“That’s amazing.” Sera swallowed hard around the distinct tightening of her throat, the prick of tears behind her eyes hot as they spilled over.
Kerrigan came to stand with her, her support absolute as she wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “Now fill me in on what I missed.”
Gavin caught everyone up on all they’d discussed.
“Weaponizing our fear,” Wyatt practically spit out the words.
“And preying on cops’ families,” Arlo added.
Although the tears still threatened, the renewed round of anger as Wyatt, Arlo and Kerrigan got on the same page as she and Gavin went a long way toward reigniting her own fury. And with it, Sera considered all she knew from her job. All the cases she’d prosecuted and all that she understood about the inner workings of the city she’d served for nearly a decade.
At the heart of it all was data.
Human beings were the victims, but they were targeted via databases. And someone with access and motive.
“Everything since Darius was shot has been focused on the gunman. We need to look at the data. The forensics on the guns. Who would have access to HR data. And how to trace any comings and goings at Hell Gate.”
Gavin added, “It’s like the work for the task force. What are the systems in place? Where are the gaps? And if you can find those, you can find the points of risk.”
“I can clearly see all you’ve laid out,” Kerrigan started in, “But I’m not making the connection with the gun recovery. Where’s anyone getting the details on our work? It’s not like they can get up there and see what we’re doing.”
“Cameras?” Arlo asked.
Kerrigan shook her head. “That bridge isn’t easily navigated. It’s not a pedestrian bridge. It just carries the Amtrak trains.”
“Via electrified train lines,” Wyatt added. “You’d have to be a fool to try to walk up there. Even if you knew how to skip the lines, trains run through there all day.”
“You can bike and run the Hell Gate Pathway to Randall’s Island,” Kerrigan said, considering. “If someone found a way there, they could try watching what’s going on. It’s been a while since I’ve been up there, but I don’t remember a lot of easy water access, though, to get a good lookout.”
“The guns weren’t directly under the bridge, though.” Sera brought up a clear picture in her mind of the area where the Harbor team had brought up the cache. “It was a bit of a ways down the shoreline, on the Manhattan side just below Randall’s Island. Maybe they’re not watching from the bridge at all.”
“All true.” Kerrigan nodded.
“Very true, Kerr,” Wyatt said. “Remember how bad the water was? We’d scoped several quadrants north and south from the dump point off the RFK. It was sheer dumb luck we found that cache. And we only found it because the water was running so hard, we had to expand our search.”
“I’m not sure your work was dumb luck, Wyatt.” Gavin was quick to support his friend and dive partner.
“But it sort of was,” Wyatt pressed. “We’d never have been that close to the shoreline if we’d found what we were diving for. Those guns could have stayed there for who knows how much longer, and we’d never have been the wiser.”
“But you did find it. And someone’s awfully upset their dumping ground is gone.” Arlo three-pointed his empty coffee cup into a nearby trash can. “So now we need to figure out who.”
Sera might not have a physical component to her job, nor was she trained in cop work, but she did know research. Forward, backward and upside down if needed. She knew how to dig into the most obscure points until she had an answer. She’d done it in law school and had spent the better part of her professional life doing the same.
“Those guns are evidence, Arlo. If you can get me descriptions, I can look at recent cases. See if anything pops there.”
It felt ridiculous to be talking about teeing up her work databases in the middle of a hospital room, but she needed to do something. And this was something she was very, very good at.
Through a cop’s eyes, the goal was to find physical evidence. But for her? The evidence was just the place to start. She was on the hunt for motive.
One strong enough and desperate enough to kill without compunction.
A week.
It had been a damn week, and she had nearly made her eyes bleed she’d hunted through so many files. Haunted every database she could find to search for details. She’d even gone to the file storage facility they housed in Red Hook to get her hands on a few old files that had seemed promising.
And still, nothing.
Not one damn thing.
Sera threw her pencil on top of her desk, about ready to call it a day. She still had a brief to write, and she wanted to get to Gavin’s for dinner.
And to surreptitiously see how he was doing.
She hadn’t made a big deal of it, but she suspected he had downplayed the pain from his injuries. That, along with the worry for his concussion, had her working hard to avoid the mother hen routine. She hadn’t fully succeeded, but had usually been able to subdue his suspicions with a well-placed kiss.
Since they turned heated quickly, it was enough to distract him.
Even if she was paying for it with a raging case of hormones—amplified even further by her pregnancy—and a healing man who wasn’t fit yet for sex. No matter how much he tried to convince her otherwise.
Even with her hormones on overdrive, she refused to be swayed. The doctor had discharged Gavin the day after the explosion, but he’d been put on medical leave from active duty for a week, with a required appointment to be cleared to return.
His checkup was tomorrow, so there was that, at least, Sera admitted to herself. It would hopefully confirm he’d healed, it would get him back to work and, if she were lucky, distracted enough for her to figure out what she was going to do.
Because with every day she spent with him, she was forgetting all the reasons she’d believed she needed to hold her heart separate. In fact, each day had brought them closer, the kissing only a portion of the growing intimacy between them. They spoke of everything, from the case to their task force to their overarching career ambitions. Places they liked in Brooklyn, favorite restaurants and a rather heated debate over the best slice of pizza.
He also wasn’t afraid to keep pushing on her lingering feelings over her parents, gently drawing her down the path of accepting their responsibilities and shortcomings in raising children by contrasting it to how the two of them wanted to raise their own child. And in return, she ensured they invited his mother to dinner one night and gave her one of those ultrasound photos, too.
But it had been the day he’d brought up names for their child when Sera finally admitted that the careful wall she’d built to keep her heart intact was crumbling, brick by brick.
