Dream Spinner (Dream Team Book 3) by Kristen Ashley (top 10 novels txt) 📕

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.

Goddamn it.

Two dead men.

Nothing new.

“That’s how I knew about Heidi,” she went on. “Because, a couple of days before he died, he got fidgety. He said something wasn’t adding up. He said there were sex workers involved. He said it might be about skimming or kickbacks. Maybe blackmail. He said he found something out about Lance Mueller, and he thought that was why he moved from the DPD to Englewood PD. But everyone was talking about how Lance and Kevin moved departments because Kevin had so many sexual harassment strikes. But Lance moved first, and Tony said that didn’t jibe, which was part of what he was digging into. And he was finding something. So he told me he thought this was bigger than what he could do on his own and he might have to take it to his higher-ups.”

“Did he take it to his higher-ups?” Ally asked.

Lynn shook her head. “I don’t know. He was dead in a couple of days. And a day after that, I came home, my house was a mess, and there was a message written on my bathroom mirror in soap that told me to keep my mouth shut. My husband’s dead. My kids are asking for Daddy. I notice guys sitting in their cars outside my house. And then the rest begins. I kept my mouth shut.”

“Your house was a mess?” Cisco asked.

“They were searching for something,” Lynn answered.

“Do you know if they found it?” Cisco pressed.

She shook her head.

“He didn’t leave you anything?” Ally pushed it, and she did because it was important. “Notes? Files? Tell you he’d hidden something somewhere?”

“If he did, he didn’t tell me. So if he did, they probably got it,” Lynn replied. “And no, he would talk about it, but only minimally. Mostly, he kept me out of it.”

“The sex workers,” Cisco butted in. “Did he mention any names of sex workers? Or, perhaps, names of the men who ran them?”

She shook her head but then it ticked, and she said, “Maybe someone named Dynamite?”

“Why do you say that?” Hawk quickly pressed.

Lynn turned to Hawk. “Because he was on the phone, and when he got off, I noticed he’d doodled while he was talking. And in the scratching on the notepad, there was one word. ‘Dynamite’ with a bunch of question marks. Outside it being weird, and maybe about some case he was working on, I didn’t think anything of it. And in the end, it might not mean anything.”

From the looks on faces, everyone had the same response to that.

No one knew anyone called Dynamite on the street.

So maybe it was an individual working woman.

No one in that room knew the names of all the ladies of the evening.

Which meant a chat with Knight, another visit with Brandi and everyone hitting up all their informants to find out.

“So how did you know Lance Mueller didn’t do what the bogus suicide note said he was doing with sex workers?” Ally asked. “Did Tony go into specifics about this skimming or blackmail?”

Lynn gave another shake of her head.

“No, he just said Lance Mueller was a lot of things, but he loved his wife and he’d never ‘do that.’ And there was a rumor about that which freaked Tony. Because he said it didn’t jibe. He didn’t get into it, but it was when he was talking about there being sex workers involved. When I heard about the murder-suicide, and what was in the note, that was when I knew what that was. The implication that Lance was taking freebies from working women.”

Now Heidi was looking at her lap.

“And maybe something else,” Lynn continued. “Something about some motorcycle gang or something.”

And … yeah.

Tony had made the connection.

And then he’d been whacked.

But it seemed only Tony knew who he told about this, if he told anyone at all.

Say, if he took it to his superiors, and they were involved, so they made moves to take him out, because the cops on their crew had looked into it, and they knew Tony hadn’t made anything he was doing official.

Or if whoever “they” were caught Tony nosing around, and that was enough to make moves to keep him quiet.

“Do you know who he was talking to on the phone?” Cisco asked.

More head shaking from Lynn.

“He was on the phone a lot. He had a network he was building. He said the evidence has to be there and he can’t be everywhere the evidence was. So he had to rely on people to keep tabs. That’s all he said about it. But I assumed he was talking about people in certain communities, Black and Latino, who could record incidences and report them to him.”

Everyone looked to Mamá.

She also shook her head, which meant it wasn’t her, and she didn’t know who it was.

But the way she looked at Hawk, she was going to find out.

“Most frustrating, though, was trying to get the women in the department to talk to him. He said they thought he’d make things hard for them. They didn’t want to be seen as complaining. Like they couldn’t take it. Tough it out,” Lynn continued.

“But Bogart had sexual harassment complaints lodged against him,” Ally pointed out.

Lynn shook her head. “From women in admin, dispatch. Not officers. Tony saw it happening with the female officers. But none of them would come forward. He thought they’d feel there was safety in numbers. But they just refused to make a big deal out of it.”

“Was it a big deal?” Cisco asked.

Lynn looked to him. “Tony knew what razzing