Page 57 of Cipher

“I love you too, baby.”

She fell asleep with her body warm and completely relaxed inside my hold.

I closed my eyes, the worries of the last several weeks briefly drifting away because everything that mattered was already in my arms.

23

CIPHER

Nomad and Falcon walked into my clubhouse office Tuesday morning. They had taken over the tail after Raines suspended Seth Pritchard the previous afternoon, keeping enough distance that a career deputy accustomed to watching his mirrors never saw the same vehicle twice. Nomad shut the door behind them while Falcon crossed to the wall display and placed three time-stamped photographs on the screen.

“Pritchard left the department and drove straight to Pike’s office,” Nomad reported, resting both hands on the back of the chair across from my desk. “Went inside at fourteen eighteen and came out seventeen minutes later. Pike followed him five minutes after that.”

“Where?”

Falcon enlarged the third image, showing Pritchard’s truck and Darren Pike’s damaged Yukon outside a narrow commercial building on the eastern edge of Escondido. “Office belongs to Eric Stowe. Pike parked beside Pritchard, and both stayed inside for forty-three minutes.”

Eric Stowe’s name had been a part of the investigation from the beginning without becoming anything solid enough to put my hands around. He owned a one-man public-safety technology firm that maintained the county’s CAD system, call-recording archive, and linked records-management platform.

His vendor account had been active during all six manipulated incidents, but its shared support architecture and the carefully scrubbed logs had prevented us from proving Stowe had used it personally rather than somebody outside the firm stealing his credentials. Pritchard’s visit changed that. Not enough to prove conspiracy in court, but it connected all three functions physically for the first time and stripped coincidence from the list of explanations I was willing to entertain.

“You get photographs of them together?” I asked.

“Separate arrivals and departures,” Nomad replied. “The office has tinted glass and no camera covering the suite entrance. We can prove their vehicles were there at the same time, but not what happened inside.”

“Keep Pike and Pritchard under watch. Stowe too.” I forwarded the images to Judge through a secure club channel, then brought up the six incidents and overlaid every vendor session with Pritchard’s rural patrol shifts. “Nobody approaches them. I want calls, meetings, dead drops, devices, and every person they touch.”

Falcon dipped his chin. “Already rotating fresh faces onto Stowe. He works alone, keeps irregular hours, and drives a county-registered service van when he handles emergency support.”

Nomad’s gaze moved over the lines connecting the three men. “Think Pritchard panicked after Raines took his badge?”

“He drove to Pike before he went home.” I leaned back, watching the timeline align beneath the photographs. “That wasn’t panic. It was warning the others that access to the department had closed.”

Raines answered my secure call on the second ring, and I gave him the clean version of the surveillance without mentioning how closely our men had followed Pritchard after the official county vehicle dropped away. He already possessed lawful evidence connecting Jeff’s payment to Pike, while the independent audit proved Pritchard had entered restricted records he had no assigned reason to view. What he lacked were communications, financial transfers, authentication records, or devices tying Pike, Pritchard, and Stowe to the same agreement.

“I’m working on warrants for Pike’s business accounts, Pritchard’s personal devices, and every vendor record attached to Stowe.” Fatigue roughened his voice. “County attorney agrees we’ve got enough to ask. Doesn’t mean the judge signs before these assholes figure out we’re coming.”

“They already figured it out.”

A pause followed, filled with everything he couldn’t officially ask me to do. “Keep me informed if they move.”

“I will.”

Neither of us defined how quickly that information would reach him or what might happen before it did. When I ended the call, Stryker appeared in my doorway with Hawkeye behind him, having already read Judge’s summary.

“Continuous coverage,” he ordered. “Nobody loses one of them because a warrant takes too fucking long. Add enough brothers to rotate through the night without repeating vehicles or faces.”

Nomad and Falcon left to adjust the watch while I spent the rest of the day pulling at Stowe’s digital footprint without alerting any system he controlled. His company had legitimate access to county software, billing records, service schedules, and emergency-maintenance channels, but six private windows appeared beneath that legitimate work like cuts hidden under old scars. Each one corresponded to a manipulated incident, and each had been sanitized too carefully to look like anything except deliberate use by someone who understood exactly where the ordinary logs ended.

By nightfall, I had enough circumstantial structure to identify the three men’s roles but still lacked the piece that would collapse the distance between suspicion and proof. Pritchard supplied confidential case information, victim routines, and patrol gaps. Pike brokered the jobs, verified targets, and handled buyers. Stowe used his vendor access to alter calls, manufacture incidents, and erase whatever the client had paid to make disappear.

Stryker called me into his office shortly after nine. Hawkeye leaned against the edge of the walnut desk with Stryker standing behind it, one hand braced against the wood as he watched the surveillance updates arrive across the wall display.

Fresh from court, Judge sat at the conference table with his suit jacket draped over the chair beside him, his tie loosened and irritation carved around his mouth.

“Pritchard returned home after leaving Stowe’s office,” Stryker said. “Falcon watched him empty a personal safe into a duffel. Cash, two phones, documents, and something the size of a tablet.”

“Hawkeye’s team saw Pike close his office three hours early,” Judge added. “He carried out a laptop case and two phones, then cleaned the interior badly enough that even a county tech would know he was wiping surfaces.”