Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 63763 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 319(@200wpm)___ 255(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 63763 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 319(@200wpm)___ 255(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
I should’ve been satisfied that my actions had proven successful. Instead, I was pissed the fuck off. Not at her, but at the situation. And myself for the obvious lack of self-discipline.
Hawkeye glanced from Bex to me, and the corner of his mouth twitched. But he wisely kept walking, joining Stryker beside Raines near the supervisor’s office without testing how much patience I had left from avoiding the woman who’d brought my body to life after years of not giving a shit about being alone.
I carried my equipment toward her console and set it on the empty workstation beside hers.
“Start from the beginning,” I ordered, my focus shifting into work mode.
Bex blinked once, then folded her arms over her chest. “I already walked Dad through it twice.”
“Good. Now do it again for me.”
Her gaze narrowed, but she picked up the legal pad beside the keyboard and slid it toward me. “You could’ve said please.”
“Wouldn’t have changed the outcome.”
I opened the notebook, finding a clean timeline written in dark ink, each detail separated from the next with small marks that made the sequence easy to follow.
“Walk me through what happened.” I turned the pad so we could both see it. “Please.”
Bex’s expression said she was as shocked by the word coming out of my mouth as I was. “Tell me what you observed. Keep assumptions separate.”
The request came out harsher than I’d intended because I was irritated at my lack of control.
“I know the difference,” she replied tartly.
She leaned closer, and her shoulder brushed my arm as she pointed toward the first line, leaving a slight tingle in its wake.
Bex reconstructed the call and her procedure, then explained how Nina’s incident vanished and what followed. “I don’t know whether the same person deleted Nina’s call and created the rollover. The timing makes me think they were connected, but that’s an assumption.”
She tossed me a cute little warning glare, clearly daring me to comment on her conjecture. I remained silent, but her glare darkened when she obviously picked up on my amusement.
She huffed and continued, “What I know is that I never dispatched the unit to the rollover, and the incident wasn’t there before Nina’s disappeared.”
“Checked the active queue and event history?”
“Twice,” she confirmed. “Then I called Dad because Nina didn’t have time for me to wonder whether I was violating procedure.”
Raines shifted beside Stryker, his expression softening with pride for a moment before the sheriff replaced the father. Bex had trusted what she knew, bypassed a system insisting the emergency never happened, and put help in motion while everyone responsible for corrupting that system believed the evidence had been erased.
The sheriff had informed us that Nina had been injured badly before the deputy reached her, but she was alive because Bex had refused to let a screen overrule her judgment.
“She got hurt because help was late.” Bex’s gaze dropped toward the legal pad, and her fingers tightened around the pen, obviously feeling some misplaced guilt. “If I’d recognized it faster—”
“No.” The word came out sharper than I intended, pulling her eyes back to mine. “She got hurt because somebody exposed her address and redirected the deputy. You sent help after they tried to make that impossible, so don’t take their decision and make it yours.”
Bex held my gaze for several seconds, the vulnerability in her expression giving way to a warmth that reached places I had no interest in examining inside the sheriff’s department. If ever.
Her lips parted, but then she only nodded before lowering her attention to her notes again. My hand tightened around the edge of the console because touching her face in gentle reassurance would have created several problems, and none of them would have ended with my hands leaving her quickly.
I opened the forensic kit and connected a read-only bridge between the department’s network core and the Black Castle laptop. The device allowed me to examine traffic, volatile logs, and active sessions without relying on county tools that might already be compromised. Stryker moved with Raines into the supervisor’s office to review personnel access while Hawkeye took a position near the dispatch entrance, leaving me to the work and Bex close enough to answer questions.
The telephony gateway remembered Nina even though the recording archive and CAD system claimed she had never existed. An inbound 911 connection had entered at the exact time Bex wrote down, remained active for four minutes and seventeen seconds, then terminated…appearing to be from the caller’s side. The archive contained an allocation number for the recording but no audio object was attached to it, while the CAD database skipped an event sequence that should have belonged to Bex’s incident.
“You found it,” she whispered, leaning over the back of my chair as the recovered fragments filled the screen. Her hand settled on my shoulder, and heat spread beneath her palm before driving straight down my spine. “That proves Nina called.”