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bedlamsbard*shakes head* Flack has really bad luck, doesn't he. And my SCU: Boston police lieutenant is changing his name and his personality, although it looks like it's for the better, since I didn't want him to be a total Mac clone, except crazier. *prods* Also, they gave me a plot. How nice of them.
On the other hand, Omerta.
“Hi,” Danny said, grinning brightly.
Matt Berg glanced up from his desk. “You again?”
“Us again.” He flipped the warrant down in front of him. “With a warrant to search the offices. Detective Flack will take care of you and Miss Wampler.”
“Hi,” Flack said, and echoed Danny’s grin, only wider and whiter.
Matt looked startled and a little scared. Flack sometimes had that effect on people.
“Let’s talk two nights ago,” Flack said as he led Matt out.
Aiden and Danny exchanged looks. “Huh,” she said.
“That’s darn cool,” Danny nodded.
“What, the shit-eating grin?”
“Wish I could do that.”
“If what I hear is true, all you gotta do is make a phone call and all your problems are gone,” Aiden grinned.
Danny blinked. “What?”
“Current gossip,” she articulated carefully, “says you got a good couple connections in with the Mafia. The most credible sources, of course. Some of the more outrageous include your being a made guy, and one says you’re actually godfather of the Italian Mafia, but I don’t think that one’s true.”
“Where’d ya hear that?”
“Chad. Heard ‘em all from Chad, actually, before you got in this morning.” She slipped her latex gloves on, let them snap against her wrists. “Let’s get to this, shall we?”
“Come on, you don’t believe that, do you?” Danny said, prodding the carpet. He reached for the luminol in kit, sprayed it around. “No blood. She didn’t die in here.”
“Well, no, I think you’d tell me if you were a godfather. Hook me up with a cute mobster with a heart of gold.”
“And a wallet of gold, too, I bet.”
“But of course.” She dug through the trash, the desk, checked behind the pictures on the walls and the bookshelves. “Nothing here either.”
Danny sat back on his heels. It had been a five minute sweep search, not likely to turn up anything but the most obvious of signs, but all they were looking for was blood and a gun. “Check out Molly’s office?” he asked. “Then we can come back and look around a little more.”
Aiden straightened up. “You got it, partner.”
Molly’s office was down at the other end of the hall, with Molly Wampler, Attorney at Law neatly labeled on the door. Danny stepped in, blinked a little at the darkness it lay in, and flipped the light switch. The curtains were drawn, which explained the darkness, but it was a warm, sunny day out, which left no reason for the windows to be covered. He started toward them determinedly.
Aiden was poking around Molly’s desk. “Nice sense of fashion,” she said approvingly. “I think I know the catalog this girl shops from.”
“Same one you do?”
“Nah, I buy all my stuff down at the mall during the after-Thanksgiving sales. Best prices then.” She pulled the drawers open one after the other. “Nothing, nothing, nada, zip, huh.”
Danny turned toward her. “ ‘Huh?’” he repeated.
“Huh,” Aiden nodded. She pulled the white scarf out with one hand, holding it delicately at the corner. “Nice. Designer brand. I love these things.”
“It looks like a dead ferret.”
“Yeah, your sense of style rocks too, Mr. ‘Wait, What Do You Mean This Is Flack’s Shirt?’”
“That was once,” Danny said. “Once.”
“See, he’s gotta pretty good sense of style,” Aiden nodded. “Not, like, perfect, but pretty good. You, on the other hand – whatta you do, pick out clothes with a blindfold on when you’re drunk?”
“Only on Fridays,” he said. “So whatta you got?”
She used her free hand to sweep up one end of the scarf, showing the black powder sticking to the fabric. “What do you bet,” she said, “that this is gunpowder residue?”
Danny reached down towards his kit, ran a swab over the edge of the scarf and sprayed it with chemical. “Well, whatta you know,” he said. “Positive for GSR. I think our main suspect just changed. I mean, we’ll have to take this back to the lab to see if it matches the GSR from Anna’s body, but this is the first real evidence we’ve gotten so far.”
Aiden bagged the scarf carefully, tucked it into her kit. “I can see why she wouldn’t wanna get rid of it, though,” she murmured. “It’s a gorgeous scarf. And these things are fucking expensive, you know.”
Danny gave her a long look.
“Okay, I guess you don’t.”
He shook his head slowly, pulled the curtains aside. Nothing on the windowsill on first inspection, but on the second – “Aiden, toss me the luminol, will you?”
“You got something?”
He sprayed a fine mist of chemical over the sill and the window, grinning. “Yep,” he nodded. “I got something. Looks like she tried to clean up after herself, and she did a pretty good job, but not good enough. Swab?”
Aiden handed one to him, capped it after he’d swept it over one of the fine spots on the wall. “And here I was getting all excited thinking Matt was our perp,” she said, only sounding slightly disappointed. “But why’d Molly kill Anna? Unless she was sleeping with Matt too, and was jealous –”
“We know she fought with Anna, supposedly over Rae’s honor,” Danny said, snapping picture after picture of the window. He finally turned away. “Maybe she was pissed enough to kill her?”
“Why not just off Matt, then?” Aiden snorted. “Why end it with just Anna?”
“Unless she wanted to blame Matt for killing Anna,” Danny said slowly. “Send him to prison, get rid of the cheating boyfriend and other woman at the same time. She’s a criminal lawyer, though, she can’t really think we wouldn’t find the evidence –” He stopped suddenly. “You hear that?”
Aiden cocked her head to one side. “Shouting,” she said.
Flack’s roar cut over it all, and then Danny heard something he’d never wanted to hear again.
Gunshots.
“Flack!” Danny yelped, panicked, and tore out the door, drawing his gun from his holster. Aiden followed, gun in her hand. “NYPD!”
“Call a goddamned ambulance!” Flack shouted as they shouldered their way out into the hall. He had Molly shoved up against the wall, one shoulder pushed into her back as he cuffed her, and there was dark blood tracing its way down his blue shirt by his hip. Aiden only gave him a cursory glance before leaping for Matt, who was down on his back with his hands pressed to the bloody hole in his stomach. Danny reached for the gun a few feet away with one hand, speed-dialing with the other. Aiden glanced up at him from where she was kneeling next to Matt, her expression saying plainly, I don’t know if he’s going to make it.
*
“You all right, Detective Flack?” Zeke asked, dabbing at the scratches on Flack’s face with a cotton ball.
Flack didn’t bother waving him off. “Just scratched. Little bitch thought she was a fucking cat or something.”
Danny chose to ignore the irony of this statement. “You sure?”
Flack turned his head toward him. “See? Stopped bleeding.”
“Keep stretching that way and it’s going to start up again,” Zeke warned. “You’re almost as bad as –”
“Don’t say it,” Flack snapped.
“– Detective Taylor,” the paramedic finished, grinning slightly. “You’re not improving your face, by the way.”
“Great.”
“It looks like you’re going to add a few more scars to your collection.”
“Great.”
“It’s kind of an unhealthy habit. My brother collects rocks; I do comic books. Maybe you should try something like that instead of things that involve you getting hurt.”
“I’ll take it into consideration.”
Danny blinked. “Isn’t your brother a mounted officer?”
Zeke offered him a bright smile. “I didn’t say it was easy.”
Aiden pushed the ambulance door aside and hopped up beside Flack. “So Matt just arrived at the hospital,” she said. “I got a call from the officer there. They’re taking him straight into surgery.”
“Molly Wampler?”
“Locked up at the precinct,” she nodded wearily. “I took a page outta your book, Flack, I got officers kicking down Rae Clayton’s door right now. I don’t know if she shot Anna or not, but she’s definitely involved somehow.”
“Confession?” Danny asked, hand resting lightly on Flack’s knee.
She shrugged. “Didn’t stick around to hear if she made one. Not like she can deny it, though, she’s got a witness for the Berg shooting, and a jury’s definitely gonna believe him.” She gave Flack a tired smile. “Fuck, I’m tired of getting shot at.”
Flack shook his head. “You weren’t the one getting shot at, Aid.”
“Point, yeah. I’m sick’a watching my friends get shot at. How’s the hip?”
He touched the gauze under his jacket lightly. “Hurts,” he said. “Like hell. Just’a graze, though.”
Zeke swatted his hand away. “Doesn’t mean you should touch it, though.”
Aiden gave him a wise look. “You get shot a lot, Flack.”
“I got a target tattooed on my back or something?”
Danny brushed the backs of his fingers lightly over Flack’s cheek, and Flack reached up to catch at his hand. “I’ve never seen a target,” he said, “and I’ve had the opportunity to look plenty of times.”
Aiden snorted, and she and Zeke exchanged knowing looks. “So,” she said, “you still married to my sister, or what?”
He flinched, tapped the scar on his forehead. “See this?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’d be a no.”
“What’d you do to my baby sister?”
“Nothing!” he yelped.
“So she just randomly decided to throw a – what, a hairdryer at you?”
“A lug wrench,” Zeke said. “And she didn’t throw it at me.”
“She hit you with it?”
“About a dozen times, yeah. I lost count when I passed out on the kitchen floor and woke up on the front porch with my stuff stacked around me.”
“Man, what’d you do to her?”
“I didn’t do anything to her,” he protested. “I’m just lucky Devin noticed I was late for work and drove by to yell at me. And that he’s a paramedic.”
“So Maya, what, just decided to hit you with a lug wrench for fun?”
“Aiden, you ever find out what I did to make her so mad, you let me know, so I can send her the hospital bill. Internal bleeding. From the ear. They had to flush it out in the emergency room. For a while I had little kids running away from me when I got out of the van.”
“Betcha had problems getting a date for a while.”
Zeke gave her a long look. “I was married, Aiden.”
“Until Maya hit you with a lug wrench.”
“Until I got served with divorce papers while attending to an injured officer who got shot trying to break up a domestic dispute.”
Aiden burst out laughing. “That, pal, is irony,” she said.
“The officer fucking laughed at me, Aiden,” he said, sounding outraged. “So did the couple getting hauled off in the blue and whites. So did Devin.”
“What?” his partner said, appearing from around the side of the ambulance. “There’s a shitload of newsies out there looking for you guys, you know that?”
“The ambulance blocks the view, thank God,” Aiden said. “Tell ‘em to refer all questions to the NYPD press office, will ya, Devin?”
“Fucking vultures,” Flack muttered under his breath.
Aiden chanced a glare back at him and Danny. They were slighty flushed, and Flack’s eyes had a familiar glaze over the blue irises. She shook her head. “Get a room, you two.”
“Just so long as the fucking reporters don’t come ‘round here,” Danny said. He pressed his hand against Flack’s uninjured side. “Press office, Devin.”
“What, am I your goddamn messenger boy or something?” Devin scowled, but he vanished around the side again.
“We gotta stop meeting like this,” Flack said to Zeke.
“Stop getting shot at, I’ll stop running into you,” Zeke said.
Flack stretched tentatively, and Aiden heard vertebrae pop. “I’m up for it when you are.”
“I’ll let you know when I can afford to pension out,” Zeke said. “Until then –”
Aiden elbowed him. Hard. “What the hell’d you do to my baby sister, pal?”
On the other hand, Omerta.
“Hi,” Danny said, grinning brightly.
Matt Berg glanced up from his desk. “You again?”
“Us again.” He flipped the warrant down in front of him. “With a warrant to search the offices. Detective Flack will take care of you and Miss Wampler.”
“Hi,” Flack said, and echoed Danny’s grin, only wider and whiter.
Matt looked startled and a little scared. Flack sometimes had that effect on people.
“Let’s talk two nights ago,” Flack said as he led Matt out.
Aiden and Danny exchanged looks. “Huh,” she said.
“That’s darn cool,” Danny nodded.
“What, the shit-eating grin?”
“Wish I could do that.”
“If what I hear is true, all you gotta do is make a phone call and all your problems are gone,” Aiden grinned.
Danny blinked. “What?”
“Current gossip,” she articulated carefully, “says you got a good couple connections in with the Mafia. The most credible sources, of course. Some of the more outrageous include your being a made guy, and one says you’re actually godfather of the Italian Mafia, but I don’t think that one’s true.”
“Where’d ya hear that?”
“Chad. Heard ‘em all from Chad, actually, before you got in this morning.” She slipped her latex gloves on, let them snap against her wrists. “Let’s get to this, shall we?”
“Come on, you don’t believe that, do you?” Danny said, prodding the carpet. He reached for the luminol in kit, sprayed it around. “No blood. She didn’t die in here.”
“Well, no, I think you’d tell me if you were a godfather. Hook me up with a cute mobster with a heart of gold.”
“And a wallet of gold, too, I bet.”
“But of course.” She dug through the trash, the desk, checked behind the pictures on the walls and the bookshelves. “Nothing here either.”
Danny sat back on his heels. It had been a five minute sweep search, not likely to turn up anything but the most obvious of signs, but all they were looking for was blood and a gun. “Check out Molly’s office?” he asked. “Then we can come back and look around a little more.”
Aiden straightened up. “You got it, partner.”
Molly’s office was down at the other end of the hall, with Molly Wampler, Attorney at Law neatly labeled on the door. Danny stepped in, blinked a little at the darkness it lay in, and flipped the light switch. The curtains were drawn, which explained the darkness, but it was a warm, sunny day out, which left no reason for the windows to be covered. He started toward them determinedly.
Aiden was poking around Molly’s desk. “Nice sense of fashion,” she said approvingly. “I think I know the catalog this girl shops from.”
“Same one you do?”
“Nah, I buy all my stuff down at the mall during the after-Thanksgiving sales. Best prices then.” She pulled the drawers open one after the other. “Nothing, nothing, nada, zip, huh.”
Danny turned toward her. “ ‘Huh?’” he repeated.
“Huh,” Aiden nodded. She pulled the white scarf out with one hand, holding it delicately at the corner. “Nice. Designer brand. I love these things.”
“It looks like a dead ferret.”
“Yeah, your sense of style rocks too, Mr. ‘Wait, What Do You Mean This Is Flack’s Shirt?’”
“That was once,” Danny said. “Once.”
“See, he’s gotta pretty good sense of style,” Aiden nodded. “Not, like, perfect, but pretty good. You, on the other hand – whatta you do, pick out clothes with a blindfold on when you’re drunk?”
“Only on Fridays,” he said. “So whatta you got?”
She used her free hand to sweep up one end of the scarf, showing the black powder sticking to the fabric. “What do you bet,” she said, “that this is gunpowder residue?”
Danny reached down towards his kit, ran a swab over the edge of the scarf and sprayed it with chemical. “Well, whatta you know,” he said. “Positive for GSR. I think our main suspect just changed. I mean, we’ll have to take this back to the lab to see if it matches the GSR from Anna’s body, but this is the first real evidence we’ve gotten so far.”
Aiden bagged the scarf carefully, tucked it into her kit. “I can see why she wouldn’t wanna get rid of it, though,” she murmured. “It’s a gorgeous scarf. And these things are fucking expensive, you know.”
Danny gave her a long look.
“Okay, I guess you don’t.”
He shook his head slowly, pulled the curtains aside. Nothing on the windowsill on first inspection, but on the second – “Aiden, toss me the luminol, will you?”
“You got something?”
He sprayed a fine mist of chemical over the sill and the window, grinning. “Yep,” he nodded. “I got something. Looks like she tried to clean up after herself, and she did a pretty good job, but not good enough. Swab?”
Aiden handed one to him, capped it after he’d swept it over one of the fine spots on the wall. “And here I was getting all excited thinking Matt was our perp,” she said, only sounding slightly disappointed. “But why’d Molly kill Anna? Unless she was sleeping with Matt too, and was jealous –”
“We know she fought with Anna, supposedly over Rae’s honor,” Danny said, snapping picture after picture of the window. He finally turned away. “Maybe she was pissed enough to kill her?”
“Why not just off Matt, then?” Aiden snorted. “Why end it with just Anna?”
“Unless she wanted to blame Matt for killing Anna,” Danny said slowly. “Send him to prison, get rid of the cheating boyfriend and other woman at the same time. She’s a criminal lawyer, though, she can’t really think we wouldn’t find the evidence –” He stopped suddenly. “You hear that?”
Aiden cocked her head to one side. “Shouting,” she said.
Flack’s roar cut over it all, and then Danny heard something he’d never wanted to hear again.
Gunshots.
“Flack!” Danny yelped, panicked, and tore out the door, drawing his gun from his holster. Aiden followed, gun in her hand. “NYPD!”
“Call a goddamned ambulance!” Flack shouted as they shouldered their way out into the hall. He had Molly shoved up against the wall, one shoulder pushed into her back as he cuffed her, and there was dark blood tracing its way down his blue shirt by his hip. Aiden only gave him a cursory glance before leaping for Matt, who was down on his back with his hands pressed to the bloody hole in his stomach. Danny reached for the gun a few feet away with one hand, speed-dialing with the other. Aiden glanced up at him from where she was kneeling next to Matt, her expression saying plainly, I don’t know if he’s going to make it.
*
“You all right, Detective Flack?” Zeke asked, dabbing at the scratches on Flack’s face with a cotton ball.
Flack didn’t bother waving him off. “Just scratched. Little bitch thought she was a fucking cat or something.”
Danny chose to ignore the irony of this statement. “You sure?”
Flack turned his head toward him. “See? Stopped bleeding.”
“Keep stretching that way and it’s going to start up again,” Zeke warned. “You’re almost as bad as –”
“Don’t say it,” Flack snapped.
“– Detective Taylor,” the paramedic finished, grinning slightly. “You’re not improving your face, by the way.”
“Great.”
“It looks like you’re going to add a few more scars to your collection.”
“Great.”
“It’s kind of an unhealthy habit. My brother collects rocks; I do comic books. Maybe you should try something like that instead of things that involve you getting hurt.”
“I’ll take it into consideration.”
Danny blinked. “Isn’t your brother a mounted officer?”
Zeke offered him a bright smile. “I didn’t say it was easy.”
Aiden pushed the ambulance door aside and hopped up beside Flack. “So Matt just arrived at the hospital,” she said. “I got a call from the officer there. They’re taking him straight into surgery.”
“Molly Wampler?”
“Locked up at the precinct,” she nodded wearily. “I took a page outta your book, Flack, I got officers kicking down Rae Clayton’s door right now. I don’t know if she shot Anna or not, but she’s definitely involved somehow.”
“Confession?” Danny asked, hand resting lightly on Flack’s knee.
She shrugged. “Didn’t stick around to hear if she made one. Not like she can deny it, though, she’s got a witness for the Berg shooting, and a jury’s definitely gonna believe him.” She gave Flack a tired smile. “Fuck, I’m tired of getting shot at.”
Flack shook his head. “You weren’t the one getting shot at, Aid.”
“Point, yeah. I’m sick’a watching my friends get shot at. How’s the hip?”
He touched the gauze under his jacket lightly. “Hurts,” he said. “Like hell. Just’a graze, though.”
Zeke swatted his hand away. “Doesn’t mean you should touch it, though.”
Aiden gave him a wise look. “You get shot a lot, Flack.”
“I got a target tattooed on my back or something?”
Danny brushed the backs of his fingers lightly over Flack’s cheek, and Flack reached up to catch at his hand. “I’ve never seen a target,” he said, “and I’ve had the opportunity to look plenty of times.”
Aiden snorted, and she and Zeke exchanged knowing looks. “So,” she said, “you still married to my sister, or what?”
He flinched, tapped the scar on his forehead. “See this?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’d be a no.”
“What’d you do to my baby sister?”
“Nothing!” he yelped.
“So she just randomly decided to throw a – what, a hairdryer at you?”
“A lug wrench,” Zeke said. “And she didn’t throw it at me.”
“She hit you with it?”
“About a dozen times, yeah. I lost count when I passed out on the kitchen floor and woke up on the front porch with my stuff stacked around me.”
“Man, what’d you do to her?”
“I didn’t do anything to her,” he protested. “I’m just lucky Devin noticed I was late for work and drove by to yell at me. And that he’s a paramedic.”
“So Maya, what, just decided to hit you with a lug wrench for fun?”
“Aiden, you ever find out what I did to make her so mad, you let me know, so I can send her the hospital bill. Internal bleeding. From the ear. They had to flush it out in the emergency room. For a while I had little kids running away from me when I got out of the van.”
“Betcha had problems getting a date for a while.”
Zeke gave her a long look. “I was married, Aiden.”
“Until Maya hit you with a lug wrench.”
“Until I got served with divorce papers while attending to an injured officer who got shot trying to break up a domestic dispute.”
Aiden burst out laughing. “That, pal, is irony,” she said.
“The officer fucking laughed at me, Aiden,” he said, sounding outraged. “So did the couple getting hauled off in the blue and whites. So did Devin.”
“What?” his partner said, appearing from around the side of the ambulance. “There’s a shitload of newsies out there looking for you guys, you know that?”
“The ambulance blocks the view, thank God,” Aiden said. “Tell ‘em to refer all questions to the NYPD press office, will ya, Devin?”
“Fucking vultures,” Flack muttered under his breath.
Aiden chanced a glare back at him and Danny. They were slighty flushed, and Flack’s eyes had a familiar glaze over the blue irises. She shook her head. “Get a room, you two.”
“Just so long as the fucking reporters don’t come ‘round here,” Danny said. He pressed his hand against Flack’s uninjured side. “Press office, Devin.”
“What, am I your goddamn messenger boy or something?” Devin scowled, but he vanished around the side again.
“We gotta stop meeting like this,” Flack said to Zeke.
“Stop getting shot at, I’ll stop running into you,” Zeke said.
Flack stretched tentatively, and Aiden heard vertebrae pop. “I’m up for it when you are.”
“I’ll let you know when I can afford to pension out,” Zeke said. “Until then –”
Aiden elbowed him. Hard. “What the hell’d you do to my baby sister, pal?”