Back in the main office, he sat in a fairly comfortable chair, holding Mary’s hand as she went through, in more detail than the night before, the case of her stalker-slash-home invader-slash would-be murderer. Anthony sat on her other side and also held her hand. Toby sensed that his woman felt a lot less stressed telling this tale than she had the night before. He also believed that his presence, his attention to her, helped.
For his part, although he tensed, Adam kept his responses polite and professional. His insistence on ensuring he had the names of the officers to whom she first reported the problem spelled correctly told Toby that very likely, some correspondence between the sheriff and the NYPD would be on the immediate horizon.
“I wish you’d come to me sooner, but I understand why you didn’t. I’ll just verify Thorncliffe’s status and have a little chat with the commissioner of the NYPD.”
Mary blinked. “You know the police commissioner?”
“Not personally. But Grandma Kate does, and so do the parents.” He grinned. “We’ll see what we can do about kicking a little New York cop ass. No offense, of course.”
Mary grinned. “Kick away.” He nodded once and then turned his gaze on Toby. “Lieutenant?”
Toby looked over at Anthony, who nodded. Despite the fact that Adam was his cousin, Anthony did know the man better, because most of his interaction over the years had been with the sheriff of Lusty and not a member of his own family. Anthony had said he was fully confident Adam would understand the entire situation.
That would be extraordinary considering, half the time, I don’t understand it myself.
“I left Wyoming and came here because the last case I was on went south. Hundreds of hours of investigative work brought us to a bust that should have been rich and put a serious dent in an extensive criminal operation and was, instead, a bust of another kind.” Toby inhaled deeply then let it go. It was hard to take himself back to that time and place. Having unfolded only months ago, it instead felt like it had been years.
“We’d been working on trying to break a gang-slash-cartel, who call themselves the Red Desert Rats.”
Adam held up one hand. “Seriously? Why the hell did they call themselves that?”
His question, and the look on his face, did something to ease Toby’s tension.
“Um, because the name ‘Hole in the Wall Gang’ was taken?” He shrugged. “There’s an area in south central Wyoming called the Red Desert.” He inhaled and felt steadier, which, he guessed, was the entire purpose of Adam’s interruption.
“Anyway, the Rats, as we call them, deal in the usual—weapons, human trafficking, drugs. You name it, they likely have their hands in it. Over the course of our investigation, we received an anonymous tip that led to a major break. We discovered a warehouse where there was to be a meeting and an exchange of cash and goods. The head honcho and their top client all in one convenient location. We had eyes inside that facility as little as six hours before the raid. It should have been a huge win for our side.
“But when we executed the op, the warehouse was empty. Not so much as a latent scrap of paper was left for us to process.”
“How the hell did that happen? Didn’t your team have the place under constant surveillance?”
“We did. And after we brought in special equipment, we found a tunnel, one that didn’t show in the blueprints but had clearly been in existence for a long time. They’d cleared the entire place out in a matter of a few hours.”
Adam met his gaze and slowly nodded. “You had a leak,” he said.
“No, we didn’t have a leak. We had a bad cop.”
Adam looked pissed. “They did not think it was you?”
Toby thought he might look back on this moment, in years to come, as the point in time where it finally hit him that, even though he was no longer in the state of his birth and his youth, he was nonetheless home, right here, and amid family.
“Fingers were pointed in several directions. The order came down to put a lid on the whole sorry situation. The coverup proved better executed than the op itself, because I don’t believe that, to this day, anyone outside the people involved in the whole debacle know a single thing.”
“So you left because you were disgusted?” Adam asked.
“Partly. I gave the reason for my moving here as wanting to be closer to my grandfather. I left without burning any bridges.”
Adam tilted his head to the side. “Do you want to know what I think, cousin? I think you know who the dirty cop is—or you suspect you do. And you left because knowing isn’t enough. You needed proof, and you didn’t have any.”
Toby sighed. “I feel like you’re painting me a lot more noble than I really am. No, I didn’t have any proof, none that would stand up in court. But I…I don’t know. I thought about going to my captain with what I suspected. But what could I say, really? And I just… The truth is I just didn’t want to ruin a man’s career, not one who’d been on the force more than a quarter-century. One who’d been wounded in the line of duty. Yet I knew I couldn’t stay there.
“So I took the easy way out. I left and came here. But now I have to wonder if my doing that somehow gave my suspicions away. Despite their hokey name, the Rats have a very long reach. Maybe someone found it suspicious that not long after that disaster of an op, I left. Maybe they found me and decided I was a problem they had to take care of.”
“Who did you suspect, Toby? I can’t work handcuffed, you know that. Give me a name, and I promise you I’ll keep it to myself.”
Mary squeezed his hand.
