“It won’t take long. Phone?”
Cade handed it over, and Marlow stepped away from the desk as he dialed in to San Francisco PD.
“This is Captain O’Hara,” he lied. “Can I speak to Lieutenant Randall?”
Randall was the longest-serving Night Shift lieutenant in California, and he’d held on to the job even after he’d lost a leg in the line of duty. He could have retired—most did; it was hard to be kept off the front lines—but he didn’t. If anyone had driven down to San Diego to deliver the news, it would be him.
He paced back and forth as he waited for someone to pick up. Every click of the mouse as Cade worked his way through the other files made him fidget.
“O’Hara,” a voice ruined by nearly twenty years yelling orders over wolf fights said. “Shouldn’t you be naked somewhere?”
The lazy tease made Marlow blink. He hadn’t realized they were friends, which meant his half-assed plan to lie wouldn’t work.
“I lied,” Marlow said. “This is Officer Kit Marlow, and I didn’t kill anyone.”
Silence for a second, and then Randall coughed out a dry laugh. “Yeah, well, you shouldn’t call me at work for that,” he said. “Hold on.”
The line went muffled, and Marlow heard Randall excuse himself to someone in the background. He had a feeling Randall and O’Hara might be more than friends, which was significantly more information than Marlow wanted to know.
Doors closed and clicked, and then Randall came back. “Why the hell should I believe you?”
“The only evidence is Franklin’s word,” Marlow said. “And my best guess is that you know better than to believe anything you hear from him.”
“Not a bad argument,” Randall said. “It’s not the only evidence, though. Apparently, you short-changed the armory more than once. The inventory on your bullets doesn’t match up.”
“That’s a lie,” Marlow said. “I’ve got the signed receipts from the armory clerk to prove it.”
“You keep them?” Randall said, surprise tart in his voice. “Do you report every ‘for your service’ gift too? Don’t answer that, I can guess. Typical of Franklin, he thinks that secretly everyone would do the same things he does if they could just get away with it. He doesn’t believe some people are just Boy Scouts.”
Marlow didn’t know about that. He just preferred to be safe instead of sorry, and all it took was a single folder in his filing cabinet to do that. So why not.
“I’m not better than anyone else,” Marlow said. “But I didn’t kill that man. I swear.”
“No offense,” Randall drawled. “But I’m pretty sure that makes you better than Franklin.”
“You think he killed someone up there?” Marlow asked. The background sound of Cade on the computer stopped, and the chair creaked as Cade got up and came over to join him. He gestured to his ear and then the phone. Marlow gestured for him to wait a second.
“I know he did,” Randall said. “He just did it legally, as far as we could prove.”
“Did it have something to do with the cops that attacked him?” Marlow asked. “I’ve seen footage of that.”
He put the phone onto speaker and set it on the corner of the desk.
“How?”
“Better you don’t know,” Marlow said. “It’s dashcam footage from an officer’s car.”
“His,” Randall said. “It went missing before I could pull it, and Franklin said nothing happened; he just slipped and fell. So I could never prove he had a motive for what happened.”
“What did happen?” Marlow asked.
“He did his job,” Randall said. “He killed wolves… and the first one was clean. I was there, and he had no other choice. Some adolescent idiot and his girlfriend had snuck out to turn together under the first full moon of the year… except she didn’t turn. Franklin saved her life—even if it wasn’t something she appreciated at the time—when he took that headshot. I should have… it didn’t bother him, you know? His first kill—even if it was righteous—and it didn’t give him pause. Not until it turned out that the dead kid bled blue. Three generations of cops in that family. Good cops. Even one Night Shift officer, although he’d retired years ago.”
“They didn’t think it was righteous?”
“Would you?” Randall asked. “His father lodged a complaint. He came down to the armory to protest, tried to throw a punch at Franklin. His partner had to drag him out of there. Is she in the footage? Tall blond woman, looks like she belongs in a painting of the English countryside.”
“Yes,” Cade said. He shrugged when Marlow raised his eyebrows at him. “She got her licks in.”
