Lynn’s gaze grazed through him before it returned to her lap.

“Lynn, we can protect you and your kids without them knowing you have protection,” Hawk stated. “And we can end this if we’ve got even something small to go on. We keep running up against dead ends. We need something to go on.”

This was true.

Sylvie and Tucker Creed had tracked down the ME on Lake Powell.

He was unsurprisingly closed-lipped, even after they put the lean on him.

His response to this was not doing the right thing.

Instead, this resulted in him cutting his vacation short, coming home, resigning and looking into relocating.

So they were forced to put pressure on and drop in the right ears his recent, large cash purchases.

Now he was under official investigation.

The bad guys also hadn’t taken the bait when the Resurrection MC entered the game. Various brothers in that club were sniffing around what really went down with those transports they got jacked for protecting in their earlier incarnation as the Bounty MC. And they weren’t being entirely legal about it.

But …

Nothing.

So now, with the ME under investigation for taking bribes, all their asses were swinging out there.

And they continued to have dick because no one had high hopes that investigation would turn up anything.

The ME contended he and his wife had been saving for years to realize their dream of eventually retiring to their houseboat on Lake Powell. They just didn’t keep this savings in a bank.

Regardless how ludicrously lame this excuse was, a man’s reputation was on the line, and after years in his position, the medical examiner had never given cause to investigate his findings or his earnings. And as such, it was taking a forensic accountant going through years of the ME and his wife’s personal accounts to prove this claim wrong.

And even when that happened, the guy would have to give it up who gave him the money.

But so far, the ME was not giving anything up.

Which could only mean one thing, and that thing was understandable considering four people were dead in this mess.

The medical examiner who falsified his reports on Lance Mueller and Kevin Bogart was more afraid of who paid him off than he was of being found guilty of taking bribes.

In other words, unless something broke, they had and would continue to have dick.

“You don’t get it. It’s never the same guy,” Heidi said.

“Please explain,” Hawk requested.

“When they’re messing with her. It’s never the same guy,” Heidi told him.

Fucking hell.

“We know this is big,” Hawk shared.

“So you know you can’t protect her from half the Denver Police Department,” Heidi returned.

“Half?” Ally asked, her voice curt, edgy.

Then again, her dad and brother were cops, and dirty ones didn’t sit well normally.

Half the force was fucked right the hell up.

Lynn spoke.

“It isn’t half.”

Again, she had the room’s attention.

“I’m sorry, Lynn, can you—?” Hawk started.

“They’d roll them in. Divert,” she said.

“Right,” Hawk replied. “And by that you mean?”

She fully lifted her head, straightened her shoulders.

And stated, “People didn’t like Tony. By people, I mean his colleagues. Fellow cops. He knew that but he didn’t care. They didn’t like him because he was by the book. He was a good man. A good man. To his core. He said he was by the book because there was a book for a reason. And it wasn’t to protect the police. It was to protect the people. And he didn’t get it. He honestly did not get it. Because, he said, you become police to protect the people. So the book should be your bible.”

Tony Crowley was known as straitlaced and exactly as she described her husband. He was also known to take that to extremes. This made him unpopular with his coworkers.

But you couldn’t argue what she was saying.

“They were racially motivated and racially profiling,” she declared. “And he saw that they were also targeting women. Mostly fellow officers.”

No one said anything.

So Lynn continued.

“That was what he thought it was. In the beginning, he didn’t know it was bigger. He didn’t know there were dirty cops. He just thought they were bad cops who had no business being on the force. So, whoever these guys are, they convinced others that Tony was the problem. And now, because they think Tony talked to me, they think I’d be the problem if this became a media nightmare because women are coming forward about stuff and Black people are having a moment.”

Mamá’s eyes moved to Hawk.

“A moment?” Hawk asked Lynn.

“Yeah, he said he heard Kevin call it that. Like four hundred years of slavery and lynchings then decades more of every Black parent having to have ‘the talk’ with their kids about what to do if a cop pulled them over isn’t worthy of a moment. When Tony was on the beat, he saw it happening. He could rant about it for hours. ‘That’s not protecting the people,’ he’d say. People of color would look at him in uniform with distrust and it broke his soul. He did what he did to keep them safe, not scare the crap out of them. He worked hard to become a detective and get out of uniform. And he wanted that element out. It isn’t all of them. It isn’t even half. But when the bad ones convince the other ones that you’re not one of them, you don’t stand a chance.”

She shook her head and her voice got small.

“Tony didn’t stand a chance.”

Fuck, Axl felt for her.

It had never been remotely okay, a good cop went down in all of this.

But seeing the aftermath in her, hearing the pride she had in her husband, pride that was deserved.

It was killer.

Hawk gave her a second.

Then he broke it down.

“So he was building a case of cops racially profiling, and he stumbled onto something bigger.”

“And the women,” she stressed, and the way she did made Axl’s neck itch.

“And the women,” Hawk confirmed he heard her, and the way he did that, Axl knew Hawk hadn’t missed her tone.

“Yes, and they killed him for it,” she returned.

“Did he mention any names?” Hawk asked.

“Lance Mueller and Kevin Bogart,” she stated.