The Sweetest Thing (Book 1) ✓

32 - Snitching at its finest

Dax

I didn't even wait to explain what Ace signalized. I just took his leash and sprinted towards my team that waited outside.

"We have a problem." All eyes were on me. I vaguely heard footsteps coming behind me, but didn't wait for the detective.

"What did he find?" Max was in full commander mode, ready to collect all the available data before making any kind of decisions.

"Ace smelled drugs around the door."

"Shit!" Yeah, my thoughts exactly. Since the bakery became the unofficial space where all the cops from our town came in for their breaks for coffee and sweets, the place constantly had at least one officer in there all the time...and everyone knew this. So, it wasn't logical for some druggies to come to this place if they weren't here for something specifically, or for someone. "Detective Conway, do you have any information about what's happening with the other break-ins connected to Emily?" This had to be connected some way. It was absolutely insane if three different people or groups had something against Lily. It didn't make sense.

"Um, I'm not sure that I'm allowed to talk about them." I was ready to punch him in the face and I guess the detective saw it in my eyes, he continued. "But I can call the colleagues and ask them."

"You go do that." After a few long minutes watching him in the distance talking on his phone, he finally finished his conversations. He took a deep breath and turned around, not surprised to see all the eyes of my team on him.

"So, hmm, I'm honestly not sure how wise it is to tell you the information we have, but I guess my superiors think it will help connect all the missing pieces." Well, I'm happy that someone was thinking straight at least. I mean, I know that we are all connected, me more than the others, but at the same time, we are cops, we can focus on the task in front of us and shut down all the emotions that are swirling in our heads.

"We are all ears, detective."

"We know that the break-in in her apartment is made by a different person than the one here in the bakery."

"How so? Do you know who did it?"

"Not exactly. But we found male's DNA in the apartment, that was not a match to any one of yours. So, we think that men were the perpetrators of that one. At the moment, we are searching for a match in our database, but for now – we don't know who did it. We know that there were at least two men there, but judging by the destruction, I think that there were more, just two of them weren't careful enough and left traces. As to the break here, we think that it was a woman. We have footage from a shop near here where she passed by around the time that the accident happened, but we can't identify her. She was wearing baggy clothes, a big handbag, with a scarf around her head and face, plus big sunglasses in the middle of the night, so there was nothing on her that could help us identify her. The last direction I knew the detective was going in was to try to identify her clothes or bag and hope that they were some boutique shits that could lead us to the woman."

"Do you have the footage? We know a lot of people coming here and probably could try to identify her if she was some of the regulars." Max was once again leading the conversation, and I was happy that I didn't have to do it. I was good at concentrating on the task in front of me and doing my job, but talking cool-headed and with an even tone at moments like this, wasn't my thing.

"Yeah, one second." Detective Conway walked towards his car and in a few minutes, he came to us with his laptop in hand. "Here, that's the woman we suspect." All of my team looked at the screen and saw a tall woman walking in front of the camera that was positioned on the top corner of a shop. The woman was trying her best to hide herself and was doing it well. Just like Conway said, there was nothing that could help you identify her. You couldn't see her hair, her eyes, even her body type. All you could see was that she was tall, even without her ginormous heels that she was wearing, it was obvious that this woman wasn't very soft.

I was watching the footage looping again and again. Looked at the way she walked, the way she was looking around, making sure that no one followed her. She was walking with a lot of confidence; she was used to walking in these kinds of high heels. But that means nothing. There are a lot of women in our town like her. The scarf around her face was black with little gray lines on it, but didn't look like something unique that would help us identify her. Then I looked at the bag in her hand. It was ginormous. Every time that I saw a woman with that kind of bag, I wonder why on Earth she bought it, and what was in it. In this case, I knew that there were some cans of spray paint and other stuff there that help her destroy the bakery, but for the others – no clue. Then, something about that handbag made me focus on it. I had no idea why it made me look at it so much, but something was nagging at the back of my mind, making me feel like I should recognize it in some way. And then it hit me. The memory played in front of my eyes like it was happening right now.

"What on Earth would you do with this bag? Are you going to carry all your wardrobe and make-up in there all the time?"

"It's clear that you don't understand a thing, Dax. This bag is a limited edition, there are only 500 of them and I want to have one. It's very high quality and I have just the shoes for her, and it will go amazingly with that one dress that I..."

"Fuck, okay, okay. So, you are sure that you'll use it. It won't stay in the back of your closet, that the money I'll spend on it will be worth it?" I didn't want to buy that stupid bag, but it was her birthday. I didn't have the time to buy her something else, something not as extravagant, ridiculous, and most importantly expensive. But here I am, after a long SWAT call that didn't end well, ready to spend a good amount of my monthly salary on some ugly bag that I knew she wouldn't use. But it was either this ginormous bag or having her all whiny and mad at me for months. I was honestly wondering what I was doing with her, why I was still accepting her bitchiness like something normal. I knew it wasn't, but still, I bought her that damn bag, and she didn't use it even one time while we were together.