by Carsen Taite
Tanner’s mind flashed to Syd, another woman she’d underestimated. When their relationship ended, she’d been convinced Syd was the weaker one, chasing money and success over the things that really mattered, but she, not Syd, was the one who’d walked away from love. And for what? She’d had a decorated career but no one to share it with. The time she’d spent in bed with Syd this afternoon was the closest thing to true intimacy she’d experienced since they’d parted ways ten years ago. Was she going to spend the rest of her life waiting for another great love to stumble into her life?
“I’ll do it,” Cyrus said.
Tanner snapped out of her reverie. Lily was smiling, and Cyrus wore a resigned expression but appeared at peace. “You’ll help us?”
“Yes, if you’ll help me.” Cyrus squeezed Lily’s hand. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I hope it’s not too late to make it up to the ones I love.”
Tanner couldn’t agree more.
Chapter Eighteen
Syd pulled up at Peyton’s house hoping someone was home since she hadn’t bothered calling first. Sitting in the hotel room where she and Tanner had spent the afternoon making love had been too much to bear alone, and she needed a distraction. She’d called Bianca, who’d promised to look into the bond issue, but she was with her daughter and couldn’t get away. Syd parked the rental and walked up the steps to Peyton’s house where she found Peyton sprawled in the front porch swing. “Hey, mind if I join you?”
Peyton scooted over, and Syd settled in, enjoying the gentle sway of the swing. “I thought you might appreciate some company. Have you heard anything?”
“Not yet,” Peyton said.
“I bet it was hard not to go with her.”
“Nearly impossible. As much of an ass as Cyrus has been, I don’t want Lily to have to see him behind bars.”
Syd rubbed Peyton’s shoulder. “Tanner will take good care of her.”
“She seems like good people.”
“She is.” Syd wanted to say more. She wanted to tell Peyton that Tanner was a rock and she’d never felt more loved and protected than when she and Tanner had been together, but it struck her as odd to say those things to Peyton when she hadn’t been able or willing to tell Tanner how she felt.
“You’re still in love with her.”
Peyton’s words were like a bucket of ice. “That’s crazy.”
“It might be crazy, but it’s also true,” Peyton said. “You look for her every time you enter a room. She does the same thing. And the thin layer of discord you both have going barely covers some pretty palpable surges of electricity.”
Syd’s jaw dropped at Peyton’s astute observations. She did look for Tanner every time she walked into a room, and only felt truly settled when Tanner was within reach. In all the years they’d spent apart, no one had ever made her feel the level of passion Tanner did, whether the source was aggravation or arousal. She’d almost forgotten how to feel anything, but now she knew the life she’d been living was no life at all. She’d been going through the motions, waiting for something, someone to wake her soul, and Tanner had done exactly that. She could deny it or she could own her feelings, and now was as good a time as any. “I never stopped loving her.”
“You should tell her. Life has a way of trying to rob us of the ones we love.”
Syd nodded, but before she could process the suggestion, her cell phone rang. She dug frantically in her purse, certain it was Tanner calling and not caring if Peyton thought she was a mess for jumping on the call. A glance at the screen told her it wasn’t Tanner, but someone she’d been hoping to hear from. “Hey, Flores, tell me you have some good news.” Syd had worked on a couple of cases with Special Agent Sarah Flores when Sarah had been assigned to the BAU, back in DC. Sarah had transferred to the Dallas field office a few years ago to work in their white-collar crime division, but she and Syd had kept in touch with the occasional email. When she’d reached out to Sarah about using the BAU database, Sarah had been eager to help.
“I’m still running those numbers you sent,” Sarah said. “I do think they’re account numbers, but without a routing number it may take a while to make anything of them, but I did find some info on that other stuff you sent.”
“Sarah, do you mind if I put you on speaker? I’ve got AUSA Peyton Davis here with me. She’s one of the good ones.” Syd punched the speaker button and propped the phone up between her and Peyton. “Okay, go.”
“I ran searches on all the cases involving known Barrio Azteca members and narrowed the parameters to only those handled in the Northern District in the past three years. There were over a hundred defendants, some of them indicted together in the same case.”
“Anything stand out?” Peyton asked.
“Funny you should ask. This can’t be right, but it appears that US Attorney Herschel Gellar handled the plea in most of these.”
Syd and Peyton exchanged surprised looks. “It probably just looks that way on paper,” Syd said. “Because the pleadings would have his name stamped on them. Trust me, this guy wouldn’t handle anything that wasn’t high profile.”
“Then the majority of these cases were high profile because his name is all over them, and not just on the pleadings. He’s showing up at hearings, on the record, in court.” The sound of paper rustling came through the phone. “Looks like the last case was about two months ago.”
“Right before I started at the office,” Peyton said. “Sarah, I don’t suppose you have a list of outcomes, do you?”
“Matter of fact, I do. You want the details or just a summary?”
“Summary is good.”
More rustling. “I’d say roughly ninety percent of these cases pled out on the low end of the range, and more than half of those below the statutory minimum.”
Syd practically bounced in her seat. “Any idea how many of those cases had 5K1 motions filed?” she asked, referring to requests prosecutors filed with the court to ask for special consideration for cooperating defendants.
“I don’t have exact numbers, but it’s a lot.”
Syd picked up the phone. “Can you hang on for a second?” She barely waited for an answer before putting the phone on mute and turning to Peyton. “Sounds like certain gang members are getting special treatment from the big boss. This might be the hook we need.”
“Maybe,” Peyton said. “But no one’s going to issue a search warrant for Gellar’s house based on just this. Besides, we don’t know if there was special treatment. All we have is proof a sitting US attorney took a special interest in the drug cases that affected his community. That’s how he’ll spin it anyway. For all we know, he showed up in court in cases involving defendants from all the other gangs in the drug trade, and they got good deals too.”
“Let’s find out.” Syd switched the sound back on. “Hey, Sarah, how long would it take you to run a comparison of the outcomes in these cases versus similar cases where the defendants are members of other gangs, like the Zetas, for instance.”
“I had a feeling you might want that, so I already searched the data.”
“And?” Syd clutched the phone in anticipation.
“Outcomes aren’t even close. The district’s convictions have most drug offenders going away for mid-range to maximum time, unless they are Barrio Azteca. And the big guy doesn’t seem to take a special interest in those other cases.”
After Sarah promised to send Syd an encrypted file with the data to her personal email address, Syd clicked off the line and stared at Peyton. “This is big.”
“It’s huge,” Peyton agreed. “But I’m not sure what to do with it yet.”
“Time for a meeting?”
“Absolutely. As soon as we hear from Tanner and you get that email from Flores, let’s set something up.”
Syd rocked back and forth with Peyton in the swing waiting for her email notifications to ping and wishing Tanner were sitting next to her. She couldn’t wait to tell Tanner what they’d found out, but mostly
she couldn’t wait to see her.
* * *
Tanner sped down the highway with Lily in the seat beside her. She’d offered to drive Lily back to the ranch to save her from having to spend time listening to Nester Rawlins pontificate on how the charges against Cyrus were trumped up and he was going to prove it in a court of law. Cyrus had made the right decision. A jury would hate Rawlins the minute he opened his mouth, and Cyrus by association.
She took the turnoff to Peyton’s ranch and looked over at Lily who was slumped against the passenger side window as she’d been since they got in the car. “Are you okay?”
“Okay is about all I can manage,” Lily said with a half-smile. “This is supposed to be the happiest time of my life. I found out my mother is alive, I have a sister, and I’m about to get married to an amazing woman.”
“I hear a ‘but.’ Let me guess. You always imagined your father being at your wedding, dancing with him, maybe even having him walk you down the aisle, but never in your wildest dreams did you think he’d be in custody, having to make a choice between his personal safety and spending the rest of his life in prison.”
“That about sums it up.” Lily straightened in her seat. “Sorry. My problems are minor in comparison to the people who’ve suffered at the hands of these horrible monsters.”
“For the record, I don’t count your father among the monsters,” Tanner said. “What he did was wrong, but he acted out of fear for your safety, and it’s not for me to judge whether he had a better choice.”
Lily reached over and squeezed her shoulder. “Thank you.”
Tanner pulled into the drive in front of the ranch house and immediately spotted Syd’s rental. She froze for a second as a litany of things that could have possibly gone wrong to bring Syd out to the ranch this late ran through her mind.
“Tanner?” Lily was looking at her with her brow furrowed. “Guess it’s my turn to ask if everything’s okay.”
“Sorry.” She parked the car and took a deep, calming breath. There had to be a reasonable explanation for Syd’s late-night visit. She pointed at the rental. “Wasn’t expecting Syd to be here.”
Lily smiled. “It’s hard to tell from your tone if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.” She unbuckled her seat belt. “Would you like to come in?”
“It’s late.”
“Come in. I think you really want to.”
She did and not just out of concern about Syd. She’d had to use incredible powers of concentration to focus on everything that happened at Seagoville tonight because every cell in her body wanted to be back at the hotel room with Syd, watching her in the shower, joining her in the shower, spending the entire night making love with her. She was only steps away from seeing her now, but she was full of trepidation. Why? Could she only handle being with Syd when there was no need for conversation, when sex was the only thing on their minds?
There was only one way to find out. Tanner followed Lily into the house, where they found Peyton and Syd in the kitchen raiding the refrigerator. Syd looked up from the open door with a sheepish grin on her face, and Tanner started to say something about her insatiable hunger, but she bit back the words as too revealing, too private. Instead she strode over to the fridge and stood beside her to peer inside. “Can I be invited to this smorgasbord?”
Syd stuffed a piece of ham in her mouth. “Maybe. There might be a little left after I’m done making all the sandwiches I can eat out of this incredible ham. Who has ham like this sitting in their refrigerator on a regular weekend?”
Tanner hitched her shoulders. “It’s not even close to Easter.”
“I know, right?” Syd mumbled with her mouth full and then pointed behind Tanner. Peyton and Lily stared at them like they were freaks of nature. “What?”
“You two should take this routine on the road,” Peyton said. “And don’t eat all the ham. Everyone else is on the way.”
Tanner raised her eyebrows. “Define everyone.”
“Mary, Dale, Lindsey, Bianca, Jade.”
“I’m guessing you’ve been working tonight.”
“Yep. Well, Syd has, and she found some information that might blow this case wide open.”
“I did.” Syd nodded. “Or my pal from BAU did. I’ll tell you everything as soon as the rest of the gang gets here.”
“Fine, then I guess I’ll wait to share what we have to say until then too,” Tanner said. “Unless Lily wants to share. It was all her doing.”
“Thanks, Tanner,” Lily said, “But it was truly a team effort. Cyrus is going to cooperate. Tanner arranged to have him moved out of Seagoville tonight before he’s fully booked in. Doesn’t make him perfectly safe, but it should buy you some time. She’s going to talk to Judge Casey personally first thing in the morning to see if she can get him in protective custody.”
“That’s fantastic news,” Peyton said. “I knew you were the right person to call.”
Tanner accepted the praise, feeling a twinge of guilt that she’d almost blown Peyton off in favor of sex with Syd. When she saw the proud look on Syd’s face, she knew she’d done the right thing. They worked together to pile a platter high with ham sandwiches, and then set out chips and pickles, plates and napkins. No sooner was the table set than the rest of the group poured into the house ready to work.
Between large bites of her sandwich, Syd relayed the information she’d obtained from Sarah Flores. Everyone shook their heads in disbelief, but they universally agreed Gellar’s special treatment of the Barrio Azteca cases showed a clear bias. “It’s not enough to get a warrant, but let’s see if we can figure out a way to leverage this information to find out more.”
“No luck on the numbers you found in Carlos’s hotel room?” Dale asked.
“Not yet. Sarah’s still working on that.”
Peyton pulled out a large poster board and a marker. “Let’s do this the old-fashioned way, by listing all the people of interest and loose ends, and then we can figure out how to tie them up. Start calling things out.”
“Sergio,” Jade said. “He’s still on the loose.” Peyton wrote his name and drew a box around it. Across the page she did the same with Carlos Aguilar. “What else?”
A few minutes later, they had a flow chart of sorts with various names in boxes and solid or dotted lines between the boxes to indicate relationships. In the center of the board was Herschel Gellar. She stabbed at the name with her marker. “Our job is to smoke out how all of the rest of these folks relate to him and why.”
“And catch Sergio,” Dale chimed in. “And get the goods on Carlos Aguilar while we’re at it.”
Tanner sat back in her chair and stared at the board. What had at first seemed like a random jumble of loosely related concepts started to form a pattern, and her brain rearranged the boxes into a perfectly logical sequence. She was deep in thought when Syd leaned over and playfully punched her in the side. “You falling asleep?”
“Not hardly.” Tanner raised her voice. “Bear with me, y’all. This is going to sound crazy, but promise you’ll hear me out to the end. I have a plan.”
Chapter Nineteen
Syd rolled onto her side, slipped her arm around Tanner’s waist, and snuggled close into big spoon position. “Are you awake?”
“Hmm, almost.”
Syd shifted slightly to check the clock. Six a.m. She should let Tanner sleep, but she’d barely slept the entire night even after another incredible bout of sex. Her thoughts and fears were starting to get the best of her. After leaving Peyton’s house, they’d spent the night at Tanner’s, where Syd had made Tanner detail her entire plan again without the rest of the team shouting out their ideas. No matter how many times she heard it, it sounded like folly, but she’d been the lone holdout of the group.
She’d give Tanner thirty more minutes of sleep before she started bugging her, and she’d count Tanner’s heartbeats to pass the time.
“Are you listening to me breathe?” Tanner turned in her arms and smiled at her with
groggy eyes.
“Close. I was measuring your pulse. You’re in pretty good shape for your age.”
“For my age?” Tanner leaned up on her shoulder and started tickling her ribs. “Take it back.”
“Don’t!” Syd arched away, laughing. “I hate being tickled.”
“Is that so?” Tanner stopped suddenly and assumed a solemn expression. “I’m sorry.” She acted like she was sitting back against the bed, but like lightning, she reached for Syd and started tickling her again. “Not sorry!”
For the next few moments, they rolled around on the bed like kids without a care in the world, laughing hysterically. When the laughter finally subsided and they both lay panting in the sheets, Syd wondered if they’d ever felt like this before. When they were in school, she’d been worried all the time—about grades, class rank, and job prospects. She’d had fun with Tanner, but there had always been an undercurrent of seriousness. She’d been a woman on a mission, and love had never been the primary objective.
“What’re you thinking?” Tanner asked.
Too many things at once. Syd reached over and grabbed Tanner’s hand. “I’m sorry.”
Tanner turned her head and smiled. “I’m pretty sure I tickled you first.”
“You did, but that’s not what I was talking about.” Syd paused to gather courage. “I’m sorry I spent our entire relationship trying to lay a foundation for the future at the expense of building something lasting between us. Maybe if I’d been honest, we could’ve gotten past our differences and found some common ground.”
“It wasn’t just you. I wasn’t clear about what I really wanted and I let you believe we wanted the same things.”
Syd pulled Tanner into a hug and held her tight. It was a relief to finally have some closure. But if this was closure, then why was she so reluctant to let go? Tanner’s what-if echoed in her mind, but it didn’t matter. They hadn’t gotten past their differences then, and now years had passed, widening the distance between them.
