. “I heard her call you uncle. I’m not here to cause problems.”
The aggression in Briggson’s posture didn’t disappear, but it recalibrated. He was still between me and the girl, still ready to put me through the wall if I moved wrong, but his hand moved away from his weapon.
“She’s my niece.” He said it like a challenge, daring me to do something with the information. “My sister’s daughter. Her name is Mia.”
Mia watched us from the bed without speaking. Her thumbs kept working the rim of that cup, circling it over and over in a small, repetitive motion that said her body had found one thing it could control and wasn’t letting go.
“She got in with the wrong crowd, ran away four months ago,” Briggson said. His voice was rough at the edges, scraped thin. “My sister called me in pieces. I’ve been trying to find her. I knew she was involved with Drift.”
“You’ve been using department resources.” Not a question.
“Every database I could access. Every drug location I could find. Every raid was a chance to walk through a room and see if she was in it.”
He held my gaze, and what I saw there wasn’t guilt. It was the hard defiance of a man who would accept the consequences and do it all again tomorrow.
“When they left me off the second raid, I almost lost it,” he continued. “Not because of my ego. Because that was another room I couldn’t check.”
I pulled the room’s only chair away from the wall and sat down.
Briggson’s shoulders came down a fraction. He turned to check on Mia, and the look that crossed his face was nothing I’d ever seen from him at the station. Something soft and raw that he was holding together by sheer force of will.
He sat on the edge of the bed beside her. She leaned into him, her head against his shoulder, and he put his arm around her. The gesture was careful, as if she might break.
I let the full weight of what he’d just told me settle against everything I’d believed about this man for weeks.
