*
Conn walked into the precinct he’d been assigned to for the entirety of his career as a Lancaster police officer. The two cops smoking outside the back door nodded in greeting. He walked down the hall past interview rooms and offices. Nothing was different, except there were more presents under the tree. The noise from the bullpen reached his ears, faint but familiar—ringing phones doubling up on each other, uniformed and plainclothes officers coming and going, televisions scrolling their black lines of closed captioned text in all four corners of the squad room.
The gang unit worked out of here because the highest volume of gang violence flowed through this precinct. They had a small conference room to use as a war room, laptops crowded on the oval table, whiteboards covered with assignments, filing cabinets containing older records. Conn walked up to the war room, opened the door, and took half a step inside.
Everyone looked up. He caught Kenny’s eye. “Got a minute?”
Kenny’s face betrayed no hint of knowledge at why Conn would be coming to visit him, other than the standard visit from a cop in trouble to his mentor. Kenny finished issuing orders to two undercover officers about the day’s buy-and-busts, then met Conn at the door. They ended up in the same vacant, slightly more upscale conference room where he’d met with Hawthorn, then Cady and Chris, a couple of weeks earlier.
Was it really only such a short time ago? He was so different. Everything in his world had changed.
“What’s up?” Kenny asked.
Conn tossed the file on the table. The picture of Jordy’s most gruesome bruises and swollen eye slid halfway out of the manila folder. “How did I do?”
“With what?”
“Fastest time? Slowest time? Somewhere in the middle?”
Kenny cracked a grin. “You always did have to know where you stood.”
“I’m fucking serious, Kenny.” Conn thumped his finger on the folder. “You set me up to take the fall for this.”
Conn shook his head. Kenny picked up the folder, shuffled the picture back inside. “It was a little test. Just to see whose bed you got into.”
Beating another human being wasn’t a “little test.” “What, like being jumped into a gang? Except you beat the shit out of someone else, blame me, and then leave me twisting in wind? What the fuck, Kenny?”
“You weren’t supposed to be shuffled off on some private security detail,” Kenny said, waving his hand. “I was going to get in touch with you on shift one night. Explain everything. Then you disappeared.”
Lightning fast, Conn said, “Why didn’t you come out to Maud’s?”
“Who the fuck knows where she lives?” Kenny said indignantly, like Conn purposefully kept Cady’s address a secret from him. “I drove past her mother’s place a couple of times but your car was never there. Tried to burrow into the paperwork trail on her house, and got nowhere, thanks to Caleb fucking Webber. Every year he wins the pool for Most Hated Lawyer. I couldn’t get it out of Eve, because she’d tell Dorchester and then he’d tell Hawthorn. I gave up. I figured you’d either figure it out and come to me, or you’d get desperate and come to me to solve your problem. Which I would have done.”
Conn’s brain, already whirring away at a high gear, shifted into overdrive. It wasn’t Kenny. But if it wasn’t Kenny threatening Cady, that meant he had to watch the recordings from the cameras. The ones he’d installed behind Cady’s back.
“It’s a big risk,” Conn said. “What if the media got hold of that?”
Kenny just arched an eyebrow at Conn. It took him a minute. He was getting better at this thinking-rather-than-reacting thing. “Jordy was in on it. That’s why this is still on the down-low. You paid him to take the beating.”
“Promoted him,” Kenny corrected, smiling. He was watching Conn closely, studying his reactions.
Conn’s stomach heaved, but he maintained his impassive face, folded his arms across his chest. The move made him look bigger than he was, and more belligerent. “I’m listening.”
“A group of us who feel we’ve been comprehensively screwed by the latest bargaining agreements with the city started a side business of our own. Consider us a little family within a family. We’re still doing good work for the city and her fine citizens, but we’re also looking after our own brothers. And sisters,” he added conscientiously. “Gotta be politically correct.”
Something dinged at the back of Conn’s mind, but he let it go. “With Lyle Jenkins gone, you’re taking over the Strykers territory.”