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“Hell yes,” she said. I knew she had been uncomfortable when she’d talked to me and Evans earlier that day. I suspected she might think that Evans read people all the time. So had I. Despite her assurances to the contrary, I still wasn’t sure how she could resist. It had to be tempting. Mulligan showing up like this meant she wanted to know what was happening, even though she thought she might bump into Evans.

“Care to fill me in?” she said, nodding at the scene in front of us.

I glanced at her sideways, not sure how much to say. She knew a lot, but not everything. I decided to stick to the basics first.

“Looks like an unfortunate accident, Chief. The car…if you can call it that… veered off the road right where we are standing, went down the slope, rolling around a few times before it landed there.”

“Cause?” Mulligan asked. She was standing with her arms crossed, bracing herself against the cold wind that came in from the sea.

“Driver fell asleep? Had a seizure? Intoxicated?” I shrugged. “Won’t know until later, but you can see the marks for yourself,” I said as I turned and pointed. Thomás had hit the brakes way too late to stop what had happened. He had lost control, and I could only guess why. He hadn’t fallen asleep, that was for sure. No, something must have happened between him and Evans. Something bad enough that they crashed like this.

“Okay,” Mulligan said as she turned back. “So why are you here? And where is Ms. Evans? Surely she is part of this? Why else would you be here now?”

I sighed. What was I supposed to say? That she had literally killed the driver of the car not long ago? That she’d probably done it twice in the same day? “Chief,” I began as they started lifting Thomás’ body out of the car. “What did Evans do for you when your son was kidnapped?” I had to know now. It was the only way to figure out how much I could tell her. It made me feel like a fraud. Hiding things. Sadly, there was some comfort in the fact that there might be two of us that would be doing that.

“Listen, Nate,” she said softly, “I can’t—”

“I need to know. We’ve come to the point now where you need to tell me because as insane as it sounds, that’s the only way I can trust you.”

She looked at me a while. I didn’t care. Only waited while I watched Thomás being laid out on a stretcher. Limp and pale.

“Okay,” she said finally. “Well, it happened before you started working here. Detective Flores was working on the case. Oscar…” her voice broke a little at the thought of her then three-year-old. “Oscar was taken from daycare.” It had happened in an unattended moment only a few moments before Mulligan had come to pick him up. At first, it was thought that it was a coincidence. That was, until the chief and her husband had received a ransom note. Hastily scribbled on the back of a flyer, full of spelling mistakes and filth. The spelling hadn’t been the biggest mistake, though. The chief’s house had naturally been under surveillance and the messenger had been caught as she tried to leave. As it turned out later, she was the kidnapper’s girlfriend, and like him, she was a known user, sometimes dealer. The chief had arrested the boyfriend before on a couple of occasions, and in his twisted head, he had figured she owed him for that. The natural solution in his drugged-out head was to take her child and demand payment for him.

“I’ve seen some crazy shit working this job, especially in Ashdale, but never have I been afraid like that,” she said as we watched the black body bag being zipped over Thomás’ body. “The bastard was threatening someone more important to myself than me. Someone I can’t always control, you know?”

I nodded. I didn’t truly know, but I understood.

“Problem was, we didn’t know who her boyfriend was, or where he was. She hadn’t been part of his life when I’d dealt with him before. And she wasn’t talking.”

I was starting to see where this was going. The girlfriend had refused to say a word. Protecting her piece-of-shit boyfriend. Not realizing the danger the little boy was in with a drugged up and angry criminal who thought the chief, and probably the world, owed him something.

“I was at my wit's end,” Mulligan continued, the cold wind all but forgotten now, though it tore at us where we stood. “Flores couldn’t get a damn word out of her. She refused to talk to us. Refused food and drink even. She looked at us like we were the damn criminals.”

“And then Evans turned up?”

Mulligan nodded. “At my house one night. She had one thing in common with our prisoner at the time. She didn’t want to be there, either. Didn’t want to talk to me at all.” It had all happened fast. Evans had known that once she started saying she could help, Mulligan would call Flores, suspicious of this new person getting involved. She could have been involved in the kidnapping for all Mulligan knew. So, Evans had listened in on the chief’s thoughts almost immediately, recounting what she heard. Karl, the chief’s husband had come in and gotten the same treatment. It had left them stunned and confused until she had clarified how this could help them.

“Fucking hell, that was creepy,” Mulligan said, visibly getting shivers at the memory. “Having someone hear your thoughts? Everything that is private to you?”

I only nodded again. I knew all too well how that felt.

“Anyway, I was shocked. Both from the kidnapping and from what she can so clearly do. It was Karl who demanded I make use of her since she was offering. It meant sneaking her into the station, but she seemed reluctant despite offering help. Karl was adamant, though. So, we did it.” They snuck her in late at night and had her talk to the girlfriend. She had been more talkative to someone who wasn’t a cop. And anyway, she didn’t need to be one, did she? Evans asked questions and always got answers whether people used their voice to answer or not.

“It’s like she asks the right question and you can’t help but think of the answer,” Mulligan said.

“Well, try not to think of an orange T-rex if I tell you to,” I said. It was impossible. It took a lot of concentration to keep your mind from wandering to places you didn’t want it to when someone was listening.

“Exactly,” the chief said. “Anyway. She got the answers. His name, location. The girlfriend seemed only sad. Like she knew it was all over by then.”

My guess, from what Mulligan told me, was that she was a member of this Community. Her aversion to cops for a boyfriend who had sent her right into trouble? No, that hate of the police screamed affiliate, didn’t it? It was likely how Evans had gotten wind of her being arrested as well. They all seemed protective of each other. But maybe she had been telling the truth when she said they would let their own be arrested if they did commit crimes? I hadn’t been sure since she wasn’t talking about Freddy Miller, but this was something else. Evans had made contact with Mulligan to try and make a serious wrong right.

“After that, we found Oscar quickly. I told Flores it was an anonymous tip. Not like I could tell him the truth, right?” He would have thought her insane. The child had been kept in an abandoned house full of squatters. If not for the other addicts living there, it might actually have been a lot worse for the kid. They’d given him some food, while his actual kidnapper had barely been aware he was there.

“Thank God most people are kind,” Mulligan said, a weak smile on her lips.

“And after that you got Evans working for the department?” I asked.

She nodded. “A few years later. Two? You were here by then. Bowman was stuck on a case…blackmail, I think. Anyway. I saw a solution. She never contacted me afterward. Didn’t ask for anything. So I reached out, knowing she wasn’t doing this for money or fame.”

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