Strathmore POV


I was glad that I'd refused to let the issue linger.

Catching Bobby kissing Alex as I'd walked into that conference room was like a final, blindingly bright light bulb going off in my head.

She would never have eyes for anyone but him.

And honestly, I was okay with that. I was happy with that because he deserved someone as great as her.

I was even happier with the fact that I hadn't dreamed about Alex last night. And that's not to say that my subconscious wouldn't backslide from time to time, because really, we can't control our dreams.

But my daydreams, I could control, and my thoughts before falling asleep, which often dictated a very specific path for my dreams – those I could control as well.

So last night, as I prepared to fall asleep, I'd thought about Mary.

And I'd ended up dreaming about Heidi.

Not any kind of erotic dream, but I'd just pictured her as she maybe was right now, in the kitchen of some cute little house in middle class suburbia, fixing breakfast for her husband before he went off to work.

And when I woke up, the pain wasn't debilitating.

In fact, it only hurt a little to picture her with someone else.

Because she was happy.

It was possible that I wasn't a self-centered asshole after all.

So I'd walked into the conference room, and after a brief chat with Mary, I bit the bullet, and offered to shake Bobby's hand.

He probably didn't know it, but I didn't breathe at all in the four-point-two seconds that it took him to acquiesce.

And the next thing I knew, they were teasing me about telling Mike so that he could kick my ass, and suddenly my world was almost back in balance.

Then Mary reminded us that we had work to do. Although that was briefly derailed when Bobby did a condensed spot-on analysis of Mary that was amusing.

Or at least it was until I learned a detail that was a little disturbing.

"You pulled a gun on them?" I asked.

"We all drew on each other," Alex clarified. "And we had the drop on her."

"Oh no," Mary argued good-naturedly. "No way. I had you guys."

Their teasing was ended when Bobby asked for the explanation of the necessity of the gun in the first place.

And that was my first real inkling that there was much more to this situation than I'd thought.

Because I'd been focused on the Heidi-aspect of this whole thing, but now I was beginning to see that it was much more complex.

But I took a last-minute respite from the seriousness when I heard Mary say that she'd been the one to put the sign on the elevator.

Which meant that it wasn't out of order.

"Wait, so you put the sign on the elevator?" I asked her. "Why didn't you take it back off? I'm on the eighth floor!"

And eight flights had been bad enough when I was sober, but the trip upstairs when I was drunk had taken me much longer than I will ever admit.

"It's good exercise," she told me as she patted me on the forearm. "Okay, are we ready to get down to it?"

At everyone's affirming nods, she continued.

"First off, and I know this is obvious, but I have to say it anyway…nothing we discuss in here can leave this room."

"So I have to go on pretending that Heidi is dead?" I asked.

And I wasn't sure that it really mattered either way, but I didn't know how this thing was supposed to work.

"Would you rather say that she's in witness protection? I mean really…what do you gain from that?"

Nothing. She was right.

"Just lay it out," Bobby encouraged.

I could tell that it wasn't in Mary's nature to be forthcoming about her job with virtual strangers, but she apparently needed Bobby and Alex's help, and she got me by default, so she took a deep breath and then got down to it.

"What you learned about Heidi is true. She lied about her education to get her job with Caduceus. She was smart, but never applied herself in school. She was a fast learner, and felt that she deserved a break, so she falsified her application. She only lied to you because she'd already lied to them and she had to keep up her story."

I could understand that. Sometimes lies got out of control, and at least I knew that she hadn't lied just to try to look better to me.

"In 1998, she was approached by Kara Quintana. Heidi was doing a lot of traveling to Denver, which was Kara's old area. Apparently, Kara had built up quite the clientele of drug buyers, but since Heidi had taken over the location, Kara wanted to bring her into the fold."

"And Heidi went along with it?"

"She did," Mary said. "But first, she contacted the FBI and told them what was going on."

"So she was working with the Bureau the whole time," Alex stated.

"That's right. That arrest record you caught wind of was because the Denver PD picked her up. An agent got her released and made sure that it didn't stick on her record."

"What happened on the night that she was supposedly killed?" Bobby asked.

"Heidi told her handler that she wanted to do one more meeting. She thought that Valero had some moles inside the police department, and she was hoping to get it out of him."

"The agents encouraged her to put her life on the line," I said.

"Probably," Mary agreed. "But she wanted to do it. She's told me that herself."

"So that night, she went to meet up with Valero to pick up some stock, right?" Alex asked.

"That's right. They were selling a unique version of cocaine. They had their own recipe for cutting it down. It was supposed to be some real potent stuff. They even had a clever name," she told us with a wry smile. "Mile high."

"How cliché of them," Alex muttered. "And Heidi was keeping up with the distribution methods? The points of sale and other runners?"

"Valero had a system for writing his stuff down. It was all in code."

"A smart drug dealer. I'm impressed," Bobby said. "So Heidi learned the code since she was a distributor. I'm guessing that none of the distributors ever left Valero's operation alive, right? No one could explain the code, and the cops couldn't break it so they had no proof, other than to catch him red-handed."

"And red-handed would only mean that he'd go down for what he was doing that moment. Without cracking the code, we couldn't book him for everything else."

"A very smart drug dealer," Alex added.

"Yes he is," Mary agreed. "But he didn't count on Heidi making it out alive."

"So that night," Bobby said. "Valero got suspicious?"

"Uh huh."

"How did she manage to not get killed?" I questioned.

It was crazy, but even ten years after the fact, and even knowing now that Heidi made it out of there alive, my heart was pounding just considering the scenario.

She'd stood up to a gang banger. I tried to reconcile that image with the memory that I kept of her in my head…it just didn't work.

"Because she was smart," Mary said. "And lucky. FBI had infiltrated the gang a few months earlier, trying to work it from that angle, too. He was still a soldier at that point, and hadn't learned all of the details yet, but it worked out for the best that he was still a peon."

"Valero told the undercover to kill Heidi," Bobby said.

"Right. Everything after that was complete fabrication."

"Who knows the truth? What about detective Rollins?"

"He only knows the story that the feds gave to him."

"So he worked a murder without the body?"

"They gave him a cock and bull story about the bureau taking custody of the body, and they supplied him with a fake autopsy report."

"So Dr. Stern is…"

"Dr. Stern is an old ME with memory trouble. We put his name on the report, and he has no idea whether he did the exam or not," she said with a roll of her eyes. And then she got serious again. "But the undercover did shoot Heidi. He had to make it look good. The blood in the photos is real, and the casings were real."

"So she was shot?" I asked dumbly.

"Twice," Mary agreed. "Valero had given him his gun to do the deed. Fortunately, he didn't wait around to see it happen. Otherwise the feds would've had to go in right away. As it was, she ended up with two non-life-threatening gunshot wounds. And she was ready to testify as to the workings of the operation whenever the feds got around to making their case."

"So that's why she had to go into protection."

"Well, that and the fact that Valero ordered her dead. If he thought that she wasn't, then not only would the cover of the undercover agent have been blown, but also Valero would've still come after Heidi. So her being dead was safer for everyone. The feds called me in that night and I got her set up."

"So what's going on now?" Alex asked. "What does Keyes have to do with all of this?"

"We think that Keyes is working with the drug cartel. He was a beat cop at the time, so we're not sure if he was the mole that Heidi suspected originally, or if there are others, but we do think that he's a paid employee of the gang."

"He popped the ballistics report," Alex said.

"Yes he did," Mary replied. "Even though we'd essentially put a lock on the file. Invisible of course, but still…no new evidence should've hit on that case."

"So Keyes prompted the resurrection of the investigation, and it was his good fortune that John called us in when Rollins went with the party line."

"And now he's following you two, hoping that you'll lead him to Heidi."

"And you want us to…falsely lead them to her? So that we can see who comes after her?" Bobby asked.

"Right. Because we still don't know all of the players. Valero is in custody for the murder, and we can pick up the evidence on him. With Heidi's testimony, he'll be going away for a long time. But you know, even if you only see just one cockroach..."

"Hundreds more have scattered at the first sign of light," Alex finished.

"Right. So we want to do this through the back door and make sure we take out as many as possible. We want to make mile high a thing of the past and put all of the dealers in prison."

"So what happened to the undercover?" I asked, although I had a feeling that I didn't want to know the answer. "Surely he's infiltrated the upper level by now."

"He was killed," she told us. "They sniffed him out a few months later. And after they realized that he was a fed, they began to suspect that Heidi wasn't really dead. But at that time, the feds didn't have a case and Heidi was in the wind, so I think they decided that she wasn't all that important."

"And now they have a case because of the murder. Who was Cortez, and why did Valero kill him? I mean, I know I'm new at all of this crime stuff, but aren't you saying that Valero had other people do his killings?"

"With his gun. He used his gun when he wanted to send a message. Heidi would've been a message to his other runners. Don't fuck with me. Cortez tried to take over part of Valero's territory. So he was a message. Whether Valero pulled the trigger or not, we don't know yet, but it was his gun, so he got popped."

Alex's phone rang, so she excused herself and stepped outside to answer it, and Bobby followed her, mumbling a quick explanation of needing to stretch his legs.

"You doing okay?" Mary asked me.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm…it's just…it's hard to imagine Heidi involved with…this. She stood up to drug dealers. She wore wires, and made buys…when she was with me, we went to cocktail parties, and movie premiers, and casino openings. And all that time, she was probably worrying herself sick. That I would find out. That Valero would find out. That she would get killed. What kind of life was that?"

"See what I mean? She's happy now," Mary said softly.

"I guess her life is a lot simpler now, huh?"

"She went back to school. She's a nurse. And…are you sure you want to know this stuff?"

"I do. What is it?"

"She's going to have a baby soon. That's why we went ahead and moved her on the off-chance that she'd be compromised. We didn't want to run the risk of her being found after the baby was born, and then having to uproot them. So we erased her life once again, and started her out fresh, again. Her and her husband, and in another month, her son."

I sat for a moment in stunned silence, and then I did the strangest thing.

I closed the twenty inches of distance between us and I kissed Mary, right on the lips.

It was brief and chaste and not really passion-inspiring at all, but I just held my lips against hers for several longs seconds, marveling that she didn't back away from me.

Then I finally pulled away and looked at her, the shocked expression on her face slowly giving way to a slight smile.

"Thank you for telling me," I told her quietly. "You didn't have to. And I'm sure you probably had to twist some arms to get approval to do so. But thank you."

"You're welcome," she replied.

I sat back in my chair and took a sip of my now-cold coffee.

"But I'm still not going to sleep with you," she added.

"I didn't think that you would," I replied with a grin.

"Sure you do," she argued. "You think that you're going to be all suave and appreciative, and then I'm going to feel sorry for you, and then when we finish this case, I'm going to hop into bed with you."

"Are you sure that you're not?"

"Am I sure?" she asked.

And then she shook her head and let out a light chuckle before adding, "The only sureties in this life are death and taxes, right?"

TBC...