Chapter 1: The Reluctant Partner
The bullpen hummed, a low, sickly sound beneath the flickering fluorescence. The air was a layered cake of despair: stale coffee grounds, the ghost of a thousand cigarettes, and beneath it all, the faint, iron-tinged scent of blood that no amount of bleach could ever fully erase. Marcus Cole let the file folder in his hands fall shut. Another dead kid. Another corner deal gone sideways. The photo paper was slick under his thumb.
He took a sip from his chipped World’s Best Grandpa mug. The coffee was cold and bitter. Perfect.
At sixty, his back ached with a familiar permanence, a souvenir from three decades of chasing ghosts through this city’s concrete veins. The desk in front of him was a monument to exhaustion: a leaning tower of yellowed case files, a half-eaten donut crust glistening with grease, a pen that had long since run dry. The air conditioner rattled in the window, losing its battle against the sweltering L.A. night. He was counting the days. Thirty-seven, to be exact. Then it would be fishing trips, silence, and not a single soul in a holding cell whining in his ear.
The double doors at the end of the room slammed open, cracking against the wall.
A woman stormed in. She moved with a purpose so intense it seemed to part the stagnant air around her. Her dark hair was a little wild, as if she’d been running her hands through it. Her eyes scanned the near-empty room—a few uniforms typing with glacial slowness, a detective snoring softly at his terminal—and landed on him.
“I need to see the detective on duty,” she said, her voice cutting through the hum.
Marcus didn’t get up. He took another slow sip of his cold coffee, letting his gaze travel over her. She was dressed for action, not the office: dark jeans, boots, a fitted jacket over a simple tank. Fierce. Voluptuous, with curves in all the right places and an ass that, even through his jaded haze, he had to appreciate. A detective’s shield was clipped to her belt. Of course she was.
“You’re looking at him,” Marcus said, his voice a gravel road. “For the next thirty-seven days, anyway. What’s left of the night shift is mine.”
She strode over, not waiting for an invitation. “Jennifer Wu. Central Division. I need to talk. Somewhere… not here.”
He sighed internally. It was always something. A domestic they couldn’t handle, a paperwork snafu, some rookie wanting a veteran’s signature to cover their ass. He’d seen a hundred Jennifer Wus—sharp, ambitious, convinced they were about to crack the big one. They usually burned out fast or got promoted over the real work.
“My office is the coffee machine,” he grunted, nodding towards the corner. “But we can use the interview room. Avoid the audience.” He pushed himself up, his knees protesting, and led the way to a small, windowless box that smelled of cheap pine cleaner and old sweat.
He didn’t offer her a seat. He leaned against the wall, folding his arms. “Alright, Wu. Talk. Make it fast. My bed’s calling.”
She remained standing too, a current of nervous energy vibrating off her. “It was a textbook stop. My partner and I, we had a tip on a weapons deal going down in that old warehouse district off Alameda. We set up, we waited. The car matches the description, we move in.”
Marcus just watched her, his expression giving nothing away. He’d heard this opening a thousand times.
“We get the driver out. He’s clean. Nervous, but clean. My partner, he checks the trunk. Nothing.” Jennifer’s jaw tightened. “Then a second car rolls up. Lights off. Two guys get out, hands in their pockets. I tell them to show their hands. They don’t. Everything… tightens.”
She started pacing the short length of the room. Two steps, turn. Two steps, turn. “My partner moves to intercept. I’m covering the first guy. Then I hear it—a thump, like a sack of flour hitting the ground. I turn, and my partner is down. Not shot. Just… down. One of the new guys is standing over him with a taser.”
Marcus’s eyebrows lifted a fraction. That was different.
“The first guy shoves me. Hard. I go into the side of our cruiser. My vision swims. By the time I’m back up, they’re gone. Both cars. Vanished.” She stopped pacing and looked right at him, her dark eyes blazing. “And then I see it. On the pavement, right next to my partner’s hand. A kilo brick of cocaine, wrapped in blue plastic. Just sitting there. Neat as you please.”
“Planted,” Marcus stated, his voice flat.
“Yes. Obviously. They tasered my partner, shoved me, and dropped the brick. A story for Internal Affairs: two overzealous detectives, a bad stop, planting evidence to cover their mistake.” The words came out in a furious, focused stream. “My partner’s in the hospital, cardiac monitoring. They’re saying it’s procedure after a taser incident. But I can’t reach him. His phone goes straight to voicemail. I called it in to my Lieutenant. He told me to go home, that IA would handle it in the morning.”
“Sound advice,” Marcus said.
“It’s a shutdown,” she fired back. “By morning, the narrative is set. Two bad cops. End of story. Those guys weren’t random dealers. They were waiting for us. They knew we’d be there. The tip was a set-up. This was a professional send-a-message.” She took a step closer. The clean, subtle scent of her soap cut through the room’s chemical smell. “I can’t go through channels on this. They’re in the channels.”
Marcus was silent for a long moment, studying her. The panic wasn’t in her eyes; it was a cold, calculating anger. She believed every word. He’d seen that look before, on people who were about to get themselves very dead.
“Why me?” he finally asked. “You don’t know me. Central’s a long way from my patch.”
“Because you’re Marcus Cole. And because you don’t care.” She didn’t blink. “Everyone says you’re counting the minutes until retirement. That you hate the brass, hate the politics. That means you might actually give a damn about what’s true, not what’s convenient. And you’ve got the rank to look without asking permission.”
A dry, humorless chuckle escaped him. “You’ve done your homework. Flattering. Misguided, but flattering.” He pushed off the wall. “You’re asking me to step into a potential IA firestorm, on the word of a detective I met five minutes ago, based on a hunch. My final case.” He shook his head. “Pass.”
Her shoulders dropped a fraction, but the fire didn’t dim. “It’s not a hunch. They targeted us. They had a taser, not a gun. They wanted a scandal, not a shootout. This is about something bigger. And my partner is lying in a bed, and they’re probably in his room right now, telling him to keep his mouth shut if he ever wants to wear the badge again.”
She pulled a folded piece of notepaper from her jacket pocket and slid it across the table between them. “The plate of the first car. It’s fake, dead-ended. I ran it. But the make and model. And a partial I got on the second—a dark SUV, maybe a Tahoe, with a bumper sticker. A green pine tree. That’s it. That’s what I have.”
Marcus didn’t touch the paper. He looked from the neat handwriting to her face, then down to the worn linoleum floor. Thirty-seven days. He could coast. Sign forms. Avoid drama. Die of boredom by the marina.
He glanced at her again as she turned to stare at the blank two-way mirror, the line of her jaw sharp, the curve of her hip outlined against the fabric of her jacket. At least it wouldn’t be boring.
With another internal sigh that felt like it came from the soles of his feet, he picked up the paper. He didn’t look at it. He just held it.
“Meet me at the all-night diner on Third. The one with the broken ‘O’ in the sign. Give me an hour.” His voice was still gravel, but it held a new note: resignation, and the faintest spark of something else. “Don’t call anyone. Don’t go home. Buy a burner phone if you’re smart. And, Wu?”
She turned, hope and wariness battling in her expression.
“From this second on,” he said, tucking the paper into his shirt pocket, “you doubt everything. Including me.”
Jennifer held his gaze for a beat longer, the weight of his words settling in her gut like cold stone. Doubt everything. Including him. It was a hell of a thing to say to someone asking for help. But that was the point, wasn’t it? He wasn’t offering comfort; he was offering a reality check served straight, no chaser.
“An hour,” she repeated, a statement, not a question.
He gave a single, slow nod, his eyes already drifting past her to the door, mentally mapping his next moves. The faded fluorescent light caught the gray in his close-cropped beard, highlighting the weary grooves around his mouth. He moved towards the door, his movements economical, like a man conserving energy for a fight he knew was coming.
She followed, her boots silent on the scuffed floor. The bullpen seemed even emptier now, a vast, quiet stage for their hushed conspiracy. The only sound was the relentless rattle of the air conditioner and the distant echo of a slamming cell door.
At the double doors, he paused, one hand on the push bar. He didn’t look back at her. “Third Street Diner. Broken ‘O’. Don’t be late.”
“I’ll be there,” she said, her voice lower now, matching the room’s midnight hush.
The doors swung shut behind her, sealing the faint scent of her soap out of the bullpen and leaving Marcus alone with the hum. He stood there for a full minute, listening to the echo of her boots fade down the corridor. Trouble. She was pure, undiluted trouble in a very appealing package.
With a grunt, he turned and walked not to the exit, but back to his terminal. The ancient chair protested as he sank into it. His fingers hovered over the keyboard. It would be so easy. He could log out, drive home, and call his lieutenant in the morning with a report of an hysterical detective from Central causing a scene. Pass the buck. Let her own division handle its own mess. That was the smart play. The retiring play.
His cursor blinked over the database login.
He swore under his breath, a single, sharp syllable, and typed in his credentials.
The search was quick. Jennifer Wu. 34. Central Division. Homicide, recently transferred from Vice. Commendations: three. One for valor. A clean record. No sustained IA complaints. Sharp. He scanned her closed cases. High clearance rate. Not a desk-jockey; she got results. There was a note from a former commander: “Tenacious. Sometimes to a fault.”
Tenacious. He could see it. That fire in her eyes wasn’t panic; it was the look of someone who’d hit a wall and was already calculating how to dig under it.
He leaned back, the chair groaning. The facts, what few she had, scrolled in his mind. The precise taser take-down. The planted kilo. The vanishing act. It was neat. Professional. It felt like a message. And sending a message to a cop with a clean record and a valor commendation wasn’t small-time. It was the kind of thing that happened when you got close to something that didn’t want to be seen.
His conscience, a grouchy old bastard he’d tried to ignore for years, gave a hard, persistent prick. Something was off. Deeply off. Letting this get buried under IA procedure felt… wrong. It tasted like the bitter dregs in his coffee mug.
With another sigh, this one full of resignation, he logged out, powered down the monitor, and grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair. The donut crust stared up at him from the desk. He left it there.
The Third Street Diner’s neon sign buzzed, the broken ‘O’ making it read “DINER.” The glow painted the wet sidewalk in pink and blue. Through the smudged window, he saw her immediately. Sitting in a back booth, silhouetted against the chrome and red vinyl. Her hands were wrapped around a thick white mug, but she wasn’t drinking. She was staring out the window, watching the empty street. Every few seconds, her eyes flicked to the door.
Marcus pushed inside, a bell jangling overhead. The air was thick with the smell of old grease, strong coffee, and maple syrup. An elderly waitress with a name tag reading “Flo” gave him a nod from behind the counter. He motioned toward the back.
Jennifer didn’t look up until his shadow fell across the table. Then her gaze snapped to his, wary, assessing.
“You’re late,” she said, though there was no heat in it. Just observation.
“By four minutes. I was savoring my freedom.” He slid into the cracked vinyl booth opposite her. It sighed under his weight. Flo ambled over. “Coffee. Black. And keep it coming,” he told her.
“You got it, sweetheart.”
When Flo shuffled away, Marcus studied Jennifer. The overhead light was kinder than the fluorescents of the bullpen, but it showed the tightness around her mouth, the faint smudges of exhaustion under her eyes. She was holding it together, but just.
“Well?” she asked, her voice low.
“You’re not crazy,” he stated, his voice flat. “And your record’s clean. For now.”
Some of the tension bled from her shoulders. It was a small release, but he saw it.
Flo returned, sloshing coffee into a mug for him. He waited until she was gone again, wrapping his hands around the warmth. “Your instincts are right. Something’s off about this. The play was too clean. But that’s the problem.”
“What is?”
“It’s clean.” He took a sip. The coffee was scorched and perfect. “No witnesses. No hard evidence. Just your word against a brick of coke that appeared mysteriously. And your partner in a hospital bed who, if he’s smart, is gonna say he remembers nothing after the taser hit.” He held her gaze. “If we go shouting this up the chain now, without a single piece of corroborating proof, you know what happens. You get suspended. I get a reprimand for encouraging hysterics. The file gets labeled ‘unfounded’ and disappears into a drawer. And whoever did this gets to try again, maybe not so gently next time.”
Her knuckles were white on her mug. “So we do nothing?”
“We do everything. We just don’t advertise.” He leaned forward, lowering his voice. “We treat it like what it is: an attempted framing of two police officers, possibly by other officers. That means we trust no one. We assume our comms are compromised. We move quietly. We find a thread they missed, and we pull it. But we don’t go to the higher-ups until we have something solid in our hands. Something that proves a cover-up, not just a bad night.”
She was silent, staring into the dark pool of her coffee. He could see the conflict in her. The desire for vindication, for the system to work, warring with the cold, logical understanding that he was right. The system she believed in might be the very thing coming for her.
“Reluctantly,” she finally said, the word tasting sour, “I agree.”
“Good.” He sat back. “Now, we start at the beginning. Tell me about the tip. Who, when, how? And don’t leave out the color of the sky.”
“It came in through the regular tip line at Central, logged at 9:47 p.m.,” Jennifer began, her voice dropping into a measured, professional cadence. “Male caller. No voice stress analysis, but he sounded calm. Almost rehearsed. He gave the location—the old Superior Plating warehouse on Dalton Street. Said a deal was going down at eleven, high-caliber weapons for cash. Named the make and model of the car, a silver Toyota Camry, and gave a partial plate that checked out to a rental. The sky was black. No moon. Just that orange-glow from the city.”
Marcus listened, his eyes never leaving her face. “Who took the call?”
“A civilian clerk. Marcie. She’s been there fifteen years. I already called her on my way here. She remembers it because the guy was so specific. Said he was a ‘concerned citizen’ who lived nearby and was tired of the activity.”
“A concerned citizen who knows the difference between an AK-47 and a Saturday night special,” Marcus grunted. “You ran the rental?”
“Dead end. Paid in cash at a kiosk at LAX, fake ID. The car was found abandoned in Koreatown two hours ago. Cleaned.”
“Of course it was.” He stirred his coffee, the spoon clinking like a dull bell. “Your partner. You trust him?”
“With my life,” she said, without a heartbeat of hesitation. Then her gaze flickered down. “But a taser to the chest… it does things to you. Fear does things to you. If they got to him in that hospital room…”
“We operate on the assumption they did. So, the warehouse district. Your scene. You secure it?”
She shook her head, frustration tightening her features. “No. After the ambush, after I called it in, my Lieutenant ordered me to return to the station immediately. He said a forensic unit would be dispatched. By the time I was cleared to leave, any unit would have come and gone. The brick was entered into evidence. The scene… it’s probably been processed already. Or made to look processed.”
Marcus set his cup down with a decisive click. “Then let’s go look before the sun comes up and the real day-shift busybodies show up.”
Twenty minutes later, Marcus’s unmarked sedan, a battered Ford that smelled of mint air freshener and old regret, idled a block away from the Superior Plating warehouse. The chain-link fence was crowned with sagging razor wire, silhouetted against the lesser darkness of the sky. The street was a canyon of dormant industry, the only sound the distant whine of a freeway and the skittering of something in the shadows.
“This is it,” Jennifer whispered, her hand on the door handle.
“Hold on.” Marcus killed the engine and the lights, plunging them into thick silence. “We go in quiet. We see. We don’t touch. This isn’t our crime scene anymore. It’s just a place.”
They slipped out of the car, the humid night air clinging to them. Jennifer led the way to a gap in the fence she’d noted earlier, her movements sure and silent. Marcus followed, surprised and grudgingly impressed by her stealth.
The vast, open yard behind the fence was a graveyard of crumbling asphalt, oil stains, and dormant machinery. The warehouse loomed, a black monolith against the sky. Jennifer pointed to a spot near a row of corroded chemical tanks. “There. That’s where we made the stop. Our cruiser was angled there.”
Marcus moved forward, his detective’s mind clicking over, reconstructing the dance from the static clues left behind. He used a small, pen-sized flashlight, its beam a focused cone of white that didn’t travel far.
He saw the sprayed-paint marks left by the forensic unit—a bright yellow ‘1’ near a manhole cover, a ‘2’ farther out. He saw the stark, empty space where the brick had been, indicated by another spray-painted circle. He saw scattered plastic evidence markers, but no casings, no personal effects. A clean scene.
“Your forensics guys are lazy,” Marcus muttered, his beam tracing the ground. “These markers are for show. They photographed the brick and called it a day. Didn’t grid. Didn’t sweep.”
He was right. The forensic work was sloppy, theatrical. It was the kind of job done to check a box, not to find the truth. Jennifer felt a cold anger settling in her gut. This was already being sanitized.
Marcus’s beam stopped, hovering over a patch of gravel near the base of one of the chemical tanks. Something glittered, sharp and out of place. He crouched down, his knees cracking in protest. “Bring that light over here. Don’t step in the marked area.”
Jennifer knelt beside him, focusing her own flashlight. Nestled between two chunks of asphalt was a small, triangular shard of smoked plastic. Next to it, almost invisible, was a thin sliver of chrome.
“Turn signal lens,” Marcus murmured. “From a push-bar or a grille guard. Something aftermarket. And that’s a piece of trim.” He didn’t touch them. He just studied their position. “Your guys didn’t hit anything. This came off the second vehicle. The SUV. It clipped this tank backing out in a hurry.”
He shifted his weight, the beam scanning outward in a slow arc. A few feet away, near a oily puddle, the light caught it: a perfect, crisp tire tread impression. Not from a sedan. The pattern was aggressive, knobby. Off-road capability.
“They got excited,” Jennifer whispered, a grim satisfaction in her voice. “They tasered Danny, dropped the brick, and peeled out. Hit the tank, left a piece of themselves behind. The forensic team either missed it or ignored it.”
“We don’t ignore it,” Marcus said. He pulled a clear evidence bag and a pair of tweezers from his jacket pocket—the habits of a lifetime. With surgeon-like care, he collected the plastic shard and the metal sliver, bagged and labeled them. He took out his phone and photographed the tire impression from three different angles, a ruler from his pocket providing scale. “This is our thread. Fragile as hell, but it’s ours.”
They were about to stand when Jennifer’s phone vibrated in her pocket. Not a ring. A buzz against her leg. She pulled it out, the screen illuminating her face in the dark. UNKNOWN NUMBER.
Her thumb hovered over the answer button. She looked at Marcus. He gave a tight, almost imperceptible nod.
“Wu,” she answered, her voice low.
The voice on the other end was professionally calm, devoid of empathy. “Detective Wu, this is Nurse Daniels at County General. I’m calling regarding Daniel Ruiz.”
Jennifer’s body went very still. “Is he awake?”
A pause. A breath. “I’m sorry to inform you that Mr. Ruiz was pronounced deceased twenty minutes ago. The repeated cardiac stress from the electro-shock weapon induced a fatal arrhythmia. His heart simply couldn’t handle it.”
The words didn’t compute at first. They were just sounds, clean and clinical, bouncing off the surface of her mind. Fatal arrhythmia. Pronounced deceased. Then they sank in, hooking into her core with cold, sharp barbs.
A sharp, choked gasp escaped her lips. Her free hand went to the rough, cool surface of the chemical tank to steady herself. The world tilted, the warehouse yard swimming in her vision.
“Detective? Are you there? Is there someone we should call?”
“No,” Jennifer managed, the word a dry scrape. “No, there’s no one.” She ended the call, her hand dropping to her side as if the phone weighed a hundred pounds.
Marcus was already on his feet, his hand coming up, not quite touching her shoulder. “Jennifer.”
She shrugged him off violently, turning away. Her breath came in short, ragged hitches. She walked three paces, stopped, and pressed the heels of her hands hard into her eye sockets. The pressure held back the flood. Grief was a luxury. Right now, it was poison. Danny was gone. They’d murdered him. A taser wasn’t supposed to be lethal. It was a tool, a alternative. They’d used it as a weapon.
“They killed him,” she said, her voice eerily flat now, all the air squeezed out of it. “They called it a stop. They called it procedure. They murdered my partner.”
“I know,” Marcus said, his own voice grave. He didn’t offer empty platitudes. He stated a fact. “And you understanding that changes everything. Last night, you were an inconvenience. A problem to be managed with a paperwork scandal. Now? You’re a witness to a murder. A cop-killing. And you’re not playing along.”
He moved to stand in front of her, forcing her to look at him. His eyes were like flint in the weak light. “They will come for you next. Not with a taser. They can’t afford another ‘accident’ so close to the first. It’ll be cleaner. A car accident. A sudden, tragic suicide. A street robbery gone wrong. You cannot go home. You cannot use your credit cards, your phone, your car.”
“I have to do something—” she began, anger flaring.
“You are doing something. You’re going to stay alive,” he cut her off, his tone leaving no room for argument. “You go to ground. Right now. You vanish. You let them think you’ve run scared, or that you’re too grief-stricken to function. It’s the only advantage we have.”
The logic was iron-clad. It tasted like ash. Running felt like betrayal, like leaving Danny behind in the cold sterility of a hospital morgue. But Marcus was right. Dead cops couldn’t find justice.
“How?” she whispered.
He took out a pen and an old receipt, scribbling an address on the back. “This is a place. Off the books. Paid for in cash, a long time ago. No connection to me or anyone. It’s a tomb. But it’s safe. Can you get there tomorrow night? After dark.”
She took the paper, her fingers numb. “Yes.”
“Bring what you need. Assume you’re not coming back out for a while. I’ll meet you there. We’ll figure out our next move from a position where you’re not looking over your shoulder every second.”
She stared at the handwritten address. It was a lifeline, thrown by a man she barely knew. She nodded, the movement stiff. “Tomorrow night.”
The safehouse was in a faded stucco duplex in Van Nuys, nestled in a row of identical buildings where noise was constant and anonymity was guaranteed. Jennifer arrived just after nine p.m., a single suitcase in hand, her hair tucked under a baseball cap. She felt hyper-aware of every passing car, every shadow.
Marcus opened the door before she could knock. He ushered her inside, locking three deadbolts behind her.
The place was exactly as he’d described: a tomb. Sparsely furnished with ugly, durable furniture from a decades-old discount store. The air smelled of dust and lemon-scented cleaner. The blinds were permanently shut.
“You made it,” he said, a statement of fact.
“No one followed me.” She set her suitcase down, taking in the bleak surroundings. It was the opposite of her bright, plant-filled apartment. This was a place for waiting, not living.
“Good. Let’s get to work.”
They sat at the laminate kitchen table. He spread out a map of the city, a notepad, and the evidence bag containing the plastic shard. “You’re compromised. I’m not. Yet. So we split the work. You stay here. You’re our research hub. You have a clean laptop?” He nodded to a bulky, older model sitting on the counter. “Use that. It’s never been online. I’ve got encrypted drives with data dumps—city vehicle registrations filtered for dark Tahoes and similar SUVs, traffic cam footage from the general area last night, which I pulled before anyone could ‘lose’ it. Cross-reference. Look for our pine tree bumper sticker, look for damage to a front-right grille. Look for anything.”
“And you?” Jennifer asked, already powering up the laptop, her detective brain latching onto the task with grim relief.
“I’ll be the ghost in the machine,” he said, a ghost of a smile touching his lips. “I’ll go to the precinct. I’ll listen. I’ll see who’s a little too interested in the Ruiz case, who’s a little too quick to call it a tragic accident. I’ll tap a few old, discreet sources on the street. The kind who don’t like cops getting whacked, even if they don’t like cops.”
It was a simple, solid plan. Isolate the vulnerable asset. Use the unrecognized one to gather intelligence. They were building a case from the outside in, because the inside was toxic.
The hours bled together. Jennifer hunched over the laptop, her eyes scanning thousands of lines of data, dozens of grainy traffic cam stills. Marcus came and went, bringing food—greasy Chinese takeout in paper containers—and snippets of information. The official narrative was solidifying: “Officer Dies Following Medical Incident During Investigation.” The planted brick was being quietly attributed to “contamination at the scene,” a vague, all-purpose excuse.
As dusk settled on the second day, Marcus returned with a bag from a Thai place. “Dinner,” he announced, setting it on the table. “You need to eat.”
They ate straight from the containers, the silence between them not uncomfortable, but focused. The orange chicken and pad thai were a shocking burst of normalcy in the sterile safehouse.
“You handle this well,” Marcus said suddenly, breaking the quiet. “The sitting, the waiting. The digging. Most people, their first time under, they crack. They need to move.”
Jennifer swirled a noodle with her fork. “I wanted to be a historian before I joined the academy. I was good at the research. The sitting. The piecing together of stories from fragments everyone else ignored.” She gave a short, humorless laugh. “Turns out, it’s the same skill set. Just with higher stakes.”
“History,” Marcus grunted, approving. “Makes sense. I never had the patience for it. I was all instinct, all forward motion. Got me through thirty-plus years. Got me a bad back and a pension.” He took a long drink of water. “Thirty-seven days. Was gonna buy a boat. A stupid little fishing boat. Just… go where it’s quiet.”
“And now?” she asked, looking up at him.
“Now I’m in a safehouse eating Thai food with a wanted detective, chasing a ghost that killed a cop.” He shook his head. “The boat can wait.”
For a moment, their eyes held across the cheap table. In the quiet, with the weight of the case hanging between them, she noticed the sharp intelligence in his weary gaze, the strength in his lined hands. There was a steadiness to him, a solidity that had nothing to do with physicality and everything to do with worn-in character. A completely inappropriate, unwelcome spark of attraction flickered in her chest. It was quickly followed by a wave of annoyance at herself. Really? Now? He was handsome, in a grizzled, ancient-oak kind of way, but he was also a sixty-year-old cop weeks from retirement. Her life was unraveling. Danny was dead. This was the least practical, most ridiculous thought she could possibly have.
She looked back down at her food, pushing the feeling aside. “We need to get access to the taser’s serial number. It’ll be logged into evidence from the scene. If it’s department-issue, we can trace it.”
“That’s a good angle,” Marcus said, all business again, thankfully oblivious to her internal lapse. “Risky, though. The evidence locker for that case will be watched. I’ll have to be a ghost.”
They finished eating, plotting their next moves, the earlier moment forgotten. Or, at least, carefully ignored.
Finally, Marcus gathered the empty containers. “I’ll be back tomorrow. Keep the doors locked. Don’t answer for anyone but me.” He paused at the door. “Get some sleep, Wu. You’re no good to him exhausted.”
After he left, the silence in the safehouse was absolute and heavy. Jennifer cleaned up, methodically, then dragged her suitcase to the bare bedroom. She lay on the stiff bed in the dark, listening to the distant wail of a siren. The spark of attraction felt like a betrayal of Danny, a distraction she couldn’t afford. She forcibly redirected her mind to tire tread patterns and traffic cam grids, chasing the clues into a fitful, uneasy sleep.