Page 51 of A Game of Deception
I nodded, goosebumps rising despite the heat. “Leo said the same thing last night. He always thought it was weird they never made a solid conclusion.”
Tara’s eyes widened slightly, as if surprised I was backing her research instead of fighting it. “The whole town believed what they were made to believe,” she said, voice stronger. “Whatwewere all made to believe.”
“Right.”
“The investigating officer,” she continued, voice tight, “was Detective Rick Morrison. His name’s all over the reports, but the conclusions... they’re missing. Or someone deliberately left them out.”
“Morrison,” I repeated, noting the name. First real clue I’d ever had. “He wrote the report?”
“He’s the one who didn’t write the entire conclusion,” she corrected, eyes sharp. “I’m sure he’ll remember you. And he knows what really happened that night.”
The gray water smashed itself against the jetty rocks, a pointless, repetitive violence I understood. For twelve years, I'd done thesame thing to myself. I’d swallowed the story whole, never once asking if it was poison.
Now I had a name. Morrison. A target. It wasn't hope, but it was a direction to point the anger.
I turned to her. The look in her eyes wasn't soft. It was the sharp, jagged edge of a world that had just been shattered. Good. We were on the same page.
“He fed us a lie,” I said. It was all that needed saying.
“And we both got fat on it,” she shot back, her voice tight. “So we find him. We find Morrison.”
There was no question in her tone. It was a damn order. An order I was ready to follow.
“A cop who cashes out on a kid’s death doesn’t just vanish,” I said. “He buys a quiet life.”
“Then we make his life loud,” she said, already turning from the water. “He has to be in the system somewhere. Pension, property records… something.”
“And Hank?” I asked.
Her jaw tightened. “He can’t know. He finds out we’re digging, he’ll bury Morrison for good.”
I nodded. “Just us, then.”
She started walking back toward the path, her pace quick, deliberate. “There’s a coffee shop down the road. They’ll have Wi-Fi.”
The coffee shopscreamed hipster heaven—outdoor tables, chairs that didn’t match, and enough plant life to qualify as a mini-jungle. We snagged a corner spot away from the morning zombies still waiting for caffeine to kick in. Tara ordered two black coffees and whipped out her laptop from the backpack she’d lugged during our run.
“Let’s start with the basics,” she said, fingers flying across the keyboard. “Richard Morrison, a former detective with the Palo Alto Police Department.”
Her fingers flew across the laptop keys, fast and certain. She attacked a keyboard the same way she did everything else—like she was trying to solve a problem that pissed her off. Her hair was still damp from our run, pulled back tight, but a few strands had escaped, clinging to the flushed skin of her neck.
And just like that, my head was somewhere else entirely. A few nights ago. Her skin, salty under my tongue. The taste of her. My name, a ragged sound torn from her throat in the dark. A low heat coiled in my gut, and I had to shift in the shitty cafe chair, adjusting my legs. Pathetic.
“He retired about five years ago,” she said, clicking through search results like I wasn’t having a full meltdown across the table. “Thirty years on the force. Decorated officer who specialized in traffic incidents and vehicular homicides.”
“So he’d know his shit,” I said, fighting for a normal voice. “The kind of guy who could look at a crash and tell exactly what went down.”
She nodded, eyes glued to the screen. “Exactly. Which makes the vagueness of that public report even more suspicious.”
I leaned closer. “Does it say where he located to after retirement?”
She clicked another link and let out a surprised “Huh.”
“Naples, Florida.”
“Florida?” I repeated, shock temporarily cooling my hormones. “He’s in the same fucking state as us?”
“Looks that way.” She spun the laptop toward me. The screen showed a local news piece with a photo of an older dude sporting gray hair and a face that had seen some shit. Caption read: “Retired Detective Richard Morrison, now serving as a volunteer with the Naples Marine Conservation Society.”
