She waited, but he didn’t say anything more. She studied him, watched those stormy gray eyes, but his focus was clearly inward. He was thinking, turning something over in his mind.

“Adam?” she finally asked.

“I just... It’s just strange. I mean she’s the one who wanted cops punished or fired for any use of force, even if justified.”

“Maybe that’s why,” she said, sourly now. “Dad didn’t actually use force, Quinn did.” When something flickered in his eyes she held up a hand. “Don’t even,” she warned, afraid he was going to slide back into that morass of guilt.

“Actually, I wasn’t going to. It’s just really strange that she would do that, unless...”

Belatedly, far too belatedly, it hit her. She jolted upright in bed, heedless of her nudity, and stared down at him.

“Unless she had reason to want to...keep me close?”

He let out an audible breath and nodded. “And maybe...maybe that wasn’t the normal staff salary.”

She scrambled out of bed and started yanking on her clothes. “Come on, cowboy. We’ve got work to do.”

“It’s a good thing her meetings are a matter of public record.” Mandy was hunched over her laptop as she made a list of dates from the city councilwoman’s calendar.

“If they weren’t, I have a feeling Foxworth could probably find out anyway,” Adam said, feeling that buzz he’d always felt when they’d been closing in on a suspect. This was far too tenuous to say that now, but the feeling was there nevertheless.

“Probably,” she agreed. “But I want them to have solid reason to look.”

“Agreed,” Adam said.

It was a strange feeling, to be back on the law enforcement websites he had once frequented regularly. There were a lot of screen names on the comment boards and forums he didn’t recognize, but many he did, and several he knew wore the same shoulder patch he once had.

The search of their quarry’s name yielded the usual public gripes and complaints, which hadn’t changed much since he’d been among them.

“None of this is news,” he muttered. “We all knew she hated us.”

“That bad?” she asked, straightening up and looking up from her screen for the first time in a while.

“Worse. But there’s nothing new here, just the same complaints about her I remember from before.”

“That’s a public forum, isn’t it?” she asked, leaning over to look.