Page 88 of Creed

He pulled up a map with a series of markers across the city. “I don’t get it. What are you showing me here?”

“These are his patrol logs.” Shep pointed to the screen, noting exact dates and times as he spoke. “There are a lot of nights when girls went missing in the exact area where he was working, but there are no calls logged, and no reports filed.”

Grim’s face darkened. “So, he’s running cover for these pricks.”

“It’s looking that way.” Shep kept hammering away, and then the blood drained from his face. “Oh shit. You gotta be kidding me.”

“What?”

“You’re not gonna like this.” Shep leaned back in his chair. “I tracked patrol logs for Maddox for the last eighteen months. Guess who was on duty the night Devin was attacked at the warehouse?”

“No fucking way.”

“Not only that, but he was thefirston the scene.” Shep pointed to the time log as he said, “Here’s the report. He signed in as the responding officer, and it’s at least thirty minutes before any backup arrived, and that includes EMS.”

“So, Devin was lying there wounded for God knows how long before this asshole called for an ambulance.”

“Unless I’m missing something.” Shep thought for a moment, then asked, “What did Devin tell you about that night?”

“That she and her partner took a call about possible prostitutes at a local mattress warehouse. They went to check it out, and when they got there, they found six or seven women bound and drugged. Looked like they were about to be trafficked. She and the partner were working to set them free when shots were fired. Partner was killed, and Devin was jumped and knocked out cold. She woke up in the hospital a few hours later.”

“So, she was out when Maddox showed up.”

“Yeah. Had no idea what happened. Just knew her partner was dead, and the girls were gone.”

Memphis turned to me with a scowl. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

“He used the time to cover their tracks and move the girls.” I shook my head, “God, this motherfucker.”

“What about the night at the Vault?” Grim asked. “Where was he then?”

“Let me see.” After a few strokes of his keyboard, Shep let out a breath and announced, “He was on patrol in that sector, parked less than half a mile away.”

“You gotta be fucking kidding me.”

“So, he’s deeper in this trafficking bullshit than we thought?” Grim asked.

“Yeah, and he’s out there trying to pin this shit on us.”

“So, what are we going to do about it?”

“We gotta turn the tables on him.”

“But how?”

“Right now, we have bits and pieces. We gotta figure out exactly how this all fits together and get it into the right hands.”

And with that, we buckled in for the night. We spent hours on end searching for anything that could help us build a case against Maddox. Every click, every file, and every log entry was another nail in his coffin, and we were going to bury him with it.

20

DEVIN

“Did you see the news?”

“Yes, Mother. I saw it.”

“Those are some pretty serious allegations, Devin.”