Page 97 of Under Cover

“You’re enjoying this,” Crosby said, and Garcia grinned at him.

“Only ’cause you’re here with us, papi,but yes I am.”

“So….” Harding was making impatient motions with his hand, and Garcia brought himself back to the meeting.

“Mazursky and Marcy Beauchamp’s husband, Kent, were both on the board of a legit political organization called Americans for America, which is… anyone?”

“A white supremist organization!” Carlyle guessed, his voice a brutal imitation of a gameshow host’s.

“And another prize for the gentleman with blood on his knuckles,” Garcia replied in kind.

“I thought I’d washed that off,” Joey muttered, and Gideon passed him, of all things, a baby wipe.

“You never clean enough,” Chadwick muttered back.

“Shit.” Carlyle wiped off the back of his hand and nodded for Garcia to go on.

“So,” Harding mused, “is it, like, another branch of Sons of the Blood, or—”

“It was short-lived,” Garcia said. “Lasted three years before getting branded a hate group. But since Mazursky was from the East Coast, it’s not hard to jump from that to Kent Beauchamp and his wife starting their own… uhm,poker gameat their place with their fellow travelers.”

“And then Kent gets killed,” Natalia said, “and Marcy runs for city council, and it falls through, and Mazursky talks to Creedy.”

Garcia nodded. “And Creedy talks to his friend, the lawyer at NYPD Cop Central, and Beauchamp gets a job there.”

“And she’s perfect,” Harding said thoughtfully. “She knows law enforcement, she’s pretty, she can make her way around a bureaucracy—”

“But only if the price is right,” Crosby added. “I studied those files today, Chief. I think there’s a lot of… ofunlikabilityabout this woman. Now normally I’d say being well-liked isn’t a factor with a coworker, but….” He made a face, and Garcia knew he was searching for words.

“She’s working with the public,” Natalia said. “She was supposedly working with the community. Likability is part of her job. So to have someone who seems to have alienatedeverybody, including her hometown, rising so high so fast over there, it does seem as though she’s working for a price.”

“And Cavendish can pay the price,” Swan said. Suddenly he frowned. “Garcia, he’s a lawyer working for the commissioner’s office, right?”

Garcia nodded. “Yeah, why?”

“Is there any way we could get a look at what cases he’s tried? Because I’d bet my ass he ran across criminals during a criminal interaction. I’ve been studying up on white-collar crime. You’d be surprised how many white-collar criminals meet their street connections in court.”

Harding frowned and stood up, pacing for a moment. “He mostly dealt with civil suits, am I right?”

Everybody in the room nodded because Garcia knew everybody in the room had read the files he’d given Crosby, including Natalia’s sweet little joke file at the beginning.

Crosby turned to Garcia. “Give Elsa your computer. I know it’s not associated with SCTF, so maybe she could take a lookie-loo and see if there’s some names we could check out.”

Garcia nodded and opened his laptop, making all the necessary modifications to keep any searches from being traced back to his IP address. Then he handed the laptop to Gail, and she grinned at him.

“Don’t worry. I’ve got a couple of tricks you might not know. It’ll still be clean as God’s fingers when you get it back.”

The problem with Gail beingsucha good field agent was that she was so much better at overwatch than he was, Garcia thought with a sigh.

“I have faith,” he said with a wink. Then he turned to Harding. “Okay, so we’ll find the connection. I’m surprised Gail couldn’t access it on the back of her eyelids already. But what do we do with it then? I mean, we’ll have a case. We’ll have the connections between Cavendish and Beauchamp and between both of them and the Sons of the Blood. What else do we need?”

“We’re building a case,” Harding muttered. “But we also need a trap. So let’s look at the case first. To begin with, we’re only assuming about the warehouse—”

“Gid and I will take care of that tonight,” Carlyle said, so casually Garcia stared.

“Uhm, how?” Swan asked.

They exchanged bloodthirsty glances. “Well,” Chadwick said slowly, “turns out we were just there earlier this evening.”