Page 32 of Trust my Heart

“He staged a kiss,” Murphy said, finally, “on a public corner, with a photographer already paid and parked. And then had the product delivered to your door.” He said each piece separately.

“It was aimed at me. I’m meant to do something stupid with it. Wave it in Luke’s face or wave it in Wright’s before punching him.”

“And Hawley doesn’t know you have them.”

It wasn’t really a question, but I answered it anyway, because this man had let me into his kitchen and I’d decided on the porch I wasn’t going to lie inside it.

“Not yet. He doesn’t know about the photographs, and he doesn’t know I’m here.” I kept my voice level. “You want to say something about that, you’d be right, and I’ll take it. After.”

Murphy didn’t answer right away. The rosary came out of his pocket, an old habit with old beads, and his thumb moved over them once and stopped.

“I see,” he agreed. “Go on. You didn’t drive out here to show me a magic trick. You’re building something.”

So, I told him about Brar.

I gave it to him the way she’d given it to me, flat, all facts. Four years riding with Wright at the posting everybody called a step up. How she read everything he touched before it went out, every warrant, every court package, because it wasn’t safe not to. A dawn raid with the wrong address on the warrant, one door off a retired schoolteacher’s house, caught at midnight and fixed and never mentioned.

“She covered him,” Murphy said.

“For four years, and the two of them never once said so out loud. Then she got tired of it. She let one of his messes land on him instead, and watched him take the fall and charm the whole room while he did it. And inside a month, her own files started coming back wrong.”

“Little things. A date off by a day. An exhibit number that didn’t match itself across two forms. The kind of mistake you can’t swear you didn’t make. And twice, before she gave up and started covering him again, she opened her own reports and found data gone. Not wrong. Gone. A whole interview summary. Half a property list.” I met his eye. “She took it to her staff sergeant. He gave her the same two choices you gave me. The system, or her.”

Murphy’s thumb had stopped moving on the beads. He looked at the prints on his table without seeing them, running years of paper through his head the way I had at dawn.

“It all fit, sir,” I said. “She was describing my two files before I’d told her a thing about them.”

“IT closed your file two weeks ago,” he said. “The program drops entries all over the city. Nothing showed that someone interfered in your case.”

“You did. And it’s true, and it’s useless. They asked whether the program loses data. It does. Nobody asked whether a person can make it lose data on purpose.” I leaned forward. “That’s the whole request, sir. That’s why I’m in your kitchen. I don’t believe a man can reach into that system, twice that I know of at my division and more than twice at his last one, and leave nothing behind. Data doesn’t move without hands. Somewhere there’s a log, an access record, a fingerprint in the machine, something. I want somebody to look who knows how to look. Not our IT. Somebody outside the building, somebody quiet, somebody whose name Wright has never heard. You’ve got connections, sir. You know somebody like that or you know somebody who does.”

“And if they look and find nothing?”

“Then I’m wrong about the trace and right about the man, and I’m no worse off.”

“You’re considerably worse off.” He said it without heat. “You’ll have put your relationship on the record, spent my capital and yours, put a flag on yourself for anyone upstairs who’s ever wanted one, all for a theory a hired expert couldn’t prove.” He set the mug aside. “I want you to hear what I’m going to say, Carlson, because I’ll only say it at this table and I’ll deny the wording anywhere else. I have thought that man was a fraud since he first walked onto my floor.”

I sat very still.

“He came up under me for four years, him and Hawley, the perfect pair, best clearance run this division ever had. Everybody upstairs wanted to shake their hands. And I sat in my office watching the work come across my desk and I knew which one of them was doing it, because I’d watched real partnerships for twenty years and this wasn’t one. It was a horse and a jockey.”

Murphy sighed. “The clearances were Hawley’s. The paperwork that sang was Hawley’s. What Wright brought to that partnership was the room’s good opinion, and he collected it like rent. I could no more have proven that than proven the weather. There was never one thing. There was never a moment you could stand on.”

“That’s almost word for word what Brar said.”

“I’ve never met Brar.”

“Then it adds weight.”

“Maybe.” He turned the mug a quarter turn, and I thought of Wright doing the same thing at a different table, and put it away. “And then the mess happened. You know which one I’m talking about. Somebody watched them, somebody sent pictures, and I got a report on my desk with no suspect and no leads that went exactly nowhere. And in the middle of all of it, with Hawley standing in the wreckage, Wright’s transfer papers came through. Clean. Approved. A better posting across town.” The lines around his mouth went deep. “A man’s life caves in, and he lands a desk other men wait ten years for. I chewed on that for a long time. Men who fall apart don’t usually fall upward.”

“You think he used it.”

“I think I watched Hawley carry that building on his back for a year after, with rumors hanging off him, while the man he’d have gone through a wall for just continued to climb, unaffected.” He said it flat, and under it there was something old and banked that I’d never once heard in his office. “Hawley never asked me for a thing through any of it. Not a transfer, not a word, not a day. You know him. You know what that year would have looked like.”

“I’m starting to.”

“I didn’t have a choice but to accept his transfer back, even smelling what I smelled. No grounds. A lawful request from a sergeant in good standing, and my personal opinion of a man’s character is not paper. I don’t run my floor on hunches, or I’d be no better than the thing I’m describing. I prefer facts, the harder, the better.” He put his glasses back on, which meant the sentiment was over. “So. You want a quiet expert, and you want protection for a witness. Brar. That’s what I understand, right?”