“Yep. Heard of him.”

“His staff submitted a report, wants to put a commendation in your file.”

“That’s nice of them. I didn’t do anything that any other good cop wouldn’t have done.” He was buttering her up for something bad. Lex always did it like this—gave her something good, then pulled the rug out from under her.

Still, she waited. Watched.

Damn, he started tapping his fingers on his desk. This was really bad.

“The feds took our case.”

She shook her head. She couldn’t speak.

“Chen is out on bail.”

“Bail? That’s fucking bullshit. He’s a flight risk! He’ll go under again. It’ll take us weeks to flush him out.”

“And that reporter from KTAG outed you.”

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Her fists clenched.

“You’re burned, Kara. There’s no going back, not undercover, not here.”

She shook her head. She almost couldn’t speak. “How?” Her voice was barely a whisper.

Lex turned around and pressed a couple buttons on the small television behind him. A tape started to play, a news broadcast. “It aired Tuesday night, prime time, after Chen made bail.”

The beginning was just rehashing the sweatshop network in Chinatown that Chen and his cronies had run. How many indentured slaves they had from China, most illegal aliens brought here against their will, threatened, some citizens who were forced into work to protect their families. Chen had run six sweatshops locally and they’d shut them all down. The victims were being processed and helped—but that wasn’t Kara’s job. Kara’s job was to stop the brutality and take down the principals. And she’d done it.

“LAPD claimed that a tip from someone inside Chen’s network led them into a yearlong investigation that culminated in the arrest of thirty-two individuals and the identification of more than nine hundred forced labor workers. The oldest worker was a ninety-six-year-old woman, the youngest an eight-year-old boy who’d been told his mother would be killed if he didn’t ‘pull his weight.’

“But new revelations indicate that LAPD had an undercover officer deeply embedded in David Chen’s criminal organization for nearly a year. Detective Kara Quinn posed as a clothing buyer in order to gain the trust of the organization—and access to their records.”

Kara’s LAPD graduation photo came on screen, followed by the clip of her frisking the dead Xavier Fong after he threw the knife at her.

“Questions about the ethics of such deep cover investigations have been asked by both civil and victim’s rights groups—namely, what did Detective Quinn know about the working conditions of the sweatshops and when did she learn it? Could she have saved the lives of those who died from abuse and deplorable conditions over the year she was in deep cover? How far do undercover operations go—and how are they justified? Join me tonight and all this week for a deep investigative report into the dark side of LAPD undercover operations.”

Kara kicked Lex’s file cabinet. She left a dent. It wasn’t the first. “No. No! This is bullshit, Lex! She can’t get away with this. Did she out anyone else? Did she—”