“I can understand why he would want you to look at him and see the face he’s chosen instead of the one he was born wearing.” Wu ruffled his thumb over the top corner of the papers he held. “Your human mentality is as much of an asset as it is a hindrance. Your mind would bend if you beheld his true face in your current state.”
“Enough.” I slashed my hand through the air. “Just enough, okay?”
Wu ducked his head. “I am sorry for what you had to do tonight.”
“That makes two of us.” I shoved him out of my way. “I’m going home.”
Standing under the shower wouldn’t make me feel any cleaner, but at least it would camouflage my tears.
Back at the farmhouse, no one spoke to me on the way upstairs to my room. The ability to smell emotions must have told them what was doing, and they let me handle the fallout on my own terms. I scrubbed until my skin turned raw before giving my hair the same callous treatment.
The brutal events of the past few weeks slipped from my eyes and down the drain until I was spent.
Dressing in pajama shorts and a baggy tee, I braided my hair back then headed down to check on Miller. I made it halfway before pounding started on the front door. The patient craned his neck to see who had come calling, but Thom shook his head once, and Miller reclined. Santiago was less circumspect. He took up position behind the door and nodded, clearing me to open it, which I did.
“Rixton.” Cold sweat broke across my spine in a chilling wave. “What’s up?”
“We need to talk.” His gaze slid past my shoulder to Miller. “Alone.”
“Let’s go out back.” I led him onto the porch and around the house to where the old oak tree overshadowed the picnic bench. Too wound up to sit, I braced against the trunk and opened myself up for what came next. “What’s on your mind?”
He wasted no time. “Where are the photos?”
“Rixton —”
“You took the spares out of the trunk.” He bulldozed over me. “I was too busy losing my shit over where you were and why you weren’t answering your phone to pass them out during the shift meeting, so I put it off until tonight. Except when I went to get them out of the trunk, I came up empty.”
“Rixton —”
“I checked on the prints before I left the station, so I know they were there when I arrived at your house. This was the only stop I made that wasn’t drive-through. You were the only person who got near that trunk other than me.” He slapped his open palm against the tabletop. “The worst part is, I told myself it didn’t matter, that I had one last set squirreled away someplace safe. I could run off more copies and let that be the end of it. Except, when I got home, those had vanished too.”
Aware of what came next, my chin hit my chest.
“That’s when I remembered what Sherry told me when I called to ask if she needed anything before I got home. She told me that you had spent the afternoon with her. That gives you the means and the opportunity, but what was the motive?” Fury crackled in the air between us. “Tell me what’s going on. Explain this to me in a way I can understand.”
“I can’t.”
“You tampered with evidence. You better have a damn good reason, or I will report this. I won’t have a choice. I have a family to support, and I can’t lose my job, not even to protect you.”
There was nothing I could say without digging my hole deeper. Summers would contact him when she realized her copies were missing. Of that I had no doubt. And together they would realize that all digital traces of those photos, as well as anything else Wu felt the need to scrub, had vanished too.
I was the only common thread, and Rixton would yank on me until the whole story unraveled.
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry too.” The fight drained out of him. “Until you can present an argument that changes my mind, I’m going to have to ask you to stay out of my home and away from my family. You violated my trust tonight, and you abused Sherry’s hospitality. You’re giving me nothing to help me put your betrayal into perspective.” He took a breath and tried reasoning with me again. “I want to trust your reasons for doing this. I want to believe you did what you did for a purpose I can understand. But you’ve got to meet me halfway.”
That last bit was an olive branch extended, and I batted it away one last time. “I understand.”
“Chief Jones read your letter,” he said in a quiet voice. “She ordered me to talk you out of leaving for the department’s sake. The mess with Timmons stirred up enough bad publicity, but your leaving before he’s sentenced makes it look like you’re getting forced out.”
My arm was being twisted, all right, just not by the department. “I don’t have a choice.”
“Seems to me you had plenty of them. You could have told me you’d decided to accept the offer from the FBI. You could have told me you had written your letter of resignation. You could have kept your sticky fingers off the evidence.” The chill in his expression stung. “You’ve been sinking since Maggie, and this latest stunt will force me to watch you drown.”
“I wasn’t ready to turn in the letter,” I protested weakly. “I wrote it but…”
“No, Luce, you don’t get to blame that on me. I might have played messenger before you were ready, but you wrote it, signed it, and addressed it to the chief. You made your choice. You just hadn’t screwed up the courage to go through with your decision.”
I couldn’t look at him, not his feet, not the ground beneath his feet. I was so much lower than that. “What will you do now?”
“I’m going to sleep on how to handle this.” His sigh whistled out in a long note, like the stab of my betrayal had punctured a lung. “You want my advice?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “Let the resignation stand and use your comp time to ride out the notice.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “I’m going to request for the Hensarling and Culberson cases to be reassigned before your association taints what evidence we do have. The only chance we’ve got at a conviction is pinning down Ivashov, if we can find him, and I won’t risk losing him on a technicality.”
Ivashov was a literal dead end, but that was yet another detail I couldn’t share with him. “Do what you have to do.”
Without another word, Rixton left me standing there alone in the dark.
I sat on the tabletop and stared off into the distance until the sun rose.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
In order to avoid any and all discussion about the fallout with Rixton, I left the coterie at my house after dawn and sneaked into the sewing room at the Trudeaus’ to crash for a few hours. Word traveled fast in law enforcement communities, and ours was smaller than most. I was on borrowed time if I wanted Dad to hear my side of the story before Uncle Harold overheard any gossip about me making the rounds, and I had to scrape them both off the ceiling using one of Aunt Nancy’s spatulas.
“Afternoon, baby girl.” Dad glanced up from the crossword puzzle he was working at the table. “You got in late.”
“We need to talk.” I joined him, grateful I had hit the sweet spot between breakfast and lunch so we could sit alone. “There are some things I need to tell you.”
“All right.” He set down his pen and linked his fingers on the table. “Shoot.”
“I resigned from the force.” Palms braced on the table, I waited for him to go nuclear. When his eyes failed to round, and his mouth remained shut instead of gaping like a carp, I feared he might have zoned out again, but I pushed on before I lost my nerve. “The FBI expressed interest in me after the Claremont case, and I’ve decided to accept their offer.”
“I see.” His shrewd eyes narrowed. “Will joining the FBI make you happy?”
Happy was so far away I couldn’t see its tail lights to chase after the glow.
One more lie spilled over my lips without consulting my brain. I was training myself to cover my ass first and ask pesky moral questions later. Wu would be so proud. “Yes.”
This must be the road I’d heard so much about, the one paved with good intentions that landed you in hell. Or, in this case, a special taskforce full of charun.