Chapter 10

Sawyer would never think of denying someone their right to a lawyer. He just wished the lawyer in question wasn't this particular lawyer. He didn't lend credence to the idea of intelligent design, but this guy in particular seemed built to embody the ideal of a human stumbling block.

"Unless you're charging my client with something, then we're done here." Devon Larue folded his hands on the folder in front of him and stared smugly across the table at Sawyer. He was as thin as Felix was bulky, with a pointed face that reminded Sawyer of a Doberman Pinscher. "Unless you'd like me to start going through all the civilian complaints your department has received over the past five years again?"

"We're not here to litigate the police department, or your client's guilt or innocence," Sawyer said. Good thing they weren't, because Devon had a point when it came to poor behavior in the past by the police department. There was an external oversight committee in place now that reviewed every complaint, and things were getting better , but earning back trust was a slow process. "All I want to know is where Mr. Daughtry got his very heavily classified information."

Felix, also far more smug now that his lawyer was here, opened his mouth to speak, but Larue cut him off. "That's not germane to the subject at hand, which is his guilt or innocence. If you aren't going to charge him, then by law he's free to go. If you do charge him, and these charges turn out to be as baseless as I expect them to be, then you can expect a lawsuit within the next week on behalf of my client for pain and suffering."

"And will your client be paying your legal fees from the money he expects to get for selling his storytelling skills to HBO?" Sawyer asked.

The self-satisfied look dropped right off Felix's face, but Larue didn't even flinch. "It's not my job to ask where the money comes from," he said with a shrug.

"Until it is."

"Until then, yeah. But for now?" He smiled. "What's the verdict, Detective Villeray?"

Sawyer smiled. "Oh, you're free to go."

"Ha!" Larue turned and shook hands with Felix, and the two of them pushed back their chairs noisily.

"But." They paused. "If, over the course of my investigation, I find a link between Mr. Daughtry and the killer, and if I determine that he did know something that could have helped us save more innocent lives that he decided not to turn over to us…well. I think being charged with obstruction of justice and accessory to murder will be the least of his worries then."

Larue sneered as he tucked his paperwork back into his briefcase. "Threats, detective? Another black mark against the police department."

"Not a threat," he said. "A fact. I appreciate honesty, and so I prefer to be upfront about my intentions. Don't say later that you didn't see this coming." He stood and got the door. "Have a nice day, gentlemen."

"I will have a nice day, thank you," Larue said as he walked through the door and down the hall with a brisk pace.

Felix moved slower, and even came to a stop in front of Sawyer and leaned in. "Hey, listen…"

Is he about to give me something? "Yes?"

"I know you don't act anymore, but you've got the look down? you know what I'm saying? Jessica's daughter is cute and all, but we could turn things in a way more powerful direction if we could convince the studio to cast you, and—"

"Get. Out ."

Felix pulled back, a little shaky but still bombastic. "It was just a fuckin' thought, there's no need to threaten me over it, Detective Villeray!"

"Threats?" Larue spun on his heel and hustled back with all the excitement of a hunting hound on the scent. "More threats? Detective, I can have your badge for this!"

"Really? You can?" Sawyer didn't bother looking at Larue, though—he kept his eyes on Felix, who was turning red as the impact of what he'd just decided to throw out there on a whim hit him.

"Are you kidding?" Larue squawked. "I can file a suit against you and this department for—"

"Let's just go," Felix muttered before turning and hurrying down the hall with his tail between his legs.

Larue stared after him, a look of disappointment on his face, before turning back to Sawyer. "Anything you have to say to my client needs to go through me after this," he said, nose in the air. "If I hear about you talking to him directly, I'll consider that harassment and— "

"File a suit against me. I think I've got it."

"I don't think you do have it, detective." Larue took a step forward. "Let me lay this out for you plainly—the police in this city have coasted for a long time. They've ignored a lot of problems and angered a lot of people by being a bunch of lazy, ineffective slobs, and don't even get me started on the racism. I would love nothing more than to see this entire force thrown out of their positions so we could start over clean, so I'll be watching not only how you interact with my client from here on out, but how you handle this case." He tilted his head condescendingly. "You're not off to a very good start on it, I've got to say. I hope you do better…fast." He turned and walked off with the firm stride of the self-righteous.

Sawyer watched him leave, then pulled out his phone to check the messages that had come in while he'd been talking to Felix. The first was from Bashir. He opened it eagerly.

Had to go back to work. Shit. Of course he did, but it still bothered Sawyer that he didn't get a chance to say goodbye. Bashir had followed that with, Assuming we can both get away, dinner tonight?

Getting away was always a gamble during an active investigation, but he chose to be optimistic. Hell yes, dinner tonight. Sawyer had to stop and restart his text twice because he was typing too quickly. Absolutely. Where?

The reply came gratifyingly fast. I was thinking my place. Eight?

Sawyer bit the inside of his lip hard in an effort to remind his body that this was not the place to be getting a hard-on. I'll bring a bottle of wine.

All you need to bring is you.

Holy shit. He stared down at his phone with a feeling that was entirely out of place right now, and even more welcome because of it. How long had it been since he'd flirted with someone like this? At least a few years, since he and Jaz called it off. It felt like longer, though. Should he reply? At the very least he needed to get Bashir's address, instead of looking it up in the database like a creeper—

"You…seem happy." Sawyer glanced up to see Nan walking toward him from the other end of the hallway. "Way too happy for someone who just had an altercation with that bastard Larue."

"Nan," he said a bit chidingly.

"Don't you ‘Nan' me, he's a son of a bitch on his best days," she replied. "The worst thing about him is that he's not wrong about everything, which of course makes him feel like he's got to be right about everything." She rolled her eyes as she stopped beside him.

"What's he right about in particular?" Sawyer asked, putting his phone away.

"Oh, the fact that our department doesn't have a spotless record when it comes to community interactions and proper policing. We had a big reckoning about six months before you came in; a lot of the old guard was forcibly retired, and a few even ended up serving sentences. I'm honestly surprised that Kurt didn't quit then. Not that he was ever one of the bad ones," she added, "but he's had one foot out the door ever since he turned fifty-five."

Ah. So Kurt's attitude wasn't just related to his wife's health. "And Larue helped prosecute all that?"

"Not directly, but he was definitely one of the muckrakers. But he's also willing to work with some of the worst assholes in the city in order to give us trouble, including defending our former mayor. "

Sawyer didn't know anything about the former mayor. "And…why is that a problem?"

"Because the guy was into child porn."

Ew. All right, it was time to change the subject. "Do you have anything interesting to pass on about the latest victim?"

Nan sighed. "Come look at this." She led him back to the bullpen, where she'd swiped one of the big whiteboards and set up a map of the city. Everywhere one of the bodies had been found was marked with a small red magnet and a picture of the victim, while the empty sides of the board were slowly filling with handwritten information. Sawyer was suddenly very glad Felix hadn't had a chance to look in here—he could only imagine the sort of sensationalist spin he could put on something like a "murder chart."

"Gerard Johnson was found here." She tapped a spot about two miles away from the precinct. "Chris White was here." She pointed to a road at the very edge of town, about five miles from the first murder. "And Gilroy Upworth was in his home here." That was in the farming community in the northeast edge of the city, next to the nature preserve. "Apart from them all being white and male, I've found next to no commonalities. They weren't the same age, they didn't have the same interests, and they didn't live in the same neighborhood or go to church together. I'm still digging into their friends and families, but so far these present as crimes of opportunity."

"Which they obviously aren't, given the effort that the killer is going to," Sawyer said.

"Exactly. But…I'm not sure if the victims are the point."

Sawyer frowned. "If they're not the point, then…what? A taunt for the police?" It wouldn't be the first time a serial killer had tried toying with the cops that way, but it wa s vanishingly rare. Occam's razor would probably indicate that there was a connection between the victims they were missing. Something the killer was honing in on. They just hadn't found it yet. Or there were three separate and unrelated killers who happened to be killing in bizarre fashions in the same place at the same time. Not likely.

So what if Nan was right?

"It could be a taunt for us." Nan lifted the end of her thick black braid to her mouth and tapped her lower lip. "But let's be honest here, the first murder alone could have been written off as bad luck if we hadn't gotten an assist from the M.E. there. If this is about us and the killer, then they're guilty of overthinking it."

"Good point." He stared at the board a while longer. A gunshot. A toxin from a plant. Pending cause of death for the last victim. None of them were the most obvious cause of death when you looked at the scene the first time, but if it really were about the victim… "Upworth was diabetic, wasn't he?"

"Umm…" Nan checked the notes real quick. "Yeah. Type two; he was on synthetic insulin."

"And Johnson had an allergy to shellfish."

"Yep. Said it right there on his medical bracelet."

"So there were relatively low-key ways of killing both of them without resorting to the lengths that the murderer did if they knew anything about the victims in advance."

"Definitely." Nan nodded slowly. "Which lends a little more credence to the idea that these particular people weren't special to the killer. They might have been convenient, but they're a message meant for someone else. But who?"

Sawyer shook his head. "I don't know." But he sensed that they were closing in on something big. "What about—" His phone buzzed with an incoming message.

I swear to God if this is Jessica…

He wasn't in the right mental space to deal with his sister right now without screaming. He checked, then did a little double-take when he saw it was from Molly.

Please call me as soon as you can.

He called immediately. "Molly? What's wrong?"

"Sawyer." Despite the ever-present fatigue in her voice, she sounded all right. Honestly, she sounded pretty annoyed, if he was honest. "You haven't seen Kurt, have you?"

"No. He's been put on administrative leave until…" Until your cancer runs its course. "Until he's ready to come back to work."

"Well, he's definitely not ready to come back to work, honey, but he's not home right now either." She sighed. Somewhere in the background, another person was ranting about " irresponsible son of a bitch douchebag piece of—" "I think he went to the bar. Murphey's. Out on Midland Road. Do you know it?"

"Yeah." Kurt had taken Sawyer there a few times before Sawyer had made it clear that he didn't want to drink over their lunch break. Murphey's bar was the sort of place where, if you weren't drinking with the food, you basically couldn't get it down. "Why did he leave the house?"

" Because he's a stupid shithead! "

"Nadine!" Molly chided, then spoke over Kurt's sister to say, "I think he's feeling a bit…surrounded, here. Lots of people, none of the privacy we're used to—it would be a lot for anybody."

"— ought to get his big-boy britches on and realize it's not all about him right now! Our daddy would tan his damn hide if he could see how —"

"I'll go get him," Sawyer interjected, "and tell him you want him to come home. I'll drive him too, if he's too drunk to do it himself."

"He probably will be." Molly sighed again. "I'm so sorry to have to ask for this, honey. I know you've got a lot to work on with that case of yours."

"It's fine." It really wasn't, but Molly had enough on her back right now—she didn't need Sawyer causing problems for her too. "I'll take care of it. You rest. Maybe ask Nadine to, ah, settle down a bit."

"I will. Thanks so much, Sawyer." She ended the call, and Sawyer put his phone away and turned to see Nan with one eyebrow up.

"Kurt's on a bender?"

"He's in a tough spot right now."

She shook her head. "I get it. Better he fuck around like that when he's not supposed to be working too, but that's a hard thing to put on Molly. It's not like she's asking to die of cancer."

"It's been just the two of them for almost forty years." That was one of the first things Sawyer had learned about Kurt—the woman in the frame on his desk was his Molly, wife and high-school sweetheart. She was an elementary school nurse with a heart-shaped face and a huge smile. In every picture Sawyer ever saw of her, she was smiling. They'd never had children—Sawyer didn't know the details and it was none of his business anyway, but he had the feeling they'd tried—and had been an inseparable pair since they'd married at eighteen. "And now he's got to deal with sharing his space and saying goodbye to the woman he loves. That's shitty. "

"It is," Nan agreed. "But that's life. It's a bunch of shit moments punctuated with occasional joy, and you didn't hear that from me because Maria would knife me, but it's true. I change diapers for twins, I know better than most. C'mon." She grabbed her purse off the desk. "I'll ride with you, then drive him home. You can do some more interviews, then…" She grinned. "Go see your sexy doctor."

"Nan…" Despite himself, Sawyer smiled. "He's not my anything right now."

"Yeah, but you want him to be."

"I take the fifth."

"Don't you start lawyer-talking at me or I will cut you," she warned as she led the way out to the parking lot.

"You talk a lot about knives for someone with little kids around the house," Sawyer commented as they reached his car.

"I know, I have to get it all out of my system before I get home," she said. "Same with swearing. Speaking of which, let's go get that shitpissing motherfucker."

There was a time to speak up and a time to shut up, and Sawyer knew which was which. He made a few calls to let other officers know to tap in if something came up on the case, then headed for his car. He and Nan drove in comfortable silence to Murphey's Bar, a sleazy dive that catered to truckers not far from where they'd found Christopher White's body. Sure enough, Kurt's Mustang was in the parking lot. Sawyer waved Nan back when she made to get out of the car with him. "He'll be easier to manage if it's just me, I think."

"He'll be easy to manage if I get him in a hammerlock, too," she muttered, but then shrugged. "Whatever you want."

"Thanks." Sawyer headed into Murphey's tentatively— the last time he'd been here, he'd been tackled the second he stepped through the door. Or rather, someone else had been tackled, and then run into him. This time there was no full-body contact, but he did see two men arguing over a pool table in the background with an air of developing violence. Hopefully they kept it contained.

And there was Kurt at the bar, staring into a dark glass like it might just hold the secrets of the universe. Sawyer walked over and, after some consideration of its likely cleanliness, sat on the stool beside his partner. "Molly called," he said.

"Thought she might." Oof, he was drunk but not too drunk. Not staggering drunk, just drunk enough to say "fuck it" to everything. "Molls is a good woman."

"She is," Sawyer agreed. "And she's worried about you."

"Waste of her time." He snorted. "Not that she's not wasting her time already, spending it all on those two hags who moved into our home."

"You're referring to…your sisters?"

"Who else?" Kurt threw back the rest of his drink, then motioned to the bartender for another one. Sawyer waved the man off, which made Kurt turn on him with a gimlet eye. "Look, you little shit. You don't come into my bar and try to tell me what I can and can't—"

"I could send Nan in instead," Sawyer challenged, and Kurt abruptly shut his mouth. "And believe me, I wouldn't be doing this if Molly hadn't asked me. I'm not your babysitter, but to be perfectly frank she isn't either, and it's shitty of you to make her call me to come and get you when you could be home with her right now."

Kurt ran a hand over his moustache, tugging on it so hard Sawyer was a little worried he was going to pull it off. The fight over at the pool table was getting louder. Keep it together, people. "You have a sister, right?" he said at last.

"Yes."

"Then you know what awful busybodies they can be sometimes."

Did he ever. "That's true."

"Molly's sister wants to be hands-on with everything, doin' all the things for her that I ought to be doing, while my sister has taken over cleaning the entire house while telling me what an awful husband I am for not doing it earlier. We don't live in filth or anything!" Kurt emphasized, stabbing his forefinger on the counter. "It's not that fuckin' bad! It's just hard to remember to do laundry when you're watching your wife fall apart right in front of your eyes, you know what I'm saying?"

Sawyer couldn't say he knew exactly, given how he'd never been married, but he'd seen his parents' relationship fall apart after everything that had happened with his mother. His father had been unable to cope with her new reality, and it had led to a complete fracture of their family unit. "I get it."

"I just needed a break," Kurt said with a sigh. "Someplace I wasn't gonna be shouted at for having a second beer or told to scrub the damn toilets again, and where her sister can't get mad at me for ‘keeping her to yourself.'"

Well. Sawyer hadn't come in here expecting to commiserate with Kurt at all, but it turned out he could still be surprised. "That's rough, but you still need to—"

He was cut off by being cut—literally, as the argument over who was cheating at pool erupted into a glass-throwing, bottle-breaking brawl that led to something shattering right over the bar and raining glass down on him, Kurt, and the bartender. A piece left a bleeding scrape along his cheekbone and more fragments lodged in his hair.

Kurt, drunk on beer and full of fury, lost his shit. "You sons of bitches are all under arrest!" he shouted before throwing himself at the nearest brawler.

"Fuck." Sawyer turned to the bartender. "There's a woman in a black Charger out in the parking lot. Tell her to call for backup." Then he ran after Kurt just in time to keep his partner from being stabbed in the gut with the pointy end of a pool cue.

Sawyer had never arrested the entire clientele of a place before. Between sorting people into the drunk tank, taking witness statements, and getting looked over by the medics who'd come roaring in along with three other cop cars, it had turned into a long fucking day. But now, at last, all the paperwork was filed, Kurt was back with Molly and nursing a broken thumb on his right hand, and Sawyer had two stitches in his cheek and two bruised ribs from where a biker's steel-toed boot had caught him while he was slapping handcuffs on the glass-thrower.

"You need to go home," Nan said, wearily brushing hair back from her face.

"I can't." It was six-thirty; if Sawyer left now, he'd have just enough time to grab a bottle of wine before heading to Bashir's. He'd only gotten one more text from the man throughout the day, this one related to the case: Toxicology will have to confirm what kind, but it looks like snake venom injected into the abdomen

Snake venom had been the cause of death? Seriously? For a second Sawyer had gotten excited, before Bashir told him you could buy a lethal dose of almost any kind—including King cobra, black mamba, and Christ knew what else— online for about five hundred dollars. There wasn't a single distributor, either; dozens of different companies sold the stuff. It was rare, and it would help narrow things down if they could pin down an order sent to this area, but it wasn't as rare as he'd hoped. A lot of companies to comb through before they found that order, and not all companies were willing to give up info like that without a subpoena, which would take time.

"Oh right, your date," Nan said, bringing him back into the moment. She looked him up and down. "Are you sure you're up for it? You look pretty rough right now."

"I have to be up for it." He wasn't going to put Bashir off for anything, especially given how their last date turned out, but Sawyer had to admit he hadn't envisioned himself showing up bruised and battered either. "I don't want him to think I'm not serious about this."

Nan raised an eyebrow. "Slow down, tiger. Just how serious are you about this?"

Sawyer shrugged. "I don't ask people for a date if I'm not prepared to get serious."

"No hookups for you, huh?"

"No." That wasn't his style at all. Hopefully it wasn't Bashir's either, at least so far as it related to Sawyer. "I've got to go. See you tomorrow?"

"Yep. I'm taking Wednesday off, though, investigation permitting," she added as he began to walk away. "Maria and the kids come back then."

"Sounds good." Sawyer made it out to his car, got into the driver's seat, and gave himself a few seconds to feel how exhausted he was. Adrenaline hangover. Twice as strong as the usual kind of hangover, without the fun of acquiring it through drinking. Get over yourself.

He wandered through the nearest liquor store in a bit of a fugue state, eventually picking a decent bottle of red from a winery in France that he'd visited as a kid. Offering in hand, Sawyer drove the rest of the way to Bashir's hoping he didn't look as rough as he felt.

His hopes were dashed when Bashir opened the door of his two-level, spotlessly groomed home. The man's gorgeous smile dropped away, his eyes widened, and he said, "Wow. What on earth happened to you?"

Sawyer sighed. "It's a long story." He held up the bottle of wine. "I'll tell you about it over a glass of something that I'm not supposed to drink for another seventy-two hours, if you want." Not that he thought he had a concussion, but the EMT was erring on the side of caution. "Or we can talk about something completely different. I just…" Time to be honest? Eh, why not. "Wanted to see you."

Bashir opened the door wider and took Sawyer's arm. "Come inside."

Sawyer went.