Page 53 of The Writer

“She starts the book with the trial. She was there.”

“And she specifically talks about you? Claims you were somehow guilty?”

I’d soon learn Detective Declan Shaw had a very good reason for feeling guilty. That, too, as much as everything else, was fact.

“Yeah. In the first line about me. But it’s a book, right? Who knows what she knew and when. Whatever she got, she got from Harrison. We’ve got to pull Harrison’s financials. You know he’s on Denise Morrow’s payroll.Has to be.We find one payment from her to him, and this all starts to make sense.”

“It wouldn’t change anything. You find payments between those two, all it proves is he was willing to share information for the right price; it doesn’t take the spotlight off you.”

“What if it was the other way around?”

“I don’t follow.”

“Maybe we’re thinking about this backward,” Declan says. “What if she pointed Harrison at me instead of the other way around? We don’t know what put Harrison on this. Why not her?”

“That’s still not a crime. How would she even come up with that?”

“You know how.” Declan is thinking about what she wrote in that book:What goes around…

“Lucero?” Cordova says.

“She was probably talking to him early on, right? Maybe as far back as the trial. Maybe before that. She needs details for her story, and he gives her one. Tells her the cops set him up. Tells her how. She takes that to Harrison and he runs with it.”

“Even if that’s true, how does it help us here? Besides,” Cordova says, “that doesn’t track. Didn’t you say she had Harrison’s name and number written on a newspaper clipping that said IAU was looking at you? That means she got his contact infoafterthe story broke.”

Declan takes out his phone and scrolls back through his photos until he finds the ones he took down in the evidence locker. Cordova’s right—the name and number are written in the margins of an article from theTimestitled “Detective in the Maggie Marshall Case Under Internal Investigation.”

Cordova squints and leans in closer. “Can I see that?”

Declan hands him the phone, and he pinches the image and zooms in on the handwriting. “Why is there a line through Harrison’s name?”

“A what?” Declan never noticed a line, but now he sees it, faint, like the flick of a pen.

“Did you dial the number?”

Declan shakes his head.

Cordova keys the number in on his desk phone. It rings three times before a harsh male voice answers: “Daniels.”

Cordova hangs up without a word.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

OUTSIDE.

Declan drags hard on a cigarette he bummed off a patrol officer during his and Cordova’s hasty exit from the Twentieth. He hasn’t smoked in nearly four years, but he sure as hell needs one now. “Has the LT ever told you he spoke to Denise Morrow? Even once?”

Cordova is standing a few paces up the sidewalk, upwind. He hates the smell of cigarette smoke. If it gets in his suit, he’s more likely to burn it than launder it, but he clearly understands why Declan needs one. “He and I have had our share of private conversations about this since it first started, and he’s never said that. He took me to breakfast the morning of my deposition with IAU, and we covered every inch of the MaggieMarshall case—every single thing you and I did—so there’s been opportunity, but if they were talking, he kept it to himself.”

Declan takes another hit of the cigarette. “I suppose you talked about me too, right?”

“What do you think?”

“So what do you think he told her?”

“This could mean nothing,” Cordova says. “It might mean she tracked down Harrison’s name from the article and got nowhere with him, then tracked down your supervisor and took a run at Daniels. It doesn’t mean they actually spoke. Doesn’t mean he told her anything.”

Declan doesn’t buy that. “That number didn’t ring Daniels’s desk line, and that wasn’t his work cell either; I got that one memorized, I dial it so much. No, that was some other number. Some phone important enough he keeps it on him. Personal cell. Maybe a burner. Why would she have that number? Who would give it to her? Had to be Harrison, right?”

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