The door clicked shut behind him.
The room went quiet. Not uncomfortable. Expectant. Like the air pressure had shifted.
Rawlings waited to make sure Vance was gone, then stood, crossed to the door, and turned the lock. The click was small, decisive.
He settled back in his chair, and the man who’d been running a routine meeting disappeared. What replaced him was someone carrying a weight he hadn’t let Vance see.
“All right,” he said. “Where do we actually stand?”
This was the meeting. The real one. On paper, Citadel Solutions had been hired to build a K9 program for a growing police department. The training was legitimate. The credentials were real. Everything about our presence here held up under scrutiny.
But the training wasn’t why Donovan and I were actually here.
“Honestly, not terribly different from what we’ve already reported,” I said. “We’re getting baselines on most of the officers. Trying to figure out who’s dirty.”
The idyllic little ski city of Summit Falls had an ugly drug problem. The narcotic syndicate had been quietly building infrastructure: stash houses, local dealers, distribution networks. Dealing in opioids, a designer version of fentanyl.
About as fucking ugly as it got.
Rawlings had laid it out for our boss, Ethan Cross, weeks ago—drug traffic climbing, cases going sideways, evidence disappearing. Seventy-five officers in the building and he couldn’t say for certain which ones he could trust. So he’d called Citadel.
Rawlings pulled off his reading glasses and set them on the desk. “Vance thinking the team will be okay with you two running real ops with them matters more than you might think. This department talks. If anyone suspected you were here for anything other than the dogs, or if they thought you couldn’t handle yourselves, Vance would’ve reported it to me.”
I nodded. “Well, today’s agreement to let us participate in the real stuff will definitely help us be able to better observe.”
Rawlings leaned back. The chair creaked under him. “I’ve been chief of this department for twenty years. I damned well hate knowing we’ve got dirty cops. But it’s undeniable.” He let out a breath, slow and controlled, like a man who’d been holding it for a long time. “Arrest rates haven’t kept pace with the increase. Cases go cold that shouldn’t. Tips reach the wrong ears before we can act on them. And I’ve got seventy-five people in this building, but I can’t tell you with certainty which ones I can trust.”
Donovan shifted in his chair. “But why come to Citadel? Why don’t you go to Internal Affairs?”
“Thought about it.” Rawlings shook his head. “But IA reports up the chain, and I don’t know where the chain is compromised. If I’m wrong, I’ve just accused my own officers of corruption based on a gut feeling. If I’m right, I’ve just tipped off whoever’s dirty that I’m looking. Either way, I lose.”
“So you called Ethan,” I said.
“Ethan and I go back. He’s helped me out before, and I’ve done the same for him. I don’t throw those markers around lightly.” He looked at me steadily. “I told him I needed people I could trust who had no connection to Summit Falls, no history with anyone in this department.”
“Well, coming up with a new K9 department was pretty brilliant,” Donovan said. “Clean reason for trainers to be here.”
“Happy accident,” Rawlings replied. “The department got funding for a new program this year. The timing was right. The cover holds.”
“And we’ll use it.” I nodded. “And now that we’re not just on training, it’ll give us more intel more quickly.”
“There’s a new drug making the rounds.” Rawlings slid a folder across his desk toward me. “Designer stuff. They’re calling itDrifton the street. Fentanyl variant, far as we can tell. Showed up about six months ago. Three overdose deathssince, all tourists, all written off as people who brought in their own supply.”
I took the folder and passed it to Donovan without opening it. He’d go through it tonight with the attention of a mother chimp picking fleas out of her children’s fur.
“But you don’t think they did,” I said.
“I think someone’s building a distribution network in my town, and at least one person in my department is helping them do it.” He said it quietly. The words of a man who’d spent a long time arriving at a conclusion he didn’t want to reach. “I just can’t prove it. That’s what I need from you. Watch. Listen. Build me a case I can hand to the FBI that’ll actually stick.”
His desk phone rang.
Rawlings glanced at the display, and his jaw tightened—not alarm, just the irritation of a man whose Saturday was about to get longer. “I need to take this.”
“We’ll get out of your way.” I stood, and Donovan followed.
“Monday,” Rawlings said, hand on the receiver. “Be ready for that raid.”
“We will.”
