She knew the question was cliché, but that didn’t help her find an answer.
Greally stood and came around the desk to take the chair beside her. Back to being her friend instead of her boss. “Look, I know this isn’t easy. Believe me, your squad isn’t the only one being overhauled. We’ve been mandated to cut eight percent of our workforce. But you have options, Lucy.”
He glanced at the folder on his desk. “You can take a medical pension. I’ve read the reports. The doctors hold out very little hope that you’ll ever return to full active duty.”
“I’ve the right to a modified duty assignment.” They both knew it wasn’t about her rights. This was about her family. Every few years she’d had to uproot her family, move to a new city, a new position. The one thing she hated about the paramilitary organization that was the FBI. Being promoted to lead the SAFE squad was supposed to end that.
Only she hadn’t counted on what had happened two months ago or on the political upheaval that came with a new director.
“There’s so much more you could be doing outside the Bureau,” he said.
Lucy shook off the idea of leaving the Bureau. “No. What are my choices if I decide to stay?”
He frowned. “Not many if you’re restricted from the field. Maybe reviewing complaints for Employee Assistance—”
She scoffed at that. “You mean working for Carroll? No way. There’s got to be something else.”
“Not unless you’d consider moving. Maybe back to Quantico?”
“No. We can’t. Megan—” Lucy couldn’t leave Pittsburgh. Not after Nick had worked so hard to build his psychology practice. He couldn’t abandon his patients. And Megan. Lucy didn’t understand why, but Megan wouldn’t even consider moving out of their house after Lucy’s mom had been killed there. Lucy couldn’t upset what little stability and security Megan had, not now.
He frowned. “Then OPR. They’re always looking.”
OPR. Office of Professional Responsibility. The Bureau’s equivalent of Internal Affairs—policing their own.
“I’m not sure they’d consider you,” he continued. “You haven’t exactly made many friends over there these past few years.”
Especially not two months ago. When she’d been forced to betray the FBI in order to save her family.
“Would you have done anything different, John?” she asked. “If it’d been Natalie and Kate they threatened?”
He glanced at his desk and the photo of his family. Shook his head. “I don’t think anyone faults you for what you did, Lucy. But that doesn’t make it the right thing, either. At least not in the mind of the Bureau.”
One thing the Bureau hated: contradiction. Like an agent being forced to choose between the job and her family’s lives. Doing the right thing didn’t always mean following regulations.
“When do you need to know?” she asked, masking her exhaustion. And her day hadn’t even started yet.
“Take the weekend.”
She planted her cane and heaved her weight up out of the seat—sitting felt good but getting up always hurt like a sonofabitch.
Greally stood as well. “Lucy, I’ve been fighting like hell to make this all go away, wanted you to come back, and everything would be just the way it was.”
Her body felt heavy, reluctant to move. To leave the one place she’d felt most at home, to leave the people she considered family, to leave the job she loved and felt was her destiny.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated.
She nodded and shuffled out the door, wondering if she’d ever find her way back again.
Chapter 2
LUCY LEFT, GREALLY’S
new secretary’s stare following her as she limped down to the elevator. More than the front office staff watching her, she felt as if the entire building was judging. They all knew what she’d done two months ago.
To them, she’d betrayed the unspoken code, putting her family’s lives before the Bureau. Something the administrators and agents who worked OPR would never understand, or if they ever had, they’d forgotten once they moved into their sterile office suites here on the top floor. To them Lucy was an incalculable risk, a wildcard. Family didn’t fit into the FBI’s Bible of operating procedures.
This was why she loved working down in the bowels of the building, side by side with men and women who really understood their mission. It had nothing to do with whatever the current administration wrote up in fancy press releases and everything to do with protecting and serving the innocent, anyway they could.
She forced herself to limp a little less, placing more pressure on her bad leg, and instead of stopping and waiting for the elevator, enduring their stares, she continued to the stairwell. Stairs were the bane of Lucy’s new existence. Because of the damaged nerves, she could no longer tell when her foot was firmly planted on the ground, and so she had to look down, watching each step. Plus, it was difficult to maneuver the cane, so she usually ended up with more of her weight falling on her bad leg.
But the world was built full of stairs, just as it was full of assholes like Carroll, so Lucy grit through the pain and made her way down to the floor that housed her office. At least for the next three days.
Her new ID got her through the locked doors that stood between the unsecured common areas and the wing where criminal activity—like analyzing illegal pornography in order to identify victims and perpetrators—occurred.
Lucy gazed out at the once wide-open space now transformed into a cubicle farm. “What the hell?”
Her question was answered by a barrage of pistol fire—Nerf pistols equipped with harmless foam bullets. Taylor popped up from behind one of the cubicle walls, his forever bed-head sandy hair and blue eyes peeking over the top.
“Hold fire,” he shouted, giving a pretty good impression of the range master at Quantico.
He stood up, forsaking the cover of the cubicle wall, and the pistol wielding shooters turned their aim onto him. None of them had hit Lucy, but somehow they all nailed Taylor right in the face. Which told Lucy a lot about the shooters: her adorable analysts from the High Tech Computer Crime section. Geeks and proud of it. They’d been even more proud when Taylor, one of their own, became a full-fledged Special Agent, gun and all.
“Sorry, Lucy,” Taylor said, dodging friendly fire as he skirted the cubicle maze to join her. “We’re working on modeling a fire fight where a Fish and Game officer was caught between Border Patrol and some traffickers. Guess we got a little carried away.”
“What’s with the new decor?” she gestured to the cubicles. They made the space seem small and crowded, not at all conducive to the collaborative atmosphere she’d fostered.
“SAC insisted. Said we were wasting too much time working together, so now we’re each assigned a separate, private workspace. First thing he made me do when he put me in charge.” He frowned at the memory then smiled impishly. “Of course, I told him each work station would need to be fully equipped and got a thirty percent increase in my equipment budget.”
“Which you have spent wisely, I see.” She nodded to the bright pink pistol dangling from his hand. Taylor, a thirty-five-year old wiz kid and certified genius, was irrepressible—not even the new administration would be able to shackle his enthusiasm.
“Where’s Walden?” she asked, looking around the maze of cubicles for her second in command.
“Waiting in your office.” Taylor glanced over his shoulder and dropped his voice. “With a case.”
One of the techs called him away. Lucy made her way around the cubicles. When the squad had originally been established, the floor plans called for a large executive corner office but no private conference area. An oversight she’d corrected by shoving her desk into the back corner to make room for a conference table and chairs.
The two interior walls were glass, enabling her to see that seated around the table were Walden as well as a man and woman with their backs to Lucy. Walden was a decade older than her, a solemn black man, but with a surprising sense of humor that showed itself at unexpected times. Good money that he was the one who’d outfitted the High Tech Crimes guys with their pistols and ammo.
She was lucky to have him as her second in command; their strengths and weaknesses nicely complemented each other. In addition to the trio at the table, prowling the area around her desk was a thirty-something year old man who would have been at home on the Steeler’s offensive line.
Oshiro. What was a US Deputy Marshal from the Fugitive Apprehension Strike Team doing here?
Before she made it to the door, Oshiro swung his shaved head her way, spotted her, and with a grace and speed that defied the laws of physics for such a large man, rushed out and had her in a crushing hug.
“Sweet Lucy Mae! How are you?” He raised her off her feet with the hug but deposited her oh-so-gently back down so that only the slightest twinge of pain rang out from her foot.
“Little Timmy Oshiro.” She couldn’t help but smile. Oshiro had the reputation as one of the toughest bad-ass deputies the Marshal’s Service had ever produced—even the hot-shot Homeland Security guys moved out of his way when he came barreling down a hall—but he didn’t intimidate her. She’d seen first hand how gentle and kind he could be with her victims. That more than made up for any other shortcomings. “How’s the only federal agent in Western Pennsylvania who’s been hauled in front of OPR more than I have?”
His grin would have scared little kids into eating their broccoli. “Actually, I think you’re one up on me there.” He jerked his chin toward her leg. “Guess they didn’t charge you with treason like the rumors said.”
“They tried.” Tried to charge her with several offenses, mainly for the crime of surviving the attack on her and her family. To save her family, she’d been forced to give her FBI administrative password to her attacker. That security breach could have been disastrous for the DOJ, but thanks to Lucy escaping and Taylor’s computer wizardry, they’d not only caught everyone involved, they’d been able to expose and repair a hidden security flaw in the DOJ computer system.
Unfortunately, not before the man sent after Lucy had gone to Lucy’s home and found her mother there. A few hours difference and the man would have found Megan home as well. That thought was what kept Lucy up at night…until she finally would drift to sleep, only to wake in terror, panicked that she hadn’t reached her family in time, that she’d lost them all.
Lucy glanced down at her foot. If you did the math, her ordeal translated to a win for the good guys. Except Lucy had almost lost her leg, her daughter had been traumatized, and her mother had been killed.
Oshiro gave her another hug, this one less effusive and more consoling. “Sorry. Heard about your mom. You doing okay?”
She nodded then looked up to meet his gaze. “Just want to get back to work. Of course, that was before I learned I don’t have a job any more.”
His smile returned, this time revealing his teeth. Some said Oshiro resembled a hyena. They were wrong. Mako shark would be more like it. Once he was committed to something or someone, nothing could force him from his path. A lot like Lucy that way. “Wanna go out with a bang? Then I have the perfect case.”
Chapter 3
“WANT TO TELL
me why you’ve brought two civilians into my squad?” Lucy asked, glancing through the glass walls into her office. This was a secure area. Civilians never came here.
“Technically,” Oshiro drawled, “only one and half civilians. The man is Seth Bernhart.”
“The Assistant US Attorney?” Lucy squinted at the back of the man’s head. “I thought he quit a few years back?”
Oshiro frowned, turned her so their backs were to her office. “Burned out was more like it. Was working in Atlanta doing some of the initial Innocent Image prosecutions.”
Innocent Images was federal law enforcement’s intensive effort to identify the victims and perpetrators in child pornography. Because of the sheer volume of images, early on, before computer algorithms were created to help ease some of the burden, it required being closeted in a small, dark room, scanning pornography over and over for clues, hours on end.
It messed with a lot of law enforcement officers’ heads, even after mandatory counseling and periodic psych evals were begun.
“Walden worked Innocent Images in Atlanta, before he came here,” Lucy remembered.
“He and Bernhart worked together. Most prosecutors never want to see the evidence, say they need to compartmentalize, focus on the trial. Not Bernhart. He was the young hotshot newbie headed for the fast track to DC, wanted his fingers in every pie when it came to his cases. Then he got in over his head with one case and it swallowed him whole.”
Now it was all making sense. “June Unknown. Everyone was obsessed with that one, even Walden.”
They both knew Isaac Walden was the most levelheaded agent around. Nothing upset the man’s equanimity—at least not since Lucy had met him two years ago when she came to start the Pittsburgh SAFE squad. But he never talked about his time in Atlanta. She’d thought it was because his wife died there—a sudden stroke on Thanksgiving eve four years ago, while Walden was working late at the office.
“Bernhart left the US Attorney’s Office after he prosecuted several of the men who had June Unknown’s images,” she continued. June Unknown was the reason why the SAFE squads were created; in the hopes that a multi-agency, multi-jurisdictional approach to child molestation and other sexual felonies would be more fruitful in capturing the worst of the worst.