Page 64 of Dozer

"Stolen." One word. It lands like a shot. "The body's gone. Whoever's behind this didn't just want the evidence you two are carrying. They wanted the primary source removed from play entirely, and they had the resources to take it clean, in federal custody, past a full security detail."

I don't say anything. We thought they just wanted whatever Kenzi found. Turns out, they were buying their time. I've built the entire mission around one core fact: protect the body and evidence, protect Kenzi, get to D.C. intact. Now half that equation has been erased by people who can reach into federal custody and take what they want.

"How," I say finally. "How does someone hit us that clean?"

"That's the question I don't have an answer to yet." Hunter pauses. "Which means the leak is deeper than we thought. The phone I’m on isn’t my normal one, I had Ruby forward my calls to a new burner that only she and I have access to. We’ve swept headquarters for bugs and I’ve changed out everything. I’m working from a new secured location. Again, only Ruby and I have the details. I’m sending a small team for you, who we know and trust with our lives. Be careful. We don’t know who is watching."

I close my eyes for half a second. "Understood."

"Twenty minutes."

"Copy."

I hang up. For a moment, I keep my hand on the receiver. Kenzi doesn't ask what happened. She doesn't have to. She's watching my face, reading me the way she reads everything.

"What?"

"The body."

Her expression changes. "They took the body?"

"Six-minute operation. Gone."

"How?"

I almost smile at the echo of my own question to Hunter, except there is nothing remotely funny about it. "Don't know yet. It means whoever's protecting this reaches high up."

She looks away. Her shoulders tighten. I know that look now. She's rebuilding the entire problem from the ground up and processing it.

"Then the mission failed."

The words hit harder than I expect. I've never heard defeat in her voice before. But it's there now.

"That's the whole reason I came on board," she says. "The whole reason Reyes died. To get that body to D.C. intact. And now it's gone, and I don't know what we're even protecting anymore."

"We're protecting the truth and the evidence in that case."

Even as I say it, I feel the hollow place underneath the words. Because the truth was also in the body, the body was the hard evidence of murder.

"The truth was in the body," she says. "The forensic evidence, the physical proof of murder."

"You still have the samples."

"Some of them." Her voice tightens. "Partial. Not the full picture."

She presses the heels of her hands against her eyes. I know what that gesture costs her. I've seen her angry. I've seen her afraid. I've seen her exhausted. This is different. This is grief wearing frustration because grief is apparently still too personal to admit to.

"We came this far," she says quietly. "We lost Reyes. We lost the safe house. We lost almost everything we had. And now the one thing all of it was supposed to protect is just gone."

I look down at the pavement. For the first time since this started, I let myself think about the part I've been avoiding. I failed. Not because I made the decision that got the convoy hit. Not because I had access to the route. Not because there was anything I could have realistically done from where we'd been. But my job is to protect things. People. Assets. Missions. And the body was gone. I don’t know how I could have protected it if it wasn’t with me, but that is beyond the point.

"I should have insisted on running the primary custody myself," I say. “I should have taken the body. Splitting up shouldn’t have been an option.”

Kenzi's head comes up. "You couldn't be in two places."

"I could've made it my job to protect both at once."

"Dozer." I don't look at her. "Dozer." Her voice is sharper this time. I finally turn. She's looking directly at me. "This isn't on you. We split up the evidence for this very reason. Had we been with the body, they could have gotten both. It’s not on you."