The Line of Duty

by Nichole Severn

  “No.” He studied the first casing in the glow of his flashlight. “In my experience, cops make the best criminals.” Shifting his gaze to her, he straightened and pocketed the evidence bag. He directed his flashlight to the second piece of evidence. “They know how to clean up after themselves, which means someone could’ve left this beauty behind on purpose, or the shooter has gotten too comfortable with their overloaded sense of power and figured no one would be able to connect the evidence to them if it was recovered.”

  Warning screamed through her.

  “But Grillo knew you hadn’t dropped the case. He knew you’d come back to this scene if he didn’t stop you.” Shea spun on her heel and swung her weapon high as movement registered from the door they’d broken through. She backed up a few steps, instinctively maneuvering herself in front of Vincent. Her shoulder brushed against his arm, and she lowered her voice. “The casing could be a distraction to keep us here.”

  “It’s a trap.” Vincent wrapped his uninjured hand around her arm and tugged her back. Her foot collided with a metal bracket, the scrape of steel and concrete loud in her ears. Exactly what the people who’d followed them would need to locate them. Staticed voices echoed through the shadows. “Follow me. Stay low and use me as a shield if you have to.”

  “We can’t leave the other casing here. It’s evidence.” She reached for the shell.

  Vincent pulled her into his chest and shoved her forward before she had a chance to collect the evidence. “We don’t have time.”

  She switched off her flashlight to conceal their position, gripping the gun in her hand tighter. Before her eyes had a chance to adjust, Vincent was pulling her deeper into the warehouse, her hand enveloped in his. Shouts pierced the sound of her shallow breathing, then a gunshot overhead. She ducked low while trying to keep pace with Vincent, heart in her throat as they ran through the maze of debris and structural damage. How could’ve Grillo’s organization known they were here?

  Glass shattered to her right a split second before a bright burst of light and an ear-piercing boom threw her off her balance, but Vincent fought to keep her upright and moving. “I’ve got you. Just keep going.”

  Smoke filled her lungs as they raced to the back of the property. There were more flashes, more explosions from behind. The muscles in her legs burned. They couldn’t go back to the SUV. If the same people who’d sent Grillo had been surveilling the building all this time, there was a chance they’d already flagged the plates and were waiting to follow her and Vincent back to the safe house. They couldn’t risk it. They’d have to escape on foot.

  Vincent released her hand, then lowered his uninjured shoulder as he rammed into the only door at the back of the warehouse. But it wouldn’t budge. He tried again. Nothing.

  The door had to have been padlocked, like the one they’d come through at the front. The voices were getting closer, the smoke from the stun grenades thinning. Shea raised her weapon, bracing one leg slightly behind her as she’d been trained, her weight on the balls of her feet. The windows back here were boarded, nothing but burnt cinder blocks surrounding them. There was nowhere else to go, and she wasn’t sure she had enough rounds to take on another team of corrupt cops. Her breath rushed out of her. “Vincent...”

  The door swung open, and Shea twisted around to follow him out. Only someone was blocking the door. Two shots. Three. The bullets ripped past her left arm almost in slow motion before embedding into two gunmen who’d broken through the layer of smoke. They both went down, and Shea turned to confront the woman with the gun.

  “Hello, Vincent.” Long blonde hair draped over the woman’s shoulder as she lowered her weapon to reveal a stark face and bright blue eyes. “I told you this case would get you killed.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Officer Shea Ramsey, Anchorage PD, meet Lieutenant Lara Richards, my former commanding officer.” The last person he’d ever expected to see. Vincent pressed his back against the cold countertop in the kitchen of their safe house. They’d barely made it out of the warehouse alive. Wouldn’t have if it weren’t for Lara, but he didn’t believe in coincidence. Grillo’s people hadn’t been the only ones watching that location.

  “Nice to meet you.” Shea stretched out her hand with a nod, shook Lara’s hand and stepped back. “Not sure we would’ve gotten out of the building if it weren’t for you.”

  Lara’s bright blue gaze studied Shea. At well over five foot ten, with lengthy, model-like features, perfectly straight teeth and lithe movements, Lara Richards had done their forensics unit proud for the nine years she’d been his commanding officer. With her help, his team had an 85 percent closure rate. They’d closed so many cases—new and cold—she was being considered for a captain’s position at the Eleventh at the time he’d left the squad. Vincent had even considered taking her job once she made the move. Until she’d shut down his theory IAB Officer Ashton Walter’s murderer had come from law enforcement. She’d warned him to drop the case, said his personal investigation into who shot Officer Walter would get him killed. She hadn’t been wrong. After the fire, Sullivan Bishop had gotten him out of town so fast, he didn’t have the chance to prove his theory to her. Now here she stood. “Can’t say I was there by coincidence. I’ve been watching one of the officers who was at the warehouse tonight for the past few months. Ever since I heard about what happened to Vincent here the night of the fire.” Lara turned her attention back to him. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

  Wasn’t the first time someone had said those words to him. “What are you doing here, Lara?”

  “For starters, I wanted to apologize. I should’ve listened when you originally came to me about the four unsolved homicides over a year ago. If I had, maybe I wouldn’t have lost three of my best investigators that night.” She pulled her shoulders back, the lighting from overhead shifting across her leather jacket. She lowered her chin toward her chest, eyes downcast to the purse she’d set on the counter. Pulling a tablet from within, she swiped her fingers across the screen, then handed it to him. “But maybe I can make up for that now.”

  “What’s this?” He scanned the documents on the screen. Case files. The four files he’d been assigned to investigate. Shea stepped into his side, her light scent in his lungs, and just like that, he fell into the memories of her body wrapped around his between the sheets. She’d trusted him for those short few hours, given him a part of herself she hadn’t given to anyone since her divorce. He’d never forget that, never forget the glimpse of unfiltered happiness he’d witnessed as they memorized every inch of each other’s bodies. He’d never seen anything more beautiful than when she’d smiled at him afterward. His back tingled in remembrance, the feel of her nails tracing patterns across his scars fresh. Unlike the other women he’d been with, she hadn’t turned away from him in disgust or refused to look at the damage. If anything, she’d been drawn to it, as though she understood the physical and mental pain he carried.

  “After you disappeared, I went back through your files and dug these out of cold cases. In your notes, you’d reported all four scenes had been cleaned by a professional, maybe someone in law enforcement or with forensic training.” Lara crossed her arms over her chest, sinking in on herself as she leaned against the countertop. “You couldn’t find any connection between the victims other than the first two, an investigative reporter for a local paper and her assistant.” Her heels clicked on the tile as she rounded the island, and she swiped her finger across the tablet’s screen in his hand. “The third victim was a public defender, and the last a rookie barely out of the academy more than two months. All four victims were shot with a .38 caliber, matching most of the NYPD’s service weapons, and I think they were all killed for trying to uncover the truth.”

  “That’s the same caliber of the casing we recovered from the warehouse,” Shea said. “So you know there’s a group of corrupt cops growing within the NYPD?”

 
“Yes.” The weight of Lara’s gaze pinned him in place, and she swiped her finger across the screen once more. “And I have proof. Like I said, I’ve been following one of the men from the warehouse for a few months now. I was able to clone his phone to see who he’s been contacting, surveil his email, access his photos, everything. It seems the NYPD is aware of the group’s existence and what they’ve been doing, but it’s impossible to identify members of the organization or bring charges against them without raising suspicion. Any threat to the organization, like these four victims, is dealt with in-house. And they’re good at what they do.”

  Vincent understood that better than most. “Brass has to be involved then. There’s no way an entity like this could cover their asses so thoroughly unless they had upper management running the show.”

  “You might be right,” Lara said.

  “What have you been able to recover from the officer you’re following?” Shea took the tablet, long fingers scrolling through the evidence his former commanding officer had gathered. “Anything we can use to expose the organization and what they’ve been doing?”

  Lara straightened. “As far as I can tell, he’s low on the totem pole, more like an errand boy. He and a partner hit up small-business owners for protection money, deliver and collect shipments, surveil and photograph targets. Guys like this follow orders, even the ones that involve executions like your four victims here.” She stopped Shea from swiping to the next screen. “And those orders? They’re all coming from one source. Officer Charlie Grillo.”

  Shea’s soft exhale filled his ears, and it took everything in him not to bring her into his arms. Looking at the face of the man who’d threatened to kill her son, who’d almost killed her, was bound to cause a reaction, but now wasn’t the time to forget why they’d come to New York in the first place. “Grillo came after us in Alaska. He brought down our plane, tried to kill us because Vincent ran the fingerprint he recovered from the death scene of that IAB officer through IAFIS. Ashton Walter.”

  “You think Walter was another victim who got too close?” Lara asked.

  “I went to IAB after you refused to run my theory up the chain of command, and Grillo’s people killed him for it. Then the bastards tried to kill me.” Dread pooled at the bottom of his stomach as he studied the SOB’s service record. Vincent had seen the original homicide crime scene photos before, but now, knowing who might be behind the killings, his blood pressure spiked higher. He could’ve stopped this, could’ve done something to keep these dirty cops from endangering innocent lives sooner. Like their pilot, like Shea and her family, his team. Vincent tried to keep the emotion out of his voice. It’d be easy to pin everything that’d happened up until now on Officer Charlie Grillo. There was just one problem. “Grillo was a beat cop. Hard to believe he had the power to keep an entire organization in line on his own, let alone convince his superiors to look the other way. Someone else—someone with a lot more authority—has to be pulling the strings now that Grillo’s dead.”

  “If there is, I haven’t been able to prove it.” Lara shifted her weight between both feet, her expression never changing. “The two men who came after you tonight have been sitting on that building for a while. My guess is they were waiting for you. There’s a chance they don’t know their boss is dead yet. Could’ve just been following orders.”

  Or the real head of the organization was waiting to finish the job Grillo had started.

  “You said you recovered a casing from the warehouse where I found you?” Lara asked.

  “Haven’t gotten the chance to run testing on it yet, but it could be exactly what we need to bring these bastards down.” Vincent wrapped his hand around the warped bullet casing recovered from the warehouse inside his jacket pocket. He’d left his forensic kit back at the scene once the bullets started flying, along with the second piece of evidence, but his instincts said this casing was more important than being simply used as a distraction. He needed to get it analyzed. “But without access to the NYPD’s labs, I’ll need my team to run the tests, and that’s only going to put the rest of them in danger.”

  “I can get you access,” Lara said.

  Shea’s sharp gasp hiked his pulse higher, and she closed the distance between herself and the counter, shoving the tablet at Lara, and every cell in his body woke with battle-ready tension. “This photo... Where did you get this photo?”

  “I don’t...” His former commanding officer’s mouth parted slightly, obviously taken aback by Shea’s panic. “I don’t know. Maybe from the officer’s phone I’ve been surveilling. I didn’t see how it was relevant to the case, so I... I buried it in the back of the file until I had more time to identify the subjects.”

  Vincent spun the tablet toward him. The photo had been taken with a phone, nothing fancy, but clear enough for him to recognize Anthony Harris, Bennett Spencer, Logan Ramsey, Logan’s new wife and Shea’s son. Wells. “We can identify them.” He shifted his attention to Shea, watched the color drain from her face. She stumbled back a few steps, but he caught her in time before she hit the opposite counter. Bringing her into his side for stability, he leveled his attention on Lara. “The location, too.”

  Damn it. The second safe house had been compromised. Shea’s family was still in danger. He tapped the information button on the screen to check the time the surveillance photo had been taken, but it didn’t look like the image had originated from the officer’s phone. It’d been sent to him. Three hours ago. Right as he and Shea had arrived on scene at the warehouse. Gravity pulled at him. Shea had been right. Grillo’s people had been counting on him to return to the warehouse, left the fresh bullet casing as a distraction to keep them occupied. So the bastards could follow through with their threat.

  “Call them.” Shea’s voice shook as she stared up at him. “Now.”

  “What’s going on?” Lara studied the photo, confusion evident in her expression. “Who are these people?”

  Vincent didn’t answer, punching in Anthony’s cell number, and brought the phone to his ear. One ring. Two. Before voice mail. Desperation climbed across his chest, into his wound. He dialed Bennett’s phone next.

  No answer.

  * * *

  THE FOG WAS BACK.

  Her pulse thudded loud behind her ears, the floor pulling at every muscle she owned. Everything seemed to move in slow motion. Three hours. Three hours since they’d gotten confirmation the safe house where Wells had been secured had been raided. Three hours her son had been out there, alone, in the hands of killers.

  Blackhawk operatives moved around the house, relaying orders, taking both Logan’s and his new wife’s statements as they patched head lacerations and checked their cognitive reflexes, more men and women trying to get a location for her son. Light from a laptop screen illuminated Elizabeth Dawson’s face as she reviewed hours upon hours of traffic camera footage. Elliot Dunham, Blackhawk’s private investigator, had never looked more serious than he did right then huddled over Elizabeth’s shoulder. Sullivan Bishop checked and inventoried weapons as he barked orders at the rest of his team. Even Kate Monroe, the psychologist, had caught the next plane to New York, her green gaze steady on Shea, but she wasn’t in the mood to talk about her feelings, about what was going through her head. She wanted her son back. Anthony Harris, the operative assigned to protect Wells, was still missing, along with Bennett Spencer. The entire Blackhawk Security team had rallied with a single call from Vincent.

  Shea didn’t recognize the other agents. Didn’t care. The safe house had been secure. How had Grillo’s organization found her son? Her ears rang, and she pressed the tips of her fingers to her temples in an attempt to drown out the horde of bees buzzing in her head. Wells was supposed to be safe.

  “Shea.” Vincent crouched in front of her. His warm hands slid up her thighs for balance, but she couldn’t focus on him. Not even with him this close. “I need to know what’s going through
your head right now.”

  “I should’ve been there.” The words left her mouth without any inflection, a mere ghost of the numbness clawing through her insides, and she winced against the effect. Sliding her gaze to his, she felt as though she were standing on the edge of the cliff. All it would take was one tug, one slip, and she’d lose everything all over again. “I should’ve protected him.”

  He shook his head as though to tell her there was nothing she could’ve done. “We had two of our best operatives assigned to protect him—”

  “Then how the hell did this happen?” Anger exploded through her, sharp, hot and unfiltered. Shea pushed to her feet, forcing him to back up a few steps, and slammed her hands against his chest. Then again. Heat seared from her scalp down to her toes, and she gave in to it because it was better than feeling nothing at all. “How did they get to my son, Vincent? I want to know!”

  He didn’t answer. Only took everything she had to give and more, absorbing each hit as tears burned in her eyes. Wrapping his arms around her, he fought to contain her, to comfort her, but it wasn’t any use. She’d failed her son. Again. Vincent tugged her into his chest as the sobs tore through her until she stilled, her ear pressed against his heart. He tangled his hands down through her hair, his cheek pressing against the crown of her head. “Whoever’s behind this—whoever sent Grillo—they’re trained just as well as we are, they’re armed, and they’ve already proven the law doesn’t apply to them.” Silence descended in the house, but she didn’t dare open her eyes, didn’t want to see how many people were watching them. “But I told you Blackhawk protects their own, no matter what it takes, and we’re going to get your son back.”

  She forced her eyes open, nails biting into his chest.

  Every single operative in the room stood around them, frozen. Then the ice she’d felt for the team she’d resented for so long started to melt. Elizabeth stood up from her laptop and nodded. Elliot Dunham half saluted with that sarcastic grin she’d come to hate over the course of the past two years. Vincent’s former commanding officer took position beside Elizabeth, and Kate Monroe smiled as Sullivan Bishop approached with a gun in his hand. Sea-blue eyes steadied on her. “When someone attacks one of us, they attack all of us, Officer Ramsey. And we’re not going to let them get away with it. You’re not alone in this fight.” He studied the team behind him, then turned back to her. “You never will be again.”