Carved in Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page A

a boyish grin. “Please tell me you said no,” he said in a conspiratorial tone she’d watched loosen the tongue of dozens of witnesses.
    “I was trying to keep an open mind but now it’s a definite hell no ,” she said, making the lie up as she went along. Hopefully all he’d seen was the picture and none of the dates attached to the arrests. Pretending to get busy with paperwork, she continued to chew on the problem. She needed probable cause to request Michael’s service records. No way could she get hold of them without raising questions. Another dead end.
    She was suddenly angry. In the space of a few hours, her carefully constructed life had spun out of control, and the lies she’d built it on were on the verge of being exposed. Taking a deep breath, she weighed her options.
    First things first, she had to figure out where Michael had been for the past fifteen years. Getting his service records through the department was out of the question, but there might be another way. Nickels, her old SWAT teammate, had been in the military, maybe he could help—
    “What’s goin’ on with you? You’re jumpy as hell.” Strickland took a seat at his landfill of a desk and kicked his feet up on its top. Papers and wrappers he didn’t seem to notice hit the floor.
    “Nothing is going on. You gonna pick that up?”
    “I need to start sneaking you decaf,” he said, barely giving the clutter a passing glance. She laughed and rubbed a hand over her face.
    “Bringing me caffeine is the only thing keeping you alive at this point.” She stood, needing to get away from Strickland until she could get herself together. He was a rockstar interrogator in a rumpled suit and a twenty-dollar haircut. His Average Joe persona disguised a brain that could pick you apart without you even knowing it.
    Her desk phone rang, and she practically dove for it.
    “This is Vaughn,” she said, but her relief was short-lived. She could practically feel the color drain from her face. It was her SWAT sergeant, Richards. He wanted to see her. Now .
    Dropping the phone in its cradle, she turned away from her desk.
    “Where you going?” Strickland got a good look at her face and sat up, his feet pulling a styrofoam take-out box off the desk on their way down.
    “Richards wants to see me before the briefing.”
    “You think it’s about what happened with Sanford?” Strickland looked worried.
    She thought about Officer Steve Sanford. It was a safe bet that whatever Richards wanted to talk to her about involved him.
    A little over a month ago, her SWAT unit participated in a drug raid on a house Narco had under surveillance for months. Once the door came down, bangers and crackheads scattered like roaches. Sanford charged in, chasing his quarry into a bedroom. He grabbed the kid’s ankle while he was trying to shimmy his way under a mattress and pulled him out of hiding. When Sanford dragged him clear of the bed, the kid came up with a 9mm and got off a couple rounds.
    Hit in the chest, Sanford was knocked on his back. The kid must’ve realized he was wearing Kevlar because he stepped up on him, intent on finishing him off with a round to the head.
    She saw it all happen, kneeling in the doorway, handcuffing her catch. Sure she wouldn’t be fast enough to stop what she knew was about to happen, she pulled her gun and fired. The kid went down, dead before he even hit the floor.
    She knew Richards’s call was about what happened with Sanford, but it was more than that; it was about what she’d failed to do as a result. Psych services were mandatory for officer-involved shootings within thirty days of the incident. The raid had happened five weeks ago, and she’d failed to attend her sessions.
    “I don’t know. He didn’t say.” She evaded his question, not wanting to admit she was more than likely going to be taken off active duty. She left her desk and headed downstairs, in the general direction of Richards’s office.
    Finding Nickels