“More accurately, conflict of interest,” Cud volleyed back.
“Sarge,” Amanda said, wishing Malone would step in. “Give me the opportunity here.”
Malone rubbed his jaw.
Cud smacked his gum. “You can’t really be considering letting her take the lead, boss.”
“What’s it to you?” Malone snapped at Cud. “I give it to her, and you and Detective Ryan catch the next one.”
That would be Natalie Ryan, nicknamed Cougar, for reasons any knowledgeable adult could imagine.
“Whatever,” Cud mumbled.
“Give us a minute alone.” Malone snapped his fingers at Cud when he didn’t move.
“Fine. I’ll be over there.” He walked about ten feet away.
Small flakes started coming down and Amanda glanced up: overcast and no visible stars. Nothing to wish on. Story of her life these days.
“You sure you could handle this?” Malone asked.
“Absolutely.”
He leaned down, leveling his gaze with hers. “If you have any doubt about it, speak now. You know you can talk to me.”
Scott Malone had been a good friend of her father’s, and still was, as far as she knew, and it earned her special treatment. Other detectives under Malone couldn’t talk as freely to him as she could.
“No doubts,” she lied. How had things escalated to this point: her fighting for the case? Her heart wanted to run, but her legs wouldn’t move.
He scanned her eyes and straightened back up to full height and rubbed the top of his head. “I’m probably going to regret this— And if I catch a whiff of drama, so help me, you’ll be off the case so fast your head’ll spin. Got me?”
“That means—”
“Yeah, I’m letting you work it.” The way his mouth contorted, his permission must have tasted like bile. “If Lieutenant Hill finds out, my head will roll, so I’m being very serious when I say don’t let me down.”
The sergeant really was putting himself in a precarious spot, and a flash of remorse rushed through Amanda. Sherry Hill was no-nonsense and not one to mess with, and, as much as Malone was a fan of her father’s, Hill was not. The lieutenant made no secret of holding a grudge against her dad. Keeping drama out altogether would be a challenge, but she’d do her best. “I won’t let you down.”
“Good. Now I have other conditions.” Malone hooked his thumbs on his waistband. “You need to call your father, tell him that Palmer’s dead. And who knows, maybe you’ll—”
“No.” She shook her head. “You don’t get to tell me to talk to him and leverage this case to make that happen.” She hadn’t spoken to any of her family since not long after the trial had ended. Not her mother, father, her four younger sisters, or her older brother. It had been her decision to pull away from them, and even though they still reached out to her at Christmas and on her birthday, it just felt far too difficult. Being around her parents, her siblings, and her nieces and nephews amplified all that she had lost.
“It would just be nice, is all, if you could reconnect,” Malone said. “I know your father would love nothing more.”
She wanted to tell him he’d crossed a professional line with this request, but if she pointed that out, he’d likely reciprocate with the fact that her working this case was technically crossing that same line. Then he’d assign it to Cud, and now she’d been given the go-ahead, she wanted to keep it. “You said you had conditions plural?”
His face darkened, and she feared her effort to redirect the conversation had him changing his mind.
“What else?” she asked, afraid to take her next breath as if it would alter his response.
“You realize my letting you work this case at all is a huge conflict of interest.”
“I do.”
“For that reason, I can’t have you working this one sol—”
“Oh no,” she griped, dreading what was coming. He was going to give her a partner. “Haven’t we talked this topic to death?”
“Yes, but apparently it hasn’t sunk into your thick skull that it’s happening.”
She groaned. He was going to give her a partner, but every one she’d had pried into her business, thought they knew her, tried to mind-shrink her. To date, all of them had been homegrown and acquainted with her tragic story. They treated her with kid gloves, like she was some sort of fragile china doll about to fall off a shelf. They missed the fact that she’d already smashed into a million, indiscernible pieces. “Who?” she shoved out. “Don’t tell me it’s Cud.”
“It’s not Cud. It’s a new guy.” He added that tidbit under his breath.
“A new guy?” she parroted. Surely he was joking.
“And I suggest you make it work. You might be the former police chief’s daughter—”
“And good at my job,” she cut in, now longing to be out from the shadow of Nathan Steele. She’d kept her maiden name after marriage because for the longest time she’d wanted to be her dad, and his name was powerful as she worked up the ranks. After Kevin’s death, there had been many times she’d wished she’d taken his surname, James.
“Sure, but you need to play by the rules like the rest of us,” Malone said, disregarding her interruption.
And he didn’t need to lay them out to her. At every homicide it was desired to have a primary detective and a number two. Maybe she should be grateful she’d gotten along solo as often as she did. “Okay, fine, have it your way. But what am I supposed to do now? Sit around and wait for the new guy to show up?”
“His name’s Trent Stenson, and you won’t need to wait for long. I was going to tell you in the morning, but it seems like Christmas has come again, or early, however you want to look at it.”
“Yippie,” she mumbled, picturing some backwoods type in a cowboy hat and chaps with grass hanging out of his mouth, but a face popped into her mind. “Wait. You said Trent Stenson?”
“Uh-huh. You know him?”
To say that she knew him would be stretching it, but she’d met him at a barbecue Becky had hosted one summer several years ago. He had boyish good looks—blond hair, blue eyes—but his starry-eyed approach to life made him seem younger. He had been a uniformed officer with Dumfries PD at the time and had rambled on about how he’d helped the FBI with a serial-rapist-and-murder case. He declared then that he wanted to be a homicide detective for Prince William County PD one day. Guess some people had stars to wish upon and grant their dreams.
“Amanda?” Malone prompted.
“I’ve met him.”
Malone smiled. “Yeah, small world, law enforcement is round here.”
Trent had been so cheery and just the thought of being around that… “I don’t know if this is a good idea. And you said he’s new to the department.”
“Sure, and as you just said, you’re good at your job, so you’ll be a good mentor for the kid.”
She hardly felt qualified to be anyone’s mentor, and “the kid” was probably only a couple of years younger than she was.
Malone went on. “For the record, Stenson is now officially your partner.”