“Because you helped me find it. You trusted me enough to look for what I already knew.” Traci gathered the files from Brooks’s desk, her movements sharp with frustration. “This time, I’m asking you to trust me without the proof. Just this once.”
Brooks had stared at the warehouse blueprints, at the operational timeline that promised to end eight months of dead ends and pressure from above. The captain wanted results. The mayor wanted headlines. The families of the missing wanted justice.
“We follow the lead,” he’d decided. “But we do it carefully. Extra backup, extended surveillance, every precaution in the book.”
The warehouse raid began at eleven-forty-seven p.m. on a Tuesday in March. Brooks remembered the time because he’d checked his watch when they received the go signal, thinking about how Traci would tease him later for being obsessive about details.
The entry went smooth. SWAT breached the main entrance while Brooks and Traci covered the loading dock. No resistance, no return fire, nothing but empty shipping containers and abandoned equipment. Too easy, Brooks thought, but pushed the concern aside.
Then everything shifted.
Gunfire came from positions that weren’t supposed to exist, from shooters who’d had time to establish ambush points. The warehouse blueprints had been wrong—not slightly wrong, but deliberately falsified. Walls that should have been solid contained hidden firing ports. Corridors that appeared on the plans didn’t exist.
Brooks took cover behind a shipping container, calling for backup that was already engaged with shooters outside the building. Radio chatter was chaos—officers down, multiple hostiles, unknown number of combatants. Everything was wrong, just as Traci had predicted.
“Brooks!” Traci’s voice cut through the gunfire, and he turned to see his partner twenty feet away, her weapon drawn but her attention focused on something he couldn’t see. “Behind you!”
Brooks spun and saw the muzzle flash from a concealed position above them. He was moving to take cover when Traci hit him from the side, her hundred and twenty pounds of muscle and momentum driving him behind a concretepillar. She’d thrown herself between Brooks and the gunfire, absorbing three rounds that had been aimed at his center mass.
“Medic!” Brooks shouted into his radio, knowing the response time would be too long. “Officer down! I need a medic now!”
Traci’s hands found his face, her touch weak but insistent. “Listen to me,” she whispered, her voice fading. “Santos was turned. Someone fed us bad intelligence.”
“Save your strength. Help’s coming.”
“Trust your instincts next time.” Blood flecked her lips as she spoke. “Don’t let them make you doubt what you know is right.”
Brooks held pressure on her wounds while she bled out in his arms, her brown eyes growing distant. Backup arrived three minutes later—three minutes too late to save Detective Traci Washington, mother of two, wife of fifteen years, best partner Brooks had ever worked with.
The image burned in his memory: Traci’s blood on his hands, her eyes vacant, the warehouse ambush that had been what she’d predicted.
Brooks jerked back to the present, Traci’s photograph still in his hands. He thought about Austin, about Traci’s intuition that he’d dismissed. She hadn’t been like Vivienne, just an experienced cop with excellent instincts. But he’d ignored her gut feeling because it couldn’t be documented, couldn’t be proven in court.
The result: a dead partner and three years of guilt.
He wouldn’t make that mistake again. Whatever Vivienne’s methods—her visions, historical knowledge, or intuition—the information was solid. That’s what mattered for building a case.
Brooks picked up his phone and returned Captain Rodriguez’s call.
“Harrington.” The captain’s voice was rough with sleep and something else. Relief, maybe. “Was starting to think you’d fallen off the planet.”
“Just working a case. Missing person turned into something bigger.”
“Sounds like you. Making progress?”
“More than I expected. The case broke open, but not the way I thought it would.”
“What do you mean?”
“I had to trust intelligence I couldn’t document. Follow leads based on instincts instead of evidence. Value results over methodology.”
A long pause. “Never thought I’d hear you say that. You were always the evidence-first guy. Documentation over everything.”
“Maybe I learned something from Traci.” Brooks set down Traci’s photograph, his fingers steady despite the emotion in his voice. “She tried to warn me about the warehouse. Had instincts about Santos, about the whole operation. I dismissed them because they weren’t based on concrete proof.”
“Traci was good police. Best instincts I ever saw.”
“And I ignored her because I couldn’t put her instincts in a report.” Brooks stood and walked to his window, looking out at the lighthouse beam sweeping across Westerly Cove. “I won’t make that mistake again.”
