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She wasn’t going to put much effort into winning them over either. She could turn herself inside out trying to get them to likeher and never succeed. No, the only path to success was to do the work and do it well. That was the only thing she was good at anyway.
Besides, it wasn’t like she joined the LAPD because she was passionate about putting an end to commercial crimes. Financial fraud was the least interesting thing to investigate. But she’d have to liaison with other law enforcement agencies, which was why Mason Worth thought of her. He remembered her from the’90s when she’d worked for everyone and no one. He also remembered her from the late’80s when, after she worked for the CIA, she refused his offer to join Metro PD.
Would she refuse him again?
It had been less of an interview and more of an invitation presented on a silver platter of benefits and rank. A very beautiful trap it was too, one that would leave her indebted to him for a while. That was a situation she did not want to find herself in again. Though she reminded herself that there was no longer any way Frank Clifton could get away with what he had back then.
She’d given him five more years of her life and labor before his bad behavior caught up with him. Ironically, it was the money trail that got him. Someone found out that he was using his budget to fund his little side projects. Like being Annie’s ball and chain on the West Coast, farming her out to whomever needed her, despite the fact that the CIA was never supposed to interrogate its own citizens. That rule was disregarded all the time, but still. It turned out that Annie wasn’t Clifton’s only side project. He’d spent decades treating his staff like his personal pawns, spending funds for his own purposes and even renaming line items in his budget to cover his tracks.
But as departments converted to computerized databases, Clifton’s suspicious spending became too obvious to ignore, andhe was forced into retirement to save face. Both his own and the CIA’s.
After he left, Annie spent some time looking through the documentation he left behind. She discovered that Frank had known all along that Dasha’s husband was still alive, even as Annie was quitting her job, wracked with guilt over the deaths she’d caused. Frank ordered him flown out of Belarus to Virginia and, months later, had him relocated again to Los Angeles. The two agents who’d been killed were not killed while investigating where Dasha had gone but had died during the extraction.
The note in her file readreintegrate or terminate. Annie knew Frank well enough to know that it meant that he thought either seeing Dasha’s husband was going to spook her enough to make her return to DC or it was going to get her killed. Annie found several other similar instances of Frank using intelligence assets as pawns to manipulate agents working under him.
She’d written up the report and shown it to her new superior.
He’d looked it over and scoffed. “What do you want? The man already left in disgrace. What use is it dragging his name through the mud now?”
Annie left the CIA not long after that. While she wasn’t surprised that Frank’s treatment of people was overlooked, she was disgusted that his financial crimes had gone unprosecuted. The irony of her shift to investigating financial crimes was not lost on her. It was funny how things worked out sometimes.
Annie knew that she could handle someone like Mason Worth better now that she was in her thirties than she could have ever handled Clifton in her twenties, when she was still green. Clifton had manipulated her to the point that she’d felt like a caged animal, and then hopeless, until she’d felt nothing at all. He threatened her family, he threatened her future job prospects with his knowledge of her sexuality, and he made sure to isolate her from the rest of the team so she didn’t have any allies.
Worse than that, he did what he’d promised never to do: he sent her overseas again.
She’d been terrified to go, terrified that the power she wielded as an agent of the United States government could get someone killed with a mere slip of the tongue.
Annie was the kind of person for whom everything came pretty easily: she didn’t have to work at being smart, she didn’t have to study particularly hard in school, she was fairly attractive without a lot of effort, and success came quickly and easily to her. All of which made her wildly unprepared for the amount of blood that she found on her hands.
Later, after some therapy and time away from the CIA, she came to understand that she’d been traumatized. The trauma of what happened in Belarus had sent her running for reasons she couldn’t explain, least of all to herself. And then Frank Clifton had traumatized her further by shoehorning himself back into her life, with his threats and his conditions and his hand on her thigh.
He died of colon cancer, she learned later, about three years into his forced retirement. She went out and bought a bottle of champagne, drank it alone, raising her flute every time she thought of him shitting himself to death.
So, no, she didn’t fear Mason Worth. He might be a big fish, but after being out in the world, the LAPD seemed like a small pond.
“Does Helen Everton still work here?” Annie had asked at the end of her interview with Worth.
“Uh, yeah. Internal Affairs. She’s a commander now.”
That was all Annie really needed to know. She accepted the job.
* * *
The LAPD paid for moving expenses and put her up in a hotel near the airport that had been designed to hold conferences. The lobby teemed with flight attendants and pilots and peoplein suits wearing lanyards and holding paper folders. She was supposed to be finding a place to live while adjusting to her new role. Her stuff was scheduled to arrive in two weeks, so if she didn’t have a place by then, she’d need a storage unit to hold her dining set, her couch, and her bed. Everything else, she had gotten rid of.
She worked Monday and Tuesday, and on Tuesday evening, as she lay in her hotel bed with her half-eaten room service, she decided to go to see Helen the next day.
She’d really thought that maybe Helen would seek her out; there was no way she didn’t know Annie had joined the force. A few women had stopped her in the hallway to introduce themselves, clearly excited to have a high-ranking female officer in their midst, but most people averted their eyes when they saw her. She heard them whispering to their buddies after she passed. Busting the pharmaceutical thing had helped break the ice, but most of that legwork had happened before she’d arrived, so everyone knew that it wasn’t really her win.
A hundred times over the last decade, she’d thought about picking up the phone to call Helen. But by the time Clifton was gone, six years had already passed since Annie had left LA, and it had felt too late to open that can of worms again. And Helen had let her go too. She’d never gotten a letter or an email or a phone call. Helen was a cop; she knew how to find people if she wanted.
Annie tried telling herself that she hadn’t returned to Los Angeles specifically for Helen, that if Helen didn’t want anything to do with her, it wasn’t the end of the world. Annie liked California independent of the Evertons and the kindness they’d shown her.
But the pain in her heart was like a bruise that wouldn’t heal, the protective layer as thin as wet tissue paper that would dissolve at the slightest tug.
* * *
A heavyset man with a gray buzz cut told her that she needed to wait for Commander Everton to return, but Annie breezed past him and opened the door. “I’m just going to wait right here,” Annie told him, making sure the gold badge on her hip wasn’t obscured by her jacket. It was an unsubtle way to pull rank, but the man understood it and held up his hands. “Suit yourself, Chief.”
