AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Matt made copies of the sketch and they met in Elena’s office—him, Elena, Lex and Kara. Matt had earlier sent Michael to stay with Violet in Big Bear, and Kara had been relieved. She’d planned to drive back, but was exhausted after a couple long nights.
Conrad was thirty-five to forty-five with cropped brown hair, dark eyes, a high forehead, square jaw. His ears were narrow and lay close to his head, his lips thin and tilted down. Faint acne scars dotted his cheeks.
Kara stared at the drawing for a good two minutes.
“Do you know him?” Matt asked.
“Wait,” she said. “Just...wait.”
She sat down at Elena’s computer and logged in. A minute later, she brought up the courthouse security footage from Monday. She found the best view of the killer, when he was sitting on the bench down the hall from Craig’s office.
“He was wearing a disguise—hair, beard, cheek fillers, glasses. But...it’s him. I can’t swear to it in court, but I’m eighty percent positive. What did Colangelo say his height was?”
“Five-ten to five-eleven.”
“That matches. Eighty percent certain.”
“That’s good enough for me,” Matt said.
“I’ll get this to McPherson and my boss,” Elena said. “Go home, sleep. It’s going to be a long day tomorrow.”
It was ten o’clock when Matt and Kara returned to the hotel. Michael called and said that Violet was good, that he’d checked out the property and everything was secure.
Matt had concurred with Kara to keep the receipt from Big Bear to themselves, but he’d sent it to his boss Tony and explained why he didn’t want to give the receipt to anyone at LA FBI. He didn’t have to say it twice: if there was a bad agent, Violet could be in danger should her location leak. Tony talked to Granderson and while Granderson wasn’t pleased that Tony was withholding proof of Kara’s alibi, he agreed to remove the BOLO, though he expected the FBI to make Kara available for questioning.
Kara didn’t want to go in for questioning. She planned to avoid it as long as possible. She didn’t kill Thornton, and she wasn’t positive that Rebecca Chavez was the only corrupt fed in the building.
She collapsed on the couch. She wanted a beer, but was too tired to get up and call room service.
Matt sat next to her and took her hand. “I know you want to keep it platonic when we’re working, but I need to hold you.”
Matt sounded unusually tired and sad. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m tired, I’m depressed, I’m angry. We learned so much...and still don’t know enough.”
She leaned into him, tucked her feet under her; he wrapped his arm around her, held her to his chest.
It felt right to be here with Matt. Kara didn’t do romance well. She liked sex, she liked to have fun, but she wasn’t a romantic “flowers and chocolate” kind of girl. She never wanted to get too close to anyone, for a lot of reasons she didn’t always understand. Sure, her childhood was a mess. She’d been raised by con artists, kept everyone at arm’s length because she didn’t know who her parents would con next. Getting to know your mark, liking your mark, was a recipe for disaster. By the time she escaped that life and moved in with her grandmother—when her dad was in prison and her mom was running around with her “boyfriend” who was a total dick—she didn’t know how to shed her wariness of intimacy.
She didn’t particularly like people, as a general rule. They usually disappointed you, or they expected more from you than you could give. They lied. They manipulated. But living with her grandma Emily for three years taught her that there were good people, and those people were worth fighting for. She loved Em. Unconditionally, without reservation. Em was the first, maybe the only, person she could say that about.
Over the years she had befriended people. Mostly cops, because hey, that was her life. She was a cop, she hung with cops. She had grown to admire many of them—like Elena, her training officer. Lex, her boss. Colton, her partner.
And they all lied to her.
Romantic relationships were nonexistent. Sure, she had sex. Colton wasn’t her first or her only. He was, though, the only cop she’d slept with before Matt Costa. Easier to not get involved with people you worked with. She kept her love life simple, focusing on casual relationships with interesting men who didn’t want commitment. When they started sniffing around at something permanent, she turned away.
There was a firefighter she dated awhile. They’d met on the job. He was tall, firm, sexy and fun. That didn’t last long because it was clear he was looking for a wife.
Then there was a bartender. More laid-back, definitely not looking for a wife, but she didn’t like his serious marijuana habit. It wasn’t illegal, and she didn’t care if he used occasionally even though she didn’t, but she’d always found excessive pot smoking made people unmotivated and dopey.
And there was one doctor—she’d been shot in the line of duty, it wasn’t serious, but the bullet was stuck in her shoulder and she had to go to the hospital and have it removed. Dr. Nick Mendoza. She didn’t care that he was eleven years older than she was; he was a walking cover model, smart but humble and as skilled in bed as he was in surgery. She really liked hanging with him, even if he owned an expensive house and drove a BMW and spent far too much money on her.
Then she found out he was writing scripts for opioids and other drugs for the wealthy women of Hollywood. He made more money pushing pills than he did as a surgeon. How did she find out? They were out at dinner at the Odyssey, an amazing restaurant with an incredible view of the Valley, and one of his “patients” came over and asked for a refill. She was drunk, and he brushed it off as her intoxication—he told her to call his office to set up an appointment—and Kara had played along with him. Then she contacted a friend of hers in Vice, learned that Dr. Mendoza had been under suspicion for years but there was no active investigation, and she volunteered to work undercover and take him down.
Three months later, he was arrested. He avoided jail time, but lost his license and paid a hefty fine.
In between her varied relationships, she would hang with Colton. The whole “friends with benefits” thing. She liked Colton. More, she trusted him. A kindred spirit. They spent more and more time together, and she stopped dating other men. They never talked about being in a relationship, but it had developed into a comfortable habit.
