“All Night Shift?”
Lem finally cracked a grin as the smug escaped him as he nodded. “They weren’t all TAC like Marlow and Piper—there was a clerk and one of the trainee pathologists—but all Night Shift.”
“What happened?”
Lem blanked the screen. “Officially, nothing. When I dug into the files, all I found were minor infractions, but instead of wrists being slapped, they got broken. It was a purge. I just don’t know why, other than it was something to do with Piper. He signed a deal for a stint in non-carnivore prison, and next thing you know, the department pruned dead wood.”
That was… interesting.
“How would that be connected to a dead body with no provenance in the San Diego morgue?” Cade asked.
“The pathologist?” Lem said. He frowned and scratched between his eyebrows with his thumbnail. “I can dig some more.”
Cade nodded. “Let’s make that discussion of misappropriation of resources worth my while. And send me those files.”
“Already sent,” Lem said. He tucked his phone into his pocket and raised his eyebrows at Cade. “I thought we’d resolved the issue with how our keycard was involved. Nothing to do with Cold Winds. It was the client’s security problem. Not ours.”
That was true.
“I don’t like leaving things half done. We might be able to pin this on the client, but we both know that this exposed flaws in the security protocols. If there’s more, I want to find them now. Next time O’Hara needs my help, he gets to ask nicely.”
That was the truth too. It was even most of it. And it bothered him that Haley might have died when she expected him to keep her safe… even if she’d no idea who he was.
“Yeah, well,” Lem said as he tucked his hands into his back pockets. “Don’t point out too many problems. Our contract with the Reserve comes up for renewal next year. We don’t want to have to drop our price.”
Cade mock-clutched his chest. “Don’t even joke,” he said. It came out lightly, but the starved penny-pincher in the back of his brain had already started to figure the run-on impact of a significant discount to the Reserve. Or worse, if they threw the contract onto the open market for bids.
The Reserve was dull most of the time. With the security system designed and in place, most of what passed for excitement up there—a stalker who’d gotten directions from the internet, a particularly pushy reporter, lost hikers—was handled on the spot by his men.
Before Haley’s death, the last time he’d had to intervene directly at the Reserve had been two years ago, during a messy divorce when the ex-spouse had shot her wife and then set the house on fire. It had been serious enough he’d had to show his face, but in reality, his particular skills hadn’t been needed. He’d never been the man in the company to go to for soft skills.
It was still the best-paid contract they had, high profit for relatively low outlay now that the security system was installed and active, and Cade liked profit. It kept him in the style he’d worked very hard to become accustomed to.
“If anyone asks, call it an abundance of caution,” he told Lem. “I doubt I’ll find any other glaring security breaches. I’d just rather know… and get them fixed before anyone else works out what they are.”
Lem nodded. “Makes sense,” he said. “I’ll do some more digging into this after I talk to our team in Germany. I need to make sure they resolved the tensions with the local gendarmes.”
“That’s French.”
The correction didn’t bother Lem. He shrugged it off with his usual grin. “They all speak, like, five languages. They’ll know what I mean. Do you need me for anything else?”
Cade dismissed that idea with a shake of his head as he headed back to his desk. He pulled the sleek black leather desk chair out, sat down, and glanced at his computer to check his schedule.
“Not today,” he said. “Thanks for this, Lem.”
“It’s my job,” Lem said. “But you’re right, I’m doing it really well, aren’t I?”
He grinned into the exasperated look that Cade sent his way and let himself out. As the office door swung shut behind Lem, Cade’s computer pinged with an email from him. All his research on Marlow.
Cade opened the file and sat back to read through it. He trusted Lem more than most, but his brother was not a man for subtleties.
A scab stitched Marlow’s lower lip together, and the dark smudge of a bruise decorated his cheekbone. It made him look younger. Dangerous.
“What happened?” Cade asked as he got out of the car. Marlow had made his own way there. The patrol car parked on the cultivated greenery cut through Cade’s fuzzy infatuation with a flicker of irritation as he tallied the paranoid complaints he’d get.
For a second, Marlow looked surprised, as if he’d forgotten about the marks. He reached up and brushed his fingers along his lower lip until he hit the tender spot. Cade’s body tightened with awareness, and he wondered what it would be like to kiss Marlow’s bruised mouth. The taste, the texture, the way Marlow would pull back or lean in…
“Got punched in the face,” Marlow said.
