Page 33 of Trust my Heart

“Wright knows I went to see her. He told me so, in the copy room, two days after. By name. He asked how her three years to pension were looking, and said she’d always tried to be so careful, and said what a shame.” I watched it land. “It was a threat with a smile on it, and I brought it on her. She told me she’d deny everything and told me not to come back, and she was right on both counts. But if he touches her files again, she’s got nobody. I want her covered. However that’s done, off paper, whatever it looks like. She spent years keeping his messes from hurting anyone and it cost her the end of her career. Somebody owes her better than me showing up at her tailgate with questions.”

“What’s she to you?”

“A good cop I only met once.” I looked at the prints on the table. “She’s what he leaves behind, sir. She’s what Luke is going to be if I sit on my hands and let this run.”

It came out harder than I’d planned. Murphy waited, and I made myself keep going, because I’d hit the true part now and there was no way around it but through.

“I know how this looks. The jealous boyfriend having a fit. The whole floor’s heard that speech, and so have I. But a week ago I was alone with him in the parking garage, no one else there, and he told me what he came back for.” Murphy didn’t move at all. “He didn’t bother hiding it from me. Luke’s worth more now than when he left, and he means to use that. He plans to take Luke back too, when he’s ready. And when he’s had what he wants out of the both of us, he’ll be finished and gone, like none of it happened. He laid it out with no heat at all, like a roster he’d already written.” The kitchen was warm and I was cold saying it. “There were no witnesses, and he chose it that way. If I repeat any of it, it sounds like something I made up, and he knew that when he told me. He isn’t after Luke because he cares or because of nostalgia, sir. He’s after what standing next to Luke gets him. And when he’s done with it, he’ll drop him, the way he did the first time.”

The furnace came on somewhere below us, a low hum through the floor. Murphy took the glasses off again, folded them, and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“You’re telling me a sergeant of this service confessed a campaign to you in a parking garage.”

“I’m telling you what happened. And I know how it sounds, a careful man saying all that where it can’t be used.” I held his eye. “He didn’t slip. He said it because he could. No witnesses, nothing I carry out of there but my word, and he knows what my word is worth right now. He wasn’t confessing, sir. He was showing me. He wanted me to know what’s coming and be able to do nothing about it. That’s the whole of him.”

“It’s worth nothing,” he said. “As evidence. You know that.” He looked up. “As information, it’s worth a great deal, because it matches years of watching him and one story from a detective from another division, and men my age stop believing in coincidence.” He gathered the three prints into a stack, squared the edges, and slid them back into my folder like they were evidence already, handling the margins. “Now sit still. It’s my turn, and you’re not going to like all of it.”

I waited.

“One. I’ll make the disclosure real. Quietly, correctly, dated tonight. What changes on the floor changes slowly, and I decide the pace, not the book and not the people upstairs? You came to me before anyone could use it against you, and that buys you the version where I handle it.” He held up a second finger. “Two. Brar. I know her staff inspector out there, we did our sergeant’s course together back when the dinosaurs had it. I’ll find a way to put a roof over her that doesn’t have Wright’s name or yours anywhere near the paperwork. Three.” He tapped the table once. “The system. I know a person. Retired out of financial crimes, does forensic data work private now, owes me the kind of favor that doesn’t expire. You get no name and you make no contact. It goes through me or it doesn’t go.”

“Understood.”

“Four. Your camera trick.” He nodded at the laptop. “Did the jeweler know you still had that access.”

“No.”

“Then as of tonight you’ve lost it. Whatever that footage becomes, it gets requested from the owner properly, with a date and a signature, when there’s a file for it to live in. You pulled the thread, fine, it’s pulled. But from here everything is clean, because the day we finally stand this up in front of somebody who matters, that man will hire the best and they will pull on every corner of it. Nothing gets to wobble.” He leaned back. “And five. You’re going to hear the part you came all this way to not hear.”

I waited.

“This may all come to nothing.” He said it evenly, without softening it. “I’ve had IT in that system once already and it handed me a shrug. My quiet person may go into those logs and find them overwritten, or purged on schedule, or clean as a whistle because the man’s more careful than either of us thinks. Brar may take the roof I build her and still never say one word on any paper, and I wouldn’t blame her. And then all you’ve got is what you had in the garage. True and worthless.” Murphy leaned back against his chair.

Upstairs the floor creaked again, his wife crossing to somewhere, and Murphy’s eyes went up to the sound for half a second.

“But you knew all that before you rang my bell,” he said. “You did it anyway. So tell me why, and don’t give me the version with a bow on it.”

My phone buzzed on the table before I could answer. I’d have ignored it, except I never ignored it anymore, and Murphy nodded at it, so I looked.

Luke. You still out?

Sitting in that kitchen with three photographs of him in a folder eight inches from my hand, I read it twice. Then I typed, Out a while yet. Back soon, and put the phone face down on the wood.

“Luke?” Murphy said. Not a question.

“Yeah.” I kept my hand on the phone a second longer, and decided to give him the part I’d meant to keep to myself. “Here’s the version without the bow. If it was just the flagged cases, I’d ride it out. I’ve been framed before, by better, you saw that year up close. If it was just the pictures, I’d burn them and sleep fine, because I know what I have and a photograph doesn’t change it. But it’s him.” The words were finally in order and I said them slowly. “Wright doesn’t want Luke, sir. Wright wants what standing next to him is worth, and Luke can’t see it, because the man spent those years making sure he never would, and every person Luke trusts thinks Wright walks on water, and the one person telling him different is the boyfriend everybody watched melt down on the floor. He is alone inside this thing, and he doesn’t even know he’s in it.” I looked at the folder. “He gave that man four years and the worst thing that ever happened to him, and Wright’s back for the rest. I can’t warn him. I tried the little version of it, and it nearly broke us. So, the only protection I can give him is to take Wright off the board before he gets to whatever he came for. That’s why. Everything else, the files, the flags, my career, that’s the part I can afford to lose.”

Murphy looked at me for a long time. Whatever he was reading, he didn’t tell me what he found.

“Finish your coffee,” is what he said. And then, when I picked up the cup, “You did right coming here. A year ago, you’d have gone at him alone.”

“A year ago, I didn’t have anything he could take.”

He grunted, which from Murphy was a whole conversation, and got up, and took the pot off the machine and topped me up like we were done with the hard part, which we were.

We spent ten more minutes on the mechanics of it. How he’d frame the disclosure, what I should expect on the floor and when, a plain agreement that neither of us would say Wright’s name inside the building in any sentence we couldn’t afford to have repeated. He walked me down the hall after. At the door he stopped, one hand on the latch, and looked out through the screen at his street.

He opened the door. “You’re the first person to bring me a corner of it I can hold. Don’t make me regret the signature twice, Carlson.”