“Afraid not,” Jenna agreed. “I wish I had better news. And now I’m going home, because I’ve been here since last night.”
“Thanks,” Shaye called as the brunette headed back the way she’d come. She looked questioningly at Cole.
“Back to square one.”
* * *
“SO, SOMEONE CONNECTED to Crazy Ed is out,” Luke said.
Cole frowned. “I guess so.”
After Jenna had given them the news about the bullet, that was practically a foregone conclusion anyway, but Cole wasn’t leaving anything to chance. So he’d bribed a couple of his fellow officers coming off duty with a pair of basketball tickets to go home with Shaye and watch her until he and Cole were finished.
After hours in the stifling heat of the station—the air conditioner was on the fritz—they’d tracked down anyone even remotely connected to Crazy Ed, which wasn’t a lot. It made Cole sad for the little boy Crazy Ed had once been: parents both killed in a drive-by when he was ten. He’d gone to live with an aunt, who’d overdosed a few years later, and then he’d ended up in the system.
Unlike Cole, who’d managed to form a brotherly bond with Andre and Marcos inside what felt like his fifteenth foster home in eight years, Crazy Ed had found gangs. The rest of his gang was now dead or in prison, and if he had any family left, Luke and Cole couldn’t find it. So no one left to avenge his death.
“He shot up a police station,” Luke reminded him, clearly able to read the direction of Cole’s thoughts. “He chose his path. Nothing we can do about it now.”
“Yeah.” Cole shook off his thoughts about whether Crazy Ed had ever really had a chance before he started dwelling on all the other kids he’d seen in homes over the years, kids he hadn’t kept track of. Kids he hadn’t taken on two jobs to provide them with a real home and ease their transition out of the system, like he had for Andre and Marcos. Because it sure hadn’t been easy for him, suddenly totally on his own, not even a roof over his head when he hit eighteen.
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