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“Aren’t you cold?” Marcy asked.
“I won’t be in five minutes. Same route?”
“Sure.”
Kara started down the road. Traffic was practically nonexistent in the small town in the early morning, even though it was the height of the tourist season. They jogged in the bike lane.
By the time they reached the end of the path at the broken dock, Kara felt invigorated. They stopped, stretched, and drank water. The sun had just broken over the horizon, the sky was clear, it would be a beautiful, warm day.
“I interviewed Cal McKinnon yesterday,” she said.
“Right, you said you were going to. How’d it go?”
“I should have talked to you last night, but we were all running around, and then my boss had me writing reports. I swear, the fucking FBI is worse about reports than LAPD.”
Marcy laughed as she stretched her hamstrings. “John is cool. I spent almost as much time writing reports in Seattle as I did on patrol. Here, I do it, but it’s so much easier. I can usually get it done between calls. In Seattle? We had hot call after hot call. Reports had to wait until we got back to the station.”
“FBI is just a bunch of fucking bureaucrats,” Kara lamented as she did windmills with her arms. She was cold here on the water, especially now that she was sweating from the run.
“Why’d you leave LAPD?”
Was she intentionally changing the subject or sincerely interested?
Kara said, “It’s a really long story.”
“That’s what you said the other night. A suspect accused you of abuse of force or something?”
“Yep.” Kara didn’t realize how difficult this was to talk about, even now. She’d given Marcy her snide response the other day. She probably deserved more. “I worked this undercover case, a sweatshop case, Chinese nationals brought in as slave labor. The suspect was a US citizen, owned the sweatshops—and ran a bunch of other illegal enterprises. Anyway, I went deep cover as a buyer for a big-box retailer. Had an informant on the inside, was working it, and had almost enough evidence when my informant was killed. I stayed inside, got what I needed, and when we went in to arrest them, the suspect ran. Fell off a fucking roof and broke his leg. Then his bodyguard threw a knife in my back.” She turned, showed Marcy the scar that was only partly concealed by her tank. “I shot him, he died, and I was put on leave, pending investigation.”
“Wow. I don’t think I’ve ever had that much excitement on a case, even in Seattle.”
“Yeah, it was intense.” Not the most intense case Kara had ever worked, but she didn’t need to get into more details. If Marcy knew she was an undercover cop by trade, she might not be as forthcoming as Kara needed her to be. She sat on a large rock and leaned forward, touched her toes. She didn’t really need to stretch, but she wanted to keep her blood pumping. If sharing her story with Marcy got her talking, it was worth freezing her ass off here on the water.
“Anyway, my boss put me on leave. Mandatory, you know, officer-involved shooting. I was cleared, completely justified—having the knife in my back helped with that. But after all that went down, my partner was killed and my cover was blown. I couldn’t go back to my job.”
“Why?”
“Like I said, long story, but the suspect has a good fucking lawyer and is walking free right now, awaiting trial.” That was only half the truth. The real truth was the LA-FBI was trying to nail her for abuse of power charges and giving Chen a pass if he testified against her. Fortunately, Matt and his boss had intervened, and everything was in limbo. She had no idea what was going to happen, when she would testify, evenifshe would testify. She left that to the lawyers. They’d tell her when they needed her.
She added, “My boss worked out a loan to the FBI, hence me being here and not LA. For my safety, they said. But I always wonder if there’s more to it. Some bureaucratic bullshit I don’t know anything about.”
She stood, stretched her calves.
“You’re not from LA, though, right?” Marcy said. “You said you were from a small town.”
“Liberty Lake, Washington.”
“That’s near the Idaho border, right?”
“Twenty miles from. A town not much bigger than Friday Harbor.”
Marcy laughed. “Who’d have thought? Ready to head back?”
She motioned for Marcy to lead the way up the narrow path back to the road.
“Oh, I was going to ask,” Kara said when they reached the road. “You said you knew Cal from the Coast Guard.”
“Right. We used to date.”
