Greed. Because the money made from that drug that was out there everywhere was more important than the people it hurt.
If Kimball hadn’t grown a damned conscience at the last minute, more people would have been killed not even two hours earlier.
IncludingMadison.Madiso
n had almost been killed because of her association with the TSP. For the third time.
Dom would never forget. Nor forgive.
Those bastards—Kimball and Wilson, included—were on borrowed time, now. Costovia and Bell were dead. Kimball had named them as shooters involved with the choir hall ambush where Madison and three of her friends had nearly been killed. They had most of the shooters now.
Just one remained out there. Dom had been looking for those bastards for a very long time. Dom hunted. Searching Kimball’s home was only the first step.
Dom took it. He stepped into the kitchen. Looked around at where the man had lived. Saw nothing to impress.
The house smelled like stale cigarettes and empty beer bottles and a scorched microwave dinner. Dom smelled and saw all three the instant he stepped inside. There was a table in the center. It had warped pressboard. There were animal gnaw marks on the legs. There had been a dog there at one time, he suspected. The linoleum was worn, dirty.
Sol Kimball wasn’t much of a housekeeper. No surprise there—he hadn’t been much of a cop, either.
There was a photo album open on that table. With beer bottles next to it.
Dom stepped closer. He had gloves. He slipped them on. To preserve evidence. He knew how to play the scientist game. If he didn’t, the ladies-of-the-lab, the ones who ruled forensics, would eat him alive. Those women had realfangswhen it came to their precious evidence.
Dom loved those women down there. Every last one of them was special. At least…the ones he interacted with the most. Haldyn, Bailey, Daryn, Madison, Charlotte.
And now Dr. Hope Coleson. Hope had replaced Dom’s pal Charlie’s wife when Rory had quit to have those twin babies of Charlie’s back in January.
The ladies-of-the-lab wereMajor Crimes’sladies.
The boys of Major Crimes protected the ladies-of-the-lab. It was just the way it was.
Now one of them was on a table right now. Fighting to survive.
Little Dr. Hazel Hope Coleson, twenty-four years old, five-six, and all of one hundred pounds of pure hyper energy, had taken a bullet to the chest tonight. As victim of a war she had no part in. She was practically still a kid.
Dom would never take that sitting down.
Sol Kimball had been the man to fire that weapon. Dom stepped up to the table. There was a photo album there.
He turned the first page, trying to figure out just who Detective Sol Kimball really was. And why he had thought it was okay to run drugs into their county, why it wasokayto target four innocent women in a damned mass shooting, and why what he had done to Hope and Haldyn was okay.
It would never beokay.
Madison had almost died.
Haldyn Harris and Hope Coleson were both in surgery now. It didn’t look good—especially for Hope.
At twenty-four years old. She had her entire life ahead of her, that girl, and now…
Sol Kimball’s face stared up at him from the first set of photos. Kimball, his wife—a reasonably attractive woman who could have done better—and a young girl. A girl who’d died because of that damned Opal Joy, a designer drug the TSP was fighting with everything they had to destroy.
That girl had been Kimball’s world.
Until she’d died, from the very drug Kimball had trafficked into the county.
The irony of that wasn’t lost on Dom. Not for a moment. Hell, that girl had deserved so much better than that.
He kept flipping the pages.
