Chapter 40: The Forger's Ghost
The loft door hung crooked on its hinges, splintered wood framing a void of unnatural quiet. The persistent scent of turpentine was now undercut by something coppery and sour.
Jennifer’s hand went to her sidearm, her body shifting into a fluid, silent stance beside the doorway. Sam mirrored her, his back against the wall, all casual slouch gone. He gave a sharp, downward nod. She went in low.
The devastation was methodical. Canvases slashed, their aggressive colors weeping onto the raw concrete floor. Clay sculptures lay shattered. The kitchenette was a landslide of broken dishes and upended drawers. But it was the center of the room that held the eye.
Michael Torres was on the floor, curled around a stomach that was a sunset of brutal color. His face was a mask of swelling and blood, one eye sealed shut. He was breathing, but each wet, ragged inhale sounded like it cost him everything.
“Medic!” Sam barked into his phone, already moving, kneeling beside Michael without touching him. “Don’t try to talk. Just breathe. Help is coming.”
Jennifer cleared the rest of the space, the oppressive silence ringing in her ears. The velvet curtain to Lena’s clean room had been torn down. Inside, the precision was obliterated. Chemicals pooled on the worktable, eating into the wood. The scanning equipment was a carcass of wires and cracked glass. The half-forged ledger page was gone.
Whoever did this wasn’t just sending a message. They were erasing a reality.
A weak, bubbling sound came from Michael. Sam leaned closer. “Michael. Can you hear me?”
The young artist’s one good eye rolled, finding Sam’s face. His lips, split and swollen, moved. The words were a bloody whisper. “They… wanted the real book.”
Jennifer was beside them in an instant. “What book, Michael? Lena’s ledger?”
A faint, desperate shake of his head. Pain contorted his features. “The other one. Hidden. She said… if anything… the key…”
His eye lost focus, drifting toward the far wall, where a large, abstract mural of neon green and deep violet fought for space. A slash of black paint defaced its center. “Floor…” he breathed out, and then the wheezing took over.
“Floor,” Jennifer repeated. She followed his fading gaze to the mural. The floor beneath it was wide-plank hardwood, aged and scarred. She began tapping, pressing, her knuckles rapping against the wood. The third board from the wall gave a hollow, reluctant echo.
She drew her knife, wedging the tip into the seam. The board lifted, a perfect, shallow cavity beneath. Not a stash hole. A craftsmanship. Inside lay a small, leather-bound notebook, the kind an architect or a poet might use. It was clean, untouched by the chaos.
She lifted it out as sirens began to wail up from the street below.
Sam stayed with Michael until the paramedics surged in, his calm voice a steady counterpoint to their efficient chaos. Once Michael was on the guttering and headed down, he found Jennifer by the windows. She stood silhouetted against the hazy LA dusk, the notebook open in her hands.
“He’ll live,” Sam said. “Ruptured spleen, broken ribs, concussion. But he’ll live.”
“He talked before they got here,” she said, her voice flat. She didn’t look up from the pages. “They asked about the real book. He didn’t know where it was. They did this because he was useless to them.”
She finally turned, handing him the notebook. “But he was useful to us.”
Sam took it. The pages were filled with Lena Reyes’s neat, precise handwriting. Names, dates, amounts in what looked like Bitcoin wallets. Shipping manifests for art crates. Inventory lists that included items like “Vermeer (fragment)” and “Ming vase (repaired).” It wasn’t a ledger of forgeries. It was a ledger of thefts. Of real things.
And on every other page, drawn in the margin like a manic doodle, was a symbol. A stylized, ornate key.
“She wasn’t just forging documents to enable thefts,” Sam murmured, tracing the symbol with a finger. “She was cataloging the thefts themselves. For who?”
“For them,” Jennifer said. She pointed to the symbol. “I’ve seen this. Yesterday. At Thorne’s place.”
Sam’s head snapped up. “Where?”
“On the wrist of one of the Blackmere guys. The one who stood by the gate when we drove up. It was a tattoo. Small. Black ink. I thought it was some unit insignia or personal crap.”
“A key,” Sam said, staring at the drawing. “Not a brand. A brand. She worked for them, or for someone they answer to. She kept her own secret records. And Thorne’s people, after grabbing her, must have guessed she had a fail-safe. So they came here to clean up the loose end.”
Jennifer took the book back, closing it with a soft snap. “Michael said ‘the key.’ He was trying to tell us about the symbol. This is the connection. Blackmere isn’t just Thorne’s private security. They’re a fence. A trafficking ring. They steal to order for clients like him, and Lena was their document forger and their bookkeeper.”
“And Thorne,” Sam finished, the pieces locking, “found out his security provider was also his supplier of illegal art, using the very access he gave them. And that his forger had a diary. He’s not scared of a rival. He’s scared of this book. Because it doesn’t just implicate Blackmere. It implicates him. Every item he bought off the books is in here.”
The loft was suddenly too dark, the shadows in the corners deepening. The uniformed officers were setting up lights, the harsh beams making the destruction look staged and grotesque.
“We need to find that guard,” Jennifer said, pulling out her phone. “We need to pull Blackmere personnel files, find the one with the key tattoo.”
“Ruiz will need more than a tattoo match from a glimpse,” Sam said, practicality warring with the adrenaline. “And Thorne’s lawyers will have that place locked down tighter than a tomb now.”
“Then we don’t ask,” Jennifer said, a familiar, dangerous light in her eyes. It was the look that preceded rules bending. “We find another way. This book is a map. These names, these dates… we cross-reference with unsolved high-value thefts. We find a pattern they missed. We find a victim who talked, or a delivery that was seen. We build our own key.”
Sam watched her. The city’s glow lit the side of her face, all determined angles. She was already deep in the maze, feeling for a way through the walls. He remembered this focus. It was what had drawn him in, and what had ultimately kept him at a distance. You couldn’t hold onto a woman who was perpetually charging at monsters.
“Alright,” he said, shrugging off his jacket. The loft was warm with too many bodies. “Where do you want to start?”
“The first entry.” She opened the book again. “Eighteen months ago. ‘Kandinsky Study, oil on board. Client: Kite. Delivery: Container 7781, Port of Long Beach.’ A Kandinsky was stolen from a private collector in Pacific Palisades eighteen months ago. Never recovered. Case went cold.”
“Kite,” Sam repeated. “Cryptic.”
“Aviation term. Corporate term for a holding company. Let’s see who ‘Kite’ is.” Her thumbs flew across her phone screen, accessing a database. She scowled. “It’s a shell. A shell of a shell. Registered in the Caymans.”
“Of course it is.” Sam leaned over her shoulder to look at the screen, his presence a solid warmth at her back. “So we can’t touch the client. But the delivery. Container 7781. Port records are a nightmare, but they exist. If we can place a Blackmere-linked individual at that container, at that time, with this book as a guide…” He trailed off, the potential unfolding.
“We have a thread to pull.” She looked up at him, their faces close in the dim light. The chaos of the loft receded. For a second, it was just the two of them and the puzzle, the old, electric collaboration buzzing back to life. “We need access to port authority logs. That’s going to require a warrant, which requires telling Ruiz everything, which means Thorne’s lawyers might get wind.”
Sam’s smile was thin, all teeth. “So we don’t get a warrant. We know a guy.”
Jennifer raised an eyebrow.
“Remember Benny? From the landfill case? Works for the Harbor Department now. Hates his boss. Loves whisky.”
A reluctant smile touched her lips. “Benny the Bitter. Yeah, I remember.” She looked back at the devastation around them, the ghost of the smile fading. “This just went from a murder to an international theft conspiracy. Michael almost died for this notebook. Lena did die for it.”
“And Thorne is on TV pretending to be a concerned citizen,” Sam added, his voice dropping. “He’s the volatile element. He’s panicking. Panic makes people stupid. Stupid people make mistakes.”
A uniformed officer approached, looking young and overwhelmed. “Detectives? The Captain is on the line for you. He sounds… intense.”
Jennifer took the offered cell phone. “Cap.”
Ruiz’s voice was a pressurized storm. “Wu. I just got a call from the Deputy Chief. Aris Thorne’s personal attorney is in his office right now. They are formally accusing Michael Torres of the assault on himself—claiming it was a drug deal gone bad, or a falling out with Lena’s criminal associates. They’re also ‘voluntarily’ submitting the personnel file of one security specialist, Ian Frye, who failed a routine polygraph today about the Reyes woman. They’re handing us a fall guy.”
Jennifer’s grip on the phone tightened. “Ian Frye. Does he have a tattoo on his wrist? A small black key?”
A beat of silence. “How could you possibly know that?”
“Because we just found Lena Reyes’s real ledger. Blackmere isn’t just security, Cap. They’re art thieves. Thorne is a client. Lena was their forger and bookkeeper. The key is their symbol. Frye is being sacrificed to bury this.”
The silence on the other end was profound, filled with the ticking of bureaucratic time bombs. “You have physical evidence of this ledger? Obtained legally?”
“Discovered in the victim’s apartment during a wellness check following a violent assault,” Jennifer said, the justification clean and ready.
“Good. Get it to me. Now.” Ruiz’s tone shifted, becoming tactical, low. “The Deputy Chief is about to eat Thorne’s version whole because it’s wrapped in a bow. A confession from within Blackmere himself? He’ll take it. We have maybe hours before this gets sealed shut as ‘solved’ with Frye as the lone wolf. Move.”
The line went dead.
Jennifer handed the phone back. She looked at Sam, at the notebook in her hands, at the brutalized space around them. The clock, which had been ticking, was now hammering.
“They’re throwing us a bone,” Sam said, deciphering her expression. “A poisoned one.”
“Yeah. So we don’t bite.” She slid the notebook into an evidence bag, then sealed it inside her jacket. “We go see Benny. We find that container. We get proof that links Blackmere, not just one employee, to a theft before we present the book. We need to show a pattern Ruiz can take to the Feds, something too big for the Deputy Chief to ignore.”
“And Frye?” Sam asked as they moved toward the door, stepping over debris.
“He’s the patsy. If we move fast, maybe we can stop him from having a tragic accident in custody before he can recant.” She hit the stairwell, her boots echoing on the concrete steps. “Thorne’s rushing. That’s good for us. But it means the walls are closing in.”
They emerged into the evening, the street lit by pulsing emergency lights. The air was cool, a relief from the loft’s blood-tinged warmth.
“You know,” Sam said, unlocking his phone to find Benny’s number, “for a clean break and a fresh start, you sure have a talent for landing in the exact center of the hurricane.”
Jennifer slid into the driver’s seat, firing up the engine. A faint, grim smile finally broke through. “What’s the point of a fresh start if you’re just going to stand still?” She threw the car into gear. “Let’s go rattle Benny’s cage. And see what falls out.”
The car pulled away from the curb, leaving the spectacle of lights and violence behind, heading toward the vast, silent labyrinth of the port, where a single container number from a dead woman’s book waited to tell its story.
The port at night was a cathedral of shadows and steel, smelling of salt-rot, diesel, and the cold breath of the ocean. Container stacks formed canyon walls under the sickly yellow glow of arc-sodium lights, their numbers stenciled in fading paint like forgotten tomb inscriptions. Jennifer killed the headlights, guiding the car by memory and the faint reflection off wet asphalt.
“He’s in the main logistics office,” Sam said, squinting at his phone. “Says he’s alone until the shift change at eleven. And he says to bring the bottle we promised.”
Jennifer reached into the backseat, retrieving a paper bag that clinked softly. “Glenfiddich 18. He’d sell his mother for this.”
“He already did, twice,” Sam muttered, peering into the geometric gloom. “This feels exposed. If Thorne’s people are cleaning house, they might be watching Frye’s known associates. Benny’s a known associate.”
“Then we’re quick.” She parked behind a colossal tire of a dormant gantry crane, its shadow swallowing the car whole.
The logistics office was a prefabricated box perched on stilts, its windows offering a God’s-eye view of the maze. A single lamp burned inside. They took the grated stairs two at a time, the sounds of their footsteps absorbed by the vast, humming quiet of the port.
Benny looked like a man perpetually squeezed by life. Bald, with a nervous mustache and eyes that darted even when his head stayed still. He flinched when the door opened, then relaxed a fraction when he saw the bottle.
“Wu. Weaver. The cops who remember the little guy.” He took the bag, his fingers lingering on the scotch. “You didn’t come for the view.”
“Container 7781,” Jennifer said, dispensing with hello. “Eighteen months ago. We need the manifest, the digital gate log, and any camera footage of who accessed it.”
Benny’s laugh was a dry cough. “You need a time machine and a court order. That data’s archived. Systems are separate. Pain in my ass.”
Sam leaned on the cluttered desk, invading Benny’s space. “The woman who wrote that container number down is in the morgue in pieces. The man who lived with her is in the ICU. The clock is ticking, Benny. We don’t need perfect. We need a direction.”
The word ‘morgue’ did something to Benny. His shoulders sagged. He looked from Sam’s intent face to Jennifer’s impassive one. He took a long, steadying breath, his eyes locking on the monitor showing a hundred silent security feeds.
“Eighteen months,” he mumbled, his fingers skating over the keyboard. “System’s been updated twice since then. Gate logs might be corrupted.” He typed, muttering strings of numbers. A window popped open, a sparse spreadsheet. “Here. Container 7781. Off-loaded from the MV Atlas Star. Bill of lading says… machine parts.”
“Who signed for it?” Jennifer pressed, looking over his shoulder.
“Digital signature. Company called ‘Palisade Logistics.’” Benny’s typing became more frantic, pulling up another database. His breath hitched. “Huh.”
“What?” Sam asked.
“Palisade Logistics. It’s a shell. But its billing address… it’s a P.O. Box. The box is registered to a law firm.” Benny turned to look at them, his face pale in the monitor’s glow. “The firm that does all the incorporation paperwork for Blackmere Solutions’ subsidiaries.”
A direct thread. Jennifer felt a jolt, clean and electric. “Can you pull the security footage for that bay from that day?”
“You’re joking. That’s petabytes. It’s auto-deleted after ninety days unless there’s an incident.” Benny chewed his lip, thinking. “But… the gate. Every person, every truck that enters, they scan an ID. Driver’s license, commercial pass. That log is kept for compliance. Five years minimum.”
He was already searching, the keys clacking like gunshots in the quiet room. A new spreadsheet unfurled, dense with lines of data. He filtered for the date, for the gate nearest the Atlas Star’s berth.
“There,” he whispered.
On the screen was a list of twenty-seven entries. Names, license numbers, company affiliations. Halfway down, a familiar company name: Blackmere Solutions (Ancillary Transport). The driver’s name was Ian Frye. The time stamp placed him at the gate three hours after the container was off-loaded.
The same Ian Frye now being offered as a sacrifice.
“He was here,” Jennifer said, the words solid in her mouth. “He signed for a container of ‘machine parts’ that coincided with a Kandinsky theft. Using a Blackmere-linked truck.”
“It’s a thread,” Sam acknowledged, “but it’s thin. His lawyer says he was running a routine equipment pick-up. We need the contents.”
Benny hadn’t moved. He was staring at the entry below Frye’s. His hand trembled slightly. “You said… a key. A symbol.”
Jennifer went still. “Yes.”
Benny zoomed in on the scanned ID image next to Frye’s entry. It was his driver’s license photo. A taciturn man with cold eyes. Benny’s cursor drifted to the next entry in the log, a driver from a different, legitimate shipping company. He didn’t zoom. Instead, he pointed a shaky finger at the corner of the scanned ID.
In the grainy pixelation of the background, just behind the driver’s shoulder, another man was visible. He was turned partly away, speaking to someone off-camera. On his wrist, clear even in the low-resolution image, was a small, dark, geometric tattoo.
A stylized key.
“That’s not a driver,” Benny said, his voice hushed. “That’s a supervisor. He doesn’t scan in. He just walks through. That’s Victor Croft. He’s Blackmere’s head of logistics. Ex-military. Nasty piece of work. He’s here to oversee.”
“So Frye wasn’t acting alone. He had a handler.” Sam’s mind raced. “Croft was ensuring the swap went smoothly. The Kandinsky came off the ship in container 7781, was moved to the Blackmere truck, and vanished.”
Benny finally swiveled his chair, looking up at them with genuine fear. “You can’t say you got this from me. Croft… he’s connected. Not just to Blackmere. He’s got friends in the longshoremen’s union, friends with pasts. He makes problems disappear. Literally.”
Jennifer placed a hand on his shoulder, firm. “You’re not in this, Benny. You showed us a public log. That’s all.” She turned to Sam, her eyes alight. “We have Croft. He’s the link between the theft and Blackmere’s upper echelon. He’s not a fall guy; he’s a principal.”
“And if Thorne is throwing Frye to the wolves, Croft must be getting nervous,” Sam finished. “A nervous principal is a talkative principal.”
They had what they needed. More than they’d hoped for. As they turned to leave, Benny spoke again, his voice barely audible over the hum of the servers.
“There’s one more thing.” He swallowed hard. “About that container. The Atlas Star. Its next port of call after here was Singapore. But six weeks before it docked here, it was in Genoa.”
He pulled up a global shipping schedule, his finger tracing a line on the map. “A week before it was in Genoa, a private villa on Lake Como was cleaned out. A dozen Renaissance drawings. Never recovered.”
The silence in the port office thickened, pressurized by the implication. The Kandinsky was one thing. A European heist, trans-shipped through LA, added a terrifying scale.
“They’re not just Thorne’s personal shoppers,” Sam said, his voice low. “They’re a global laundering service. Art in, clean money out. Lena wasn’t just forging deeds. She was fabricating provenances for stolen goods, creating paperwork to make them seem legitimate.”
Jennifer stared at the grainy image of Victor Croft’s wrist. The key was a brand of ownership. “And Thorne found out his security firm was using his property as a distribution hub. He must have realized any investigation into them was an investigation into him. He had to grab Lena to see how deep the ledger went.”
She took out her phone, snapping photos of the screen—the log entry, Croft’s tattooed wrist. “Benny, email me this log. Now. And then take the rest of the night off. Go somewhere public.”
Benny nodded, his fingers flying over the keyboard. A moment later, Jennifer’s phone chimed. “Done. You never got it from me.”
“You’re a ghost,” she confirmed, already moving toward the door. Sam was a step behind, the worn stairs groaning under their urgent weight.
Back in the car, the engine snarled to life. Jennifer dialed Captain Ruiz, putting it on speaker as she navigated the container canyons toward the city’s glow.
“Talk to me, Wu,” Ruiz answered, background noise suggesting he was still at his desk.
“We have it,” she said, her voice cutting through the static. “Blackmere’ head of logistics, a man named Victor Croft, was physically present at the port to receive a container linked to an unsolved international art theft. He has the key tattoo. We have timestamped gate logs placing him and Ian Frye there. This isn’t one rogue employee. This is an organized trafficking operation, and Lena Reyes kept their books.”
Ruiz was silent for three full seconds. “Croft. I know that name. Ex-Delta. Dishonorable discharge. We have whispers.”
“The Deputy Chief needs to see this before he accepts Frye’s confession,” Sam added, leaning toward the speaker. “Frye is the cut-out. Croft is the artery. Thorne is trying to cauterize it.”
“I’ll handle the Deputy Chief,” Ruiz said, and they could hear the rustle of him putting on his jacket. “Get me that evidence. Clean chain. I want Croft’s face, his tattoo, and that log entry on my desk in thirty minutes. Then you two stand down. If Croft is what you say he is, he’ll have scouts. You’re too close.”
“Stand down?” Jennifer protested, merging onto the freeway.
“You’ve done the job, Jennifer. You found the thread. Now let the machine pull it. Get the evidence to the lab, then go get a damn taco and be visible somewhere that isn’t a crime scene. I need you sharp for tomorrow, not dead tonight.” The line clicked off.
“‘Get a taco,’” Sam repeated, a faint smirk returning. “An official order.”
“He’s not wrong about scouts,” Jennifer conceded, though every instinct screamed to keep pushing, to find Croft now. She glanced at Sam. “We need to dump this to the digital lab. Then we can… follow orders.”
Across town, in John Ruiz’s modest apartment, the blue glow of a superhero movie played across two faces. Kelly was tucked into the curve of his arm, a bowl of popcorn balanced on her lap. She laughed at a quip on screen, the sound warm and easy.
John smiled, but his focus was porous. The movie’s explosions melted into the memory of that morning’s bullpen: Jennifer’s face, the micro-second fracture in her confident mask when Kelly had taken his arm. It hadn’t been anger he’d seen. It had been a flash of pure, unguarded hurt, quickly buried under professional ice. The sight had hooked something deep in his chest, an old, persistent pull he thought Kelly had finally silenced.
Kelly’s lips brushed his cheek, soft and questioning. “You’re a million miles away. What’s up?”
The contact jolted him back. He looked at her, at her gorgeous, concerned face, and felt a wave of guilt so sharp it was nauseating. “Nothing,” he said, too quickly. He shifted, taking the popcorn bowl. “Just need a refill. Want anything?”
“Just you,” she said, smiling, believing him because she had no reason not to.
He fled to the kitchenette, gripping the edge of the counter. The rumble of the microwave was a weak mask for the turmoil in his head. He was happy. This was good. This was stable. So why did his mind keep drifting to a complexity he knew would burn him?
In the precinct’s digital forensics lab, Jennifer handed the encrypted drive from Benny to a tired-looking tech named Amir. “Gate logs, timestamped, with image files. I need stills extracted and cleaned up, focusing on the individual in the background of frame… let’s call it Subject Victor. Pay special attention to his left wrist.”
“Priority?” Amir asked, popping the drive into a isolated server.
“The Captain is currently convincing the Deputy Chief not to do something stupid. So, the highest.” She glanced at Sam, who was leaning against the doorframe. “How long?”
“Twenty minutes to process and enhance. I’ll ping you.”
It was enough. They walked out into the cool night air of the nearly empty parking lot. The adrenaline of the port was metabolizing, leaving a hollow, humming fatigue. It was past ten.
“Street van?” Sam suggested, nodding toward the glow of Olympic Boulevard. “I know a Thai place that parks by the old theater. They put crack in their peanut sauce.”
“That’s the kind of forensic analysis I trust,” Jennifer said, the ghost of a real smile touching her lips.
They took her car but parked a block away, walking the rest. The van was a converted VW camper, lit by fairy lights, steam billowing from a wok into the night. They ordered drunken noodles and spring rolls, taking the flimsy paper plates to a low wall overlooking a silent fenced-in lot.
The first few bites were consumed in a shared, focused silence. The food was spicy, bright, a vivid contrast to the grim digital files they’d just deposited.
“So the academy,” Jennifer said finally, breaking the quiet. “Was it weird? Going from analyzing the aftermath to learning how to theoretically prevent it?”
Sam swirled a noodle around his fork. “It was mostly learning how to fill out forms in triplicate. But the field training… that was something. Getting chewed out for contaminating a scene I used to own. It was humbling.” He took a bite. “Your turn. The bayou. Marcus.”
The name landed between them. It wasn’t a challenge. Just an open door.
She let out a long breath, watching the steam rise from her food. “It was good. He’s… settled. Happy in his retirement cruiser, doing consultancy. We closed the case. We had a beer. We agreed that what we had was great for when we had it.” She looked over at him. “It was a clean end. No ghosts.”
“Unlike us,” Sam said, not looking at her.
She didn’t deny it. “Unlike us.” She poked at a piece of chicken. “I heard you left the morgue soon after. I figured it was because of me. The awkwardness.”
Sam was quiet for a long moment. “It was because of me. Watching you walk away made me realize I was just cataloging endings. I wanted to try for a middle. Even if it meant starting over.” He finally glanced at her. “Even if the middle was potentially across from you in the bullpen.”
The admission hung in the air, simple and undeniable. The city sounds—a distant siren, the rumble of a bus—felt like they were receding, drawing a circle around the two of them on the wall.
“I missed this,” Jennifer said softly, the words leaving her lips before she could vet them. The easy silence, the shorthand, the shared weight.
“Me too,” Sam whispered, the gravel in his voice more pronounced.
He gestured with his fork toward her mouth. “You’ve got a little… sauce. Right there.”
She swiped at the corner of her lip with her thumb, missing it.
Without thinking, he reached out. His thumb brushed the spot, a quick, intimate stroke that wiped away the dab of chili oil. The contact was electric, a sudden, warm spark against her skin.
She went perfectly still, her amused eyebrow lifting at the gesture’s familiar tenderness. Her eyes held his, the joke dying on her lips as she saw his expression.
He didn’t pull his hand back. He leaned in.
The space between them evaporated, charged with the memory of a hundred late nights and the sharp, present reality of the past week. His gaze dropped to her mouth. She didn’t move away.
Their lips were a breath apart. She could smell the ginger and basil on his breath, see the faint constellation of freckles across his nose. The world narrowed to this point of almost-contact.
Her phone buzzed violently on the wall between them, the sound like a physical shock.
They jerked apart. The moment shattered into a thousand glittering pieces.
Blinking, her heart hammering against her ribs, Jennifer fumbled for the phone. It was Ruiz.
She answered, her voice not quite steady. “Captain.”
“Where are you?” Ruiz’s voice was tight, all business.
“Eating. Following orders.”
“Good. Stay alert.” He paused. “The Deputy Chief saw the port logs. He’s stalled. He’s not accepting Blackmere’s offering yet. But we have another problem.”
Jennifer locked eyes with Sam, who was watching her intently, his own breath coming slow. “What problem?”
“Ian Frye. Our supposed lone wolf. He just had a seizure in his holding cell. They’re rushing him to Cedars-Sinai. The jail’s medic says it looks like a pre-existing condition.”
Sam, close enough to hear, mouthed a single, silent word: Poison.
“He’s not going to make it to a debrief, is he,” Jennifer said, flatly.
“Doubtful,” Ruiz confirmed. “Which means someone inside our house is cleaning up. Croft’s reach is longer than we thought. Consider your stand-down order a protective detail. Watch your backs. I’ll call you in the morning.”
The line went dead.
Jennifer lowered the phone. The night air no longer felt cool; it felt thin, dangerous. The near-kiss was a surreal artifact, buried under the fresh, immediate threat.
“They’re killing their fall guy,” Sam said, his voice cold and clear. “Croft is tying knots.”
Jennifer stood up, crumpling her paper plate. The world snapped back into a harsh, familiar focus. “Then we untie them.” She looked down at Sam, the professional mask firmly back in place, though her lips still tingled from his almost-touch. “Ruiz said watch our backs. Let’s not go home. Let’s go find a different hole in the world. And see what Victor Croft does when his first knot fails.”