Page 45 of Take the Fall
And the rest fit around it. The drug operation had been pushing into 51’s ground for weeks before Ryan ever set foot here. He’d known that part longer than me. Daniel had told him, in the hospital bed, before any of it had a shape. Somebody had taken Ryan off the division he’d already burned down and set him in the division where the fire was about to start, so that when it came apart here too, he’d be the obvious one to blame. The man who fails twice is the man nobody believes a third time.
Somebody with that kind of reach had set him here to fall. And now I had the name on the order, and it belonged to his father’s closest friend.
His reach goes everywhere,Ryan had said last night, his voice coming apart at the seams.Into every room I’ve ever called mine. And I can’t prove a hand and I can’t prove there wasn’t one.
He’d meant it as the fear. The kind that never resolves, because you can never be sure.
I was sure. And I had nothing. Robert Branford’s name was on none of it. Not the shell, not the company, not a single page that would stand up in a room. A friendship is not a crime. A transfer is just paperwork. The money stopped at a row of names that were not names. He’d built the thing that did this to his son and left nothing in it anyone could get a hand on.
I closed the browser. Opened my notebook. Wrote four lines of shorthand, nothing legible without the key. Locked it in the drawer.
Last night Ryan had cried in my arms until there was nothing left. He’d come apart, his fists in the back of my coat, his face in my shoulder. I’d held on. Kept my jaw at his temple. Stayed.
I’ve got you,I’d said.
And then his name. Because it was right.
Now I knew his father’s money had funded the thing that took his career apart, and I couldn’t prove a word of it.
I was not going to tell him today.
If Ryan knew, he’d go at it. Fast, wide open, at his father, at Murphy, somewhere, and there’d be a tell, and whatever was left of the investigation, the family would bury before I had a case. The shell was built to disappear. The chain was built to break. I needed more before I had anything that could survive being touched.
David Branford had stood at Ryan’s door last night with his hand on Ryan’s shoulder, the hand Ryan’s father had never once given him, and said:I wouldn’t use it. But I’m not the only one who can see it.
He’d been talking about me. About what Ryan had built in that apartment now.
Whitfield had Branford reach. Which meant if I moved wrong, the family could see it before I was ready.
I kept working.
Saunders walked past my desk around two. He looked at the empty chair, looked at me.
“Still solo,” he said.
I kept reading. He moved on.
Reid and Ryan came through the side door at half past two.
I heard Reid first. The laugh he got when he’d just said something he was pleased with. Then Ryan under it, dry, a few words, and Reid laughing again. They came in together, Reid with his jacket over his arm, Ryan with his coat open. Both of them carrying the looseness of a good call.
Ryan looked across the bullpen and came over.
He dropped into the chair. Loosened his collar.
The ease was back in him. The call had given it back, a stupid file, a garden bed eleven centimeters over a line, Reid counting letters with his jacket over his arm. He’d come through the side door carrying that, and now he was right here, collar open, the give in his shoulders I hadn’t seen in months.
I noticed it the way you notice something you’ve been careful not to notice.
He looked good. The open collar, the line of his throat, the two undone buttons and the skin under them. His sleeves were pushed up. He sat back and let his thighs fall open the way a man does when he’s stopped bracing for something, and I felt it go straight through me, low and hot, the way it hadn’t in years.
I wanted to put my mouth on his throat. Right there, where his pulse was. I wanted my hands under that open collar. I’d spent months keeping the desk between us and the desk was the only reason I was still in my chair.
And underneath the wanting, something bigger and harder to hold: he didn’t know. He was sitting here, loose and warm and two feet away, and he had no idea what was four feet from him in my locked drawer. What his father had built and walked clean out of. The reach he’d called something he could never prove, I had it on paper.
I was the only thing standing between him and all of it.
I didn’t know what to do with that. I knew I wasn’t going to move.
