Forgiving Lies by Molly McAdams Read Free Book Online Page A

quickly snapped his mouth shut when he saw Chief’s look.
    The room stayed tense as we all stared at each other in silence for what felt like hours. Finally, Chief sighed and handed two files to each of us. “Look, we’ll take care of the police-brutality thing, but I don’t think it should come as a shock to you that you are out of the undercover narcotics division.”
    Do. Not. Say. Desk.
    “But since Juarez already had his suspicions of the two of you, he had guys lined up in case he was taken down. And we just caught wind of it this morning. There’s a hit out on both of you.”
    “What the fuck?” I whispered mostly to myself as I looked through the top file. There were new credit cards, a driver’s license . . . everything I would need to start over. Except the name didn’t say Logan Kash Ryan. And the state sure as shit wasn’t Florida. In its place was Logan Kash Hendricks. Texas. I glanced over at Mason, who was now scrambling to see what was in his file, before looking at Chief. “Chief, for the last three and a half years we’ve lived—almost the entire time—with thugs, dealers, and druggies. When don’t we have someone wanting us dead?”
    “This is a serious hit. What we’re doing isn’t exactly witness protection. But it’s getting you away from here until things calm down, and before you say anything”—he held his hand up and I snapped my mouth shut—“you’ll still be working. Just not with narcotics. You’ll still be undercover.” He grabbed both files that had been under the ones with our new identities and opened them. “Do you remember the college girl who went missing and was found tortured to death in that basement about two years ago?”
    I skimmed quickly over the file and newspaper clippings. We’d been neck-deep in another operation at the time and hadn’t been paying much attention to the news. But that had been huge. She’d been the third girl in what they were now calling the Carnation Murders. All the girls had looked alike and each had been found tortured, murdered, and with one white-and-pink carnation lying on her chest. The last girl had been right in our backyard.
    “A few of our detectives have found some things other than physical appearance, type of torture, and the flower that are starting to link all of them together. Whether we’re about to go on a wild-goose chase or not, we don’t know. But they’ve been studying this trail for a few months now and we just got the okay to send in some of our guys.”
    “All right. And . . . ?”
    “And we’re sending the two of you.”
    Glancing down at my new ID, I peeked at Mason’s file and saw that he had a Texas driver’s license with the last name Hendricks as well. “I’m sorry. Let me see if I’m understanding all this. You’re getting us away from a hit that may or may not be out for us, we have Texas IDs all of a sudden, and you’re sending us somewhere. You’re sending us to cowboy country?!”
    “You always were a quick one, Ryan,” Chief said, deadpan. “Or should I say, Hendricks.”
    “If you’ve followed this trail to Texas then it’s out of our jurisdiction. Let Texas law enforcement deal with it.”
    “Austin detectives have already been sent all of the information we’ve collected on this James Camden guy, and they’re expecting you on Monday.”
    “Monday?!”
    Chief continued like we hadn’t spoken. “Mind you, there’s never been an actual suspect that has had any credibility, and when the victims’ family and friends were shown a picture of James Camden, no one had ever seen him before. And no one can actually track Camden down, so it’s possible his identity has been stolen.”
    Just looking at the balding now-forty-year-old put a bad taste in my mouth. His mug shot from a petty theft six years ago looked like a photo from a story you’d see on the news about a child molester. I studied his face and every description of him as Mason and Chief argued over the