“Like Jolly.”
“Yes. Like Jolly.”
William was quiet for a moment, still studying the page. Then he looked up at me, and I saw something settled in his expression—a decision already made.
“Mom, Jolly is a police dog. That means he catches bad guys and protects people.”
“That’s right.” At least, according to the movies and TV shows I’d seen. Always the most realistic source of information.
“I want to be brave like that.” His voice was steady, the way it got when he’d been thinking about something for a while and had finally decided to say it out loud. “Maybe I could be a policeman when I grow up. Then I could have a dog like Jolly, and we could be partners. I’d take care of him, and he’d take care of me.”
I looked at my son. This careful, watchful boy who had spent the last year learning to read moods and tiptoe around silences and make himself as small as possible. This boy who had found a friend through a gap in a fence and kept him secret because he was afraid someone would take it away.
“I think you’d be a great policeman,” I said. “And I think your dog would be really lucky to have you as a partner.”
He grinned—full, unguarded, the kind that used to come easily. Then he slid off his chair and headed for the living room, already talking about what he wanted for dinner, his voice carrying through the house.
I sat at the table with my sketchbook open, listening to him rummage through the living room, probably looking for the remote. Outside, the late-afternoon light was glowing gold through the kitchen window, and somewhere on the other side of the fence, a K9 with a perpetual grin was probably still waiting for the next pinecone to come sailing over.
But damn it, I would still have to talk to Ben. Hope thatthe man who’d apologized unprompted in a coffee shop and carried a stranger’s bags to her table without a second thought would understand that what was happening between his dog and my son was something worth protecting.
But that conversation could wait for tomorrow. Tonight, the house was full of my son’s happy voice, and I wasn’t ready to share it with anyone.
Chapter 8
Ben
Two days after the raid, seventy-five faces stared back at me from my dining room wall.
Donovan and I had cleared the sparse furniture and covered the drywall with a grid of personnel photos. Every sworn officer, every civilian employee, every face in the Summit Falls Police Department arranged in neat rows under the harsh overhead light. The files Chief Rawlings had given us were spread across the kitchen counter, and the takeout we’d picked up an hour ago sat half eaten beside them, going cold.
Somewhere in that grid was a traitor. Maybe more than one.
Donovan stood beside me, arms crossed, a bottle of beer dangling from his fingers. We’d been at this for two hours, sorting the department into categories. Low-risk. Medium-risk. High-risk. The system was crude, but it was a place to start.
“This is not what I thought I would be doing when I signed on with Citadel,” Donovan said. “Honestly, I hate this part.”
“Which part?”
“Looking at a wall of cops and knowing one of them sold out.” He took a long pull from his beer. “These people took an oath to protect and serve. And someone decided it didn’t mean anything.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. The betrayal cut deeper than the investigation itself—the knowledge that someone wearing the badge had looked at their fellow officers and decided to sell them out.
So far, only one photo had come off the wall entirely. Chief Rawlings, removed and set facedown on the kitchen counter.
Even that hadn’t been unanimous.
“I still say it would be a brilliant play,” Donovan had argued earlier. “You’re dirty, you suspect someone’s getting close, so you call in outside investigators yourself. Point them at everyone else. You look proactive, concerned, completely above suspicion.”
“You really think Rawlings is playing us?”
“No.” He’d shrugged. “But I’ve been wrong before.”
I’d put Rawlings back on the wall after that. Off to the side, in a category of his own. Not eliminated. Just unlikely.
The low-risk section was growing steadily. Administrative staff, records clerks, the civilians who kept the department running but wouldn’t have had access to operational details about Monday night’s raid. The tip-off had come fast—whoever warned those dealers knew the raid was happening while the team was still staging. That meant someone with real-time tactical information.
Which pointed directly at someone on the entry team.
