Vance smiled. “Good dog. Strong argument for a K9 program here.”
He turned and went back to running the scene. Evidence collection, suspect processing, radio traffic. Everything by the book.
We watched officers move in and out of the cabin for a while, Jolly dozing against my leg, until Vance told us to clear out. Everyone was heading back to the station.
The Summit Falls police station was bright and loud when we got back, which was unusual for a quarter to midnight. Word had spread. A successful drug raid with product and suspects in custody had pulled people in. Officers who weren’t on shift showed up anyway, drawn by the energy of a win the department hadn’t had in a while.
The suspects were processed through booking. The man at the card table had been separated from the three users. The runner came in from the hospital with both arms wrapped, one from Jolly, one from the knife he’d been stupid enough to pull. Vance handled the coordination with the same efficiency he’d had all night.
An EMT at the station took one look at my arm, peeled back Donovan’s field dressing, and told me I needed stitches. I told her I needed to finish my deployment report. She told me the deployment report would still be there in twenty minutes, and that if I didn’t get the cut closed properly, I’d be explaining to my employer why their contractor was out of commission with an infected forearm.
She had a point.
Six stitches, a fresh bandage, and a tetanus booster I probably didn’t need, and I was back at the desk.
I was finishing the K9 deployment report when Donovan dropped into the chair across from me and set two coffees between us.
“The guy at the table talked after all. No lawyer.”
“And?”
“Says he’s been at it less than two weeks. Got recruited through a friend of a friend, never met anyone above him. Product showed up on the porch every few days, already packaged. He’d sell it to whoever came through the door. Cash went into an envelope he left in the mailbox, and somebody picked it up overnight.”
“He can’t ID anyone?”
Donovan shook his head. “Doesn’t look like it. Doesn’t know where the product comes from. Doesn’t even know what Drift is, just calls it powder. Swears up and down he was just trying to make a little extra money.”
“You believe him?”
“That’s the thing. Yeah, I do. The guy was shaking so hard he could barely hold a pen to sign his statement. He’s not protecting anyone. He just doesn’t know anything.”
A dead end, then. Four people in custody and not one of them could point us up the chain.
“The three users are all possession charges. Small-time. The runner gets assault on top of whatever they tag him with.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Street-level, all of them.”
“Well, hopefully the department can still shake something loose.”
Donovan leaned back in the borrowed desk chair and kept his voice low. “Funny how this one came together in an hour, and we got a full stash. Ridgeline had a week of planning, and we got an empty cabin.”
“Yeah.” I wrapped my hands around the coffee. “Funny.”
Funny in a way that wasn’t funny at all.
The obvious read was that the Ridgeline operation had leaked because too many people knew too far in advance.Tighten the circle, shorten the timeline, and the raids work. Definitely confirmed someone was leaking information.
I was taking another sip when the front doors banged open hard enough to rattle the glass.
Seth Briggson came through them like a man who’d found someone’s pubes in his coffee.
Civilian clothes. Jeans, a jacket thrown over a T-shirt. He’d come from home. His eyes scanned the room until they landed on Vance.
“What the hell, Eric?”
The bullpen conversations died in a ripple, people registering the tone and turning to watch.
Vance looked up from the intake desk. “Seth.”
“You guys had a possible bust, and nobody thought to call me?” He crossed the room in four strides, stopping close enough that Vance had to tilt his head back to maintain eye contact. “I’ve been on this team for eight fucking years. This is exactly the kind of op I should be on.”
