Page 51 of Diesel’s Desire

“Penny.”

She takes a deep breath. “I need you to leave.”

“No,” I answer, shaking my head.

“Evan—”

“I’m not walking out that door and letting you spiral into whatever this is alone.” I stand, reach for her, but she steps back like my hands are something to be afraid of.

“You don’t get to decide that. Not tonight.” Her eyes are wet, but her voice doesn’t break again. “I have spent almost two decades building a life on the other side of a line you keep asking me to cross, and you just told me you’re standing knee-deep in exactly the kind of case that could end everything I’ve built.”

“So what, you’re gonna arrest me?”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do.” Her hands are trembling. “That’s the problem. I don’t know, and I hate that I don’t know, and I need you to leave so I can figure it out without you standing here looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m supposed to forgive you just because you’re you.”

I grab my jacket off the back of the couch, jaw working, every instinct in me screaming to stay, to fix this, to make her understand that the ring mattered more than the job it got lost during. But I know that look on her face. I’ve seen it before.

“I’m not giving up on this,” I say at the door. “On us.”

“Then you should’ve thought about that before you robbed an evidence van.”

The door closes softly behind me, quieter than I expected given how loud everything inside me is screaming. Thunder barks once from behind it, and then there’s nothing but the porch light and the sound of my own boots on her walkway, carrying me back toward a truck that suddenly feels like it’s going nowhere I actually want to be.

26

PENNY

The email hits my inbox at eight-fourteen Monday morning: Interim Chief Bradley Wexler will address the department at 0900. Attendance mandatory.

I read it twice, coffee going cold in my hand. Morris gave his notice three weeks ago, and the council used every day of it to pick his replacement.

Johnson catches my eye across the bullpen and mouths, you know him?

I shake my head. Never heard the name Wexler in my life, and I’ve spent a decent amount of it in this county.

At nine, we file into the conference room like kids called to the principal’s office. Wexler stands at the front in a uniform so pressed it looks like it came off a mannequin an hour ago. Mid-fifties, silver hair parted with a ruler, the kind of posture that says he practiced looking authoritative in a mirror. He’s got a folder in front of him, squared perfectly to the edge of the podium.

“Morning.” He doesn’t smile. “I know change is uncomfortable. I’ve reviewed the department’s clearance rates, budget allocations, and case management protocols over the past two years, and I want to be transparent. There’s work to do.”

Beside me, Johnson mutters, “Here we go.”

“Effective immediately, all field reports require supervisor sign-off before filing. All overtime requests route through my office, no exceptions. And any contact with outside parties in ongoing investigations—informants, civilian consultants, whoever—gets documented and approved in advance.”

My stomach drops a little. That last one feels aimed at me specifically, though there’s no way he could know. Unless Morris briefed him on the way out the door, which wouldn’t shock me.

“Questions?”

Nobody raises a hand. I don’t either, though I’ve got about nine hundred of them.

He dismisses us like we’re a classroom, and I head back to my desk trying to convince myself it’s fine. New broom, new rules. Every department goes through this.

Then Tuesday happens.

I catch the Doss case again on a routine records pull, the one from the Pemberton fallout, and there’s a loose thread. Emily Doss’s older cousin, a woman named Katrina, mentioned to a caseworker back in the original report that she saw a black SUV parked outside the Doss house the same week Emily disappeared three years ago. Nobody followed up. Everybody was too busy being paid to look away.