“This woman’s doorbell camera is the only one on the block pointed across the street toward the Carlson driveway.” Shane wasn’t sharing anything Sam didn’t already know about their case. “We serve the warrant, get the footage, and make the arrest.”
The Carlson case had landed on their desks six days ago. A mother and her sixteen-year-old daughter gunned down in their own driveway as they returned home from a volleyball tournament on a Saturday afternoon. The teenager, Zoe, had died at the scene, her body crumpled beside the open passenger door of the family minivan. Her mother, Amber, had made it twelve hours before dying in the ICU without ever regaining consciousness. Two lives extinguished in seconds. A family destroyed in the time it took to pull a trigger.
“Almost makes you wish you’d stayed in vice, doesn’t it?” Sam said, brushing crumbs from his lap before wiping his mustache with a crumpled napkin. “At least the drug dealers usually kill each other, not innocent mothers and their kids.”
Shane didn’t respond. His mind had drifted back to the morgue photos of Amber and Zoe Carlson, images he’d studied for hours without getting any closer to being able to look at them dispassionately. Two faces he’d never met in life, now committed permanently to his memory in death. The father, Greg Carlson, had been inconsolable when they’d interviewed him at the hospital, barely able to form coherent sentences through his grief. He’d kept asking if his wife had said anything before she died, and Shane had to tell him three times that she’d never woken up.
Shane’s stomach twisted, and it wasn’t just the lingering stench of eggs causing it. Their jobs revolved around finding killers and putting them behind bars, a duty they performed with dedication because the alternative was a world where violence went unanswered. The justice system had its flaws, flaws that Shane had witnessed firsthand during his years in vice and then homicide, but it was the framework that separated civilization from chaos. It was what they had.
And yet Kinsley’s choices cut deeper than matters of legality. They reflected something fundamental about her character, a willingness to cross a line that Shane had always believed was uncrossable, and he struggled daily to reconcile that darkness with the woman who had once lain beside him, whose laugh he could still hear if he wasn’t careful, whose voice on the other side of a phone call had once been the best part of his evening.
The burning in his chest intensified, and he took another sip of coffee despite knowing it would only make things worse. When he’d first pieced together what had happened, he’d nearly convinced himself to report it without speaking to Kinsley.
Something had stopped him from picking up the phone.
Loyalty? The need to understand? Or something weaker and less defensible, like the fear of what reporting her would meanfor himself, for the department, for the memory of whatever they’d been to each other before everything went wrong?
“You’ve got that look again,” Sam observed, breaking into his thoughts with the bluntness of a man who had never learned the art of subtlety. “Like something is crawling up your ass.”
Shane rubbed his eyes, doubting the pressure would do anything for the throbbing behind them. Sam was a good man, a mediocre partner who had never quite recovered from being passed over for sergeant, and irritating as hell on a good day.
This morning, he was pushing his luck.
“Trust me, this footage will give us what we need,” Sam said, retrieving his fountain soda from the cup holder and taking a long pull through the straw. “I’ve got twenty bucks that says the ex-boyfriend did it.”
The confined space of the car continued to press in on Shane from all sides. The burning sensation in his chest crept higher, settling at the base of his throat like something alive. He swallowed hard, trying to force it back down.
Lines had been crossed, and laws had been broken.
How was Kinsley able to justify her choice? How did she walk into the station every morning and sit at her desk and open case files and interview suspects, fully aware that she had done the very thing she spent her career prosecuting? The cognitive dissonance of it should have been unbearable. And yet she functioned. She worked. She investigated a thirty-year-old murder with the same dedication she’d always brought to her cases, as though the blood on her own hands was somehow different from the blood on everyone else’s.
“Middle-class family, usual debts, nothing that stands out as unusual,” Sam continued, still working through the Carlson case aloud the way he always did, using Shane as a sounding board, whether Shane was listening or not. “The only thing Greg Carlson could give us was that his daughter’s ex didn’t take thebreakup well. Kept pestering her. And you heard some of Zoe’s friends at the school. That kid has a temper.”
“Thatkidis eighteen years old,” Shane pointed out as he monitored a white sedan parking a few spots ahead of them on the street. “And while I’m not buying that his parents haven’t heard from him recently, he’s probably lying low somewhere. He’s got to know he’s our number one suspect by now.”
“That kid isn’t hiding because he thinks we suspect him,” Sam said, shaking his head in disagreement before taking another draw on the straw. The soft drink had clearly reached the bottom, judging by the hollow slurping sound that filled the car. “He’s in hiding so Greg Carlson doesn’t beat his ass to death.”
“We’ve already warned the father not to take the law into his own hands.” Shane shifted his gaze back to the boutique's front entrance as a male subject stepped out of the white sedan and walked in the opposite direction. Not their person. “Let’s hope he listens to reason. There’s a good chance this doorbell footage tells a different story.”
“Listen to reason? For all we know, that kid is already six feet underground.” Sam must have caught Shane shaking his head, because he leaned back in his seat with the satisfied expression of a man who had successfully provoked a reaction. “Sometimes I forget how young you are, Levick. Or maybe it’s because you worked vice instead of homicide. I’m not saying the system doesn’t have its place, but let’s not pretend it always delivers justice.”
What was it with that kind of dismissive attitude lately? On any other day, Shane could have brushed it off as the cynicism of a veteran cop who had witnessed too much death and too many acquittals to maintain faith in the machinery of justice. Today, with the knowledge of what Kinsley had done pressing againstthe inside of his skull like a migraine that wouldn’t break, the comment struck a nerve that was already raw.
“What’s the alternative? Vigilantes running around deciding who deserves to live and who deserves to die?” Shane did his best to keep his tone even, though he could hear the strain in his own voice. “That’s not justice, Sam. That’s chaos.”
“It’s not that black and white. In all my years in homicide, you think I haven’t arrested people who had taken a life in retribution? I made the collar. I did my job. I processed them and testified against them when the time came. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t understand why they did what they did.”
Rain streamed down the windshield in rivulets now, the gray, dismal morning matching Shane’s mood. He didn’t respond to Sam’s speech, hoping the silence would signal that he was done with the conversation and that Sam would let him sit and brood in peace until the boutique owner showed up for work.
“You ever see that Kevin Bacon movie?” Sam asked, shattering any hope of quiet. Shane stifled a groan. “The one where his kid gets killed by a gang member during a gas station holdup?Death Sentence, I think it was called.”
Shane gave a curt nod, not that his acknowledgment did anything to slow Sam’s momentum.
“The court lets the killer off with a slap on the wrist because of some plea deal, and Bacon’s character just snaps. Decides if the system won’t deliver justice, he’ll do it himself. Goes after every single one of them.” Sam shook his head with something that looked like reluctant admiration. “What gets me about that film is the way it shows the transformation. He starts off as this regular guy, a family man, someone who’d never even thrown a punch. And then grief hollows him out, fills the empty space with rage, and suddenly he’s capable of things he never imagined. Now put yourself in Greg Carlson’s shoes. His wife and daughter were gunned down in their driveway, and he hasto live the rest of his life without them. Thinking about their last moments as they lay on a slab of hot concrete, struggling to breathe as the blood pooled beneath them. Makes you think about how quickly any one of us could become that person under the right circumstances, doesn’t it?”
“Real life isn’t a movie, Sam.”
“No, it’s messier,” Sam agreed, setting his empty cup in the holder. The remaining ice settled against itself with a hollow rattle. “But the principle stands. You push people far enough, they snap. And sometimes, the snapping makes more sense than pretending the system is going to deliver anything resembling justice.”
