Everyone in the room looked to Lynn.
She was staring at her lap.
Heidi kept on.
“I mean, seriously dicking with her. Calling her. Leaving notes on her doorstep. Passing her in the grocery store and saying shit to her. Sitting outside her fucking day care and watching her go in and come out with her freaking kids. It’s lunacy.”
“As we’ve mentioned to you, we can discuss protection,” Ally stated.
“And as we’ve mentioned to you, let them know we talked to you?” Heidi snapped. “No way.”
Ally looked to Mamá.
So Axl looked to Mamá.
Mamá sat in her armchair, her eyes not leaving Heidi.
“Lance was messed up before they killed him,” Heidi stated. “I had no idea what he was talking about. I mean, I’m a cop’s wife. I know shit can get real. I had twenty years of living with that. But he was a detective. He wasn’t on the beat anymore. But he kept talking about, ‘If something happens to me.’ But he never would answer when I asked why he kept on about it. It was flipping me out. He updated our will to make sure all was in order. He increased his life insurance policy, which by the way, was fucking voided because he supposedly killed himself, so that was money well spent.”
She tossed a hand Lynn’s way.
And kept going.
“Tony didn’t know these assholes would kill him. He didn’t take out a life insurance policy. Three kids, she’s part time, she’s fucked. Funeral expenses will eat you alive, trust me. And his pension doesn’t cover three kids. I’ll tell you that.”
Single-handedly, with no backup, no one knowing he was doing it, investigating a syndicate of dirty cops and he didn’t get life insurance.
Hell, just being a cop and he didn’t have it.
It wasn’t smart.
Everyone in that room knew that.
No one said anything.
“So … yeah,” Heidi carried on. “When my husband was murdered, it didn’t come as a big surprise. I knew something was up. Though, Lance killing Kevin and then turning the gun on himself, that is utter bullshit. Kevin was an asshole, but he always had Lance’s back. I didn’t get it. Lance said it was a guy thing. But if things went south with those two, Lance would just walk away. Or ask to be assigned a new partner. Or whatever. He wouldn’t shoot him. And he would never, not ever, kill himself. Me?” She shook her head. “Our kids? Leave us like that? He’d never do that.”
No one said anything.
Though even if there was something to be said, they couldn’t.
Heidi wasn’t done.
“And Lynn’s got all this shit happening, and she comes to me and says my husband didn’t fuck those women. She wants me to know that. My husband …My Lance …He did things … ” Suddenly, the rage just spluttered out, and in a whisper, hanging her head, “Goddamn.”
Giving Heidi a minute, and for other reasons, everyone now was looking at Lynn.
“Lynn, if you have anything on Tony’s investigation, it would help,” Hawk carefully urged.
Lynn’s gaze grazed through him before it returned to her lap.
“Lynn, we can protect you and your kids without them knowing you have protection,” Hawk stated. “And we can end this if we’ve got even something small to go on. We keep running up against dead ends. We need something to go on.”
This was true.
Sylvie and Tucker Creed had tracked down the ME on Lake Powell.
He was unsurprisingly closed-lipped, even after they put the lean on him.
His response to this was not doing the right thing.
Instead, this resulted in him cutting his vacation short, coming home, resigning and looking into relocating.
So they were forced to put pressure on and drop in the right ears his recent, large cash purchases.
Now he was under official investigation.
The bad guys also hadn’t taken the bait when the Resurrection MC entered the game. Various brothers in that club were sniffing around what really went down with those transports they got jacked for protecting in their earlier incarnation as the Bounty MC. And they weren’t being entirely legal about it.
But …
Nothing.
So now, with the ME under investigation for taking bribes, all their asses were swinging out there.
And they continued to have dick because no one had high hopes that investigation would turn up anything.
The ME contended he and his wife had been saving for years to realize their dream of eventually retiring to their houseboat on Lake Powell. They just didn’t keep this savings in a bank.
Regardless how ludicrously lame this excuse was, a man’s reputation was on the line, and after years in his position, the medical examiner had never given cause to investigate his findings or his earnings. And as such, it was taking a forensic accountant going through years of the ME and his wife’s personal accounts to prove this claim wrong.
And even when that happened, the guy would have to give it up who gave him the money.
But so far, the ME was not giving anything up.
Which could only mean one thing, and that thing was understandable considering four people were dead in this mess.
The medical examiner who falsified his reports on Lance Mueller and Kevin Bogart was more afraid of who paid him off than he was of being found guilty of taking bribes.
In other words, unless something broke, they had and would continue to have dick.
“You don’t get it. It’s never the same guy,” Heidi said.
“Please explain,” Hawk requested.
“When they’re messing with her. It’s never the same guy,” Heidi told him.
Fucking hell.
“We know this is big,” Hawk shared.
“So you know you can’t protect her from half the Denver Police Department,” Heidi returned.
“Half?” Ally asked, her voice curt, edgy.
Then again, her dad and brother were cops, and dirty ones didn’t sit well normally.
Half the force was fucked right the hell up.
Lynn spoke.
“It isn’t half.”
Again, she had the room’s attention.
“I’m sorry, Lynn, can you—?” Hawk started.
“They’d roll them in. Divert,” she said.
“Right,” Hawk replied. “And by that you mean?”
She fully lifted her head, straightened her shoulders.
And stated, “People didn’t like Tony. By people, I mean his colleagues. Fellow cops. He knew that but he didn’t care. They didn’t like him because he was by the book. He was a good man. A good man. To his core. He said he was by the book because there was a book for a reason. And it wasn’t to protect the police. It was to protect the people. And he didn’t get it. He honestly did not get it. Because, he said, you become police to protect the people. So the book should be your bible.”
Tony Crowley was known as straitlaced and exactly as she described her husband. He was also known to take that to extremes. This made him unpopular with his coworkers.
But you couldn’t argue what she was saying.
“They were racially motivated and racially profiling,” she declared. “And he saw that they were also targeting women. Mostly fellow officers.”
No one said anything.
So Lynn continued.
“That was what he thought it was. In the beginning, he didn’t know it was bigger. He didn’t know there were dirty cops. He just thought they were bad cops who had no business being on the force. So, whoever these guys are, they convinced others that Tony was the problem. And now, because they think Tony talked to me, they think I’d be the problem if this became a media nightmare because women are coming forward about stuff and Black people are having a moment.”
Mamá’s eyes moved to Hawk.
“A moment?” Hawk asked Lynn.
“Yeah, he said he heard Kevin call it that. Like four hundred years of slavery and lynchings then decades mo
re of every Black parent having to have ‘the talk’ with their kids about what to do if a cop pulled them over isn’t worthy of a moment. When Tony was on the beat, he saw it happening. He could rant about it for hours. ‘That’s not protecting the people,’ he’d say. People of color would look at him in uniform with distrust and it broke his soul. He did what he did to keep them safe, not scare the crap out of them. He worked hard to become a detective and get out of uniform. And he wanted that element out. It isn’t all of them. It isn’t even half. But when the bad ones convince the other ones that you’re not one of them, you don’t stand a chance.”
She shook her head and her voice got small.
“Tony didn’t stand a chance.”
Fuck, Axl felt for her.
It had never been remotely okay, a good cop went down in all of this.
But seeing the aftermath in her, hearing the pride she had in her husband, pride that was deserved.
It was killer.
Hawk gave her a second.
Then he broke it down.
“So he was building a case of cops racially profiling, and he stumbled onto something bigger.”
“And the women,” she stressed, and the way she did made Axl’s neck itch.
“And the women,” Hawk confirmed he heard her, and the way he did that, Axl knew Hawk hadn’t missed her tone.
“Yes, and they killed him for it,” she returned.
“Did he mention any names?” Hawk asked.
“Lance Mueller and Kevin Bogart,” she stated.
Goddamn it.
Two dead men.
Nothing new.
“That’s how I knew about Heidi,” she went on. “Because, a couple of days before he died, he got fidgety. He said something wasn’t adding up. He said there were sex workers involved. He said it might be about skimming or kickbacks. Maybe blackmail. He said he found something out about Lance Mueller, and he thought that was why he moved from the DPD to Englewood PD. But everyone was talking about how Lance and Kevin moved departments because Kevin had so many sexual harassment strikes. But Lance moved first, and Tony said that didn’t jibe, which was part of what he was digging into. And he was finding something. So he told me he thought this was bigger than what he could do on his own and he might have to take it to his higher-ups.”
“Did he take it to his higher-ups?” Ally asked.
Lynn shook her head. “I don’t know. He was dead in a couple of days. And a day after that, I came home, my house was a mess, and there was a message written on my bathroom mirror in soap that told me to keep my mouth shut. My husband’s dead. My kids are asking for Daddy. I notice guys sitting in their cars outside my house. And then the rest begins. I kept my mouth shut.”
“Your house was a mess?” Cisco asked.
“They were searching for something,” Lynn answered.
“Do you know if they found it?” Cisco pressed.
She shook her head.
“He didn’t leave you anything?” Ally pushed it, and she did because it was important. “Notes? Files? Tell you he’d hidden something somewhere?”
“If he did, he didn’t tell me. So if he did, they probably got it,” Lynn replied. “And no, he would talk about it, but only minimally. Mostly, he kept me out of it.”
“The sex workers,” Cisco butted in. “Did he mention any names of sex workers? Or, perhaps, names of the men who ran them?”
She shook her head but then it ticked, and she said, “Maybe someone named Dynamite?”
“Why do you say that?” Hawk quickly pressed.
Lynn turned to Hawk. “Because he was on the phone, and when he got off, I noticed he’d doodled while he was talking. And in the scratching on the notepad, there was one word. ‘Dynamite’ with a bunch of question marks. Outside it being weird, and maybe about some case he was working on, I didn’t think anything of it. And in the end, it might not mean anything.”
From the looks on faces, everyone had the same response to that.
No one knew anyone called Dynamite on the street.
So maybe it was an individual working woman.
No one in that room knew the names of all the ladies of the evening.
Which meant a chat with Knight, another visit with Brandi and everyone hitting up all their informants to find out.
“So how did you know Lance Mueller didn’t do what the bogus suicide note said he was doing with sex workers?” Ally asked. “Did Tony go into specifics about this skimming or blackmail?”
Lynn gave another shake of her head.
“No, he just said Lance Mueller was a lot of things, but he loved his wife and he’d never ‘do that.’ And there was a rumor about that which freaked Tony. Because he said it didn’t jibe. He didn’t get into it, but it was when he was talking about there being sex workers involved. When I heard about the murder-suicide, and what was in the note, that was when I knew what that was. The implication that Lance was taking freebies from working women.”
Now Heidi was looking at her lap.
“And maybe something else,” Lynn continued. “Something about some motorcycle gang or something.”
And … yeah.
Tony had made the connection.
And then he’d been whacked.
But it seemed only Tony knew who he told about this, if he told anyone at all.
Say, if he took it to his superiors, and they were involved, so they made moves to take him out, because the cops on their crew had looked into it, and they knew Tony hadn’t made anything he was doing official.
Or if whoever “they” were caught Tony nosing around, and that was enough to make moves to keep him quiet.
“Do you know who he was talking to on the phone?” Cisco asked.
More head shaking from Lynn.
“He was on the phone a lot. He had a network he was building. He said the evidence has to be there and he can’t be everywhere the evidence was. So he had to rely on people to keep tabs. That’s all he said about it. But I assumed he was talking about people in certain communities, Black and Latino, who could record incidences and report them to him.”
Everyone looked to Mamá.
She also shook her head, which meant it wasn’t her, and she didn’t know who it was.
But the way she looked at Hawk, she was going to find out.
“Most frustrating, though, was trying to get the women in the department to talk to him. He said they thought he’d make things hard for them. They didn’t want to be seen as complaining. Like they couldn’t take it. Tough it out,” Lynn continued.
“But Bogart had sexual harassment complaints lodged against him,” Ally pointed out.
Lynn shook her head. “From women in admin, dispatch. Not officers. Tony saw it happening with the female officers. But none of them would come forward. He thought they’d feel there was safety in numbers. But they just refused to make a big deal out of it.”
“Was it a big deal?” Cisco asked.
Lynn looked to him. “Tony knew what razzing was. He got razzed every day for being the kind of cop he was. And then some. He wouldn’t push it if it was just razzing. In the end, cops are cops. It’s a brotherhood, not a sisterhood. They give each other guff, and sometimes, it can seem mean. It’s a way to blow off steam. Build camaraderie. This was not that.”
For covert purposes, none of the cops on their crew had done any thorough questioning of officers.
Axl had a sense that was probably going to change.
“Lynn,” Hawk said gently, “something like this doodle of Dynamite might mean something. I know this is difficult, and it might not come to you right now. But if you remember anything like that, we’re in this until the end. We’ll follow it to see where it leads.”
“After this, I can’t … ” she looked to Heidi, “we can’t—”
“With your permission, we’re going to have eyes on your houses,” Hawk announced. “All entries, including windows. They will be monitored, and recorded, twenty-four seven. We’ll also give y
ou panic buttons to carry with you. And we’ll install panic buttons in your homes so you can push them and have protection rolling out before you can dial nine-one-one. We’ll do the same with cameras on the day-care center. You won’t have a protective detail. They won’t know any of this is happening. But you will have eyes on you and there will be someone to intervene within minutes if you face a threat.”
Both women looked uncertain.
So Hawk kept going.
“It isn’t just the people in this room who have your back. This team is larger. We’re motivated to see an end to this not only to put a stop to what’s happening in the DPD, but to make certain you two and your families are out from under this threat.”
When they both continued to appear unsure, Hawk gave them more.
“We don’t know who they are, but we know what they want. Now what we need to do is stop them before they get it and disappear. I know I don’t have to tell you that Tony needs justice. And Heidi, whatever your husband did, he didn’t kill his partner. What he did cannot be undone. But that’s what should be known about him. And what should be known about the ones behind this is that they’re dirty, they’re murderers, and it might not be innocent men who took their raps, but they were innocent of those raps. I understand your fear and that it might be difficult to trust people you don’t know. All I can do is assure you that we have significant resources, and they’re at your disposal to keep you safe if you choose to accept them.”
Heidi and Lynn looked at each other.
Then they looked at Hawk.
“Okay,” Lynn said.
“You’ll clear my husband’s name?” Heidi asked.
Hawk nodded, but replied, “Of what he didn’t do. Absolutely.”
Heidi took a beat.
Then she said, “Okay.”
That ended the meeting.
Ally, Mamá and Cisco were about taking care of the women.
Hawk, Boone and Axl moved back out to the Hummer.
Hawk had turned around in the huge drive and had just started them down it when he said, “I wanna know who Dynamite is before we’re down the mountain. And I want to know where to find whoever that is.”
Boone got out his phone.
Axl did too.
Dream Spinner (Dream Team Book 3) Page 37