“It came together fast. We grabbed who was available.”
“Available.” He repeated the word like it tasted wrong. “You called Reeves, who’s worked here exactly two seconds?” He hooked a thumb at us. “You called the fucking contractors? But I wasn’t worth a phone call?”
“There wasn’t time to build a full roster, Seth. Patrol developed the intel a couple hours ago, and we had a narrow window.”
“You had time to reach Garrison. You had time for his buddy.” He jerked his chin toward me without looking. “You took the contractors but not your own people?”
“They were together when I called. One call, two operators and a trained K9.”
Something shifted in Briggson’s face. The anger was still there, but it rearranged itself around a different question. “Who was in the cabin?”
Vance blinked. “That’s not?—”
“Who’d you pick up tonight, Eric?”
“Four suspects. You can read the report in the morning.”
“I’m asking now.”
“And I’m telling you to go home.” Vance’s voice went flat. “Read the report. If you want to discuss staffing decisions, we can do that during regular business hours and without an audience.”
Briggson held Vance’s gaze. Something moved behind his eyes. Anger, obviously, but layered underneath it, something I couldn’t read. He looked like a man with more to say who had just enough discipline to keep it behind his teeth.
He turned and walked out. He didn’t slam the door. He pulled it shut behind him with a deliberate, controlled force that was somehow worse than slamming it.
The bullpen held its breath for a beat. Then conversations came back, tentative at first, the way sound returns to a room after a gunshot.
Donovan was still in the chair across from me. Neither of us had moved during the entire exchange.
Briggson’s fury was the most honest thing I’d seen from anyone in this department. The question was what it was honest about.
A territorial cop who’d been passed over looked exactly like a compromised cop who’d been cut out of an operation he needed to control.
Both versions fit. Neither eliminated the other.
I looked at the deployment report in front of me. Somewhere in this building, someone had a photo on my dining room wall for a reason. And we weren’t any closer to knowing who.
Chapter 10
Ben
The driveway had never looked so good.
I pulled in and killed the engine, and I sat there for a minute with my hands on the wheel. The stitches in my left arm pulled every time I moved it wrong, which was every time I moved it at all.
Between last night’s raid, the scene at the precinct with Briggson, and the six hours of paperwork that followed, my body felt like it had been put through an industrial press and reassembled by someone who didn’t read the instructions.
Two raids. Zero progress on the only thing that mattered—figuring out who was dirty in the department and shutting down the syndicate moving Drift through Summit Falls.
It had been a fucking long day.
Donovan had headed back to his rental, a place not far from the precinct that he’d chosen for proximity to the work. I’d chosen this house for the yard. A house with no yard meant a K9 partner who was either crated or leashed everyhour of his life, and after seven years of doing the hard stuff together, he deserved better than that.
I had too much to carry, so I went to the front door first with my gear, unlocked it, and left it standing open. Then I headed back to the truck for the groceries—two bags, not much, a couple of steaks, a carton of eggs, a loaf of bread, a few other things. I was so tired of takeout that I’d pulled into the store on the way home just to buy something I could cook myself.
I grabbed the bags from the passenger seat, then went around back to let Jolly out of his crate. He jumped down from the truck and stayed close while I walked toward the house.
Kayla was at her car across the yard. She looked up and gave a small wave. I shifted a bag to free one hand and waved back.
