Page 10 of The System (Fire Universe #4)

“H i.”

“Oh. Miss Hart, hello,” Dylan said, looking up from her desk to see Kieran standing in the door.

“Kieran. And I’m sorry to just drop in on you, but I wanted to check in, and I couldn’t get a hold of Carina.”

“Carina?”

“The prosecutor.”

“Yes, I just didn’t expect you to call her Carina.”

“Oh. She told me it was okay,” Kieran replied. “Do I need to call you Lieutenant again now that my sister is here and officially under arrest?”

“No, Dylan is fine. Come in. Come in. Sorry, it’s a bit of a mess.” Dylan stood and began stacking file folders that littered her desk. “I’ve got a few officers who indirectly report to me from this and other stations, but I’m still the only full-time cold case detective, so my desk pretty much always looks like this.”

“How can they report to you indirectly?”

“Oh. Well, we have officers who are interested in working cold cases, but we can’t justify pulling them from the active ones to work the old crimes, so I only borrow them from time to time when I need them. We’ve got a few cases right now where I do.”

“Did I hear correctly out there?” Kieran walked into the office and sat down opposite Dylan’s desk. “Someone said you were about to be promoted when I walked in.”

“Oh,” Dylan said as she shook her head. “They won’t let me turn it down again.”

“You’ve done that before?” Kieran asked, surprised.

“Yeah, a couple of times. Captains don’t really work cases, though – they’re more administrators – and I like working cases.”

“And they’re making you take the promotion now?”

“It’s technically still my choice. I could decline it again, but the department is restructuring and, well, my boss is retiring, so they want me to replace him and put a detective in this office. He’s good. I’ve been working with him for the past several years. He’ll do a great job. With this restructure, though, it’s either I finally take the promotion and replace the captain, or they bring in someone else. And, in the past, it was fine because I knew the other lieutenants who were in the running, and they were good. I didn’t have an issue working for them. But, this time, I know the other person in the mix if I don’t take it, and I’m not a fan. He’s all about politics and wants to run for mayor one day. He thinks police work is a means to an end. He won’t put the other officers or the cases first, and that’s not the kind of person I want to work for.” Dylan finished moving the file folders around and stacked them all in one corner before sitting back down. “Besides, I think my wife wants me out of the field at this point. She would never admit it because she’s fiercely independent herself and wants that for me, too, but when I get a break in an old case, I need to go all sorts of places and at all times of the night. While it isn’t usually dangerous, you still never know, and she’s been putting up with this for a while. It should work out for both of us.”

“Well, congratulations, I guess. What happens with my sister’s case now that you’re moving on, though?”

“I’m not moving on just yet,” Dylan replied with a little laugh. “It’ll easily be a few months before anything becomes official. And I’m still the arresting officer and lead detective on her case, even when I’m promoted, so I’ll be handling the rest of the investigation and working with Carina.”

“You call her Carina, too?”

“We’re friends,” Dylan explained. “Years now. Occupational hazard. You become friends with lawyers.” She laughed. “Or, you marry one.” She shrugged.

“Your wife’s a lawyer, too?”

“Yup. Ada is a child advocate attorney.”

“That’s probably a difficult job.”

“It’s not easy, no, but she does the best she can to make sure kids get the support they need.”

“Would someone like Ada have been there for my sister?”

“Depends. It’s possible, but from what I’ve seen in the records, she had a social worker assigned to her case, and that was it.”

“So, no one advocating for her needs?” Kieran asked.

“The social worker would’ve done that.”

“They have a million cases. I’d know; my mom was one.”

“True,” Dylan said. “Well, not quite a million. If you want to talk to someone about what they would’ve done for your sister, a good friend of mine is a social worker. She also grew up in the system. You might only need to ask your mom, though.”

“Your friend grew up in the system and works in it now?”

“Yes. And she and her wife adopted their two kids out of foster care, too. They just adopted their second one, technically. You might know of her wife, actually. Most people do. Kenna Crawford.”

“The host on that crime show?”

“Yup. Her wife’s name is Ripley. I met her through Kenna when my wife and I were on Kenna’s show.”

“You and your wife work cases together?”

“Not exactly. If you look up mine or my wife’s name online, you’ll find the story, so it’s out there, but Ada’s brother, Noah, disappeared when they were kids. They were playing outside by the lake. One second, he was there, and the next, he was gone.” Dylan cleared her throat then. “I was an officer on the case. And before you ask, Ada and I are ten years apart. I promised her that I’d find him, like a dumb rookie, so I stayed on the case even when she and I lost touch. We reconnected when we were both asked to do Kenna’s show on an anniversary of his disappearance, and we’ve been together ever since.”

“You mentioned something about this before.”

“Yeah, I have a new suspect. We’ve been working this for the past few months. Well, I’ve been working this lead for over a year.”

“What happened to him?” Kieran asked.

“It looks like Noah died the day he went missing. Hikers found him a few years ago. The woods surrounding the lake where they were playing butt up against a private acreage that we’d asked to search years ago, but the owner denied the search, and the judge wouldn’t issue a warrant because we didn’t have any evidence that Noah was anywhere near that property. A couple of years after he disappeared, we finally got a new judge to agree to a search, but we didn’t find anything. So, we moved on. Anyway, there’s another property on the other side of that one that’s technically in another jurisdiction. It was miles from where Noah went missing, and it was more than a decade later, so I didn’t think we’d find anything. I’d searched everywhere else around that lake, though, and I’d searched the whole lake myself. He wasn’t there, or I would’ve found him. So, if he was taken and then immediately killed or left, he could only be on that other property. Whoever took him would have been long gone by the time we’d arrived on the scene the day he went missing. I have a friend of a friend who runs a ground-penetrating radar company. He volunteered his time and equipment, and we went over the property. It took days, and we didn’t find anything. Then, on the last day we were there scanning, there were some hikers who were on the outskirts of the property on a county trail. They spotted a tennis shoe under some brush and thought it was weird that one shoe was just sticking out. One of them got closer, and they noticed that it wasn’t just a shoe. If he was buried, it wasn’t deep, and it had been a long time, so there wasn’t much… left to…” Dylan shook her head. “We had to get a forensic anthropologist to look at the bones, but all they could tell us was that he’d been hit over the back of the head with a blunt object. We thought it might be the property owner who denied the search, but he didn’t do it. Finding the body next door to his place got us a warrant to search, but we didn’t find anything. I checked his alibi to be sure, but he was out of town at gun shows in the region for two weeks before and after Noah’s disappearance, and he lived alone. So, that left us with a body but no suspect.”

“Wow, that’s a story,” was all Kieran could say.

“It’s my life,” Dylan replied. “Ada and her brother were close, and she lost him that day but never knew what happened to him. Finding his body gave her some closure, but Noah clearly didn’t run off, fall down, hit his head, and then bury himself in a shallow grave, so not knowing who did this and what happened has always been something she and her parents have had to deal with.”

“But you have a new suspect?” Kieran asked.

“I can’t talk about that part in any real detail. It’s an open investigation. But I’ve got a lead and consider them a strong person of interest.”

Kieran nodded and said, “I hope you figure it out.”

“Thanks. Me too. I want to wrap this up as much as I can before my promotion. I won’t be the lead on the case then because I can’t, but I’ll still oversee it. I just want to give Ada this one thing I’ve never been able to. She deserves to know what happened, you know?”

“Yeah,” Kieran said.

“But you didn’t come here to talk about Ada and Noah or my promotion.”

“I tried calling Carina for an update.”

“She’s probably in court. I’m sure she’ll get back to you.”

“They said I need to get Marin to put me on her visitor’s list to see her again.”

“That’s technically true, yes,” Dylan confirmed.

“But she hasn’t yet. And I can’t exactly text her to ask her to do it.”

“It’s up to her who she wants to see, Kieran. She might not have added you yet, but she will.”

“Our first meeting didn’t exactly go well,” Kieran replied.

“You’re both a little in shock, at least, but trust me, she’ll add you.”

“How do you know?”

“Because she doesn’t have anyone else, and she’s never done real time. She’s adjusting right now, but soon, she’ll realize that she’s alone in there, and the only person visiting her is her lawyer. She knows you exist now, so she’ll add you. It gets lonely in there. Having a visitor to look forward to can get them from one day to the next.”

Kieran nodded and said, “You can’t tell me anything about her case, can you?”

“Just that she’s being arraigned tomorrow morning.”

“Shouldn’t that have happened already?”

“It would have, but we had two judges on vacation and then a holiday, so the court’s a little behind.”

“Can I go?”

“To her arraignment? Of course,” Dylan replied. “It’s open court. It could be a long morning, though. The judge sees every case in order. Some take thirty seconds, while others might take a few minutes, and they are behind as is, so maybe bring lunch. Isn’t your ex-husband representing her? He can’t tell you this?”

“He told me a few things that he was able to this morning about the evidence you all have, but it’s just the stuff I’d be able to hear about on the news when it breaks, according to him,” she replied. “Then, he asked if he could stay with me during the days and nights that he’s here for the case so that he doesn’t have to commute back and forth, and I said no. He wanted me to put a guest bed in my office for him.” Kieran shook her head. “After I said no to that, he said he could sleep on the couch, but his back isn’t great. He plays golf nearly every Sunday without a problem.”

Dylan laughed and said, “He’s one of those, huh?”

“He just hasn’t given up yet, but we’ve grown apart, and I don’t love him like that anymore. Still, he’s doing this amazing thing for Marin, and I need to make sure he keeps on doing that. He really is a good attorney. When there are cases that they think they’ll lose at his firm, they put Diego on them, and he somehow wins or gets a great deal for his client.”

“Carina is good, too.” Dylan gave a stiff nod. “She’s going to be the DA soon. No chance that the other guy wins.” She shook her head a few times. “She has the highest win rate of any ADA, and I’m pretty sure she’s never lost a murder-one case.”

“Never?” Kieran asked, swallowing.

“Not that I know of. This isn’t exactly a big city with a ton of murder cases, but there have been at least ten or so that I can think of since she’s been around, and she’s won all of those.”

“I can tell she likes to argue,” Kieran said with a smile. “She argued with me about my drink last night.”

“Drink?” Dylan asked curiously.

“We went to a bar after I met Marin for the first time, and she was kind enough to buy me a drink. I ordered whatever beer they gave me first, but when I went to order something else and chose a margarita, she said I sounded like a tourist and proceeded to try to convince me to get a martini instead.”

Dylan laughed and said, “Sounds like Carina. What bar did you go to?”

“Some place on Fifth Street. I didn’t catch the name.”

“Jessa’s bar. It’s Carina’s… favorite,” Dylan said.

“She mentioned that.”

“I hope you ordered yourself a car if you had a beer and a martini.”

“Carina took me home. And how do you know I went with the martini instead?”

“I told you that Carina was good,” Dylan replied with a wink.