“Thank you.” He nodded at a battered bit of greenery in her hand. “What’s that?”
“Mistletoe.” She held it over her head, and beckoned him to her with one crooked finger. This time, when he laughed, his whole body relaxed.
*
Lieutenant Hawthorn returned from his conference on Tuesday morning. Conn was waiting by his office when he walked in just before eight o’clock. “Officer McCormick,” Hawthorn said. “Come in.”
The Block hummed around them, a little hive of activity as the holidays approached. Conn stood in Hawthorn’s office, hands shoved in his pockets. The weight of his badge and gun registered more than they normally did, because he wasn’t sure if this was the last time he’d wear them.
“I read your final report,” Hawthorn said as he set his coffee on his pristine desk. “It’s a little unclear as to how the mystery-stalker situation resolved itself.”
“It was her sister,” Conn said. “I saw a threat when it was just a teenage girl acting out.”
Hawthorn gave him a sharp look, then an odd, raw laugh. “Don’t underestimate the power of a teenage girl to ruin someone’s peace of mind.” He sounded like he was speaking from experience, but Conn knew better than to ask. “I assume she doesn’t want to press charges and would prefer to keep this out of the media.”
“Got it in one,” Conn said.
“Good. Jordy’s refusing to cooperate with us. All charges have been dropped. Abracadabra, you’re back on your regular shift.” He opened his laptop, then looked back at Conn while he waited for it to power up. “Anything else?”
“I’m putting in my papers,” Conn said. He took his badge and his gun off his belt and set them on Hawthorn’s desk. Only because Cady came back for him could he do this. Her love, her presence, made it possible for him to see a future without the police department.
“Explain yourself, McCormick.”
“Cady offered me a job as her bodyguard. I took it.”
One of Hawthorn’s eyebrows shot skyward. “That was fast.”
“I won’t actually be leaving town for a few months,” Conn said. “But after I tell you what I learned in my own investigation, I’ll need to put in my papers anyway. I know who set me up.”
“You do.”
“It’s Kenny. He’s running the Strykers from the gang unit.”
A slight widening of the eyes was Hawthorn’s only reaction to this bomb. “And you know this how?”
“I put it together,” Conn said. He set a file folder on Hawthorn’s desk, and a memory stick. Hawthorn would want an electronic version, but not one sent through the department’s email. “I went into the records and started looking at the arrests, the trends, which cases stuck and which ones went away. I couldn’t make the data, which said the Strykers were fading away, work with my experience on the street, which was that the Strykers had the entire East Side in a stranglehold. So I started looking at the officers on the gang unit. The one thing they had in common was that Kenny trained them.”
“He’s not part of the gang unit.”
“No, but until last year, he worked out of this precinct. Remember when he transferred into administration and everyone was so surprised?”
“He was distancing himself.” Hawthorn had no nervous habits. You had to really pay attention to notice the most minute changes in facial expression. “What happened?”
“I confronted him about the assault. He said it was an initiation rite. He was going to track me down on shift one night and tell me what was going on. I wasn’t supposed to be assigned to a special duty that basically made me drop off the face of the earth.”
“Why you?”
“Because I had no one but the department. I was a loner, volatile. Kenny thought I’d be easy to turn.”
“And now you’re not alone.”
Now he had Cady, but Conn could be mysterious and silent, too. “When he couldn’t find me, he figured either I’d figure out what happened and go to him, in which case I could join them, or I’d go to him crying to make it go away, in which case he’d fix it and act like he knew nothing.”
“What did you do?”
“I told him I was in.”
Hawthorn’s gaze flickered to the gun and badge on the table. “But you’re obviously not in.”
Police departments had factions that rivaled the tribal warfare tearing apart most of the world’s hot spots. Conn had been singled out for one of those factions, which usually meant, in the us-versus-them world, that he was tainted to all the others. “Even if Cady hadn’t offered me a job, I can’t be that kind of cop. If that’s what it means to be a part of this department, and Kenny turned it into an us-against-them proposition, I won’t do it.”
Hawthorn’s gaze sharpened. “So if you didn’t think you have to resign, you’d stick around until she went on tour?”
“I can’t. I agreed to participate in illegal activities,” Conn said. “That’s grounds for termination.”
Hawthorn shook his head. “Pick up your weapon and your badge, Officer McCormick.”