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Kara’s heart sank even as she was flooded with relief that Colton was very much alive.
Violet fumbled for the gun that was no longer on the nightstand.
“My name is Detective Kara Quinn. I’ve been looking for you.”
28
Staring at the woman in the dim light, I reached for the gun Colton had given me, but immediately realized it wasn’t there.
Kara Quinn.
I had heard that name several times over the last few months, knew she was a cop, knew she was the one who had arrested David Chen and then had to leave because of a threat on her life.
But most recently, I heard her name from Colton on Monday night when he found me here.
“Kara still thinks I’m dead.”
Then he’d said that Kara was a dog with a bone, that she would be looking for me.
“I can’t stay. Now that Craig is dead, I have to go deep until I have everything.”
“What if she finds me?”
“You can trust her. Tell her everything. She’ll be mad at me, but she’ll understand.”
Trust was hard for me, and it hurt to learn that Craig Dyson was dead. He had listened to me, even when I got emotional and upset. He gave me directions on what to look for. Without him, I would never have found out that Theodore Duncan, the mayor’s chief of staff, was profiting on the backs of people like my mom. That he had made a deal with David Chen and helped that evil man exploit all those Chinese women.
Colton didn’t trust people, either, but he said he trusted Kara Quinn. I needed to try.
“Let’s talk,” Kara said.
I got out of bed. As I slipped on my flip-flops, I realized I towered over Kara. But I looked at her and knew she’d be able to hurt me if she wanted. She motioned for me to lead the way to the kitchen. I did. I sat at the table, in the dark, because I didn’t know what to do.
Kara made coffee. She knew where everything was. She waited, watched the pot brew, as if she didn’t need to talk. I didn’t need to talk, either. I was scared and defeated and just wanted this to be over.
But I didn’t think it would ever be over. Even if the police arrested all the people involved in killing Craig Dyson, the system would still be broken. Craig was the only one who could fix it, and he was gone.
Kara put a mug of black coffee in front of me. She pulled out her phone and sent someone a text message; my heart skipped a beat. Could I trust this cop? I didn’t know. But...she’d been Colton’s partner, and I trusted him.
She said, “From the beginning.”
I told her everything. About how I became suspicious after the computer crash at city hall. How I’d suspected that the crash was deliberate, and then Will introduced me to Craig. How I figured out that someone had overwritten files from the backups and they all related to homeless housing grants. I learned that David Chen had received government money to house the women he’d trafficked, and Craig wanted to know how the system worked, how he got away with it, and so I got him the files and records he needed. We uncovered hundreds of millions of dollars of waste, possible fraud. I explained how there were nonprofits within nonprofits and how whoever was in charge profited off the system.
“None of it is illegal,” I told her. “But Craig started looking at who worked at each nonprofit. He brought in his investigator, Mr. Sharp, to do deep background checks on everyone. And then I found it.”
“Whatever you were bringing to Craig at the courthouse on Monday afternoon.”
“Yes. I found the original files. I can’t get to them, but I know where they are and knew that Craig would be able to get a warrant. The virus deletes specific files when the backup gets loaded into the city hall system, but the files are still there in the backups. The city by law has to keep them for a year. So we only have until the middle of February before they’re gone forever.”
“Do you know who is responsible? Who erased the files to begin with?”
“I know whose computer it was done from—the mayor’s chief of staff. And that makes sense because Theodore Duncan had created the commission to review all grants when the mayor won his first election. Duncan put his brother-in-law in charge. At least, that’s what Craig and I figured out. After that, things started clicking into place.”
“I don’t understand what clicked into place,” Kara said.
“The city spends nearly a billion dollars every year on the homeless. But nothing gets done. It costs the city over eight hundred thousand dollars to house one person. The money that’s supposed to go into transitional or permanent housing? By the time it gets to the end point, it’s a fraction of what the grant was originally for. The city doesn’t actually do the work—they have the money, and then private contractors and nonprofits apply for grants to do different things.”
“Don’t they have to like, I don’t know, give a report? Show what they’ve done with all this money?”
