The Guardian
Chapter 1

Matteo Garza would give his left nut for a crime scene. Not that he’d ever wish death or destruction on anyone—he became a cop to solve crimes and help people, and he’d done a damn decent job of it for a decade, thank you very much. But the Intelligence Unit at the Thirty-Third Precinct hadn’t seen an active case in an unprecedented two weeks, and what they had seen for the two before that had been barely worth the paperwork.

Nobody would say this out loud, of course, because fate was a tricky bitch who couldn’t resist temptation, and they were nothing if not a superstitious lot. But while some of his fellow detectives were all too happy to take the slow roll in stride, the quiet made Garza antsy. When things went the molasses-in-January route in the Intelligence Unit, he couldn’t do the one thing that meant more to him than any other.

His job.

“Damn, G.” Detective Shawn Maxwell looked across his desk at Garza, his dark brows lifted toward what would be the guy’s hairline if he didn’t shave his head on the regular. “Who died?”

“What?” Garza asked, more in an effort to dodge the question than because he hadn’t connected the dots. But he wasn’t exactly a heart-on-his-sleeve kind of guy, and coming out with “I miss our 15-hour workdays like the deserts miss the rain” was bound to earn him some side-eye.

Maxwell? Not a dumba*ss. Unfortunately, also, not bashful about calling Garza out. “You look like someone just kicked your kitten, man. Seriously. What gives?”

“I don’t have a kitten,” Garza pointed out, and Detective Addison Hale, whose desk ran perpendicular to both Maxwell’s and Garza’s, let out a bubbly laugh that matched her personality to a frigging T.

At the twin looks of surprise coming from both Garza and her partner, she bit her l*p. “Sorry. It’s just that the idea of Garza cuddling a sweet, fluffy kitten is kind of…”

“Ridiculous?” supplied Maxwell.

“Implausible?” chimed in their tech and surveillance expert, James Capelli, from the spot where he sat at a bank of wall-mounted monitors halfway across the open office space designated for Remington’s most elite police unit.

Hale rolled her green eyes skyward even though her smile still stuck around. “I was going to go with ironic. But whatever works.”

Garza resisted the urge to argue, mostly because he knew he’d lose. He had too many rough edges not to avoid cute and cuddly like a tax audit. After working beside them for the past two years, his fellow detectives all knew it.

“I’m just a little bored, is all,” Garza said, because even though he wasn’t wild about spotlighting his overly ambitious work ethic, it was better than talking about kittens. “We wrapped up the Sansone case a month ago, and everything else has been…” He waved a hand around the freakishly quiet office. It was as close as he’d get to actually saying how dead things had been around here.

Maxwell laughed, the gesture at odds with his imposing stature, the numerous tattoos swirling their way down from both sleeves of his snug black T-shirt, and the pair of small stainless steel hoops hugging his left earlobe. “Dude. We deserve a breather after the Sansone case.”

Okay, so Garza had to admit that the guy had a point. Catching a murderous gunrunner who had threatened and attacked a CI and held the A.D.A. hostage with the intent to have them both tortured and killed had been one hell of a workout. Still… “I guess I’d just rather stay busy.”

“Have you forgotten that, for us, busy usually means mayhem and dead bodies?” Hale asked, but Garza was quick on the redirect.

“We’re cops. That’s kind of our specialty, isn’t it?”

“Fair enough.” Hale tipped her head, her blond ponytail sliding over one shoulder. “Still. You don’t need a buttload of cases to stay busy.”

Capelli frowned. “I don’t think ‘buttload’ is an actual unit of measurement.”

Leave it to the Brainiac to get technical. And leave it to Hale not to bat a single eyelash in reply. “What I meant was, there are always things to do around here. You could help me finish planning Isabella and Kellan’s baby shower,” she suggested, her smile growing thirty watts brighter.

Garza’s heart beat out a steady rhythm of ha ha ha, hell no. “Oh. I, uh, don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Not that he wasn’t happy for his fellow detective and her firefighter husband now that they were T-minus six weeks to go on their first baby. Love and marriage and babies were great, just as long as they were happening to other people. The idea of commitment to anything other than being a cop gave him the f*****g shakes.

Which was probably why his one and only commitment to another person had ended in your basic dumpster fire, but hey. It wasn’t like he’d be making that mistake again.

His job would never ask him to be something he wasn’t; namely, anything other than a cop from bones to balls.

“I’m pretty sure that’s not the kind of busy Garza had in mind,” Maxwell said, sliding a sympathetic look out of the corner of his eye. Of all the cops in Intelligence, Garza had known Maxwell the longest, way back from the early days, when Garza had worked in the gang unit and Maxwell had worked undercover. They all had bulletproof work ethics—this wasn’t the kind of job you could half-a*ss. But Maxwell didn’t just know Garza was going to be all-in, all the time.

He knew why.

“He’s probably right, Hale,” Capelli said, and Garza took the opportunity to stuff the memory back into the ugly hole from which it had come. “If Garza’s not the type to have a kitten”—he paused, measuring the words—“literally, since there’s a figurative usage of that phrase, as well, then it follows that he’s probably not the type to want to plan a baby shower. Even if it is a co-ed one.”

“Fine,” Hale agreed, her smile keeping her from looking put out. “That just means Hollister’s going to have to help me pick the cake.”

“Did someone say cake?” came a voice from the doorway, and yes, Garza had just officially escaped the hot seat. Detective Isabella Walker made her way into the office, albeit a little more slowly than she usually might if she wasn’t nearly eight months pregnant, with her partner not far behind. Isabella was the veteran detective in the unit, although both Garza and Maxwell were older. She was also the only one they called by first name. That hadn’t always been the case—cops so rarely went by anything other than their last names, and Garza didn’t even think of himself as anything but. But Isabella had changed hers when she’d married Kellan, and as a firefighter, he went by their last name more often than not, too. To avoid confusion, they’d all just fallen into the rhythm of using her first name unless formality dictated otherwise.

“Donuts, I get,” Detective Liam Hollister said, his arm muscles working overtime on the two large file folder boxes balanced in his grasp as he followed Isabella into the office. “I mean, hello, we’re cops. But cake? It’s only nine thirty in the morning.”

Garza jumped up to grab the box on top of the stack, following the guy over to Isabella’s desk. “When you’re eating for two, it doesn’t matter,” he said with a shrug. At Hollister’s lifted brows, he added, “I have seven nieces and nephews, all under the age of six. Trust me. You don’t want to come between a pregnant woman and cake, no matter what time it is.”

“He’s not wrong.” Isabella laughed. “I have hand-to-hand combat skills for a reason, and I’m not ashamed to say I’d do some pretty unspeakable things for buttercream frosting at this stage in my pregnancy. Morning, noon, or night.”

“Well, I’m sorry to bust everyone’s sugar-bubble, but we’ll have to wait until the shower for cake,” Hale apologized. “Hollister, it looks like you get to help me out with that.”

Before Hollister could ask how he’d drawn the short straw without even being in the room, Garza went for a full-frontal subject change. “So, what is all this stuff, anyway?”

Isabella focused her attention on the boxes he and Hollister had thunked over her work space, sending a shot of relief through his chest. “Well, I can’t exactly work active cases with you guys, seeing as how I’ve got a future linebacker taking over my entire midsection right now.” She slid a hand over the swell of her belly, the affection in the gesture canceling out any resentment the words might’ve otherwise carried. “So, I thought I’d dig in to these cold cases to keep busy.”

Ahhhh, now she was speaking what his younger sister, Camila, would call his love language. “Want some help?” Garza asked.

Isabella’s expression was entirely WTF. “You actually want to work on cold cases?”

“A case is a case,” he pointed out. “They all need solving, right?”

“Well, yes.” Her caramel-colored brows tugged downward for just the briefest of seconds before she flipped the top off the box closest to her, erasing the but that Garza had expected to follow. “Every one of these victims deserves justice.”

“Finding it on a cold case is rough, though,” Maxwell said, and Capelli agreed with a nod.

“Statistically speaking, we only solve…” He trailed off at the scowl Garza couldn’t help but deliver, finishing with a quiet, “very few of them” instead of the exact figure he’d probably been ready to dish up like breakfast.

Isabella smoothed over Garza’s sharp edges in a good cop/grumpy cop routine they’d cultivated from day one. “Well, let’s see if we can improve on that, shall we?” Smiling, she pulled a handful of files from the stack, passing them over to Garza before diving back in for more.

“It’s kind of old school to have actual files,” he said, although he wasn’t about to bitch about a break from screen surfing.

Capelli straightened in his desk chair. “We have everything stored electronically, of course. We’ve been required to log every aspect of a case in the database for over six years now. Some detectives also prefer to keep hand-written notes on their more difficult cases, though.”

“By ‘some detectives’, he means me.” Isabella laughed. “I haven’t done it in a long time, but for the really tough ones, I’ll sometimes print out the case file and make handwritten notes to give myself a fresh way of looking at things. The files obviously have to stay in the building for security purposes, though.”

“Understood.” Garza lifted his chin once in a nod, but it was all the time he was willing to waste not getting to it.

He flipped through the file folders in his hands, his pulse quickening in a way that it hadn’t for nearly a month. F**k, he’d missed this. A string of robberies and home invasions, a possible drug ring, a suicide that may or may not have actually been a murder, and—

Whoa. “You guys tried to go after the Bianchi family?” he asked. “As in, the biggest organized crime family in Remington?”

“Ugh, yeah,” Isabella said, her displeasure on full display. “‘Tried’ being the operative word.”

Hollister grinned enough for both of them, leaving Garza to wonder—not for the first time—if anything ever ruffled the guy. “I forgot that was before you came on board, G. That was one of our more ambitious investigations.”

“Ambitious is definitely one way to put it,” Garza said.

On paper, Victor Bianchi and his two sons, Dante and Nicky, were businessmen and entrepreneurs, investing in everything from restaurants and nightclubs to the stock market. In reality, they were practically mob royalty. The Feds had taken Dante down in a showstopper of a case a year and a half ago—guilty verdicts on fifteen counts of extortion and bribery with six counts of tax fraud like a cherry on top—but both Victor and Nicky had squeaked by, unscathed. Victor was practically untouchable, so well-connected and shrewd that he’d never even gotten a parking ticket, let alone been indicted for any of his alleged crimes, and Nicky seemed to be following in dear old dad’s footsteps rather than those of his bolder, sloppier brother. They were smart. Slick. Ruthlessly criminal.

Making a case against them would be huge.

Garza must’ve done a piss-poor job of masking his excitement, because Hollister kept hold of his grin. “I take it you’re familiar with Victor and sons?”

Locking his expression down, Garza said, “They’re pretty hard to miss. We had a decent profile going when I worked in the gang unit, but you know how it is. Most of it was just for situational awareness. There’s always chatter on the street, but we didn’t exactly have jurisdiction to move on them since organized crime families don’t technically count as gangs.”

“We do like to hog the good cases over here,” Hale said brightly, and Isabella held up her hands as if to admit guilt.

“Sure, when we can make them.”

“Or the Feds don’t steal them,” Maxwell interjected, his frown/eye roll combo broadcasting his opinion of federal agents in Technicolor.

Without arguing, Isabella continued. “We had a pretty good start, too. There were all the makings of a pretty big money laundering scheme there, with Nicky right smack in the middle of it all”—she pointed to the folder in Garza’s hand—“but then Dante was indicted and everything stopped cold.”

Garza’s brain went from zero to sixty like a Ferrari in the quarter mile. “Did you bring this to the FBI?” As much as he hated it, Maxwell was right. Once cases like this got big enough, the Feds usually took over.

“We did,” Maxwell said. “But they didn’t get anywhere, either, and they already had everything they needed to make the other charges against Dante stick. Sometimes you’ve gotta take what you can get, and they sure got great press for nailing Dante.”

Having never settled on a case in his life, Garza arched a brow. “So, the whole thing just dropped?”

“More like, it never fully formed.” Hollister leaned against his desk, running a thumb over the auburn perma-stubble on his chin. “After the Feds passed, we gave it one last whack. But that indictment had Victor and Nicky playing full defense. Best we could get were back alley whispers from jittery CIs about bribery and about nine different kinds of fraud, all of it linked to some construction company Nicky had been doing business with. He cut ties with them completely three days after Dante was indicted, though, and they folded not long after.”

Hale sighed, a long, drawn-out number. “And poof. There went the case.”

“This specific case, maybe.” Garza held up the folder in his hand. “But there’s no way Nicky changed his stripes.” Organized crime wasn’t exactly something you could quit, like eating carbs or sneaking the occasional cigarette. Once you were in, you were in forever. Especially if it was your birthright.

“Oh, I’m sure Nicky’s hands are dirty again now. Two years is far too long to lie low,” Isabella said. “Trouble is, he’s a very cautious needle in a very, very corrupt haystack. It would probably take months, not to mention a shitload of luck, to catch even one lead on the guy now.”

“I’m good for it.”

Okay, so the words had do-si-doed right past Garza’s brain-to-mouth filter, and that wasn’t usually his style. But his work-only work ethic wasn’t exactly a secret, and the colder the case, the more he just wanted to break it.

It wasn’t just what he did. It was who he was.

No matter the price.

“You sure?” Maxwell asked, dark brows gathered low like his voice. “That’s a hell of a lot to take on, especially after all this time. The case is probably a lost cause.”

Garza didn’t hesitate. “I’m sure.”

Lost cause or not, if Nicky Bianchi had been up to something, Garza was going to do everything in his power to uncover what it was.