“Fuck off,” Cade snapped.
Marlow folded his fingers around the cards. It felt like they should be heavier, that the information should have a weight of its own, but they were just thin plastic and even thinner metal.
“At this point,” he said. “Who hasn’t tried to kill me?”
Justin had given them an office and a computer in order for them to look over the files. He’d insisted that nothing—physical or digital—leave the building. It wouldn’t have been easy to enforce since Marlow already had possession of the cards, but his demand actually worked in their favor. The moon would be up enough to trigger the first shifts in—under now—two hours, and the city’s police force were still looking for Marlow.
So they didn’t have time to go back to Cold Winds and access their equipment, and they couldn’t exactly just drop into a nearby internet cafe either.
There were .doc files and spreadsheets, haphazardly named video clips—Marlow recognized a few police codes, but others just seemed to be strings of alphanumeric text and digits—and a dozen “copy of…” folders that been made without renaming.
Marlow didn’t know why he was surprised.
“He always sucked at admin,” he said. “It was an unofficial assignment for one of the team to write up the incident reports for him. He’d just sign them.”
Cade snorted as he turned the screen toward him and used the mouse to drag the cursor up to the corner of the display. “It probably says bad things about me that I’m more offended by his sloppy approach to his insurance policy than I am his corruption.”
“I mean, he did shoot me,” Marlow pointed out as he leaned on the back of Cade’s chair to watch what he was doing. “If we’re dating, I might expect you to just be more offended by that on principle.”
“I said almost.”
“You did not.”
Cade chuckled as he dragged all the files over into one folder and clicked up in the corner to organize them by date. An .avi jumped to the top. The structure of the file name looked familiar, and the date embedded was ten years ago—before Franklin came to San Francisco.
“That looks like dashcam footage,” Marlow said.
“One way to find out,” Cade said and double-tapped the file.
Someone had already clipped the extraneous footage out. The video started as the first punch was thrown. It wasn’t what Marlow had expected. A dozen cops in a grim circle, illuminated by the headlights of the cop car, as they kicked the shit out of someone on the ground. The footage was grainy—ten-year-old technology and filmed at night—but it was good enough to pick up the splatter of red on the ground as someone kicked the victim in the head.
Human instinct was to either look away or watch the point of impact. It was one reason why eyewitness statements weren’t as useful as TV cop shows made them look. People didn’t focus on the face. They looked at the fists or the feet.
Marlow looked at the faces of the cops who had taken part in the beatdown. He didn’t recognize any of them. Piper had promised them something to take Franklin down, but he wasn’t there.
“Did you see that?” Cade asked abruptly. He stopped the playback and leaned forward to squint at the screen.
“No,” Marlow admitted. “What?”
Cade clicked back three seconds, then five. He hit Play again and moved the cursor up to the victim’s hunched-over shoulders. “Watch.”
Two boots to the gut nearly lifted the man off the ground. He managed to get his elbow under him and tried to push himself up. Before he could, one of his attackers kicked it out from under him, and he went back down.
Marlow had already seen what Cade had, though.
“Shit,” he said. “I thought you were bad with faces.”
“Not when they matter,” Cade said. He backed up frame-by-frame until he found the second that Franklin’s face was visible on screen. It was him, although the scar in his eyebrow was still a split-open gash here. “I thought this was meant to implicate Franklin in something.”
“He’d not appreciate anyone knowing he’d been assaulted,” Marlow said. “Especially by wolves.”
Cade glanced up at him, then back at the screen. “It’s not the full moon,” he pointed out. “Could be nulls.”
“Not in San Francisco,” Marlow said. “Nulls in active duty have to wear a medical alert bracelet for triage. The only one there with any jewelry is Franklin. Those are wolves, and there’s no moon. Give me ten minutes?”
Cade looked at the time on the screen. “Make it five,” he said. “You need to get back to the apartment and lie low. Otherwise, if the wolves don’t get you, Night Shift will.”
It was the sort of truth that should have stung, but it didn’t. The idea that he couldn’t trust his fellow Night Shift officers was… nothing new. Marlow hadn’t trusted any of them for a long time. He’d just not admitted it.
