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STEVE SAT IN A CELL on the plane, his hands secured to the seat, and Scully glared at him from the opposite side of the bars.
“You really are a piece of work,” he said and crossed his arms.
Steve raised his eyebrows. “Scully, I may be a piece of work, but you’re just a bureaucratic dick.”
“I’ll gladly put a bullet in your ass if you don’t shut up.”
“Do you always believe the crap they feed you?” Steve asked, staring him down.
“You made a choice, the wrong choice,” Scully started, pointing his finger at Steve and then he stopped, folding his hands in his lap.
“I needed help and Ty offered me an option. You know he was a computer whiz, right?”
Scully crossed his arms.
“The money trail had run dry and no one knew where Winslow went. Ty was motivated by his stepson’s death and he would have gone after Winslow with or without me.”
“Not if he was in jail.”
“Yeah, well, that wasn’t an available option.” Steve looked down at his hands. “Ever made a promise to someone that goes against everything you stand for?” He raised his gaze meeting Scully’s.
“No.”
“Of course not,” he muttered and leaned back in the chair as far as his cuffs would allow. He looked out the window and let the conversation die.
After a few minutes of silence, Scully bit, “What kind of promise?”
Steve turned and met his gaze. “What if your partner was dying and asked you to make a promise, would you honor it?”
Scully remained quiet and looked out the window, but his thoughts turned over the question, mulling the answer. Instead of immediately saying no, he questioned himself because there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for his partner.
“Not an easy question to answer, is it?” Steve said, and Scully met his gaze, this time his expression wasn’t of disgust or anger.
“No, it’s not. But here’s the thing, you have to put the welfare of the public before a promise made under duress.”
Steve inhaled and nodded. “Ty wasn’t a danger to the public. Winslow was, so I made a judgment call.”
Scully noodled on the information, finding, after turning it this way and that, that the judgment call Steve made was perhaps the lesser of two evils and one, given the same set of circumstances, he might have opted for as well. “What about the extortion charge?”
“Unfounded.”
A skeptical eyebrow lifted.
“Think what you want, but I never asked for any of this,” Steve said. “I never asked for the responsibility of his boys either, but he decided to make my wife and me their guardians. That was more of a shock than anything else.”
“It looks like one of them is walking in his footsteps.”
Steve shook his head. “Tom isn’t the Windwalker.”
“You really are blinded by your emotions, aren’t you?”
“No. I arrived at the scene at almost the same time as the police and I saw things from a very different view, besides there was no weapon or scalp in the vicinity.” He shrugged. “I’ve been to the crime scenes and investigated serial killers for most of my career, and Tom doesn’t fit the profile.”
“I read his profile, he could have had a psychotic break,” Scully said.
“I thought about that too, especially with all he’s been through, but it still didn’t add up. There would have been signs.”
“So, you’re telling me you actually looked at him as a suspect?”
Steve looked out the window. “Yes,” he said and turned toward Scully. “Just don’t tell my wife.”
Scully smirked and nodded.
“Are you married?”
“I was, but she couldn’t deal with my job,” he said.
“Sorry, man,” Steve said. “My wife hates the job, too.”
Scully huffed. “Don’t they all?”
Steve glanced at him, sizing him up for a moment. “Not necessarily. You ever meet my partner Sarah Connelly?”
A crease appeared between Scully’s eyes, “No, but I understand she knew about your culpability.”
“She asked, and I leveled with her.”
“She should have come forward.”
“Like you’d hand over your partner,” Steve scoffed and looked out the window.
Scully pulled out his iPad and signed on, bringing up her profile. His eyebrows rose when her photograph came up and he glanced at Steve.
“You work with this every day?”
“I hear she’s looking for a new partner,” Steve said and barely suppressed a grin at the interest sparkling in Scully’s eyes.
Scully glanced at the picture and then at Steve and his expression turned incredulous. “What does your wife think of you working with a fucking bombshell?”
“Have you seen my wife?” Steve asked and received a nod in response. “So, you get it.”
“No, not at all. This alone would have been grounds for divorce,” Scully said holding the photo up.
“It took some time, but Jen and Sarah became good friends and after that, whatever sense of insecurity Jen felt with us being partners went away,” Steve said and shrugged, finding Scully much less of a bureaucratic fool than he originally thought. “I’ll introduce you to her when we get to Washington.”
“You really are a piece of work,” Scully mumbled and stared at the photo for a moment before turning the iPad off.
Steve smiled and glanced out the window. His smile faded as he lined up his strategic defense in his head. While it had been easy to turn on the doubts in Scully’s mind, he wondered just how easily he’d be able to turn a jury without this one on one contact.