Page 18 of Crown of Ash

Lead inconclusive. Insufficient basis for further action at this time.

He read his own sentence four times, the letters not blurring but hardening each time, before he let himself truly accept what it meant to him, then and now.

He hadn't written that because the lead was weak. He'd written it because the trail led somewhere that, even then, he couldn't allow on record, and burying it quietly had felt, at the time, like the responsible thing to do. Contained. Controlled. A decision made by a man who still believed the system he served would eventually get there on its own, given enough patience and the right warrant. And because… even then… he hadn't been willing or able to lead the law to Marcus' door.

Three years. He'd sat on this for three years, the same three years he'd spent telling himself Marcus was the one who'd stopped believing in doing things the right way.

Andre put the report down and didn't pick it back up.

He'd built an entire version of himself around the idea that he was the one who'd stayed inside the lines. That had been true right up until the day it wasn't, and he'd never once gone back and corrected the record, not even to himself, not until right now, sitting alone in a room with his own initials proving otherwise.

Andre sat with it a long time after he put the report away, long enough that the fluorescent light over his desk buzzed twice and cut out and he didn't bother getting up to fix it.

He needed to talk to someone who wasn't Marcus and wasn't Reyes and wasn't anyone who'd either judge him for the file or use it against him. Somebody who'd already figured out how to carry two versions of the same badge without it splitting him in half.

Dray's name came to him almost on its own. Andre had filed him away months ago as a curiosity, nothing more, a homicide detective who moved through old-money rooms with an ease that never quite added up on a city salary, connections nobody at the precinct could fully account for. Andre had never pushed on it. Some instinct had told him not to. Bring childhood friends with Cass Marritt wasn't enough… he knew there was more.

That same instinct was telling him to call Dray anyway.

He pulled out his phone before he could talk himself out of it.

The reply came back in under a minute.

Andre named a bar he hadn't been to in years, mostly because it was quiet and mostly because nobody from the precinct ever went there. Dray texted back an address instead, three blocks off the one Andre had picked, no explanation attached.

Andre drove there without asking why.

Dray picked the bar, which didn't surprise Andre until he actually walked in and found it half-empty, no TVs blasting a game, no crowd loud enough to need raising his voice. Not a cop bar. A place built for a conversation nobody wanted overheard.

"Rough couple of days?" Dray said, already sitting, two beers on the table like he'd ordered for both of them before Andre even texted back.

"That obvious?"

"Your jaw's been tight since you walked through the door, and you keep checking the exits like you're not sure you want an easy way out of this conversation." Dray pushed the second beer across the table. "Sit. You're not the only one having a week."

Andre sat. He drank half the beer before he said anything else, mostly because he didn't know yet how much of the truth he was planning to hand over.

"I'm not here officially."

"Nobody who says that ever is." Dray's mouth curved, not quite a smile. "What do you need?"

"A read on somebody, maybe. Marcus Whitfield. Lakefront." Andre watched Dray's face for anything, and got nothing back but patience. "You'd know the name."

"I know the name." Dray turned his glass a quarter turn on the table, unhurried. "I also know you didn't drive out here to ask me a question Google could answer. You came here because you're trying to figure out if a man can run an operation like that and still be worth trusting. That's not really a question about Marcus Whitfield. That's a question about what it would mean about you, if the answer's yes."

Andre didn't have anything ready for that. Dray let the silence sit there and didn't push.

"I'm not going to tell you what to do with your own case," Dray said. "But there's more than one way to carry a badge and still sleep at night. I know that better than almost anybody you're ever going to meet."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Exactly what I said." Dray's phone lit up on the table between them, face-down, buzzing once, then again. The half-smile vanished the second he looked at it. His jaw set, hard. That was the same shift Andre had caught in his own reflection more than once this week.

"You need to take that?"

"Yeah." Dray was already standing, phone against his ear before Andre finished the question. "Cass. What?"

Andre watched his whole posture change while he listened, shoulders squaring, weight shifting forward onto the balls of his feet, the easy bar-stool slouch gone like it had never been there.