Page 64 of Her Silver Fox Firefighters
“You’re not getting much out of what you have here?” I ask and look at the folder. “Surely, there are plenty of inconsistencies to explore. His financial transactions alone should give you a pattern to follow up on.”
“Not serious enough to warrant IA going after him. He’s the sheriff of a large district and a very influential man within law enforcement. Nobody’s going to go after him based solely on breadcrumbs. We need more, Olivia.”
I’d hoped pointing Carlos in the right direction would be enough.
“Marcus is careful, isn’t he?” I ask, rhetorically.
“Extremely careful, and I didn’t expect anything less from a man who has amassed so much power within the department at his age,” he says. “I don’t like this any more than you do, Olivia. But you said you had something, something short of nuclear to burn this guy.”
“What I have might not be enough,” I sigh. “I thought it would be, but a good lawyer could still?—”
“Whatever it is, I need it, if only to get a judge to sign off on a warrant. That could get the ball rolling to open an official IA investigation and maybe even get the New York City DA on board. We need more ammunition, and you’re the one who’s got it.”
I show him my wrist, on which a charm bracelet rests. It’s one of the few items I am rarely without. “I’ve had this for as long as I can remember. Marcus got it for me on my twentieth birthday. A token of his love, he called it. Every time I found a new charm, I’d buy it and add it to this chain.”
It’s a sterling silver chain, now holding twenty-five small pieces of jewelry, each one found at some little shop or street corner over the years. One, in particular, catches Carlos’s eye, and for good reason. It’s a four-sided die covered in acrylic black with white dots, a fine line running along the middle.
Carefully, I remove the die and open it, revealing a tiny USB pebble.
Carlos can’t help but smile. “Smart girl.”
“I’ll make a copy and have one of the guys give it to you,” I say. “I’m not parting with this.”
“It’s the original.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll need to authenticate it at some point.”
“But can you work with a copy until then?” I ask.
“Yes, what’s on it?”
My stomach tightens at the thought of what it contains. My appetite is about to take a nosedive as I remember theminutes I stole late at night, copying files onto this drive, making sure Marcus wouldn’t hear me.
“I got these off his laptop and his phone while he was sleeping,” I say. “Contacts, emails, photos, scanned documents. A lot of things that didn’t make much sense to me, but if you run them against his arrest record, you might find some red flags.”
“It won’t be considered fruit of the poisonous tree because it came from you,” he concludes, already thinking about ways to introduce it as evidence.
“There are also report files from the work I did for him: doctored transactions modified records and their originals, each organized in specific, accurately dated folders,” I tell him. “It’s the one thing I had the presence of mind to do right, I guess.” I take another deep breath. “There is a problem with this, though, with me handing it over, I mean.”
“What is it?”
I lower my gaze in genuine shame. “It will inevitably incriminate me, too. I was aware of the illegality of my actions. I did it anyway because I loved him, because I wanted to protect him and help him.”
Carlos needs a moment to think about it. The guys don’t know the details of how dark my work for Marcus got before I left. It’s too shameful. I still blame myself for the part I played in his rise to power. In a way, I feel responsible for the deaths of Chloe’s parents. His audacity stems from what I helped facilitate for him as the sheriff of Devon, NY.
“Did you know that he was doing it to hurt people?” Carlos asks me.
“No,” I reply, shaking my head. “He gave me this whole story about doing things that way because there were corrupt officials within law enforcement that would try to stop him, because the drug dealers he was going after had the DA in their pocket, all stories I believed, until I realized that those same pockets were actually his. And the money he said he was making from those dealers… he wanted to reinvest it into our drug-ravaged community.”
“That alone tells me you were lied to, Olivia. You had good intentions.”
“The ends don’t really justify the means, though, do they?”
“Not always. But given what we’re up against, I’m sure we could work out a good deal with the DA to keep you out of it,” he says.
There it is again. That flicker of hope burning in my heart. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Carlos. I don’t want to have my babies in jail.”
