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But by losing the evidence—or moving it, or whatever the fuck they’d done to it—they were telling us that this was all tied together. That the closed cases maybe weren’t quite as wrapped up with little bows as we’d thought when Ward’s ghosts tore the life out of Picton’s chest.
Andthatmeant that I had to have missed some members of the Ordo.
And if that was the case, then that they were most likely gunning for more than just Doc. Ward and Beck were probably also in the proverbial—and possibly also literal—crosshairs because they’d been part of bringing down most of the Virginia chapter of the Ordo.
And so had I.
Greer, Nesbit, and Mitchell had been my cases.
Oldham had been mine.
Hell, Oldham stillwasmine, because fuck if I was going to let it go as cold as the freezer Villanova had shoved it in.
I wanted to know who, what, and why.
Because while revenge might be best served cold, fuck revenge. I wanted something steaming hot and savory.
“What else don’t we know?” I asked Dan.
“Why Whitehead’s office was ransacked. What, if anything, was missing out of place in either Bazan’s home office or law office. And we don’t have any fucking suspects.”
“Who’s on the cases with you?” I asked.
“You don’t think—”
“How the fuck else do you think they’re keeping you in the ice box?” I asked him pointedly.
“Fuuuuuuck.” He drew out the word.
“You want my opinion?”
He sighed. “Yes and no.”
I understood. He wanted to know, but he also didn’t want to know. Because if he knew, or even suspected, a particular person, that would make him think differently, act differently, draw attention to himself.
Nobody knew better than I did what drawing attention to yourself could do.
Slashed tires and broken windows. Threats left on your voicemail or spraypainted on the side of your car. Hands that shoved you into the middle of a violent riot. A gun held on you in the dark.
If you were lucky, you could quit and walk away with your dignity and your life mostly intact.
“Let me know if you decide you do,” is what I said to him.
He grunted.
“And if there’s anything I can do.”
There was a pause, and then he spoke again, his voice soft and deadly serious. “Find out what’s missing, Hart.”
I felt my eyebrow arch, even though Dan couldn’t see me. “You want me to raise Whitehead and Bazan and interrogate them?”
“I’m not telling you to do anything,” he replied, and there was an edge to his voice that chilled me. It’s not good when good cops have to be the ones breaking the rules. Because that means that the bad cops have a lot more power than the good ones, that things have gone completely tits up, or that the rules were well and truly fucked. Or, if you were particularly unlucky, all three.
I was pretty sure Dan and I were squarely in the middle of an all three situation.
So by not telling me to summon Whitehead and Bazan, Dan was in fact asking me to do just that. He just couldn’tactuallyask me to do it. Or see that Ward got paid for it.
Not explicitly asking was a way to have plausible—or at leastlegal—deniability. So that if anybody asked, neither one of us had to perjure ourselves when we denied that Dan had ever asked for us to interrogate the dead people he wasn’t supposed to be thinking about.
