Page 65 of In the Dark of the Past

“You’re thinking psychological pressure.”

“I’m thinking pressure points. Every hierarchy has one. And breaking it is easier than tearing down the whole building.” I inhaled through my nose. Steadied. Refocused.

“Okay,” I said, lifting my chin. “Let’s chart affiliations. Who has access to the Fund? Who benefits? Who signs off on disbursements? Who closes complaints without documentation?”

Finn opened a drawer one-handed and pulled out a thick binder. “The city’s budget records for the past six years. Public-facing versions, anyway. I requested them after the library permit incident last spring.”

“Before I came home,” I realized.

He froze for half a second. “Yeah. Before that.”

“So, were you guys already investigating corruption?”

“Discrepancies,” he corrected. “We didn’t have proof of a pattern. It was just things that came up in the last couple of cases we took on that niggled at something in my cop brain.”

“Well,” I said quietly, “I’m thinking we have more that points to that now than ever.”

We dove in. Minutes folded into an hour. Each line item opened into three more. Each connection exposed a fault line. We traded calls with the other members of the team, all of us keeping each other updated.

I was leaning over the desk, flipping through Kline’s staff emails as Finn went through all the recent physical evidence from the woods, when he suddenly stilled.

“What?” I whispered.

He didn’t speak, just walked over with a bagged photo that he slid across the desk. “It’s the Polaroid from the drop box in the woods,” he said.

It was that one of my inner office door. My nameplate. The date.

Now that the fear haze of knowing I was at the center of things had burned off, something struck me.

“Can we zoom on this at all?” I asked.

“Yeah, they have digital photos of everything we found. Give me a second.” Finn pulled up the digital file on his monitor and enlarged it.

I leaned in. There. In the reflection of the glass pane to the left of the door was a silhouette. Someone standing far back in the hallway, where I hadn’t looked before on the physical copy. It didn’t look tall enough to be Grant, but it wasn’t heavy enough to be Kline, either.

Finn leaned closer, likely thinking the same things I was.

My stomach dropped. “This isn’t intimidation. They had no way of knowing I would ever see this photo. That anyone but those it was meant for would see it. This is a directive.”

“No,” Finn said grimly. “It’s surveillance.”

A slow, icy dread slid through me.

“Seven active members,” Finn murmured, pacing as he roughly ran a hand through his hair. “Fucking hell. What if one of them is embedded in this goddamn department?” He shot a look at his closed door where the sheriff’s department buzzed behind the wood.

My blood went cold. “You trust Linton,” I said automatically.

He nodded. “I do.”

“Torres?”

“He’d rather eat gravel than join a conspiracy.”

“Dispatch? Doyle? Morrigan? Myra?”

“Myra?” Finn snorted. “She’d expose them before lunch.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Then who⁠—?”