Page 92 of Under Cover
“There’s no poisoned water,” he mumbled.
“It’s all gone.”
“I can breathe here,” he said, and he heard the earnestness in his own voice as he tried desperately to tell Garcia something important.
“Always, baby. Take a deep breath and go back to sleep.”
So he did, and this time he slept until morning.
GARCIA WENTinto the office that day, refusing all of Crosby’s entreaties to go with him. As a consolation prize, Crosby got folders on Courtland Cavendish, Marshawn Devereaux, and Marcy Beauchamp, their three suspected Sons of the Blood members in higher-up positions, and he got his first good look at how his team hadn’t been idle during his absence.
Kicked back on the made bed, clean, fed, wearing sweats and socks, oh gods,comfortablefor the first time in nearly two months, he took a look at the research the team had done in between their regular nine-to-nine jobs of saving the world.
Open this one first, read Garcia’s handwriting on a Post-it. Dutifully Crosby opened the file on Marshawn Devereaux and saw a candid picture of a handsome, stern-looking Black man with his family, including his daughter and her wife with their two small children and a note from Natalia, making Crosby remember what Garcia had told him about Devereaux from the beginning.
Sorry, guys—I asked my father-in-law to check on Crosby and help backstop his cover. I can assure you, nobody in this family has any connection to a white supremacist group.
Crosby laughed outright and spent a moment looking at a happy family, some of whom lookedveryfamiliar. In particular Natalia caught his eye, holding her son while playfully bussing his cheek while her wife balanced a toddler on her hip, and just their smiles made him smile in return. After a sweet moment, he set the folder aside. He wanted to go directly to Cavendish’s folder, particularly after McEnany’s revelation, but another Garcia Post-it stopped him.
Don’t dismiss Beauchamp—smells like an outhouse.
Oh?
Hmm…. Marcy Beauchamp, originally Marcy Lamb, graduated from… CSU Stanislaus, California? The actual hell? What was someone from the sinking center of the West Coast doing in New York cop politics?
“Marcy Lamb, Marcy Lamb, where did you come from…?”
Marcy Lamb was the daughter of a cop who was the son of a cop who was the son of a cop in an area of California known for its sharp dividing lines between the Mexican immigrant community and the rich landowners who drove the area. She’d gotten her criminal justice degree—but just barely—having blown off, ignored, and probably pissed off the professor who taught a required course on hate crimes and the racism built into the criminal justice system. Crosby was reading between the lines here—but he saw the D-, the D+, and finally the C because Marcy had needed to take the class three times to get a grade that would let her graduate. He also noticed a surprising dearth of letters of recommendation in her file from her other educators. She’d had to, in fact, rely on her sponsor, a notoriously right-wing councilman, and his son to get her through the academy.
The councilman’s last name was Beauchamp.
After marrying up, Marcy followed her husband to Texas, where he’d accepted a job in charge of border patrol. Crosby grimaced because the number of citations for human rights violations and brutality had been reduced to six pages of bullet points in small font, and it told him that the Texas Rangers—one of the country’s peacekeeping forces with their roots deepest in the toxic well of racism—were alive in spirit.
Marcy had worked under him and had gotten a lot of commendations for things Crosby thought should have gotten her fired.
When Kent Beauchamp was killed on the job, Crosby imagined a lot of people breathed easier. Including his wife, who politicized her husband’s death to further her own political ambitions.
Crosby studied these notes carefully, frowning.
She hadn’t been well-liked, he thought. Either the well of misogyny ran deep—always a possibility—or she had rubbed people the wrong way. He saw a lot of good records, but a lot of denied promotions. He saw good scores on detective exams, but no recs for the job. When she ran for police commissioner in her hometown, she lost to a man who had only moved there a few years before.
Finally, she’d taken her commendations and her lack of likability and moved them to New York, where she was appointed as an expert on border patrol via the harbors smuggling in immigrants and proceeded to terrorize the harbor TSA.
Her picture showed a woman who could have been handsome, but a squint of dissatisfaction in her eyes and a pinch around her mouth put her into the category of someone Crosby would cross the street to avoid.
But none of that explained to Crosby how she’d ended up in the commissioner’s office.
Narrowing his eyes, he pulled out the other file, the one on Courtland Cavendish, and started to read.
Ugh.
Courtland Cavendish was the kind of career politician both sides of the aisle claimed to detest.
Born to old money in Florida, he’d campaigned on all the usual suspects—family values that devalued families, small government that tried to legislate everything from who people married to what they did for a living to what they read, and law enforcement that only enforced laws in certain neighborhoods and were praised on their conviction rate of minorities. He’d been hired out of Harvard Law School directly into the commissioner’s office, and Crosby would bet that if he lookedreallyclose he’d find that Cavendish’s old man did some favors for the chief of police or something to make that happen. His was one of those careers that didn’t do a lot—no legislation bore his name, and nobody owed him a debt of gratitude for finding money for training or opening up more drug rehabilitation centers or anything—but boy did he mouth off on social mediaallthe fucking time.
And he did a lot of community photo ops in some of the poorer precincts in the city. Crosby could see how he’d be a big hit with the Sons of the Blood, in spite of the fact that Cavendish’s family tree was hydroponic—none of those roots got anywhere close to getting dirty for the sake of the family wealth.
Okay, he thought, staring at the two folders. There was the local girl who married up and widowed into politics and the glad-hander who’d failed up, given his lackluster grades in Harvard, and who was now a small fish in a big pool and trying to make himself bigger.
