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Avery waves off my apology. “I know. It’s fine. I’m high-strung, too.” She exhales heavily and pushes her hands into her hair. “But now that I’m back, I need to get to my lab and straighten out those reports before the press tries to link me to some half-hatched conspiracy.”
I pin her with a heated glare. “No. The lab’s off-limits.”
Crossing her arms over her chest, she matches my stare. “No offense, Quinn, but technically, you’re not my boss.”
I hear a muffled snort and glance at the source. Sadie covers a hand over her mouth, refocuses her attention on the statement.
A knock sounds at the door, saving me before I blurt something else asinine. Carson peeks his head inside.
Fucking hell. “Does no one have a job to do around here?”
“Sorry,” Carson says. I wave him in, impatient. “But last time, I kind of got my ass chewed for this. Wanted to make sure you heard it straight from the source.” He acknowledges Avery with a nod her way. “Welcome back.”
“Thanks,” she says. “I’m kind of tired of leaving.”
Gritting my teeth, I bury my irritation with the intimate way in which he’s staring at Avery. “Christ. What now, Carson?” I say, pulling his focus to me.
“Right.” He sets his laptop on my desk right beside mine and taps the keyboard. The same news anchor comes alive on the screen. “Just watch,” he says.
“Sources now tell us that the two victims have been positively tied to the Alpha-Omega crime ring. Both the deceased bore the branded emblem of what we now know is the Alpha’s signature on their person.” A close-up of the letter highlighting the design appears in the upper right corner of the screen.
“Fuck,” I shout, and Avery flinches. I go to say something to reassure her, but Sadie points to the screen.
“Quinn, listen,” she says.
“Are the recent murders and the attempted silencing of the ACPD medical examiner being kept from the public on purpose? Jeff Jackson is live now with the suspects’ lawyer to answer our questions.”
The backdrop alternates to a transmission of Maddox walking in front of the courthouse, the press holding microphones alongside him as they keep pace. His slick dark hair gleams in the sunlight, and though his mouth is set as grim as his clients’ circumstance, there’s a smile in his eyes. I already disliked this bastard before I ever laid eyes on him.
The reporters sling questions at Maddox, demanding to know if his clients murdered the victims; if the victims were prostitutes connected to a crime ring; if he’s the acting attorney for the crime ring itself; if his clients attempted to kill the medical examiner working the case; if the ACPD is involved with a cover up; if Maddox knows who the Alpha in charge of the crime ring is. “No comment at this time,” is his calm reply.
“With all this damning evidence, why haven’t the local authorities confirmed the suspects in custody are indeed responsible?” the news anchor asks as the screen blinks to her. “With the city just suffering a tragic murdering spree, the public has a right to know if there’s yet another serial murderer on the prowl. Do the police have the Alpha Killer in custody now, or is he still out there, branding his victims? Is there a new threat in Arlington, a powerful head of an underground organization that oversees the killing of women?”
I’m out of my seat and slamming the laptop closed, just stopping myself from throwing it across the room. “A department full of detectives and we can’t find one goddamn leak?” I shout.
Sadie grabs the laptop, getting it out of my reach before I demolish it. “Department issued,” she says in way of an explanation and hands it over to Carson. “Quinn, you know how the press work. They’ve used this Alpha-Omega scheme before to fan fires for ratings.”
I heave a strenuous breath, my blood pressure rising. “But who the hell served them up that bullshit on the brand being a signature? I want a team on that pronto. I want it discredited, but I also want to fucking find out what the hell it actually means.”
Alpha Killer.
My jaw tightens, and I breathe through the restriction seizing my chest.
I scoop up the search report I requested yesterday, the one that shows a hit for the brand on a dead pro outside of the city. No mention of any fucking underground criminal network on the report. Which means we have nothing on it in the database, because it doesn’t exist. It’s a damn urban legend the press cooked up to increase ratings, just like Sadie said.
“Let him be a figment of the press’s imagination,” Sadie says, reading me like she always does. I look up. “The media can run circles around the Alpha Killer story. It will keep them busy and out of our way. They don’t have the one key piece of evidence that matters.” My office settles with a thick silence as that fact clicks into place.
I eye Carson, slitting my gaze. “Who all has had access to the M.E. reports?”
“Just us,” he confirms. “With what happened to Avery…there hasn’t been time for anyone to investigate the vics further.”
But there has been. Because the press somehow got their leaked information from the doctored COD reports that had no mention of the drug. Avery’s update on the cause of death was just simply overlooked. Accidents don’t make for good news.
“Avery, I need for us to access your reports, and no one else outside of this team is permitted to see them.”
She nods hesitantly. “All right, but for what it’s worth, this doesn’t seem like something one of ours would do. The leak, I mean. I know you can’t really trust anyone…” Her voice lowers as she trails off. “But I can’t believe that any one of my colleagues would throw me to the wolves like that.”
After everything she’s been through, no one would fault her for losing faith in the system. Shit, I wouldn’t blame her for giving up on it entirely after what she just suffered. But hearing her contradict that assumption ignites some kind of fire in my chest.
