Chapter 12

Dinner was delicious. Sawyer would have eaten anything at this point—it had been way too long since his last meal, and damn it when was he going to remember to carry protein bars around with him—but even biased toward enjoyment as he was, the meal was…

"Holy shit, how?" he asked after swallowing a mouthful of tender lamb tagine.

"It really wasn't hard," Bashir assured him. "I just put it all in a slow cooker and let it go for a while."

Sawyer knew false modesty when he saw it. The tagine, sure, you could throw a bunch of ingredients in a pot and let them do their thing, but the pomegranate couscous? The cucumber raita? The flatbread? Hell no. That took planning.

"Sure, sure." He raised an eyebrow. "A man who's busy enough to give the cops a run for their money, and you just happened to have enough time to put all this together."

"Well." Bashir looked down at his plate for a moment. "I wanted to make it good, after our last date was interrupted the way it was. And I actually got off from work fairly early—Andy wanted extra hours."

Who? Sawyer would have asked if he hadn't just taken a bite, but Bashir seemed to read the question in his expression easily enough. "Andrew Boyce. He's the other pathologist in the morgue."

"Ah, Boyce. " Sawyer had forgotten the man's first name—none of the other officers used it when referring to the guy. Probably because he didn't invite that level of intimacy. Or any level of intimacy, really. "He's…huh."

"Competent," Bashir suggested.

"Sure, we'll go with that." Sawyer scooped up some lamb with a piece of flatbread. He'd have to brag to Nan about this amazing meal tomorrow. "Remind me to tell you about his last interaction with my current partner sometime."

"I'm not sure I want to know," Bashir said.

That might be for the best. Sawyer didn't want to create drama where there was none. He finished his bite and reached for the cucumber raita, then winced as his injured side reminded him it existed.

"Are you all right?"

Sawyer nodded. "Fine." Bashir looked far from convinced. "I mean, as fine as I can be. I really do feel a lot better, I promise. I think spending some time with you is just what the doctor ordered."

"You know, if I was your doctor, I would probably have ordered you to go straight home and get some rest instead of coming over here."

Sawyer grinned. "Good thing you only work with the dead then, huh?" If you'd asked him this morning whether flirting with Bashir would include references to dead bodies, he'd have laughed .

"I suppose it is."

They finished the meal, sticking to light topics like Bashir's family (he had some incredible stories about the shit his nieces and nephews had said) and Sawyer's last job (in a town where smuggling moonshine was still a thing, and the only time he'd ever seen a vehicle actually explode was one that had been filled with jugs of the stuff). It was easy, warm—it seemed like once someone got past Bashir's prickly exterior, he let them in without reservation.

Eventually the food and wine were gone, but Sawyer wasn't ready for the evening to end.

"Let me help you clean up."

"Sure." Bashir welcomed him into his pristine kitchen and, at first, put him to work loading the dishes that he rinsed off into the dishwasher, but when he noticed Sawyer wincing every time he bent over he switched their jobs. Once the machine was loaded and running, Bashir reached out a hand. Sawyer took it and let himself be reeled in, nice and slow, until he was close enough to see the amber flecks in Bashir's eyes.

"So," Bashir said, holding him close but being very careful with where he put his hands. "I'd love for you to stay, but I don't think that there's much we can do tonight, given…" He glanced at Sawyer's side, then kissed his cheekbone right beneath where the black eye started.

"I think you underestimate me," Sawyer said, pressing a little closer.

"I kind of doubt that." His look was mostly amused, but there was some compassion there too. "You're probably going to have a hard time lying down tonight."

"I'm really great at sitting," Sawyer replied. "So great at it. I've won literal awards for my ability to sit." That was truer than Bashir knew, but Sawyer didn't want to get into the Oscars bullshit if Bashir didn't know to bring it up. That could be saved for later, when he was ready to break his silence around his family and the crap his sister was trying to pull.

Bashir laughed, but that wasn't what Sawyer was going for. He ran one hand into the short, thick hair at the back of Bashir's head and pressed him forward into a kiss. It started gentle but didn't stay that way for long, escalating into a heated, hungry exchange that made Sawyer fight to keep from making some truly embarrassing noises.

He finally leaned back and was gratified to see Bashir's eyes had gone glazed, his mouth slack, and his hands a little less careful now than they had been. "Amazing at sitting," Sawyer breathed. "Let me show you on the couch."

"The—"

"Couch. Right now."

Sawyer let Bashir lead him into the living room, but as soon as Bashir sat down Sawyer straddled his lap and wiggled around until he found an angle that worked for him. From this position he was a little taller than Bashir, and it made it easy to wind his arms around Bashir's shoulders and pull him into another kiss. The fading buzz from the wine was replaced by a sweet flood of endorphins as Bashir's hands found a spot that was definitely not injured in the fight earlier today.

"Oh, fuck," Sawyer moaned when Bashir grabbed his ass and hitched him forward. He wasn't so gentle there, gripping hard enough that Sawyer hoped it bruised. He wanted to be able to look at his butt tomorrow and see exactly where Bashir's hands had been, and yeah, he wanted to be pulled in like that and he wanted to grind down like that and shit, he wanted to feel the ridge of his cock pressing against the fly of his jeans hard enough that Sawyer could fucking writhe on it, and—

His phone went off.

No! He wanted, desperately, to ignore it, but…what if it was Molly again? What if Kurt was going and doing something stupid again?

Sawyer broke the kiss with a grimace. "Damn it." He disentangled himself from Bashir and reached for his—phone, jacket, where the hell was his jacket?—he got it just before the call went to a message. It was Nan. "What?" he asked, sure that he sounded pissed off but trying not to take it out on Nan any more than he already had.

"I'm so sorry," Nan said, and to her credit she sounded it. "I know you're on a date, but Felix is back. He's demanding police protection and threatening to sue the department at the same time, and since you're the lead detective on the case he's involved in…"

Sawyer pressed the heel of his hand to his closed eye hard enough to make sparks fly across the darkness. "Felix wants police protection from whom , exactly?"

"Fuck if I know. He's not talking but he says he's got video proof that he's being surveilled."

"And he's figured this out in the…what, five hours since he left the station?"

"I know it's probably bullshit, but…"

Sawyer dropped his hand and looked over at Bashir, still reclined on the couch, deliciously rumpled and so fucking hard it made Sawyer's mouth water. "I'll be there in fifteen," he said tiredly, then ended the call. "I…am so sorry about this."

Bashir, because he was awesome, was more sympathetic than annoyed. "It sounds like a uniquely irritating sort of emergency. "

"It is." He couldn't say anything else about it, but he knew that Bashir had heard enough. "I really, really don't want to have to leave, though."

Bashir got to his feet. He stalked across the living room with hungry eyes, grabbed Sawyer's face in his hands, and proceeded to kiss the breath out of him. "I don't want you to go," he said when they finally parted, "but I get it. And you should know that when I go to take care of this—" he stroked himself through his jeans, and Sawyer groaned "—I'll be thinking of you."

"You're going to kill me," Sawyer breathed.

That dimmed the light in Bashir's eyes a bit. "I hope not," he said quietly, then stepped back. "Hey, at least we made it through dinner this time." He tipped his head toward the wine bottle. "Are you okay to drive?"

Sawyer thought about it, then nodded. "I'm good. I only had about a glass and a half, and I finished that a while ago."

"All right. Drive carefully anyway." Bashir smiled. "Maybe next time we'll get through dessert, too."

"We should do dessert first next time," Sawyer insisted. Bashir grinned, and Sawyer left with a lighter heart than he'd thought he would. Work was a stumbling block, for both of them, but so far…

So far, they'd handled it. Now if he could just get a chance to handle Bashir.

Sawyer spent a long and tedious night reviewing footage from an irate and extremely loud Felix about how he was being stalked now because he'd had two potentially-the-same generic black SUVs drive past his house in a single hour .

In the end, he was able to talk the man down from both his demands and his threats, but he seemed committed to finding something to hold the police department directly culpable for. "For all I know, it's a cop who's trying to intimidate me, and you're covering for him!" Felix said more than once. "You can't stand that I'm getting close to the truth of this case before you are!"

"Is that what you really think?" Sawyer asked.

"I know it!"

"Does that mean you've become aware of new information since we last spoke…"—he checked his phone— "seven hours ago? Because if so, you're withholding evidence from an investigation."

"Don't make me call my lawyer!"

No, God forbid Sawyer made him do that.

A late night turned into an early morning thanks to a hit-and-run at four a.m. The department—unexpectedly understaffed thanks to a sudden and unseasonal bout of the flu running through everyone—was pulling detectives to fill in for beat cops. Sawyer woke up to sand in his eyes and the desk sergeant in his ear. "You sure you're not sick?" Sergeant Reyes asked after Sawyer groggily said he'd be there. "I could call Detective Walker instead."

"Mmno, her wife just came home. I've got this." As he rolled out of bed with a groan—Bashir had been right, he shouldn't have laid down to sleep because now his back was pissed —and fumbled into some clean clothes, he kind of wished he was sick, though. Hit-and-runs were some of the worst crimes to investigate, in his opinion; they stank of avoidance and desperation and always carried terrible consequences, no matter who was at fault. And this time, with one of the club-going party girls dead on the scene and another still unconscious in the ICU, there was very little to go off so far.

But…actually, there was one faint silver lining to this very grim cloud, and that was the prospect of seeing Bashir not even half a day after they'd parted. It even made listening to Huerta go on and on about tire treads and the statistics of wear and tear in various environments tolerable.

Until the pathologist arrived. It wasn't Bashir.

It was Boyce.

Oh, fuck my life.

"Dr. Boyce," Sawyer said as the man walked over, shooting for professional and…eh, close enough.

"Thank you for demonstrating your ability to recall my name," the bald pathologist said sourly as he knelt next to the body.

Thanks for demonstrating your inability to recall mine. Or, more likely, he just didn't care to bother using it.

Awesome, this was off to a great start…if they were filming a cop show like the one his sister wanted to produce. As it was, Sawyer needed to have a working relationship with this asshole, so he didn't pursue the disrespect. "Lena Reid, twenty-two, struck in a hit-and-run after leaving Club Tango about—" He checked his phone. "Fifty-five minutes ago. Witnesses say she died instantly."

Dr. Boyce spent a few long moments inspecting the body before replying. "That would track with what looks like a broken neck. Vehicle make?"

"A sports car of some kind. We're in the process of getting camera footage to find out."

"Hmm." He checked her legs. "Impact happened just above the knee. Severe bleeding from the legs. Probably severed the femoral artery…" He glanced over at Huerta. "Are you going to start writing this down sometime today? "

"Oh!" The young man had gone weirdly quiet as soon as the Boyce arrived. "Yes, Dr. Boyce, let me just—um—" He fumbled in his pockets for a few seconds before Dr. Boyce shook his head.

"Never mind, you're useless. Go prep the stretcher."

Huerta didn't answer to Boyce and could've easily told him to pound sand because none of that was his damn job, but he probably wanted to avoid confrontation. And it was as good an excuse as any to get away from the asshole for a moment, which, Sawyer guessed, was why he took the order and ran off.

Sawyer weighed the good to be had from biting his tongue versus saying something. In the end, he decided to speak up. "I didn't know it was his job to take notes at the scene for you. Or help you remove the body."

"I didn't know it was your business either," Dr. Boyce replied as he got to his feet. "I don't try to do your job, detective, so I'd appreciate it if you don't even attempt to understand mine. I'll have a preliminary report on the death for you sometime later today." He took his gloves off with a resounding snap, then headed briskly toward the van where Huerta was getting the stretcher out of the back. "You're not being paid by the hour—what the hell is taking so long?"

Sawyer wasn't sad to see Dr. Boyce drive off with the victim fifteen minutes later, leaving a chastened tech who seemed to have had all the verve knocked right out of him. "I can finish up here," Huerta said. "There's not that much. You can go."

"I'll help," Sawyer said. It took a few minutes, but Carlos finally seemed to get his second wind.

"I hate going out on scenes with Dr. Boyce," he confessed. "He's always really impatient and sometimes he doesn't want to wait for me to finish taking photos or collecting all of the evidence I need to, but if I don't get absolutely everything then we might end up compromising a case, so I really have to be thorough."

"I get it."

"And then he starts yelling at me to hurry up and he never listens when I tell him I am, and the last time he went out on site with Tami, she came back crying."

That was surprising. Tami didn't seem like the type of person to be intimidated by a blowhard like Andy Boyce. "Wow."

That was all the encouragement Huerta needed to keep going. "Yeah, I mean, nobody really likes working with him in the field, but Tami especially. They always used to argue about who needed to do what and he tried to treat her like he treats me. Then one day she says she's not his servant or something like that, and then he says she is basically his servant, and…it's a real mess. She doesn't ever argue with him or push back at all anymore. Like ever." Huerta sighed. "I wish he could be more like Dr. Ramin. He never gets mad at us or acts like the CSIs work for him, but sometimes he's busy somewhere else, you know?"

"He seems like a good guy." I bet he's even better in bed. Sawyer chided himself firmly for veering in a sordid direction while he was working. He blamed sleep deprivation.

"He is! He's the best medical examiner I've ever worked for, including one guy named Dr. Krane who was one of my professors at school. I really thought he was the best for the longest time because he was also really patient and…"

Eventually, the kid shut up and got back to work. By the time Sawyer was waving goodbye to Huerta, the young man seemed in a much better mood.

Sawyer couldn't say the same. He did not—absolutely did not —need a hit-and-run case on top of the fucking serial killer he was already investigating, but the world never seemed to care much about timing. He drove to the hospital to check on the second victim, whose family had been informed. Her older sister sat in the waiting room, drawn and red-eyed, with a sleeping baby in a sling across her chest as they spoke.

"I don't know what I'll do if Chris doesn't recover," she said, staring down at the baby. "Michael is hers, not mine. I'm not ready to be a mother, I…I just offered to babysit while she went out with Lena, I didn't…I don't—" Her face crumpled. "How could I ever tell him about this? About what happened to his mother?"

"She might pull through," Sawyer said, although the doctor hadn't been encouraging. Massive compound fractures to both legs, swelling on the brain from the impact with the ground; it was honestly surprising she'd lived this long. He left his contact information with the sister, gave the baby a gentle rub on the back, then headed for the precinct.

Nan was entering the building at the same time as him, a smile on her face and a bounce in her step. "Hey! I'm sorry about Felix. I hope you were able to ditch him after a few…" She slowed down and stared at him. "Holy shit, did you get any sleep?"

"Hit-and-run this morning." Sawyer collapsed into the chair at his desk, then regretted it as his ribs tried to jump right out of his body. "Too many sick officers, not enough coverage. I handled it," he added when she looked like she wanted to argue about it. "It's fine."

Nan made the face that meant she knew it wasn't , in fact, fine, but that she also knew there was nothing either of them could do about it. "You want to work on that one and I'll keep up with the others for now? "

"Sure." At least reviewing camera footage was easy work compared to the mental slog of putting puzzle pieces together in the serial killer case. Sawyer normally would have preferred the complexity, but too few hours of sleep and too many cups of coffee after getting his ass handed to him yesterday didn't make for the most attentive mental state today.

He got lucky with the footage. Two of the nearby stores had good angles on the car that hit the young women—a Maserati Levante, a heavy, luxury SUV that stuck out like a sore thumb from the Toyotas and Fords on the road. He couldn't see the driver, but after a little bit of work he was able to get a partial on the license plate. UWAN …a quick search pulled it up, and Sawyer rolled his eyes. UWANTME, the perfect vanity plate for whoever was driving this fucking car, because Sawyer did want them now, badly, to be under arrest. The address associated with the car was in a city a hundred miles away, but that didn't mean anything. He just needed to make a few calls, look for family connections or friends in town, and then—

Sawyer's phone rang. "Detective Villeray," he said distractedly.

"Sawyer." It was Bashir, but his tone of voice said that this wasn't a social call. "We've got another body."

Sawyer's heart sank. "Is it the other victim in the hit and run?" he asked. Her doctors hadn't been confident she would make it, but damn it, her sister was going to be devastated—

"No. Another one of those bodies."

Oh. Oh, shit.