TJ was elsewhere; the faux blood was good, yes, but it stained far more than he’d thought it would. He was presently scrubbing hands and ankles in one of the nearby men’s rooms.

Foster snapped, “Jesus, you wanted Kathryn unarmed and demoted to Civ-Div but still talking her way onto the interviews with the suspect to track down Serrano. So I wouldn’t feel threatened by her.”

Yep. Exactly.

Overby added, “So you’d be free to cut a deal with Serrano when he pulled a gun on you.”

Dance told him: “We made the case against the real Serrano ten days ago. Handed it over to the FBI, Amy Grabe in San Francisco. So you wouldn’t get wind of it. She busted him. He rolled over on Guzman. They’re both in isolation. The, quote, ‘Serrano’ you saw was Bakersfield PD. José works undercover. He’s good, don’t you think?”

Not professional, she observed of her comments. But she was in a mood.

“We got him because he looks like the real Serrano.”

Anger joined Foster’s revulsion: “Jesus. We were all suspects. And you faked the, quote, ‘leads’ to Serrano—with Carol, the bungalow in Seaside. With Gomez, the houseboat. At the motel just now. You ran the same set, the same play at every one of them. TJ played the dead snitch. All I saw was the legs and torso. Not his face.”

Overby filled in, “Except at the houseboat. That was Connie Ramirez, playing…what was her name again?”

Dance answered, “Tia Alonzo.” She continued, “It was a test we put together. The real traitor’d save himself. Those on the task force who were innocent? Well, I’m afraid they had a few bad moments when José turned his gun on them. But it had to be done. We needed to find who’d sold us out.”

In the first set, Carol had suicidally lunged at the fake Serrano, knocking a table of ceramic keepsakes to the floor. Gomez had sighed and resigned himself to death and said a prayer.

And Foster had played the OG card, invoking the name of Lamont Howard to save himself.

“If you’d passed the test, it would have meant Steve Lu was the snitch. Since you said you told Kathryn you were the only connection, he’s clean.”

“You fucking set me up.”

Finally, quiet Al Stemple spoke. “I think ‘set up’ means more wrongly implicating an innocent person, ’stead of trapping a guilty asshole. Am I being transparent enough, Steve?” He gave a loud grunt, then sat back and crossed his arms, wide as tree trunks.

The Guzman Connection sting had been Dance’s idea and she’d fought hard for it. All the way up to Sacramento.

She’d decided to put together the operation after a horrific drive-by shooting in Seaside, a mother killed and a child wounded. The woman had been a witness to one of the Pipeline hubs. But no one could have known about her—except for a leak inside the operation itself.

“I went through the files a hundred times and looked for any other instance of operations that could’ve been compromised. TJ and I spent weeks correlating the personnel. We narrowed it down to four people involved in all of them—and who knew that Maria Ioaconna was a witness. You, Carol, Steve Lu and Jimmy. We brought you here. And set up the operation.”