“I’m a criminal lawyer, not a private investigator. I only represent clients who are innocent. My fiancé is the county medical examiner, and two of my closest friends here are police officers. I try to work with the good guys.”
Isabel rubbed her hand along her neck like she was having trouble swallowing or breathing. Maybe both. “The good guys.”
The way she echoed my words made me feel like I was missing something again.
She tried to step backward and bumped into the counter. “Your association with the police is one of the reasons I was afraid you were helping my husband. The police aren’t always the good guys.”
The sadness in her voice made my throat ache.
Her husband couldn’t be…but there wasn’t any other option that made sense. Her husband was either a law enforcement officer or he worked with them.
I wanted to defend the police. Most police officers were the good guys. Most of them wanted to protect the innocent and serve their community. They were willing to put their own lives in danger to do so. They worked long hours and faced a lot of stress and situations that would break the average person.
But even I couldn’t argue they were all good. Look at former Chief Wilson and Chief McTavish’s ongoing corruption investigation.
Oh no. My vision went fuzzy, and I felt a bit like I might throw up.
How could I have missed it? There was one other case, if you could call it that, that Mark, Troy, and Chief McTavish might have had in common—the ongoing investigation into corruption within the Fair Haven PD.
I forced myself to take a few deep breaths, and my vision slowly cleared. Isabel gave me a look that said she didn’t know whether to get me a paper bag to breathe in to or tie me up and drop me somewhere so she could make her escape.
“You’re right,” I said. “Not all police are the good guys, and I think I just figured out why an officer I knew was murdered and my fiancé was framed for it.”
15
“Sit down over there”—Isabel pointed at a thick pile of blankets that had to be her bed—“before you fall over.”
I obeyed because at least she wasn’t pointing a knife at me anymore, and it wasn’t like I could do anything about what I’d figured out, considering it was the middle of the night. “Does this mean you believe me that your husband didn’t send me?”
“It means that if you crack your head on my counter, I’ll have to call 911, and there’ll be no way my husband won’t find me then.” I thought I caught a hint of a smile.
Isabel put a pot onto a burner, spooned in sugar and cocoa powder, and added milk.
I’d broken into her truck in the middle of the night, thinking she was a murderer, and she was making me homemade cocoa. She was either the nicest person I’d ever met or she’d spent so much time trying to soothe an abuser that she couldn’t break the caregiver habit. It might be a bit of both.
Truth was, I didn’t care why she was doing it. It felt like what I imagined it would have been like if I had an older sister. I would have sneaked into her room late at night and talked through my problems with her in the way that I never could with my parents.
She handed me a mug and settled in next to me. She tented her knees up and rested her mug on top in a way that said she expected to have me tell her what was going on.
I explained my theory. “Now I don’t know what to do. Normally, if I thought I’d found something relating to the corruption investigation, I’d take it to Chief McTavish.”
Isabel wrapped her hands around her mug. Given the warmth in the truck, it couldn’t be because her fingers were cold. Whatever she planned to say must make her uncomfortable.
“You can’t go to the police,” she said. “Whoever’s behind this made sure of that.”
My first reaction was to say that was her natural distrust of the police talking, but she was right. By implicating Mark in Troy’s murder and making Chief McTavish vanish, they’d ensured I didn’t have an official channel to turn to. It was brilliant, really. They’d cast blame and protected themselves all at the same time.
The only people left in the Fair Haven police department were strangers who wouldn’t believe me because they thought I might have aided and abetted Mark, and officers we couldn’t trust because they might be part of the web of corruption.
I took a long, slow sip of the hot cocoa. It coated my tongue in chocolate sweetness in a way that hot chocolate from a package couldn’t, and the warmth spread far beyond my stomach. It might feel a bit hopeless right now, but I wasn’t completely alone. “I guess the place to start is to figure out if there’s anyone we can trust.”
Isabel glanced at me sidelong. “That’s always the place to start.”
I’d have told her she could trust me if I thought it’d make any difference, but I got the impression that she placed more weight on actions than on words.
“Is there anyone other than your missing chief who would know who he’d already cleared and who he suspected?” Isabel asked.
Mark might, but it wasn’t likely. He’d told me Chief McTavish wanted to keep him in the dark about his conclusions so that Mark could approach the files and old autopsies McTavish handed him without bias. I knew McTavish—at least early on—hadn’t confided in Erik. Because Erik was second-in-command after former Chief Wilson, he’d been one of the primary suspects initially.
I shook my head.
Isabel swirled her mug around like she was thinking, but it could simply be that she was trying to mix any sugar and cocoa powder that’d separated from the milk back together. My brain was still working overtime trying to figure her out.
“I wish there was something more I could do to help.” Her voice had a tone that begged me to understand everything she wanted to say but couldn’t. “But I can’t be around the police.”
“It’s okay. It’s not like you could find out something I couldn’t anyway.”
She opened her mouth, closed it again, and got to her feet. She drained her cup and placed it in the sink. “Are you feeling steady enough to drive now?”
I had to be. I couldn’t continue to camp out on the floor of Isabel’s food truck all night. I should get some sleep. Mark would be out on bail tomorrow. He could write down all the cases he remembered that he’d flagged as suspicious for Chief McTavish. Maybe if we pooled our brains with Elise, Erik, and Anderson, we could spot a link between them.
It was a long shot. If it were an obvious link, Chief McTavish would have closed the case long ago. But it was what we could do, and Elise and Mark had the advantage of having grown up in Fair Haven. That alone might provide them with the missing link when they looked at it all together.
I handed my mug up to Isabel and got to my feet, trying not to step on her bed.
I glanced down at the rumpled bedding. I had enough troubles of my own to worry about, but I couldn’t simply walk away and leave her here. “I have big dogs.”
Isabel gave me a look that said that before she’d had it beaten out of her—by life, her husband, or both—she’d had a strong sense of humor and the ability to see the absurdity around her and laugh. “Good for you.”
