The next morning, I tell myself I’m going to the station to drop off evidence, not to beg anyone to save me.
The lie doesn’t hold long.
I park across from the brick building, the one with the tasteful etched glass of a sailboat on the front doors, like Crescent Bay’s police department is sponsored by a regatta. From here I can catch a strip of the cliffs in my rearview mirror, pale teeth above the dark line of the rock shelf. Boats bob in the harbor beyond them, masts like needles stitching up a wound the town refuses to name.
I sit there with my hands on the steering wheel, breathing in the stale coffee smell from my travel mug and the salty damp that has crept into the upholstery. Last night’s CPS visit clings to my skin, a film I can’t scrub off. We will notify the court. Mothers should know when to put their children first.
I have Elliot on tape saying he can make Juliet disappear, and people still keep trying to make me disappear instead.
I tuck the thumb drive into the inner pocket of my bag, under my cheap wallet and a wadded receipt from the liquor store downstairs. For once, I’m not carrying my mic. This visit is supposed to be off the record, a tired mom bringing the system what it claims to want.
I step out of the car. The air tastes like salt and exhaust and whatever hair spray the officer smoking by the side door used this morning. I walk past him, past the humming compressor unit, through the double doors and into the station’s cooled, humming maze.
Inside, it smells like disinfectant, burnt coffee, and copier toner. Phones ring. A radio crackles. Somewhere, a printer grinds out more paper to file in cabinets that never hold the whole truth.
“Morning,” I say to the sergeant at the front desk.
He looks up, recognition flaring, mouth tightening. “Ms. Lane,” he says. “Detective Navarro’s in the bullpen.”
The way he says her name scrapes on my nerves. I tell myself I’m imagining the stiffness.
I cross the lobby, catching a flash of engraved brass on the wall: Harrow Family Community Safety Wing. Calder’s name sits nearby in smaller letters, a permanent footnote.
My sneakers squeak once on the linoleum, loud in my ears.
The bullpen door buzzes when the sergeant hits the button. I push through.
Luz’s desk sits near the far window, the one with a sliver of harbor view that she pretends not to care about. Usually there’s a stack of case files leaning toward collapse and a half-dead fern trying to survive on recycled air.
Today there’s a cardboard box.
Luz is sliding a mug into it, the chipped one that reads World’s Okayest Detective. Her badge is clipped to her belt, but her gun is gone. The sight knocks the breath out of me harder than CPS’s clipboard.
“No,” I say, before my brain catches up with my mouth. “No. What happened? Did they… move you?”
She flinches when she hears my voice, shoulders tightening, then smooths her expression and straightens.
“You’re not supposed to be back here,” she says. Her tone tries for dry. It lands brittle.
“Try and stop me,” I say. My pulse thuds in my ears. “What’s with the box?”
She glances toward the glassed-in conference room where a man in a tie I don’t know pretends he isn’t watching us. Through another window I see Calder’s old office, now occupied by a successor whose name I always forget because he’s just Calder with fewer wrinkles.
“Administrative leave,” she says. “Effective this morning.”
The phrase hits like a physical shove. My hand grips the strap of my bag until the nylon cuts my palm.
“For what?” I ask. “You didn’t do anything. Unless ‘listened to a woman’ is a new category of misconduct.”
One corner of her mouth twitches. Then she reaches into the box and pulls out a manila folder, thinner than the Juliet file but heavier, somehow, in the way she holds it.
“Internal memo,” she says. “Unofficially, you’d call it a warning shot. Officially, it’s the letter that tells me to hand over my cases and go home.”
She extends it toward me.
My fingers feel numb when I take it. The paper is warm from her hand, rough against my thumb. I lift the top page and read.
Subject: Detective Luz Navarro – Allegations of Evidence Mismanagement and Inappropriate Entanglement with Civilian Media Actor.
My eyes snag on the words Glass Roses podcast in the second paragraph, printed in neat black ink. On phrases like potential compromise of ongoing investigations and unauthorized access to Harrow Island property in accompaniment of a civilian podcaster.
“They name me?” I ask. My voice scrapes like I’ve been screaming.
“Indirectly,” she says. “They call you a ‘civilian media actor.’ Which is a fun way to say ‘woman with microphone who won’t stay in her lane.’”
I keep reading. Paragraph three: anonymous tip and corroborating concerns raised by departmental personnel. Paragraph four: possible tampering with or coaching of witnesses related to the Reeves cold case.
“Tampering?” My laugh comes out too high, too sharp. “Because you kept Sadie from doxxing another teacher? Because you told me not to blast the tape? That’s tampering now?”
“Because I took you to the audio lab without looping in half the brass,” she says. Her jaw tightens. “Because I went to Harrow Island with you instead of arresting you on the dock. Because someone here didn’t like watching me do my job without asking permission from their donors first.”
The fluorescent light hums above us. Someone’s keyboard clacks unevenly. In the back corner, a fan ticks each time it rotates.
“They got details, Mara.” Her voice lowers. “The memo references ‘late-night off-book contact with subject on Harrow Island.’ That’s you. And me. And the dock. The only people who should know that are you, me, the guy who lent you the boat, and whoever watched us from the water.”
A chill crawls up my neck. “So either the guy in the other boat made a call,” I say, “or someone inside this department is reading your texts.”
Her gaze flicks to my bag. “Or both,” she says. “This town’s power structure loves redundancy.”
I look down at the memo again. The words blur a little. I focus on them anyway, forcing my eyes to track each sentence.
We are particularly concerned about perception of bias in cases involving families with longstanding ties to the community and department.
That’s the lawyer-speak version of what Calder told me over club salad: Some of these families built this town. They don’t take kindly to being dragged through a podcast feed.
“Who signed this?” I ask.
“Captain first, then Internal Affairs,” she says. “IA is out of Hartford, but they don’t get this wound up without a prod from inside.”
“Anonymous tip,” I say. “Like the anonymous CPS report last night.”
Her head snaps toward me. “What?”
“CPS showed up at my door during dinner,” I say. Saying it out loud makes it feel more real, less like a bad TV episode. “Anonymous concern about exposing Theo to violence. They referenced the cliffs, the death threat, the morning show segment. Details, Luz. And then I got an email from a masked account using the same language as the social worker.”
She curses under her breath in Spanish, the words clipped and hot. “They’re hitting both flanks,” she says. “You through family court, me through IA.”
“They,” I repeat. “You think this is Elliot? Calder loyalists? Oracle? Some PTA hydra in a cardigan?”
“Doesn’t matter which head is biting,” she says. “The body’s the same. Same surnames on plaques, on the regatta trophies, on the school board minutes, on the officer roster.” She nods toward the wall where a framed photo of the Prom Throwback fundraiser hangs, glossy adults in 90s costumes laughing under paper roses. “Same people who turned Juliet’s murder into a decorative ghost story.”
I press my thumb into the edge of the folder until the skin goes white. “What does administrative leave actually mean?” I ask. “In real terms. For me. For the case.”
“It means I’m not supposed to touch Juliet’s file,” she says. “I’m not supposed to talk to witnesses unless IA sits in like a chaperone at a school dance. It means if I sneeze wrong, they open a formal misconduct investigation and hang me with it.”
“And for me?” I ask.
She hesitates. That scares me more than the memo.
“It means if anything happens to you on Harrow property,” she says quietly, “I can’t respond in an official capacity. They made that very clear. I step foot on that island or at that house in a detective role, they call it defiance and boot me for good.”
The words land like a fist to my sternum.
“So they cordoned off the battlefield,” I say. “Where the actual crime happened.”
“They quarantined their donors,” she says. “Let’s call things what they are.”
For a moment, we just stand there, the memo heavy between us. I can hear the faint thump of bass from a car idling at the light outside, echoing the rhythm of waterfront parties that never really stopped, just aged up.
“I thought we were getting close,” I say, the words low. “We had the tape. The dock. Elliot’s voice saying he’d make Juliet disappear. I thought the system had to listen this time.”
Luz’s mouth softens. She reaches out and pushes the folder back into the box, then taps the lid of the World’s Okayest Detective mug.
“The system listened,” she says. “Then it did what it always does here. It protected itself.”
Heat prickles behind my eyes. I blink hard. I will not cry in this room where men with donor last names can walk by and chalk it up to female hysteria and bad branding.
“So what now?” I ask. “You go home and watch cooking shows while IA dissects your career? I go home and delete my RSS feed?”
“You keep breathing,” she says. “First rule. Second rule: you get smarter.”
She reaches into her blazer pocket and pulls out a folded piece of paper, already creased along sharp lines. She holds it out to me like contraband.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“Copy of the audio lab’s preliminary report,” she says. “The one I was going to file formally before IA told me to cease all extracurriculars. I printed this before they locked down my access.” She nods at my bag. “Put it somewhere safe. Not in the cloud. Not in any system Elliot’s company touches.”
The paper feels fragile and dangerous in my hand. I slide it into my bag next to the thumb drive with the dock argument.
“Luz…” My throat closes for a second around her name.
“Listen to me,” she cuts in. Her voice goes low, the tone she uses with panicking witnesses. “Record everything now, Mara. Not for your feed. For you. For court. For whatever this turns into.”
“I already record everything,” I say. “That’s the problem.”
“You record like a storyteller,” she says. “You cut the boring parts. You protect sources with edits. You think about narrative arc. I need you to think like a cop without a badge. Let your phone be your body cam. Meetings, encounters, weird cars outside your building. You don’t have the luxury of trusting anyone’s notes but your own.”
I picture my phone’s voice memo app, crammed with half-finished thoughts and raw tape. I think about the tiny LED on my mic, the comfort I used to take from its glow.
“And Elliot?” I ask. My mouth tastes metallic.
Her jaw flexes. “Do not meet him alone,” she says. “No more private office visits, no more friendly coffee chats. If he invites, you bring someone, or you don’t go. If he catches you in a hallway, you hit record before you say hello. He knows IA is on me now. That makes you exposed. Men like him get sloppy when they feel exposed.”
“What if he dangles something I can’t ignore?” I whisper. “A confession. A deal. Access to records.”
“Then you tell him you’ll consider it,” she says. “You walk away. You call your lawyer, or you call a reporter who doesn’t owe him anything. Or you call me at home on the landline my brother bullied me into installing. I’m off duty, not dead.”
The last line eases something tight in my chest. “They told you not to talk to me?” I ask.
“They told me not to coordinate an investigation with you,” she says. “Conversations with concerned citizens aren’t banned. Yet.”
We share a look. There’s a whole history in it now: the cliffs at midnight, the dock under my feet, Juliet’s voice on an old tape, Theo at the school, my mother with her hands in rich girls’ hair.
“I’m sorry,” I say. The words feel inadequate, a Band-Aid over a bullet wound. “This is my fault.”
She steps closer. The bullpen noise fades under the rush of my own pulse.
“No,” she says. “This is their fault. They’re the ones who killed a girl on a rock shelf and turned it into a campfire story. They’re the ones who used you as a shield until you stopped behaving and started hitting back. Don’t hand them the satisfaction of thinking they scared us quiet.”
Her hand hovers near my arm, then drops without touching. I still feel the ghost of it.
“But you’re the one paying,” I say.
“For now,” she says. “Careers are long. Cases are longer. Reputations… in this town, those go on plaques.”
She picks up the cardboard box. It looks wrong in her arms, like she’s carrying a piece of herself in a cheap container.
“Walk me out,” she says. “So they can’t say I met with you in secret.”
We move through the bullpen together. Conversations stutter, then resume at altered volumes. No one meets my eyes for long. On the wall in the hallway, a display case holds Crescent Bay High memorabilia: a faded regatta jersey, a photo of the first Prom Throwback fundraiser with adults in 90s tuxes mugging for the camera. Glass roses glitter in the centerpiece on the table in the picture.
Shiny, preserved, utterly useless.
At the lobby doors, we pause. Sunlight cuts in, smelling like salt and car exhaust, carrying the faint echo of bass from someone’s waterfront playlist.
“They’re going to come at you harder now,” Luz says. “Through Theo. Through sponsors. Through every system they can file a form with. Make sure when they do, you’ve got a record of who pushed the buttons.”
I nod. The resolve in my chest feels heavier than courage, closer to stubborn grief.
“I won’t stop,” I say. “For Juliet. For Katie. For you.”
Her mouth curves. Not quite a smile, not anything soft. Something steely.
“Good,” she says. “Just don’t die doing it. I’d hate to have to testify about your podcast at your memorial.”
She pushes the door open with her shoulder and steps into the glare, carrying her box past the engraved Harrow plaque.
I watch her go until the door swings shut, cutting off the smell of salt and the sight of the cliffs.
Then I turn back to the lobby, to the sailboat etched on the glass, to the donors’ names, to the echo of the CPS worker’s voice in my kitchen and the anonymous email in my inbox.
I press my phone in my pocket until I feel the hard rectangle, the recorder waiting behind the dark screen.
From now on, everything is content and evidence at the same time.
They just took away my cop. That leaves me with a microphone, a thirteen-year-old, and a story that keeps swallowing the people who try to tell it.
I walk out into the bright, salt-stung air and ask myself the question I know will decide what happens next: without Luz watching my back, who is going to be listening when Elliot finally slips—and who will believe me when he does?