Page 69 of In the Dark of the Past

River fiddled with the ends of her hair, tension radiating off her in waves. “So, what’s our move?”

“I trust Linton. I’ll bring him up to speed, and we’ll watch her,” I said. “Quietly. Limit her access. No case files, no updates, no evidence handling. And we’ll set a tripwire.”

River’s eyes narrowed. “A tripwire?”

“If she’s feeding information to anyone,” I said, “we can bait her with something false. Something that looks real enough to matter.”

“What kind of something are you thinking?” Atlas asked.

I turned toward the whiteboard and the seven empty columns.

“Let’s give her a name.”

River exhaled softly. “A fake person of interest.”

I nodded. “Someone believable. Someone with just enough circumstantial motive to be plausible. If she moves on it—if that information gets back to Grant or Graham or anyone else—we’ll know.”

Atlas grunted. “And then what? We just...wing it?”

“No,” I said. I crossed to my bottom drawer.

Atlas’s brows rose as I unlocked it. “That the good drawer or the bad drawer?”

“It’s the one that makes this official.”

I pulled out the spare deputy commission—unused for over a year—and the badge clipped to the cardstock.

Atlas stared. “Finn...”

“I can’t trust half my department,” I said. “But I can trust you.”

River’s breath caught softly.

Atlas sat forward. “Deputizing me makes this real.”

“It was already real,” I said. “If you’re going to keep doing this with me—from surveillance to takedowns—you need legal authority.”

He huffed a low laugh. “Well, hell. Guess that retirement didn’t stick.”

“You want it?” I asked.

Atlas grinned, the tilt slow and wolfish.

“Oh, I want it.”

I handed him the badge.

He clipped it to his belt with a quiet, definitive click.

And the line between us—between friend and deputy—shifted.

“Let’s do this,” he said.

We worked until darkness fell, constructing the false lead, placing it cleanly in the chain of information so there’d be no doubt where it leaked from. River drafted a psychological profile for our fictional suspect so detailed it gave me flashbacks to my academy training when they’d brought in members of the bureau’s Behavioral Analysis Unit.

When it was done, the office felt too small for all the pressure inside it.

River leaned her hip against the corner of my desk. “So, what now?”