Free Internal Affair by Samantha Cayto

him, he raised his eyebrows. “I needed to look at all of this from a fresh angle, so I decided to use your father as the centerpiece of my investigation and that meant going back to the beginning.”
    She pointed to the various columns with her forefinger. “Then I tracked them to see what happened to them over the years. I haven’t finished, but I made a good dent.” She pointed to a particular column. “Here’s where you see who’s died, who left the force, who is actively wearing the badge.”
    Daire whistled in appreciation. “That’s a lot of work for one day.”
    His praise warmed her, and she beamed back at him, feeling both stupid and proud. “I’m good with tracking down details, although like I said, I’m not finished. For those that I do have info on, I also included how the dead met their end and if any are off the force involuntarily.”
    Daire leaned in closer for a better look. The moment he did, her body temperature started to climb. A flush lit up her cheeks and her skin prickled. Pushing her netbook closer to his part of the table, she sat back to put more distance between them. She wrapped her hand around the sweaty, yet still cool, bottle of soda and took a good swig of it. If she could have gotten away with it surreptitiously, she’d have run the thing across her hot brow.
    This close, she could appreciate for the first time how muscular the man was. His suits and dress shirts had so far hidden that fact. Now, with his pants stretched tight across his thighs and a bit of chest peeking out from his open collar, she noticed the power as well as the grace in which he carried his bulk. And although the cut of the pants made it hard to see, she thought she glimpsed a scarily bulky package between his legs.
    Her breasts tingled and her pussy throbbed. She shouldn’t have been surprised. Hadn’t she just ruminated over his masculine aura? His having actual physical power was all part of the package.
    Too bad she hadn’t met him on a dating site or some other modern, yet appropriate social avenue. Not that she looked for men in those ways. Part of her was too old-fashioned and would have welcomed meeting a man through family or friends. A murder investigation didn’t count. They both needed to keep their focus on the job, especially when any doubt over the existence of a ring of bad cops and the desperate measures they’d go to had died along with Forrester.
    Parker forced her head back in the one game that counted right now. “I don’t have any stats to back this up, but it seems to me that there is an unusual number of people from your father’s graduating class who have died in, let’s say, less than natural causes.”
    Daire stared intensely at the screen. “I really have no idea if you’re right about that. Do you have a list of how these guys died?”
    “Oh.” She hit the tab to show him what she had.
    “Line of duty, car accident, suicide.” He glanced her way. “Suicide is topping the list number-wise. Police officers do have a relatively high rate of suicide, or so they say.”
    “Correlations between profession and suicide are murky.” Yes, she was a geek in her own way, always capable of pulling some weird statistic out of the back of her head. This one mattered, however. “It’s going to be hard to tell if we have a statistical anomaly here.”
    Daire sat back with a heavy sigh. “Yeah, and I’m not sure what it would mean anyway, except that this group might choose to take out malcontents and other liabilities within their own ranks.”
    “Like O’Malley.”
    He nodded. “Like O’Malley.”
    Neither of them said anything more for a few seconds. As much as she hated herself for it, she thought like your father? She didn’t voice the question, of course.
    Daire must have read it in her expression anyway. “Not like my father. He was taken out because he’d figured out what was going on and their obviously willing to do anything to keep their operation