Page 19 of Lovesick Titan (Lovesick #2)
“What were you thinking, Grant?” He collapsed back into his chair.
“There’s already Internal Affairs in your office, looking through everything.
Right now, no one other than me and a handful of IA know, but something like this isn’t going to be easy to keep quiet.
Just tell me…if he has something on you, if he’s extorting—”
“ No . It wasn’t like that.” Mal holding over him that he knew his identity had nothing to do with them sleeping together, with them coming to care about each other.
Danny deserved this. He couldn’t even be angry at Mal for the low blow of sending in the photograph, because he’d brought this down on himself.
For a rare, brief moment, Shan lost his anger and disapproval completely and just looked defeated.
“Give me something to help you, Grant. You’re one of the best we got.
I refuse to believe you’d throw that all away just to help some thief get away with his crimes.
Even if you never altered evidence, if he’s just a bad call you slept with some Friday night… give me something I can work with.”
Danny had never doubted Shan was a good man, a good officer who honestly cared about this city and its people. Now, he was trying to offer Danny a lifeline he hadn’t earned. “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t have anything to say.”
The anger and hardness returned to Shan’s expression.
He snatched up the photograph and closed it inside the folder.
“Get out of here. You can collect personal items from your office, but the officers in there are going to check everything you try to walk out of here with. And they’re going to have questions for you, so don’t even think about leaving town. ”
Danny nodded, got up, and left, walking in a daze toward his office, feeling colder and emptier with every step.
It wasn’t really hitting him how much his life would change from this.
If he served time. Even if he didn’t. Unless he could prove it was all a lie, which he couldn’t and didn’t want to, his career was over.
He reached his office and found two officers from IA rifling through his things.
One of them was Lieutenant Liu, who’d interviewed Danny a few weeks ago when IA thought he might go off the rails nearing the anniversary of the defeat of Thanatos.
Despite their earlier encounters, she’d never shied from Danny or acted unfriendly.
Now she fixed him with a calculating stare.
“Have a seat, Grant. When we’re through, you can get what you need, but we’ll have to check your bag as well.”
Nodding impassively, Danny had no intention of fighting any of this.
He sat off to the side while they continued ransacking his office.
Not messy or spiteful, just thorough, no softening of any blows because, in this situation, Danny was the enemy.
If they were the officers working the investigation, then they already knew about the picture.
It was maybe ten minutes later and they were nearly finished going through his desk when John stormed in. He must have followed Danny out of the house. Shan was right on his heels.
“What the hell is going on?” he barked at Liu and the other officer .
“John…” Shan warned. “You can’t—”
“Sir,” Liu called from Danny’s desk, having opened the last drawer, the bottom drawer where Danny had…
Oh no . He sat up straighter as Liu dumped the plastic evidence bag with Mal’s comms in it on top of the desk.
He hadn’t thought it would matter, too preoccupied to come back for the comms during the week like he’d planned and dispose of them.
Sitting there these past ten minutes, it hadn’t dawned on him that something that could easily lead them right to Mal existed in plain view.
Danny didn’t care that it clinched his own downfall, but if they were able to trace the comms…
“Grant, why was this evidence not correctly catalogued with everything else from the museum case last Monday night?” Liu asked with a hard look as she inspected the catalogue ID and held up the bag.
They were all staring at Danny. He couldn’t look at them, so he turned his gaze to the floor. “Because I was hiding it. I had no intention of processing that piece of evidence.”
“Danny…” John said in disbelief as he no doubt began to piece together what was happening. Shan, the IA officers, the stashed evidence. Danny was caught red-handed as crooked; he was going down for it, and no one could do anything about it.
“Go home, Grant,” Shan said, practically seething. “John, you can’t be a part of this—”
“Sir,” the other officer with Liu spoke up. “We still need to look through Grant’s bag before he leaves.”
Shan sighed. “Then we’ll do it now. Get up, Grant.”
Danny felt like a slide under a microscope—exposed and at the mercy of the others.
He handed over his bag and stepped back.
They went through everything, but there was nothing to find.
Not there. Danny realized they would go through his pockets next and thought of his cell phone.
There was more than enough on his phone that pointed to him as Zeus, to his involvement with Mal, to Andre and Lynn helping him. His friends, everyone would be at risk.
Backing up a step, he caught John’s eye.
His father looked so betrayed, which Danny knew would only get worse once John learned what had started all of this, but he didn’t hesitate to keep Shan distracted while the IA officers worked and Danny took the next moment when no eyes were on him to stash his phone by the exit with a quick lightning jump.
When they were done with his bag, they went through his pockets.
“Where’s your cell phone, Grant?” Liu asked.
“Didn’t bring it.”
“You know this will go smoother for you if you hand it over now,” the other IA officer said. “It won’t make anything better if you make us get a warrant, and we won’t have any trouble doing that after the evidence we’ve found so far.”
“It’s not on me, I swear. You just checked. I forgot it at home. You can search my house; you’ll find it there.”
Both officers looked unconvinced, but there wasn’t any more they could do.
“You can’t prevent us from looking into your phone records, Grant,” Liu said, “so don’t try anything stupid in the meantime.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Get out of here,” Shan practically threw Danny’s bag at him. “You’ll know when they’re ready with questions or to search your premises. I don’t want to see your face in here until you’re requested. You got that?”
“Yes, sir,” Danny said and turned immediately to leave with his father. He glanced back, and as soon as he had a moment where Shan and the IA were all looking the same direction, he lightning jumped to retrieve his phone.
Danny had only a brief reprieve while leaving the station and getting into John’s car to head home.
He took out his phone, called Andre, and explained in no uncertain terms that he didn’t have time to tell his friend what had happened yesterday because they had an emergency.
He needed Andre to remotely wipe all of his text messages and calls that could point back to him as Zeus or get anyone else in trouble.
IA were going to be looking at his phone; there wasn’t much time.
“Yeah, Danny, you know I can do that. But what happened?”
“I’ll tell you later. Just make sure there’s nothing they can use against us.”
He thought the hardest part would be coming clean to John as soon as he hung up.
The sharp stare and tight purse to his father’s lips as they drove, the purposeful silence waiting for Danny to just speak .
But what made it worse was that even after he explained, no tiptoeing around it—“The captain has a photograph of me kissing Malcolm Cho. We’ve been sleeping together for almost a month, and now they know I hid evidence for him”—John didn’t even yell, just sounded hurt and disappointed, which only made it worse.
Danny was so tired of being a disappointment to everyone.
“Once they prove that picture is authentic, even if they didn’t have other evidence, which they do, the second they close the investigation, they’re coming to arrest you,” John said as he shut the door behind them into the house with more force than necessary.
“Four years jail time for felony harboring. Not to mention hiding evidence.”
Laying a hand on the back of the couch to steady himself, Danny slowly turning to face John. “Technically—”
“Oh give it a rest,” John shook his head. “It’s over, Danny. You can’t protect him or yourself. Why would you throw your life away to sleep with Malcolm Cho?”
Danny heard a familiar intake of breath from Stella before Joey’s voice followed it, “What? What about Cho?”
He and Stella had just come out of the kitchen. Stella must have come over after Danny and John left. Of course they were both there. Of course they’d overheard. Of course everything had to erupt into the open before Danny could get a handle on how his life was unraveling.
Leaning against the back of the couch with his father at his right in front of the door and Joey and Stella walking in from the kitchen at his left, he felt surrounded and suffocated.
“Why, Dad? Why would I sleep with Malcolm Cho and risk losing my job?” Danny said, no longer caring about keeping secrets.
His secrets had been laid bare and he was going to pay for each and every one of them.
“Because it felt good, that’s why. Because he felt so good.” Danny stared forward at nothing as he remembered the past several weeks and everything he’d lost. “Because I love him. I love him. He was worth the risk, any risk. And I ruined everything.”
A moment of stunned silence passed before Stella said, “ Cho’s who you’ve been seeing?”
“You knew about this?” John snapped.
She frowned at him but didn’t say more .