Chapter 3: Wrapped in a Jacket
The salt air did little to clean the feeling from her skin. Two days later, and Teresa could still smell the warehouse: rust, oil, and the coppery tang of the bearded man’s blood. Her hands were clean, but they felt stained. In the quiet of her little beach cottage, the crash of the waves outside seemed to mock her, each one a reminder of the violence she’d both inflicted and narrowly avoided.
She’d called in sick to school. The thought of facing a classroom, of discussing Shakespeare or thesis statements while her mind replayed the sound of a nose breaking, was impossible. She’d spent the morning scrubbing the kitchen counters, organizing her books by color, doing anything to outrun the shaking in her chest. Callum’s jacket was draped over the back of her worn armchair. She hadn’t washed it. It smelled like him—wool, faint smoke, and a crisp, clean scent underneath. She told herself she was waiting for him to collect it.
A sharp rap on her door made her jump, a glass of water sloshing over her hand.
Through the frosted pane, she saw a tall, lean silhouette. She knew it was him. The shape of him was already familiar, imprinted from the chaos of the yard.
She opened the door, the sea wind whipping a strand of hair across her face. He stood there, hands in the pockets of a different jacket—a dark wool pea coat. His hair was mussed, his green eyes shadowed with a fatigue that went beyond a simple lack of sleep. He looked at her, his gaze taking in her sweatpants, her old university hoodie, the lack of makeup.
“Lovett,” he said, a simple acknowledgment.
“Detective.” Her voice was flat. “I suppose you want your jacket back.” She didn’t move to let him in.
He glanced past her into the cozy, book-cluttered living room. “Partly.” A pause. “Can I come in?”
She hesitated, then stepped aside with a small, grudging movement. He walked in, his presence immediately making the small space feel smaller. He didn’t sit.
“How’s the knee-breaker?” she asked, leaning against the doorframe to the kitchen, putting distance between them.
“Surgery. He’s not talking. Lawyer’s glued to him.” Callum’s eyes finally landed on his own jacket, slung over the chair. It looked intimate there, in her space. He looked back at her. “Ryland is talking. A lot. Mostly about how scared he is.”
“Of you?”
“Of the other guy. Of whoever they work for.” Callum took a step further into the room, stopping by her fireplace mantel, cluttered with seashells and a photo of her and Cassadee, arms slung around each other, laughing on a pier. He didn’t touch it. “The ‘merchandise’ he mentioned. It’s not drugs. It’s people, Teresa.”
The words hung in the air, cold and heavy. She’d known, in her gut, but hearing it stated so clinically stole her breath.
“A trafficking ring,” she whispered, the sound of the ocean suddenly menacing.
“Small, local. New. Which makes them sloppy and dangerous.” He turned to face her. “Ryland’s a low-level lookout. The guy you disassembled is mid-level muscle. They grab women who won’t be missed right away. Runaways, newcomers, women with… unstable lives.” He didn’t say ‘like Cassadee’. He didn’t have to.
Teresa pushed off the doorframe, the fear solidifying into a hard, cold knot in her stomach. “Is she… did he say…?”
“No. He didn’t know names. Just a description that could fit a hundred women.” Callum ran a hand through his hair, the gesture frustrated, weary. “But it confirms the vector. It tells us what we’re looking for.”
“So you have a lead.”
“We have a thread. And you yanked it into the open.” He finally met her eyes, his expression unreadable. “That was a phenomenally stupid thing to do. You could be in a trunk right now.”
The anger sparked, hot and immediate, cutting through her numbness. “And Cassadee is in a trunk! Or worse! While you people filed reports and checked boxes!”
“I’m not ‘you people’,” he shot back, his own control slipping, a raw edge in his voice. “My sister’s boyfriend is Cassadee’s little brother. He cries on my couch every night. I see her photo on my fridge. This isn’t a case file to me.”
The admission silenced her. She saw it then, the personal weight he carried, the same one that was crushing her. It wasn’t just duty in his eyes; it was a haunted, personal guilt.
“Then why does it feel like we’re the only ones moving?” she said, the fight draining out of her, leaving her voice thin.
“Because procedure exists for a reason! To build a case that doesn’t collapse in court. To protect witnesses.” He gestured at her, a sharp, frustrated motion. “To keep civilians from getting dead.”
“I’m not a civilian. Not in this.”
“You are. And last night proved it.” He took a step closer. The scent of him, the same as the jacket, filled the space between them. “You were shaking so hard I thought you’d fall apart.”
“I didn’t fall apart.”
“No.” He looked at her, really looked, his gaze tracing the faint, fading bruise on her wrist, the tightness around her mouth. “You didn’t. You fought. And you won. And it scared the hell out of me.”
The quiet confession landed between them, more disarming than any shout. The defensiveness in Teresa’s posture softened. She wrapped her arms around herself, not looking at him, looking at the photo on the mantel instead. “It scared me too,” she admitted to the laughing image of her friend. “I keep hearing the sound. That… crunch.”
Callum didn’t offer empty comfort. He just stood there, a solid presence in the eye of her storm. “Yeah,” he said, his voice lower. “That sound stays with you.”
She finally turned her head, her bright blue eyes glistening but clear. “What happens now?”
“Now,” he said, exhaling slowly, “I have to follow the thread. It leads to a few shipping yards, some shell companies. It’s slow, quiet work. The kind that doesn’t involve bricks in dark warehouses.”
“And me?”
“You stay here. You teach your classes. You let me do my job.”
She gave a short, hollow laugh. “Right.”
He studied her face, the stubborn set of her jaw. He seemed to be wrestling with something. “Ryland mentioned something else,” he said, the words careful. “Before he clammed up about specifics. He said the new arrivals, the ‘merchandise,’ were sometimes shown off at private parties. For certain clients. He called it ‘the gallery’.”
Teresa went very still. “What kind of parties?”
“The kind with money and passwords. Not my usual scene. Hard to infiltrate without…” He trailed off.
“Without someone they wouldn’t recognize,” she finished. The implication hung in the air, dangerous and electric.
“No.” The word was absolute.
“I didn’t suggest anything.”
“You were thinking it.”
“Of course I was!” she fired back, the energy returning. “It’s a lead. A direct one. You have a description of the kind of parties. Locations? Guest lists?”
“Fragments. It’s not enough. It’s a whisper.”
“Then we need to get closer to hear it!” She took a step toward him, the ocean of fear parting around a single, sharp purpose. “Callum, I can be… plausible. I’m not a cop. I look the part. I could—”
“You could get killed, or wish you were.” His voice was hard, but his eyes betrayed a flicker of something else—not just professional concern, but a personal dread. “This isn’t a self-defense class. These are people who make problems disappear.”
“Cassadee disappeared!” The words were a raw shout. The tears came then, finally, hot and angry. She didn’t sob; they just leaked out, tracing clean lines through the tension on her face. “And you’re asking me to sit in my book club and pretend everything’s normal while she’s in some ‘gallery’?”
He didn’t reach for her. He just watched her cry, his own face a mask of conflict. The rulebook was clear. It was etched in his bones. But the rulebook hadn’t found Cassadee. The rulebook had almost gotten Teresa killed.
“Give me the fragments,” she said, wiping her cheeks roughly with the sleeve of her hoodie. Her voice was steadier now, scraped clean by emotion. “The whispers. Let me look. I have a brain. I know how to research. I’m a teacher, for god’s sake. I can follow a paper trail. Just… give me something to do that isn’t waiting.”
Callum was silent for a long moment. The only sound was the relentless pull and crash of the tide. He looked from Teresa’s fierce, tear-streaked face to the photo of the two friends, forever smiling in a sun-drenched past.
He walked over to the armchair and picked up his jacket. He didn’t put it on. He held it, his fingers digging into the wool.
“I never came here,” he said, his voice barely above a murmur. He reached into his inner coat pocket and withdrew a small, black notebook. He tore out a single page. On it was scrawled a list: two vague party themes, three high-end residential neighborhoods, a surname—‘Vos’—with a question mark.
He placed the torn page on the arm of the chair. He kept his jacket.
“If you find anything,” he said, meeting her gaze, his green eyes deadly serious, “you call me. You do not move. You do not go near. You call. That is the only way this works.”
Teresa looked at the page, a mere scrap of paper that felt heavier than the brick she’d wielded. She nodded, a quick, sharp dip of her chin.
Callum moved to the door. He paused, his hand on the knob. Without turning, he said, “And wash your face. You look like you’ve been crying.”
Then he was gone, the door clicking shut behind him, leaving her alone with the roar of the ocean and a single, illicit page of whispers.
She picked it up. The paper still held the warmth from his pocket. She traced the handwriting, the forceful, slanting script. It wasn’t permission. It was a breach. A crack in his professional wall, and he’d left it open just for her.
She walked to her laptop, the page held tight in her hand. The screen glowed to life. For the first time in days, the trembling in her hands wasn’t from fear. It was from focus. She had a thread to pull.