Hide (Detective Harriet Foster #1)(3)

“I’ve just been going over your personnel file again. Solid career, which is why you’re here and not out in the boondocks answering nuisance calls about rabid squirrels. Commendations. Solid leadership skills. Impressive clearance rate.” She looked Foster over again. “I intend to tap those leadership skills. I want you out in front.” She paused. “How’re you doing?”

Foster had no idea how to answer the question. How was she doing? She was here. She’d gotten through the front door. Her mask was on. She was almost sure she could be a cop today.

“Fine,” Foster said.

Griffin sat back to study her. “Maybe. Tough thing losing a partner that way. Losing a partner period. I’m sorry for your loss.” She flicked another look at the personnel file. “Detective Glynnis Thompson. Family and everything. Jeez. This job . . . sometimes . . . it just breaks you.” She looked up and saw the stricken look on Foster’s face along with the beginnings of a cold sweat. “The elephant in the room.” Griffin laced her hands together in her lap. “Your first day back. Are you all here?”

Foster let a beat pass. This was the moment, one of several over the last weeks when she had a decision to make, a side to take, in or out, as she’d had to do five years ago after losing Reg. “Yes, boss.”

Griffin didn’t miss the pause. “I talked to Sergeant Traynor. He told me you and Thompson were a star team. A real buddy act. It’s a loss . . . but not the only one you’ve suffered.” She flicked a look at the photograph on her desk. “Losing a kid. I can’t imagine anything tougher than that. I can see from your face you don’t want to talk about it. I respect that. It’s not common knowledge out there with the team. Up to you what you share.”

Foster heard Griffin, her words made sense, but she’d detached, distanced herself from the pain behind the wall she’d built for just that purpose. She watched Griffin’s mouth move, heard the words, but she was elsewhere, somewhere safe.

“Foster?” she heard Griffin say. “Harriet, you all right?”

She cleared her throat and dialed back in. “Yes. Sorry. Slight headache.”

Griffin reached into her top desk drawer, pulled out a bottle of aspirin, and slid it across the desk to Foster. “Take two.”

Foster grabbed the bottle and watched as Griffin rolled her chair back, reached into a tiny fridge behind her desk, and pulled out a squat bottle of spring water, which she offered to her. She swallowed two tablets and washed them down. Foster started to push the aspirin bottle back across the desk, but Griffin held up a hand. “Keep it.”

Foster slipped the bottle into her bag and nodded thanks.

“You always this subdued?” Griffin asked.

Their eyes held. “I don’t know what you’re asking.”

Griffin leaned forward. “I’m asking, Detective Harriet Foster, if you have your head in the game and your waders on tight. You’ve had two devastating gut punches. One of them would have been enough to sideline most people. I need to know that you’re solidly on the beam. Traynor says you’re steady. I believe him. I’ll believe you, too, if you say it.”

Foster’s breath caught. She wanted to scream and run out of Griffin’s office, out of the building. She needed air. Only pride, stubbornness, and concern that it was this job or nothing nailed her to the chair. “If I weren’t ready, I wouldn’t be here,” Foster said. “Boss.”

The women sat watching each other. This was the start of it. Foster’s road back, Griffin’s necessary ask. “I had a suicide on my team,” Griffin began. “He’d been on the job twenty-five years. A bit of a loner. Dombrowski. One day he’s the same old Dombrowski, cracking jokes, clowning around; the next day he’s strung up from a pipe in the john. He hung himself with his own tie. We found his star in the toilet. You’ve lost a son, a marriage, now a partner. What have you got outside this building, Foster? Faith? Family?”

“A mother. A brother. A niece and nephew. Cousins, aunts, uncles.”

“Close?”

Foster thought about it. Some families fractured after loss. Sometimes the fractures were slow to repair. It was complicated, too complicated to go through here and now. “Enough.”

“Hmm. You couldn’t see yourself staying with your old team?”

How could she stay when she couldn’t bear to park in the lot? To sit at her desk? To see someone who wasn’t Glynnis sitting at hers? “I needed a change. I left on good terms. Traynor can vouch for that.”

“He has. He was also sorry to see you go, but he understands. As I do.” Griffin smiled. “You’ve had your fair share, Foster, that’s for sure. But you’re still kicking, and that shows me what you’re made of. Still, CPD can’t be what you hang the rest of your life on. I’m glad to have you here, but don’t bury yourself here. Understand?”

Foster nodded but said nothing.

“I’m going to need to hear it,” Griffin said.

Foster cleared her throat before speaking clearly. “Yes, boss, I understand.”

“Then you’re in. Here’s the spiel. I don’t do the old boys’ club here. I actively recruit women to fill my spots. In my opinion, women are smarter, faster, more intuitive. You’re a woman, Foster.”