“Nothing but the best when you work for the city.”

• 67 •

RADCLY fFE

“Yeah, I noticed that.” Sloan glanced into the room where the two detectives were absorbed in sorting out a tangle of cables. She lowered her voice. “But once I get the various networks connected, I’ll be able to browse any database I choose. I already know someone on the inside has been hacking data from the crime lab and the detective bureau’s Þ les. With unlimited access, I can trace him back to the source computer, not just the department.”

“How long?” Watts asked eagerly.

“If I had Jason and Mitchell here, maybe a week, but there’s no way to do that without someone getting suspicious.” Sloan lifted a shoulder. “Working by myself—I don’t know. I could get lucky, or it could take me a few weeks.”

“How long if you sleep once in a while?”

Sloan’s mouth tightened. “I have a wife, Watts. I don’t need another one.”

Watts smirked. “How about a boyfriend?”

“How about you Þ nish your coffee break somewhere else and let me get to work.”

“I was hoping you could do me a favor.”

“What?”

“I need to look at some Þ les that don’t exist.”

“Yeah?” Sloan’s eyes brightened. “And where might these nonexistent Þ les be located?”

“Well—I Þ gure one of three places. Captain Henry, Avery Clark, or buried in the narco records.”

“You want to know what Jimmy Hogan was doing for the Justice Department that got him killed.”

Watts nodded.

“It’s not Henry,” Sloan said with certainty. “When the initial evidence pointed to him as being the mole, I went through every byte of data in his system. He never had anything to do with Hogan’s undercover assignment and never got a single report from him. That all went to narco, because Hogan was presumably their boy.” Her expression hardened. “Of course, no one knew he was really Justice’s plant and working for Clark. So it’s possible he never Þ led any kind of substantive report with the PPD but just passed everything he got on to the feds.”

“Maybe. But Hogan must’ve been feeding some tidbits to Jeff

• 68 •

Justice Served

Cruz, or else why would Jeff have been with him down on the docks the day they were shot?” Watts slid a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and shook one out. He lit it with a scratched and dented Zippo and took a deep drag. “Hogan either thought Jeff knew something, or he decided to cut Jeff and the Loo in on his investigation.”

“Hogan was supposed to be undercover investigating the drug arm of Zamora’s operation. Frye and Cruz didn’t have anything to do with drugs.” Sloan followed the trail of smoke from Watts’s cigarette as it curled indolently toward the ceiling. “You’re gonna set off the smoke alarms.”

“Nah. None of them work.”

“No,” Sloan mused, her mind still occupied with the elusive connection between Jimmy Hogan, a federal agent working undercover as a narcotics detective working undercover as a small-time drug dealer, and Jeff Cruz, a detective in the Special Crimes Unit who dealt primarily with sex crimes. The obvious tie-in was that all of those criminal endeavors were part of the organized crime network. “Too loose.”

“Huh? What? The smoke detectors?”

“The association.”

Watts squinted through the fumes. “You wanna give me a hint here?”

“It has to be something more speciÞ c than just the fact that the Zamora organization was behind the crimes that both Hogan and Cruz were investigating. Something links the drugs and the sex.”

“It always comes down to the same thing,” Watts noted sourly.

“Puss—uh, girls. It’s gotta be the prostitution.”

“That makes sense, since Clark showed up and put us all on the trail of the Internet pornographers.” She jammed her hands in her pockets and started pacing. “There have to be reports from Hogan to Clark. If he wrote them on a computer or e-mailed them, I can Þ nd them.”

“You work on that,” Watts dropped the butt and crushed it under the toe of his scuffed wingtip, “and I’ll drop around to narco and see if I can get anything out of the guys Hogan was supposedly reporting to.

If I can get you a name, you’ll have another thread to pull.”

“Fine. I’ll be here turning the Wonder Boys into cybersleuths for a while yet.”

“Yeah. Don’t forget their red capes. Meanwhile, I’ll do some real

• 69 •

RADCLY fFE

detecting.” Laughing to himself, Watts sauntered off, a happy man with a mission.

v

“Mmm.” Sandy purred and stretched as a warm mouth slowly deposited gentle kisses down the back of her neck and between her shoulder blades. Without opening her eyes, face still buried in the pillow, she reached behind her and felt for the familiar form. Finding it, she smoothed a hand over the subtle curve of hip. “I’m sleeping, Dell.”

“Go ahead,” Mitchell whispered, continuing her tactile journey down the center of her lover’s back. She swirled the tip of her tongue in the hollow at the base of Sandy’s spine as she caressed her Þ ngers up the inside of Sandy’s leg, stopping to stroke the buttery-soft skin high on the inside of her thighs. “I’m Þ ne here by myself.”

Sandy shifted, drawing up one knee, opening herself to her lover’s quest. “Yeah? Then how come you’re touching me instead of yourself?”

“’Cause you’re sexier.” Emphasizing her words, Mitchell traced a Þ ngertip ever so lightly along the lacy border of Sandy’s labia, coating the delicate tissue with the moisture that rose beneath her touch. Her voice was husky when she murmured, “See?”

“I’m too tired for sex,” Sandy groused, but her hips lifted in silent invitation.

“I’m just petting you. You don’t need to wake up.” Mitchell eased onto her right side, taking care not to put any weight on her injured leg, and cupped Sandy’s sex in her palm. Still squeezing gently, she followed the curve of Sandy’s ear with her lips until she reached the ß eshy lobe. Sucking the plump ß esh in and out between her lips, she pressed the pad of her Þ nger to the tip of Sandy’s clitoris.

“Too late,” Sandy gasped. “Everything just woke up.”

Mitchell chuckled. “I noticed.” She rocked the stiff prominence of Sandy’s decidedly aroused clitoris, her stomach tightening as Sandy whimpered. “Oh man, me too.”

“What?” Sandy pushed back into Mitchell’s hand, rotating her hips, working herself against the teasing Þ ngers. “What, baby?”

“Wide awake.”

• 70 •

Justice Served

“Too bad.” Sandy’s breath came in short, shallow bursts. “You started it. You Þ nish me Þ rst.”

“Say please,” Mitchell taunted, pulling her Þ ngers away from the spot where she knew Sandy wanted her, at the same time dragging her teeth down the side of Sandy’s neck. Sandy shivered and moaned.

“If you fuck with me now you’ll pay, rookie,” Sandy warned, pushing her hips into Mitchell’s crotch. “I swear…you’ll be sorry.”

“I’ll risk it.”

“Come on, baby. Don’t tease. I wanna come.”

“Bad?”

“Touch me and see.” Sandy’s breath caught as Mitchell dipped inside her, then out again. “Do that…again…I’ll come for you.”

Mitchell’s stomach tightened, her clitoris twitching, but she ignored the painful pleasure. She pressed her thumb Þ rmly to the tight circle of muscle between Sandy’s buttocks while sliding her Þ ngers over the slick, swollen labia. Sandy bucked as if jolted with an electric current.

“Dell…” Sandy’s voice shook. “I don’t know…if…”

“It’s okay,” Mitchell soothed. “I won’t if you don’t want me to.”

“I…just…easy.” Sandy Þ sted the sheets, her legs tensing. “Talk to me…talk to me while you make me come.”

“That’s it, honey,” Mitchell whispered, her mouth against Sandy’s ear as she carefully massaged the sensitive ring. “That’s all I’m going to do this time, just make you feel good.” When Sandy began to push back against her, Mitchell held pressure with her thumb while sliding her Þ ngers in and out of her lover’s warm depths. “That’s right. Take me all the way in, honey.”

“More,” Sandy gasped.

Despite the urgent thrust of Sandy’s hips, Mitchell held back, fearful of going too far too fast. Instead, she worked her free hand beneath Sandy’s body and caught her clitoris in her Þ ngers.

Sandy made a faint, high keening sound, and Mitchell squeezed harder.

“Coming. Dell…Dell…”

Eyes closed, Mitchell pressed her forehead to Sandy’s back and worked her lover with both hands, squeezing and stroking and Þ lling her to overß owing. Mitchell’s arms trembled and her hips thrust erratically

• 71 •

RADCLY fFE

in time to her lover’s as Sandy climaxed with a choked cry. Releasing a pent-up breath, Mitchell smiled and relaxed against Sandy’s side.

Long moments later, Sandy muttered, “You fall asleep?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Did you come?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Wanna?”

Carefully, Mitchell rolled over onto her back and Sandy followed, curling up in the curve of her body. “I think I’m pretty good. Sometimes when you come, it feels like I did too.”

“You think you’ll get tired of it?”

“Tired of what?” Mitchell snugged her cheek against the top of Sandy’s head while making aimless patterns over Sandy’s shoulder with her Þ ngertips. She’d never felt so peaceful in her life.

“You know…the sex thing.”

When Mitchell didn’t reply, Sandy stiffened. “Never mind. It’s dumb.”

“Sandy,” Mitchell murmured, tightening her hold before Sandy could move away. “I want to make love with you for the rest of my life.”

“Jeez, rookie.” Sandy forced a laugh, struggling to hide her shock.

“I just meant…that’s not why I…you don’t have to say—”

“I know,” Mitchell interrupted. “I’m just telling you the way I feel.”

“I don’t think we oughtta talk about this. Because it’s just too crazy.”

“Okay,” Mitchell replied easily. “We don’t have to talk about it now.” She lifted her head and kissed Sandy soundly on the mouth. “But I meant it.”

“You just don’t quit, do you,” Sandy complained. But her eyes were soft with longing and desire.

“Not where you’re concerned,” Mitchell whispered. She caught Sandy’s hand and drew the small Þ ngers down the center of her abdomen and between her legs, where she held them cupped against her. “And I’m wide awake now, honey.”

• 72 •

Justice Served

CHAPTER EIGHT

Rebecca piloted the Corvette through the narrow one-way streets of South Philadelphia. Watts, hunched in the passenger seat beside her, was for once mercifully silent. Turning left onto Delaware Avenue, the wide four-lane highway that ran along the waterfront, she drove north until she reached the parking lot adjacent to the Maritime Museum. She parked alongside the huge wooden pilings, interconnected by rusted links of chain, that formed the only barrier between someone standing on the blacktop and the roiling brown water of the Delaware River twenty feet below.

Wordlessly, she switched off the engine and slid out. A moment later, Watts joined her at the edge of the pier. Directly below them, a Þ fteen-foot-square wooden dock rocked on the water, matching the rhythm of the ebb and ß ow of the currents. The chalk outlines of the two bodies that had lain there six months before had been washed away by the waves and the rain in the intervening months. But Rebecca could still see, with photographic clarity, exactly how her partner Jeff Cruz and the undercover narcotics detective, Jimmy Hogan, had looked.

Right down to the small, neat, matching holes in the backs of their heads. Her hands closed into Þ sts.

“Loo?” Watts asked carefully.

“We should have something by now, Watts.” Rebecca’s tone was pensive, her expression brooding. “We’ve been taking bites out of the Zamora operation all summer—even made a few busts, grabbed a few headlines.” She snorted derisively. “But we can’t get a handle on who killed two of our own.” She turned her head, gave Watts a hard stare.

“What the fuck are we missing?”

“Well, you know, we Þ gure it was a contract hit, right?

Untraceable.”

Rebecca stared back at the water. “We might never get the

• 73 •

RADCLY fFE

triggerman. But whoever gave the order is right here.” She let her gaze follow the river south, then half turned and swept the city skyline.

“Jimmy and Jeff—one of them was getting close to something big.

Something so big it made killing two cops an acceptable risk.”

“This pornography ring,” Watts offered. “Shutting that down has got to be taking a chunk out of Zamora’s income. Maybe Hogan got wind of it through his drug connections and wanted to clue you and Cruz in. And maybe that’s what got them killed.”