The Wolf (Black Dagger Brotherhood - Prison Camp 2)

“It true you’re retiring, Detective?”

José looked across at the kid he’d been partnered with for the last six months—who was actually thirty and had a wife and two children at home. Treyvon Abscott was tenacious, a little bit arrogant, and smart as hell. With his perfectly tended fade and his navy blue departmental perma-fleece, he looked more like a Marine who was off duty than any kind of donut-munching homicide detective—

“Yup, I’m calling it a wrap on this job.” José snuck a hand under his blazer to pull his pants up over his dad-bod belly. “Sixty-four days left. Not that I’m counting.”

Trey walked over to the sofa and stared down at the blood-stained cushions. “Hate to see you go, sir. We’re going to miss you.”

In spite of the guy’s casual khakis-and-fleece action, which was worn no matter the season, no matter the weather, there was a formality to Treyvon that José approved of. Then again, when you felt tired in your bones and weary in your soul, you appreciated when someone two decades younger than you paid you a little respect.

One newbie last year had tried to call him Joey, for fuck’s sake. He’d nearly slapped that nickname right out the guy’s mouth.

“Nice of you to say that.” José closed his notebook and ran his fore-finger over the cover. To think he wasn’t going to have to buy another of these spiral-bound steno numbers. “So I think we’re done here, Trey.”

“Yeah, not much to go on.”

“Nope.”

And yet both of them hesitated to leave. Which was the sign of a good detective, wasn’t it. Until you got your answers, you couldn’t let anything go.

Maybe that was why he was so tired after all this time. Too many questions with blank spaces after them, the catalogue of what he considered failures weighing him down. He was praying that retirement would get him not only a gold-plated watch from the department, but a cord-cutting from all that shit, a freedom, from everything that haunted him.

Dead children. Brutalized women. Innocent men who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Missing partners, who disappeared without a trace.

“Maybe the bullet will turn up something,” Trey said.

“Maybe.” But José didn’t think so. This was all very professional—and not as in the shooter’s gun skills, but the drug trade context of the murder. “Well, I’m gonna head back and type up the report.”

Trey frowned. “You sure? I can do it.”

“It’s my night to cover the desk. Besides, Quiana will appreciate the extra set of hands with that new baby of yours. How late were you out on scene last night?”

“I don’t remember.”

“And here comes the next generation,” José muttered. Then, a little more loudly, he felt compelled to add, “Be careful. This job can not only eat you alive, but your whole family.”

“You’re still happily married.”

“I’m lucky. I hope the same for you.”

“My wife understands me.”

“Just make sure you take time to understand her. That’s the tricky part.”

“Yes, sir.” Trey looked over at the worktable. “Listen, if you hear anything about that missing undercover officer, will you let me know?”

José frowned. “We have someone missing?”

“That’s the rumor.”

“Who?”

There was a pause and the younger man put his hands in his pants pockets, a physical parallel for whatever he was keeping to himself. “It’s a female. I don’t know. I just heard something. Maybe it’s a rumor.”

No, José thought. There were no rumors about that kind of stuff—and there was a protocol for all undercover assets. They had to check in every twelve hours to their administrative contact with a code when they were actively working a case.

“That fucking Mozart,” he muttered, thinking of the dealer who had taken over the city. “What else do you know? Did she miss her check-in—”

“I got nothing else.”

So that was why the detective didn’t want to go home. Trey was waiting for the other shoe to drop about the absent officer, and José wasn’t about to badger the guy into revealing his sources. He could guess how the intel drop had happened. The identities of undercover personnel were need-to-know only, but clearly the administrative contact was reaching out to homicide—and undoubtedly had some kind of personal relationship with Trey that made that easier.

José had had his own share of those phone calls over the years, and the fact that he didn’t get this one was yet another sign things were moving on without him already.

“If anything comes in,” he said, “I’ll let you know immediately.”

“Thanks.”

As their eyes met, they both knew what the “anything” was: A body. They also both knew that sometimes you didn’t even get that. There were plenty of missing people who stayed gone, and plenty of cases that were still cold. Take this scene. Yeah, they had a corpse, but you could bet your Dunkin’ that the ballistics on the bullet inside the guy wasn’t going to link to anything. And there was so much contamination here at the scene, they weren’t going to find many prints that were useful or fibers that meant anything.