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4
Theo
Enemy or Ally?
Elizabeth Ellen Tate is thirty-one years old, has served eleven years on the force, and has no true blemishes on her record. I sit in the back of my car and scan the reports sliding along my Griffin Industries smart tablet.
Glass of water in one hand, tablet resting on my leg, I read about the medals for bravery she’s been awarded, and try not to worry about the things she had to do to earn those. I smile at her almost perfect record for arrests.Almost, because a couple of the guys she’s brought in over the years have periodically complained she was rough with them. But those same guys were eventually tried and convicted of dangerous felonies. Maybe they were complaining just to be spiteful, or maybe she really was rough, but I feel confident in the fact they were scumbags.
Cops disgust me, and for the first time since I was eleven, thinking of Libby makes my skin crawl. Residual anger toward her father. Residual anger toward the police in general, but where sliding into the Bishops’ accounts was mildly difficult, it’s alarmingly easy to slide into Libby’s.
Knowing the deepest workings of her life eases me.
Elizabeth Tate collects her meager police salary on the first and fifteenth of every month. She earns just over fifty thousand a year, and receives no extra bonuses, like a squad car to drive around. Her colleagues each drive departmentally supplied vehicles, so either she refuses, or they’re misogynistic pricks who don’t think their female colleague deserves one.
Libby’s account shows no suspicious activity, no extra deposits or withdrawals, no strange account numbers, no exorbitant power bills, no expensive restaurant bills, nothing but a gym membership that is regularly used.
Thatconnection, the people who own that gym, bothers me a little.
I know Libby’s routines just by scrolling; she pays her phone bill on the sixth, her cable on the twelfth. She puts gas in her car just once a week, and around the twentieth of every month, she binge-buys things from a place called Jonah’s store, mere minutes before ducking a few doors down and stopping at a place registered as Dixie’s Ice Cream Parlor. Groceries and ice cream on the same day every month.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure that puzzle out.
One week a month, she fills her gas tank twice, and on that same day, she checks into the maximum-security prison that I know for a damn fact her father is locked up in.
Is she checking in with him for good or bad? Is she making sure he’s okay, or that he’s still locked away?
The most interesting part of my discoveries is the fact that the town Libby lives in is not the town I met her in. It’s not the town I met Colum Bishop, Abel Hayes, Sean Frankston, Raymond Tate, or the sour-sisters in. It’s not the same town my mother was murdered in, or the town that owned the alleyway I grew up in.
No. That town is about seven hours from here.
But stranger yet, and possibly the strangest of all, the town she lives in and patrols now is the same town the Bishop brothers have settled in. It’s the same town Colum died in, and the same town Sean Frankston was arrested in.
Why, so long after the first meet, am I discovering that Bishop had sons, Libby became a cop, Frankston had a daughter, Hayes had another club,andthey all live in the same small town like a cozy little family?
Coincidences are never coincidences. That word is a completely fabricated social construct to explain away the things that make people uncomfortable to discuss. Coincidence is only coincidence because the guilty party calls it that.
The evidence is almost damning against that cute girl I met forever ago. Her only saving grace is her meager bank account. Of course that would suggest she has others, hidden somewhere far away. But I’ve looked, I’ve had hours to comb through the internet and call in favors to find the data I need.
Either Libby has access to the same hacker the Bishops do, or she’s trulyjusta cop. Either she has no clue of the Bishop connection, or she’s patrolling that town for that very reason.
The latter would be the most convincing, if only the dates matched up. Bishops came to this town around three years ago; Libby has been here eleven. She couldn’t possibly have known eight years in advance who would end up assigned here, which brings me right back around to basically… I have no fucking clue.
Guilty or innocent? Daddy’s girl, or Daddy’s downfall? Clean or dirty?
None of it makes sense in my mind, and considering the nature of my upbringing, I lean toward suspicion.What can I say; it’s the street rat in me.
“Sir?”
I glance up as my car slows on a dark street just outside the apartment Libby has listed as hers. I look out the tinted windows, frown at the darkness, then glance down to my watch.
It’s ten on a Friday night, and every apartment around hers is lit up like a department store. But her place is pitch black.
“Do you want me to stop here?”
“Yeah.” I toss my tablet onto the leather seat and unbuckle my seatbelt.
I don’t instruct my driver to park a block away. I don’t particularly care about being seen. This is just a regular SUV. It’s black with tinted windows, but then again, most are. My driver wears a suit. Always. I honestly don’t think I’ve seen him in casual clothes once in our adult life. Our windows are tinted, but within legal restrictions. I carry no weapons that a regular search will find. I don’t deal in drugs. In fact, I’ve never in my life touched them, so a swab test won’t show a single trace.
