“What’s wrong with that?” Landon was sure letting the accusations fly this morning. “It’s standard procedure in high-profile cases.”
“Yeah, when we’re dealing with organized crime or the cartel,” Landon remarked. “You’re going overboard. We’re not to that point yet.”
“You sound like Davis.”
“You’re not yourself, so I’m going to forgive that slight to my character. All I’m saying is, try to get a grip. Or better yet, a little perspective. And for the love of all that is holy, think about coming clean to her. Your inability to communicate is going to bite you in the ass someday.”
“What are you talking about? I communicate.”
“Yeah. Okay. Keep telling yourself that and it’ll be your lonely ass jerking off in the bathroom.”
Yep, Landon was a total dick.
“Now, get the hell out of my vehicle and get your ass home. You’re on suspension.”
Galen cocked a brow. “I am not on suspension. I’m taking a break.”
Landon’s brow puckered and his eyes narrowed. “Get the fuck out. My relief is here and I’m going to bed.”
Galen climbed out of the SUV and jogged back to his truck. From the corner of his eye, he caught sight of Landon as he pulled out into traffic. He stuck his arm out the window and gave Galen a one-finger salute as he drove off. It was sort of their own fucked-up way of saying they cared.
There were days that Galen loved his job more than anything in the world. Today was not one of those days. Landon managed to remind him of why he had no business working this detail. He could only imagine the office gossip his behavior had managed to spawn. There would be those who attributed his over-the-top attitude to coming off of SOG duty in France. And then there would be others who would whisper that his intense interest in Harper Allen was anything but professional.
Phone calls, texts after hours, checking in with the other deputies until he finally passed out from exhaustion. He couldn’t keep up like this. Concern for Harper’s safety was one thing. Obsession was another. He’d even taken it upon himself to conduct an informal investigation into Senator Ellis’s death, checking leads, asking a few questions here and there, digging where he had no business digging. All in an attempt to find something that Davis, in his arrogance, had overlooked. Something that would deflect his interest from Harper as a suspect and point him in the right direction.
If Monroe found out what he was up to, his ass would be in a serious sling. If Harper had any idea how often he checked up on her, she’d probably request a replacement. And if Galen didn’t get his fucking head on straight and separate his personal life from the job, he was going to ruin a career he’d spent years building. This had to stop. No more phone calls. No more texts. No more toeing the line of professional indecency. Because the banter that he and Harper shared in their nightly texts had become something more than a simple professional conversation. Whenever he felt the urge to be playful, or witty, or whatever, Galen needed to remind himself why he’d walked out of her apartment without a word that morning.
And thanks to the disciplinary action spurred by Davis’s tattling, he had one more day free to consider the benefits of practicing professionalism and detachment.
Chapter Sixteen
Harper stared at the flash drive in her palm. She slid her thumb across the smooth, metallic surface and ejected the USB connector. Peggy was stationed at the dining room table with a few files, her laptop, and a notebook spread out on the little square. Harper imagined that protective detail could be boring sometimes. If she were Peggy, she’d be ready for a nap right about now.
“Peggy, do you know anything about the SOG team?”
Peggy looked up from her work, a knowing smile plastered on her face. “Oh, sure, I know about it.”
“What is it exactly?”
Peggy fluffed her perfectly coifed bob and turned in her chair to face Harper fully. She guessed the deputy’s age somewhere in her late forties. Her hair was bottle blond, her makeup on the modest side, but always perfect. She struck Harper as the type of woman who lived by a routine and didn’t like having that routine disrupted. “The SOG team is a little more highly trained than the rest of us. They get the higher-profile assignments and even though they’re based in a certain city, they’re on call and have to go wherever and whenever they’re told twenty-four-seven.”
Harper picked at her thumbnail as though it was marginally more interesting than the conversation. “So, if Galen got called, he’d have to drop everything and leave?”
“Pretty much. But don’t worry, Harper. He’d have to wait for someone to relieve him first. He wouldn’t just run out on you.”
Heh. Don’t be so sure, Peggy. Galen’s pretty good at running off without a word
. The phone call he’d gotten after Davis’s interrogation had spurred him into action. He’d left her apartment with barely a “See ya later” when Peggy had shown up to take his place and she hadn’t seen him in the few days since. “What does the SOG do?”
“Apprehend fugitives, provide security, transport high-profile and especially dangerous prisoners. Protect dignitaries and federal judges. Occasional undercover work. Pretty much all the high-risk stuff. They have to be ready to move out at a moment’s notice. Last year, an SOG team staged a raid on a house in California owned by a heavy hitter in the cartel. They seized his assets, arrested his cronies. Cop stuff. On steroids.”
“What sets them apart from the FBI?”
“Intelligence?” Peggy snickered.
Looked like disdain for the feds came standard issue with a marshal’s badge. “I know an FBI agent or two who might not appreciate that statement.”
“Probably not.” Peggy shrugged as if she couldn’t care less. “They say worse about us, believe me.”
With that, Peggy turned her attention back to work, which was fine by Harper because she still had a mysterious flash drive to investigate. For days she’d been waiting for an opportunity to crack into the little silver nugget of information, but the ever present marshals got in the way. She was constantly worried that someone might look over her shoulder, realize what she was up to, and rat her out to Davis. A quick glance over her shoulder confirmed that Peggy was finally focused on work. Curiosity ate away at her and she was tired of waiting.
Harper angled her laptop away from where Peggy might catch a glimpse and slid the connector into the port, anticipation shivering across her skin. She held her breath as she double-clicked the drive’s icon on her desktop. The window popped open and she scanned the folders: Budget, House Bill 23-072, Photos, Agenda . . . fifty or more files stared back at Harper, all of them indicating what she’d suspected: That the flash drive belonged to Senator Ellis. He must have dropped it in her bag right after he was shot.
Why? The stress, the speed at which everything had happened muddled the events of that night in her mind until it felt as though she were wading through sludge for every tiny sliver of recollection. He’d been about to confide in her. And his dying words about a blue lake and hazard assessment—whatever the hell that was—could have prompted Ellis to drop his flash drive in Harper’s bag. Hell, maybe Agent Davis wasn’t too far off in his assumption that Ellis had known his number was up. Maybe Ellis had given her a trail of bread crumbs to follow because he knew he wouldn’t have time to draw an actual map. The gunshot had put a swift end to any confession he may or may not have been about to make. And now, all she had to unlock the senator’s secrets were two words and a bunch of meaningless files.
Well, maybe not completely meaningless.
Harper’s eyes landed on a file named JOURNAL. Her journalistic Spidey sense tingled from each individual hair follicle down to the tips of her toenails. Her finger scrolled over the track pad on her laptop, the cursor hovering on the file. A weary sigh escaped her lips. Trashy gossip-mag-style reporting wasn’t her thing and this was about so much more than landing a story. Her shoulders tensed as her mind filled with the deafening crack that had echoed in her ears, followed by Ellis gripping her as he fell, the hollow look in his eyes, the blood staining his shirt and bubbling from his mouth, and her own fear welling up inside of her and choking the air from her lungs as she crawled under his car. The realization that he was dead and that in a few short seconds, she was going to die right there beside him was as fresh in her mind now as it had been weeks ago. Her pulse jumped in her veins as she relived that night and it took all of the self-control she had not to shoot out of her chair and run.
No, this wasn’t about landing the story of the year. Harper was interested in one thing:
Why did he have to die?
Why had someone resorted to murder to keep Ellis’s mouth shut? He was a politician—and probably a slimy one at that—but his career wasn’t the scope of his existence. He’d been someone’s husband. Someone’s father. And his family didn’t give a shit about those secrets that died with him. The only thing that mattered to them now was the fact that he was gone and never coming back. And someone needed to be held accountable for their loss.
With a cleansing breath, she clicked the file and it revealed hundreds of individual Word documents, all listed by date. From the looks of it, Ellis had written an entry a week for a very long time. They began around the time Ellis had run for office three years ago, and ended a week before his death. Harper chose the first entry—more to find a baseline for subsequent entries—and skimmed the contents. The senate campaign worried Ellis. His advisers didn’t want him to play the blame game with his opponent and practice the time-honored political tradition of deny first and apologize later. They had a new tactic ready to roll, one that would encourage the public’s trust and buy him the election. Ellis wasn’t interested in drawing attention to himself, but he buckled to peer pressure. With the help of his inner circle, he became the Ellis the media had lauded. A straight shooter who didn’t try to hide his past or sugarcoat the truth for the benefit of the voters.
Harper skipped forward six months. Though he didn’t seem to have much of an attack of conscience, Ellis worried for his family, who had taken the brunt of his honesty-first campaign. He’d admitted to an affair early on in his marriage. Family counseling. A bout with depression and anxiety. Questionable business dealings that teetered on the edge of what was legal. His finances, tax returns, investments, even his kids’ report cards were made available to the media. Harper had only been a sophomore in college at the time, but she remembered reading the coverage of Ellis’s campaign and wondering if he ever felt guilty over what his public admissions had done to his family. Honestly, it was a wonder the guy had ever been elected in the first place. Ellis was like the popular kid in high school who bragged about his misdeeds but was so charming no one seemed to care.
With each new entry, Ellis’s outlook began to deteriorate as he became more and more jaded. Honesty wasn’t the best policy. He was alienated from his peers, who refused to confide in him, the media and his constituents began to doubt his intentions, and every bill, every vote was an uphill battle. His detractors were doing their damnedest to make sure he wouldn’t serve a second term, and his family life had taken the brunt of his stress. With the recession in full swing, Ellis’s investments had taken a hit, and his finances weren’t what he needed them to be to keep his head above water.
Harper jumped forward in the journal entries to five months ago, around the time Ellis’s staff had begun to dodge her interview requests. She skimmed the first half of the entry—mostly about how he and his wife were dealing with their daughter’s formative teenage dramas—until something caught her eye.
January 3rd
Politicians lie. It’s a fact. We don’t represent the people. Our interests are our own. No one would have noticed or even cared about me if I was just another Washington asshole who didn’t have a clue how the rest of the world lived. Now, I have to play the game, keep these secrets that I promised countless voters I’d never keep and hope that no one finds out. In hiding behind false honesty, I’ve guaranteed that when the shit finally hits the fan, I’ll go down in history as the biggest hypocrite in national political history. No one will remember my environmental work. No one will acknowledge my education reform. Will anyone even care that my legislation helped to renew unemployment benefits for thousands and increase the base minimum wage for struggling families? No. The only thing they’ll say about me is that I was worse than the rest of them. That I betrayed those who trusted me. And I deserve every ounce of their disdain.
I’m starting to think the stress isn’t worth it. I’m one heart palpitation away from a heart attack. I can’t sleep. Forget about eating, the ulcer has pretty much shut that down. I lived through the big reveal of my secrets three years ago. Will this be any worse? How could it be? I splashed my affair, the details of my marriage, my shortcomings as a husband and businessman throughout the media and plastered a pleasant smile on my face while those greedy, nosy bastards circled the sordid details of my personal life like sharks scenting blood. Why not give one of them the exclusive of a lifetime?
As Harper read, her curiosity grew. Senator Ellis had bared all during his campaign. What could he have possibly done in office that was worse than recreational drug use in college, a couple of extramarital affairs, rage and depression issues, and troubled teens? Did he kick puppies in his spare time? Sell babies on the black market? Maybe Blue Lake was a secret facility where they grew genetically engineered wheat and prayed to the gods of GMO. Who the hell knew?
I guess the real problem here isn’t me. I’m okay with coming clean. But this time, the secrets aren’t mine alone. State-level heavy-hitters, and low-level staffers alike will be at risk of exposure this time around. And there’s nothing to be done for it. In for a penny, in for a pound. I can’t come clean without exposing everyone else who’s involved and I’m finally, completely okay with that. I have to do this. There’s no other choice anymore. If any of the partners find out what I’m going to do, they’ll try to stop me. Honestly, I wouldn’t put it past one of the bastards to put a bullet in my head. They might be okay with the secrets, the guilt, the underhandedness of what we’re doing. But I’m not okay with it. Not anymore. And I’m going to do something about it and suffer the consequences for my actions. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. I never believed the truth of that statement before now. No one should be above the law, exempt from punishment. We’ve all got to be held accountable for our actions and I’m going to make sure that we are.
Harper stared at the last entry. She scooted to the edge of the couch, her head bent toward the screen of her laptop as though she could crawl right inside of Senator Ellis’s memories. What? What was it he’d done? And who the hell else was involved? How high did this supposed scandal go? Questions burned through Harper’s brain and she was desperate to find the answers. Not only because the investigative reporter in her demanded it, but because if this was as bad as Ellis made it sound, the chances were pretty good that Harper wouldn’t be safe until his murderer was behind bars. And at the rate Agent Davis was moving, she’d be dead before that happened.
“Harper? Is everything okay?”
Peggy’s voice jolted her and Harper jumped about a foot in the air. She tried to laugh it off, but Peggy’s own marshal Spidey sense must have been tingling because her expression was pure suspicion.
“I was just concentrating really hard,” Harper said with a shaky laugh. “You startled me.”
Peggy’s eyes narrowed. “Your mouth was hanging open like your jaw had a couple of broken hinges. And your eyes were pretty wide, too. To tell the truth, Harper, you looked a little spooked.”
“Heh.” She tried to laugh it off, but Peggy wasn’t buying the brush-off. Hell yeah, she was spooked. She might have inadvertently stumbled on the biggest political scandal of the year. That is, if she could figure out what in the hell Ellis’s cryptic journal entries were all about. Until then, she was nothing more than a woman with a target on her back. “Just wrapped up in work. I sort of get that way when I’ve had an ‘aha!’ moment.”
“Okay,” Peggy said slowly. “But, Harper, we can’t help you if you’re not honest with us.”
“I know.” The answer came too quickly, almost defensively, and Harper wished she wasn’t so damned jumpy. This was exactly why she’d waited so long to investigate the flash drive in the first place. It obviously didn’t take much to rouse Peggy’s suspicion. She needed something more concrete before she could share because right now, Ellis’s journals were simply that. She had no motives, no suspects to offer up to Peggy or anyone else. The e-mail preview window popped up in the corner of the screen, and Harper turned her attention back to her laptop, closing Ellis’s files and opening the new message. The sender was marked as “unknown,” which wasn’t half as disconcerting as the sound bite attached to the file. She turned the volume up and double-clicked the file. Her apartment suddenly filled with the sounds of her own voice, echoing in the distance, calling for help. “H-help! Someone help!” The sound of her own panic caused Harper’s heart to jump up into her throat. “Senator Ellis has been shot!”