Lassiter isn't used to having to work elbow-deep in chaos, which is probably why Shawn Spencer is slowly killing him.
A/N – Takes place between the pilot and episode four of the first season. Lassiter-centric; established Lucinda/Lassiter. Rated for language and the assault and battery of porcelain.
It took some detective work, but he figured out by Thursday that his hand hurt because he'd been spending most of the week throttling inanimate objects. Most times they were things that could take the abuse, like food wrappers or rubber-band balls, but that morning it'd been a styrofoam cup holding the dregs of his coffee. The mess had soaked the cuff of his sleeve and dripped halfway down the hallway before he realized he had a problem. "You have a problem," Lucinda said, attacking the stain with the tube of Tide To Go she kept in her purse. "You can't let him get to you like this, Carlton."
"He's not getting to me," but mostly he was occupied with the fact they were poised to botch the McCallum case and Lucinda's transfer notice was probably already in her mailbox. Last night had been an awkward game of emotional hide-and-seek for both of them: him letting her smoke her first cigarette in two years out on the balcony, her letting him screw her on the kitchen table instead of the bed because it made it easier for them both to walk away from each other afterwards. "This is a one-shot deal at best. Karen can't possibly be this naïve."
"And if he actually does close the case? What are you going to do then?"
He didn't know. To cover his confusion, he knocked Spencer stupid against the squad car at the McCallum mansion as he arrested him, hoping the exercise would clear his head. The reality was that Spencer was likely going to shrug off the trespassing charge with some pocket change and then move on to terrorize the next town over, and Lassiter would be stuck behind dealing with an outed inner-office romance and a partner whose entire career was suddenly under scrutiny just because he'd convinced her to start banging him five months ago.
He didn't have time to dwell on it, because the impact with the police car seemed to knock down the last load-bearing wall of Spencer's sanity. Lassiter stood and watched with the other officers as Spencer thrashed around the grass like he was being mauled by a cheetah, wondering what he'd done to deserve this. Getting together with Lucinda had been unprofessional but not really karmically punishable. Certainly nothing to deserve watching Spencer scream "Calumite!" and "Check the wound!" and "For the love of god, check the wound!"
Lassiter was preparing a second attempt to haul Spencer off the ground when he spotted the blood draining out of McCallum's face. McCallum was staring at Shawn with a tight-lipped expression, eyes unblinking. His hand was clasped over his bandaged forearm.
Lassiter realized several things simultaneously. McCallum had been their murderer all along, which made he and Lucinda just about the most unobservant fuck-ups this side of the San Antonio divide. A civilian had managed to implicate him in under seventy-two hours without any professional training, while Lassiter had sacrificed all his personal dignity and had pooled together all his resources and had come up with nothing. Worse than nothing, because once Internal Affairs caught up to him, there'd be no end to the things he could lose from there.
Aware that this could be his last act as Chief Detective, Lassiter read McCallum his rights and stuffed him into the backseat of the squad car. When he slammed the door and turned around, Spencer was looking at the car with his head cocked, looking uncharacteristically subdued.
The world had shifted on its axis while he wasn't looking, leaving him with a single outstanding need. "Seriously," he said. He met Spencer's eyes. One detective to another. "How'd you do it?"
"I really don't know," Spencer said vaguely, officially marking the closest Carlton Lassiter came to committing murder.
Lucinda stopped answering her phone later that week, prompting Lassiter to drive over to her apartment when she didn't show up for work. He keyed himself into the building and stalked up the steps, taking them by two, only to find her door stripped of decoration and locked, a pale shadow in the carpet where the welcome mat used to be.
He stood there a minute, stumped, trying to make sense of what he was looking at. Lucinda changed her front door decoration every month, hanging holly wreathes in the winter and dried flower arrangements in the spring. Everything down to her mounting nails had been pried out, leaving small constellations of holes in the wood and faded paint where tape had been pulled up. The only thing remaining was an envelope taped under the peephole with 'CL' penned on the front.
Lassiter worked the tape up gently to avoid making another mark in the paint, then folded the note into a smaller square and slid it into his wallet without reading it.
The sound of a door opening down the hallway brought his attention up. An elderly woman in a blue raincoat carefully made her way out of her apartment, muttering to herself, a reusable shopping bag looped over her knobby wrist. Despite her distraction, she noticed him immediately. "Carlton!" she exclaimed, brightening in honest pleasure. "I saw you on the six o'clock news last week! How's the getting, young man?"
"I—" His voice cracked. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Good as always, ma'am."
"Now, you keep those streets clean so an old woman doesn't have to do all the dirty work herself." She fussily fished her penguin keychain out of her purse, peeling the keys back one by one as she sought the right one. "Doctor says no more vigilantism until my knee knits. Just don't let them know I'm on hiatus, or the streets will be overrun."
"My lips are sealed, Mrs. Quinn."
"What brings you here, might I ask?" Mrs. Quinn sent him a sharp side-eye even as she located the apartment key. She set to work locking her door. "I'm a little surprised to see you here now that Lucinda's gone. Now, it's none of my business, Carlton, but I would have thought you'd help that poor girl move out. It took her most the day."
He could feel his heartbeat in his gut. His voice still wasn't working quite right. "When did she leave?"
"Well, Saturday, of course. Didn't she tell you? You really should have been there," she repeated disapprovingly. "I'm not sure what you were thinking, making her do all that herself."
"Did she say anything to you before she left?"
"This and that," she said, in that evasive way Lassiter allowed from old women he liked and pretty much no one else, not even orphans. "And a promise that I'll still hold you to dinner the first Tuesday of every month. No exceptions, young man. I know where you live."
He was still reeling, but it wasn't the time to deal with it. You waited until you were in a safe place to disassemble your gun. Instead, he forced himself to step away from Lucinda's door, walking towards Mrs. Quinn with his arm held out. "I wouldn't dream of missing our dinners," he assured her. "Please, allow me walk you out."
Mrs. Quinn demurred, hitting his arm even as she took it, the tough old broad. She insisted on taking the bus all the way down to the ground floor, but he drove her to the grocery store anyway, managing to get her back just in time for the news at six. She let him leave only after sending a tupperware full of homemade macaroons with him and extracting a promise that he wouldn't renege on their dinner dates, no matter how busy he got saving the world.
The light was flashing on his answering machine when he let himself into his house. He ignored it, stripping down to shower while his chicken kiev was cooking, hanging up what was salvageable and tossing whatever wasn't into the laundry basket. Dinner tasted buttery and his drink tasted like fizz. He zoned out somewhere in the middle of everything, letting the sauce congeal on his plate.
When it took more work to stay vertical than not, he cleaned up the kitchen, brushed his teeth, and went to bed.
The note stayed in his wallet.
"Try to behave yourself," Interim Chief Vick said Tuesday, handing him the file on his new partner, officially marking the second closest Carlton Lassiter ever came to committing murder.
Henry Spencer stalked through the station like a grizzled old bulldog that had scent-marked all of the desks before he'd retired, scattering officers left and right as he made a beeline for Lassiter's desk.
Lassiter was terrified by his approach for different, existential reasons. It hadn't mattered that Henry was a legend in the department with one of the best closing rates in the state, because all the peace and order he'd fought for his entire career had vanished after one night of getting busy with his wife. Now he was the father of a trainwreck that had been actively crashing for the past twenty-nine years, and no amount of damage-control could bring that peace and order back, no matter how many times he polished his gun or organized his fishing trophies or mowed his lawn with his toenail clippers.
Lassiter could think of at least seventeen different reasons off the top of his head to never have children. Seeing Henry standing in front of his desk, bald and wrinkled and looking a lot like he'd enjoy shoving his bad mood straight up someone's ass with his foot, brought Lassiter up to an even twenty. "Can I help you?" Lassiter said.
"Don't start with me, kid." Henry slapped an overstuffed manila folder down on the desk with a crack like thunder. Lassiter noticed several officers in his peripherals finding other places to be. "Keep them," Henry said. "I've got copies of all of them, one file in a fireproof strongbox. These are all the tips he's called in, all the crime he's been witness to, and all the consultations he's done on and off record. He fell off the grid for a while, so the list might not be fully comprehensive, but for the most part it's there in bulk. Keep it out of sight. If he finds it and asks, tell him you did the digging."
"First of all," Lassiter said, a little jarred by the use of 'kid' and also by the fact that the entire station was apparently staffed by bashful kindergarten girls, "my life does not revolve around researching the crap your offspring has done in his spare time. Second of all, who the hell do you think you are, coming in—"
"I've got a show coming on at two and a bird in the oven, so you can go ahead and keep your noise," Henry said. "I'm in here because Shawn never learned the difference between games and reality, and now he's got it in his head that he's going to be a detective, which means he's going to be a pain in your neck for as long as it takes to work it out of his system. I give it two to four months. In the meantime, no matter how good he thinks he is, he's still a civilian, which makes his safety this department's responsibility."
"Look, if it were up to me, I'd have thrown him out on his ass the minute he started spasming in lockup. It's the chief's idea to have him on, so take it up with her."
"I did. And now I'm taking it up with you." Henry was wearing an ear-piercing Hawaiian shirt and beach sandals that'd tapped the tile like castanets coming into the station. He looked nothing like Shawn at first glance. That changed when he leaned over to jab a finger towards Lassiter's nose, bringing the two of them face to face, and Lassiter was abruptly reminded of the anger he'd spotted behind Shawn's smirk during that first interrogation, flaring like the glint of glass under murky water. "I don't care what grudge you've got with him, and frankly whatever trouble he's got coming down on his head, he has coming," Henry said. "That's not the issue here. What I expect from you is that you'll do the job you signed on for. You wear the badge. You bring him in as a consultant, you protect him on the field. Or there's no deal."
"Deal?" Lassiter blurted, flabbergasted enough to forget himself. "Since when am I his keeper? For god's sake, Henry, if you're that hung up over it, just own up and admit to Karen that he's lying through his teeth. That'll be the end of everything right there."
To his surprise, Henry flushed. He straightened up, squaring his shoulders, putting distance back between them. "I didn't say the kid wasn't gifted," Henry said stiffly. "Just careless. He doesn't understand the risks. You and I do."
"And just what am I supposed to do about it?"
"Keep his ass out of the line of fire."
Lassiter wanted to bang his forehead against his desk. "And if he runs into it?"
"Make sure you've got fire of your own to send back."
"Great, so I'm babysitting," he said. "How about this. How about we just arrest him, throw him into the cell for obstruction of justice, let him marinate until this blows over? How about that? Would that make you happy?"
"If that's what it takes to keep him out of the ground, then yes!"
The station quieted under Henry's sudden bellow. Taken aback, Lassiter stared at Henry until Henry shifted his weight under the scrutiny, clearing his throat. "That's the size of it," Henry said, as though nothing had happened. "I've got to go before the bird dries out. I'll talk to you later."
"Spencer, look," Lassiter began reluctantly, but Henry was already moving away, flapping his hand in the air as though brushing the entire thing aside. A throng of officers discreetly parted for him on the other side of the room.
Lassiter sat there for a long time, trying to process what the hell had just happened.
By the time the other officers started trickling back to the area and O'Hara returned from the lady's room to unpack the last box of hers marked DESK SUPPLIES, Spencer's file was open and Lassiter had one more reason to hate himself.
The entire disastrous first meeting with O'Hara had been a palpable reminder that he was too old for twenty-something junior partners. Especially partners like O'Hara, who exuded sunlight with a determination that gave him indigestion.
He bawled her out over bringing him cold coffee that first morning, then bawled her out again when she became so flustered that she spilled it in his lap. It was clear she was bright and eager to please, which should have made it easier to deal with. The problem was, molding a fresh young impressionable partner took work, and Lassiter had already established he was too old for that bullshit, which left them both at square one.
Around the middle of the week, Lassiter remembered that he had to put food in his stomach in order for his body to function. He changed course on the way home for the night and dropped by Silvergreens, figuring he'd burned enough calories that week to earn some grease.
He ordered a Tillamook burger and a beer, undoing his top button halfway through when the air around him grew warm. His waitress winked at him from across the room when he did it, which might've interested him except he was too old for that bullshit too. Still, it was appreciated. As a reward he calculated a twelve percent tip in his head and left it down to the penny on the table, neatly stacked, before finishing the trip home.
He swayed a little when he kicked off his shoes, realizing that he was utterly exhausted. He showered and shaved on autopilot, neatened up the hair by his ears, trimmed his toenails and buffed his fingernails. He watched television on mute for nineteen minutes, then turned it off and sat in gloom for a while. The house talked to him in the silence: creaks of the frame and the floorboards as the ambient temperature steadily dropped, the grind of his ancient wall clock chugging away.
When the darkness started to make sense around him, he slid his phone out of his pocket and pushed 2 for Lucinda. Her voice mail activated after two rings. He hung up and tried again. This time it activated immediately.
He closed his phone. He reached up and fumbled for the switch on the lamp, painfully blasting his night vision apart, and spent the next several hours diligently combing through old case files that no one gave a shit about.
His head was pounding with fatigue, but his blood was humming incessantly, keeping him wired. At midnight he succumbed to crippling stress by firing up his internet, digging out his credit card, and retreating to his old coping strategy: ordering a metric ton of vintage ceramic figurines.
He stayed conservative at first, landing "Little Girl In Her Overalls Chopping Wood" and "Vintage Lassie Collie With Number On Paw". Then the slant of Spencer's smirk and Lucinda's empty apartment caught up with him again, leading him to R&W Berries Co's 'Bitch A Little, You'll Feel Better' figurine circa 1970, a Lefton Christmas candy cane angel bell ornament circa 1950, and a Josef original July birthday girl with a blue dress and a gold garland.
He capped it off with two ugly bookends, one of a girl reading and the other of a boy fishing, ponied up for shipping for sixteen items, before shutting off the computer. Then, with a suddenness that startled him, he couldn't remain vertical either. He stumbled to his room and barely managed to set his alarm before collapsing on top of his covers.
When he woke up his blanket was on the floor and his pillow was by his feet, and the phone was buzzing on his nightstand. He blinked at his clock for a moment, sorting out the numbers, then reached out and answered it on the fourth ring.
"Look, this is probably just a case of sabotage from some overzealous parent. Tell me again why we need this hack to come in and do our job?"
"The reality is that this could very easily slip through the cracks." Vick looked tired but alert. "The department is overtaxed and this case is highly publicized. The spelling bee participants will be in fifty different cities in a few days. We need this wrapped up quickly and we don't have time to be picky."
"Chief, the man solved one case. That doesn't make him a psychic!"
"That 'one case' involved a very high-profile murder, and he produced the key evidence to put McCallum away," Vick said. "Whatever his motives, whatever his true abilities, he has already proven himself useful. It's worth a shot to see if his success continues."
Lassiter could feel O'Hara hovering by the doorway like a nervous sunbeam. He'd seen her gun trembling in her hands just this morning as they'd pulled in their mark at the diner, but she'd stood her ground, which was no less than he expected. On the other hand she'd spent the rest of the morning clearly waiting for something from him. Maybe a pep talk, unaware that Lassiter made a policy of never giving pep talks. Especially to people who needed them. "I'm going to revisit the scene to make sure I have all of the details, then give him a call," Vick said. "I expect you two to handle any and all press. O'Hara, I want you to question Brandon Vu's mother again, make sure that she's given us absolutely everything. I want all the information we can handle going into this."
"Leave it to me," O'Hara said, right on cue.
Vick looked at Lassiter expectantly.
Lassiter mentally walked his way through the steps of shooting himself, predicting the pattern of bloodstains on the wall and the amount of brain matter, the cost of replacing the carpet and patching the wall, the amount of reconstruction they'd do to make him look good for his funeral. How many people would show up. Which woman his mother would bring to the funeral with her. Which—
"Detective," Vick said.
"On it, Chief," he said. He sounded normal, which probably surprised no one in the room but himself.
All evidence in the file Henry had given him pointed to Spencer spending his life drifting in and out of towns like stink, which might have been enough to cast doubts on his character had every article including him not been almost saccharinely positive. Athletic events, picnics, fund raisers, parades, animal rescues, clean-up efforts. Photo evidence from Montana to Michigan, from Maine to Florida, from Texas to Oklahoma: all of Spencer butting into local affairs, sloshing around, and leaving before he got wet.
It all burrowed straight under Lassiter's craw and stayed there, sharp and sour even after multiple cups of coffee. He stayed late into the nights, rolling his sleeves up to his elbows, letting life flow around the edges.
"What exactly are you expecting to find on this guy?" O'Hara asked tentatively, setting a fresh cup of coffee next to his mousepad. On the screen was a newspaper article dating back six years. The photo showed Spencer and an old man standing in front of a restaurant, both wearing chef hats. Spencer's arm was around the old man's shoulders as they beamed at the camera, both holding up improbably large hot dogs. Underneath, the caption read: One Foot In Front of the Other: a young man's quest to revitalize a local business. "Did he do something?"
"Just concentrate on the case," he snapped, grabbing the coffee and downing half the scalding liquid in a gulp. One of the blonde tendrils of her hair had slid over his shoulder as she'd leaned in. If his coffee mug shook a little as he set it back down, he blamed it on the caffeine.
Lucinda called him that night as Criminal Minds was winding down. The photographic evidence taken from the spelling bee was shoved over to the side of the coffee table, anchored by a pile of travel-sized Good & Plenty boxes he'd swiped from the basket at the guest check-in table. "Where are you?" he asked.
"Oregon. They have me up by NCC, just outside Salem."
"With…?"
"Tony Greer."
His gun was in polished pieces on the coffee table. The television was on mute, projecting arrhythmic patterns of primary colors onto the wall. "Well? Is he worth a damn?"
"He can't shoot but he can pirouette a car on a dime," Lucinda said. "I can't tell if it'll even out yet."
"Bring anyone down?"
"It's mostly been quiet so far. Nobody has any vitamin D here. There's been a petition to put sun lamps in the interrogation rooms so we can dose up while we're grilling the suspects."
There was something in his mouth. A toothpick. He reached up to take it out, and only then did he realize he was shaking – full body tremors, starting from his calves and creeping up his spine to buzz at his hairline.
He set the toothpick down carefully on the edge of his plate and clinically waited for his body to get itself back under control. "You were on the news," Lucinda said.
"The news?"
"They've been giving a lot of coverage to the sabotage at the spelling bee. They even ran the clip of your public address."
They had? He'd assumed anyone who wasn't local wouldn't be tuned into the spelling bee, sabotage or not. Then again, it was a national contest, so it made sense that it'd be given national coverage. In the meantime the shaking crept up his belly, threatening to get into his voice. "How did I look?"
"Pale. Tired."
"Must have been the lighting in the hall." At the moment he'd bet anything she was on her couch, curled up on the left side, legs folded underneath her to help conserve heat. She would've gone shopping the second day there, filling her wardrobe with sensible tops better suited to the climate. She'd neatly fold the Californian clothes in a box and label it and then never wear those clothes again, because where she could be practical she could also be selfish, hording her past with no intention of revisiting it.
"Did you read my letter?" she asked.
"Sure."
"No, you didn't. Ten to one you only touched it long enough to put it into your wallet."
"I read it."
"Carlton, I'm sorry," Lucinda said. "I won't even ask you to forgive me. What I did was despicable."
"Then why did you do it?" He actually hadn't planned on asking her that. He could've continued this ridiculous dance all night long just so long as it kept her on the other end. "Why didn't you let me help you?"
"Because it would've made it too hard to leave."
"What is this, a Lifetime special? Don't fuck with me, Barry."
"My feelings aren't invalid just because they're cliché," she said. "And don't swear at me. You know how I feel about that."
Lassiter reined himself in with effort. His shaking had since died down, leaving a deadly kind of calm in its wake. He'd welcome that focus in most situations, but being angry was currently the only thing protecting him from things that'd hurt worse. "I wouldn't have held you back. It's not like I could stop the transfer."
"That's not what I was worried about."
"So what was it? You thought I wouldn't help you move the couch or something?"
She laughed. It wasn't a nice-sounding laugh, but he'd missed the sound of it anyway. "That's always been your problem. You make things so hard when the answer is in front of you the whole time. You really don't think it would've been harder for me to leave if you'd been there?"
"You had to leave anyway."
"So my feelings mean nothing? It wouldn't affect me at all to see you standing there as I drove away?"
"What, so I was supposed to wave a handkerchief after you? Is that what this is about?"
"Oh god, I can't," she said. "I can't do this. Not tonight."
"Well, I don't know what you want me to do!" he snapped, frustrated. "You leave without telling me, you call me up out of the blue to apologize, and then you chew me out for not understanding your gibberish?"
"No," she said. "You know what, I'm sorry. Forget it. It was stupid to bring it up."
"Don't hang up," and Lassiter hated himself immediately because he'd been on the offensive, and she owed him for this, maybe forever, and their neediness had always been mutual. Not something for him to blurt out to her in the dark a hundred miles away.
"I'm not going to hang up," Lucinda said. "I'm going to stay on the line, and you're not going to say anything else because if you do, I'm going to kill you. And I don't want to kill you."
"So you're staying on the line so we can not talk?"
"You're not going to talk. You're going to set the phone down, reassemble your gun, turn off the TV, lie down on the couch, and pick the phone back up again. And you're going to keep me on while you go to sleep."
"What are we, thirteen? I'm not wasting my minutes on that."
"Put the phone down and do it. I'll wait."
The erratic light from the TV was giving him a headache. Clenching his jaw, Lassiter tossed the phone down on the table and assembled his gun. The dishes from dinner still sat on the edge of the coffee table, congealing with sloppy vengeance at being ignored.
He finished in record time, jabbed the power button on the remote, and picked up the phone to bawl her out. "Lay down," Lucinda said, interrupting him.
"I'm not—"
"Do it."
He kicked his feet up and slammed his head back against the cushion, hard enough to feel the unyielding edge of the arm on the other side. The darkness churned above him. The television had been muted the entire time, but without the light the silence in the room still seemed deeper somehow for the change.
Then gravity came crashing down to blindside him. He sank into the couch, palm pressed against his forehead, phone pressed against his ear. "It's okay," Lucinda said.
"I can't do this." He could barely hear himself speak, which was good because he already had concrete plans to kill himself for admitting this to her just as soon as daylight hit. Darkness just made it easier. "I can't solve this without you. It doesn't work."
"It's just a different set of variables. You'll still get the same answer in the end."
"It doesn't work. It doesn't work. He's always there."
"Stop thinking about it. Let it go for tonight. It'll be there for you in the morning."
"But you won't."
"No," Lucinda said.
He knew it was a trick of perception that made him feel Lucinda's breath in his ear, which was why he let himself enjoy it. Illusions only had power if you believed them. He didn't mean to fall asleep, but somehow he ended up dropping off anyway, phone wedged between the cushion and his ear.
When he woke up somewhere near four in the morning, the phone call had ended, the screen open and black under his cheek.