I Put My Hand in the Hole and Found

by dhalgren99

In a tale that's only vaguely CSI and thus certain to please no one, two men who aren't quite cops look for a child that probably doesn't exist. I swear, there's a good reason for all of this.

Full title: I Put My Hand in the Hole and Found That the Hole Was Not There

Yeah, I like the long titles. Sorry. Eventually I'll come up with a catchy short one but that day is not today.

Right. Now this one is really going to take some explanation. Continuing with my inability to do normal reviews, this one is technically for TriplePirouette's "Innocence and Beauty", chapter six. For those who haven't read it, it tells the years-spanning tale of Grissom's daughter (and does an excellent job of it, too!). That chapter comes up with a rather clever explanation for how throughout all the years of the show, nobody ever mentioned her. I thought it was clever, at least.

So this is my attempt to provide commentary on that chapter and consider the ramifications of being a little too private at work. While being entertaining in the process. But that's up to you.

Caveats abound: As the little summary hints, this one takes place in the CSI "universe" but doesn't really feature the characters to any great extent. Grissom gets a cameo and others get name-checked. I was just telling a story, so if you're here to read about the detailed further adventures of your favorite TV characters, now is the time to jump off ship. With that in mind . . .

Characters: Joseph Brown is mine. He's second in command of the Time Patrol and part of my repetory. On the odd chance you absolutely fall in love with him and must use him, let me know about it first. The Time Patrol are a quick-moving, wide-ranging military organization. Sort of like UN Peacekeeping Forces but secretive and not temporally bound. Oh, and they regenerate.

Hawkins and Miller are not mine, they come from "Innocence and Beauty". Granted, I was working off one line in the story and thus made everything up, but if they appear elsewhere in the tale and aren't like this at all, I can only apologize. They could be characters in the show, for all I know, but I kind of doubt it. So I wouldn't go using them without asking her first.

Emma, who's mentioned at several points, belongs to TriplePirouette and is very much not my character. So hands off!

Any CSI characters are obviously not mine either.

Phew. I think that does it. Any further questions, I'm more than happy to oblige.

From "Innocence and Beauty" (she's almost done with it, so go over now to get a good seat for the finale!):

"[Miller], uh, he slipped up at a crime scene. While he was working he started to get personal. He wasn't being unprofessional. He was just processing the scene, but his mouth was running, ya know? And it wasn't even something he should have been hiding, or afraid to talk about... anyway, the case was about a serial killer- killed kids, teens, found out when we caught him it was because he had been tormented in school when he was young. But Miller didn't know any of that when he was processing the scene. In the crowd surrounding the scene our killer had come back, and he listened to Miller tell Hawkins about his ten year old daughter's gymnastic's competition. Miller resigned, moved out of state. Jessica's remains were so mutilated that they decided to have her cremated . . ."

And thus our story begins.

---

"You have kids, Hawkins?"

The question stopped him dead in his tracks, flung out of nowhere without warning. But it wasn't the question itself that halted him, but the voice asking it.

"Excuse me?" he said, the words barely carrying over the near-empty parking lot. It had just rained and the asphalt was shimmering with the thin coat of wetness reflected off the lights above. The sky was black tonight, darker than usual, the typical light pollution from the strip not even making a dent in the opacity.

Hawkins stood still, his body poised. His coat sported the telltale bulge of a firearm, but he made no move toward it. A shadow unbent itself from the portion of the wall where the corners met, walking toward him in an unhurried fashion. The newcomer was thin, whip-like, dressed neatly in near-black clothing that looked just casual enough to not be a uniform.

Neither man said a word until the new arrival reached Hawkins. "You have kids, Hawkins?" the man asked again, not as insistent as before.

Hawkins wet his lips before answering. "Three," he said, looking the man directly in the eye. "But one's in college and I barely see her anymore. I just get the bills." There wasn't any humor in the sentence.

"So you have two." Shot out rapidly, a spear almost too fast to catch.

"Not quite. One lives with his mother. The youngest, she'd thought he'd do better growing up with her. Every Christmas I get a picture. Good lookin' boy."

"Then you just have one."

"Yes. And the little runt watches too much damn TV."

The man stared at him for what felt like too many seconds. Hawkins kept his face still, resisting the severe urge to back away and get the hell out.

Then, suddenly, the man shifted his stance. "At ease, Hawkins."

Hawkins relaxed so sharply it felt like a rubber band snapping inside of him. "Sir," he said, his hand automatically moving into the usual reaction.

The man stopped it with a look. "Save it," he said tersely, although there was a small smile that even the half-light couldn't hide. "You're still in cover. Don't want people getting ideas that you're some kind of spy."

"Of course not, sir," Hawkins replied with a straight face. "So you're not here to pull me out?"

The man shook his head. His gaze was skimming the roofs of the surrounding buildings, darting and sure. "No. We're still going to need you here a little while longer." With a twitch of his head he indicated for Hawkins to follow him as he started to walk out of the parking lot. "And lose the 'sirs', Hawkins, or your co-workers are going to get the wrong idea." He paused in his stride for a second, thinking. "Commander, too. In fact, just call me Joe. I don't think the boss will mind if we relax protocol for the day."

"If you say so . . ." he bit off the rest of the sentence only with an effort. "Why are you here, then?"

"Kids, actually," Brown said, shoving his hands into his pockets and walking on his heels, a casual rambling that made Hawkins feel as if he were the one out of place. "Dead ones, specifically."

"Really?" It had been years since Hawkins could honestly say that he was surprised. But every streak had to be broken eventually. "If you don't mind my saying, that seems a bit of our mandate. With all due respect."

"Yeah, I don't remember that being part of the charter either." He was staring at the ground, his brow furrowed as they came around the corner. This late barely anyone was outside unless you were entering or leaving the building, although he could see plenty of lights on inside, especially from the labs. Those people never seemed to go home.

Within a few steps Brown was a stride ahead of the shorter Hawkins, who was doing his best not to appear to be running to catch up. Over his shoulder Brown said, "But if they ever wrote up a job description for this gig, neither of us would be able to lift it. I like to think that's what keeps it interesting. Most days." He stopped in front of the entrance to the precinct and for a moment Hawkins thought he was going to walk right inside like he belonged there.

But instead he turned and crossed the street, chewing on his lip thoughtfully. Hawkins had no choice but to follow as Brown made a path right for the bus stop, already settling himself onto the bench as Hawkins reached him. Brown sat back, folding his arms behind his head, his eyes half-closed.

"You normally don't take the bus," Brown said as the other man sat down tentatively beside him, "but a friend of yours showed up from your college days and so you're just keeping him company until it arrives. Which won't be for twenty minutes, so we have some time to sit and chat."

"About dead kids," Hawkins ventured, eyeing him uneasily.

"Mm. I know, you're a pretty morbid bastard when you reminisce." He shifted on the bench, crossing one leg over the other. "A few months back, you had an incident where one of your co-worker's kids were killed. Am I right?"

Hawkins felt his mouth go dry. "Yeah. Jessica Miller."

Brown glanced at him, his eyes still slits. "Tell me about it."

Hawkins sat forward a little, rubbing his palms on his thighs. "Her father and I were processing a scene. It was outside, the killer had slit her throat and dumped her out on the sidewalk." He swallowed thickly. "At least that's where it ended, as far as we could tell. The area had been cordoned off and we were scouring it for evidence. As usual there was a crowd of onlookers, the curious types, the ones who just want to see a dead body. You learn to ignore them after a while." He laced his hands together, running the fingers back and forth. "Miller, he was an odd one. All the blood and stuff never seemed to bother him, you'd have thought he was working in a cornfield . . . he had a habit of humming to himself on the job. Strange, never knew what song it was, either. But we could be neck deep in guts and he'd . . . he'd be fine. Me, I was all right but when it was kids, that never sat too well with me." Hawkins let out a slow breath and glanced at Brown, who hadn't moved. "But this isn't what you wanted to hear about, was it?"

"Keep going," Brown murmured. "You'd be surprised what becomes important."

"Anyway, like I said, Miller was able to work, like, normal. So we're working around this kid's body and I'm telling you, it was a mess. She must have struggled before he killed her, because it looked like he had taken it out on her. Blood everywhere, the body was not in a good state. But this . . . apparently it reminds Miller of his own daughter. He starts talking about her, just chatter to pass the time. Anywhere but a crime scene it'd be normal." He wiped a hand across his forehead, feeling the thin sheen of sweat. "I should have been paying more attention, I guess, but I was trying not to think too hard about the kid and just sort of tuning out Miller and . . ."

"Who heard him?" A young woman came in and sat down at the edge of the bench, her arms pulled close to her body, her stance tentative. Brown glanced over at her with a friendly smile, which she returned nervously.

Hawkins looked over at the girl and raised an eyebrow to Brown but the man didn't react, which he took as a sign to continue. "The killer had come back. Sometimes they do that, either for the thrill of being there and not getting caught, or because they like to see their handiwork again . . ." he heard Brown's impatient intake of breath and hurriedly forged on, ". . . anyway, Miller was talking about his kid, his daughter. Jessica. About her gymnastic meet." The girl was staring at them both now with wide eyes. Hawkins didn't even know how to be reassuring. "That's not where he got her though. He must have watched the place, saw Miller pick her up so that he knew what she looked like." She was sitting almost half-off the bench, her breathing coming faster.

"Why not? That makes sense." Brown's voice was placid, they were merely discussing the weather. "Better to get her in a isolated place. It'll make things easier later."

"It did." Hawkins leaned forward, tugged at his chin. "Got her when she was walking to school." The girl's gasp was just audible enough. "By the time anyone realized she was missing, nobody had the first idea where to even look. He had her away and all the time in the world."

"How bad was the body?" If Brown noticed their companion's distress, he didn't comment on it.

"Bad." Hawkins eyed the girl. "Do you want me to . . ."

"Describe it to me. Exactly what he did. Every detail."

The next sound was a clatter followed by a rapidly retreating series of footsteps. Brown craned his neck to watch the girl leave, his face expressionless. Hawkins said nothing.

"Hawkins. I'm waiting . . ." he said without turning back.

"Uh, sir . . ."

"Drop the sir and answer the damn question," Brown snapped, his voice spiked with rods. "What did she look like?"

Hawkins put his hands together, pressed them against his face. Then just as quickly he let them drop. "That's just it, I, ah, I never saw the body."

Brown raised an eyebrow. "Never? How is that now?"

"It was handled mostly internally, the case." Hawkins stared forward, remembering. "The department wanted to keep it as quiet as possible, both for Miller's privacy and to avoid a panic among the force. Everyone worked extra shifts that week to try and track the bastard down." Hawkins smiled, the edges of his face crinkling. "For once I didn't have to remember to act tired, we were in and out so much that nobody noticed that I worked for like three days straight. But I wanted this done, we all did."

A group of officers came out the front door of the precinct, laughing and joking with one another, their behavior rattling up and down the otherwise empty street. Brown made a noise that might have been a reply to Hawkins or perhaps was a comment on the others. "Yet you knew the body was in bad shape without seeing it?"

Narrowing his eyes, Hawkins replied, "I had a glimpse of the pictures at the scene, which was enough. And I found one of the girls who did the autopsy crying in the break room later that day. She was pretty rattled, told me way more than I wanted to know about it. I was in and out so much on cases that by the time things were settled, the kid was dead and buried. He didn't even have a funeral for her, guess he didn't want to put himself through it." Hawkins spread his hands, glancing at Brown. "That's as much as I know."

"Hm." The other man frowned, clasping his hands together and staring at the sidewalk. "That's interesting." The edge of his words were frayed slightly by the roar of a bus pulling in, like it was drawing in all the available air.

Hawkins cocked his head to the side. "How is that . . . interesting? That's not the word I would have chosen."

"Because," Brown said, standing up just as the headlights from the bus flooded the shelter, wreathing him in brightness and reducing all his details to shadow, "Jessica Miller is a nice story. She never existed."

* * * * *

With a clang the door inside the prison slammed shut, cutting off the shouts and curses and catcalls of the other inmates that smeared the concrete walls. The new corridor was empty, extending about maybe fifty feet down before ending in a solid brick wall. There were no windows, and the only illumination was a series of dim fluorescent lights that lined the ceiling, painting everything in sickly yellowish shadows. A series of solid metal doors lined the walls, maybe three doors on each side. None of them possessed windows or any feature other than a small slit that perhaps food could be slid into.

The two men stood just inside, the silence around them aching, almost begging to be broken.

Brown was the first to venture. "He's in one of these, then?"

Hawkins nodded, watching as the other man took a few steps down the corridor, one hand tracing the wall and turned so that his back was almost against it. "Yeah, he got life and they stuck him here so to reduce how much of a stain he can make on society."

"Careful," Brown murmured, walking up to the first door and tapping against it lightly. In the quiet the flat sound rang like a church bell. "Don't forget you're supposed to be objective here." He moved to the next one. "For all you know, his killing spree might inspire the greatest detective of the next generation to take up law. And in doing so, prevent an even worse serial killer."

Hawkins stayed where he was, but folded his arms over his chest. "We were told not to look for patterns here. That was always the rule."

"Oh, I know," Brown replied, walking up to each door and peering at it like he could see through the metal. "You're ground level, you can't go looking for connections . . . you start doing that and you get paralyzed, start to believe that no matter what you do you're going to affect something." He gave Hawkins a sidelong glance, grinning. "That's why we like keeping you gents in blissful ignorance."

Cautiously, Hawkins began to follow Brown down the hallway. His footsteps tapped uneasily, the edges of the hard notes wavering. "I don't remember them using that term during the briefing."

"No, we find nicer ways to put it, otherwise no one would volunteer." He appeared to be counting the doors, the seriousness of his expression at odds with the lightness in his voice. "I think at the last meeting we decided to call it 'a temporal fog.' I'm pretty sure someone got soldier of the month for that. Wish I'd thought of it, to be honest. It's kind of catchy." His voice was a sharded reflection in the empty corridor, and Hawkins swore that he could hear the murmured stirrings of the people behind the doors.

"Suh . . . Joe-" he started to say.

But Brown had already stopped in front of the next to last door. "Here we go. I'll take that key off you now, Hawkins."

The other man halted in mid-step. "I'm not sure I know what you're talking about-"

"Left jacket pocket, there's a large silver key." He didn't even turn around. His lips were moving during his pauses, as if keeping a count. "It must have fallen off the guard's keyring when they were checking us in. Good thing we found it. If the wrong person had it, they could potentially have a problem." He held a hand out.

Hawkins dug into his pocket, wondering why he was even surprised to find his fingers wrapping around a solid metal object. Without a word he handed the key over to Brown, who took it without comment and slid it into the lock.

Brown pushed, and the door swung open with a metallic wheeze. He swept in after it, leaving Hawkins to assume that he was to follow.

"Hello there," he heard Brown say even as he reached the doorway. It was dark inside the cell, with the only illumination the sickly dirty-white block of light feebly poking its way inside. It smelled both sterile and dank, like the air itself was contaminated beyond all attempts to clean it. The opposite corner held a partially covered hole that could be assumed to be a toilet. A single chair and table, made of concrete and attached to the wall, took up the other corner. The room held no other features, and it reminded Hawkins of nothing less than a coffin with furnishings. And not even comfortable, at that.

"Hello," came the answering voice from the center of the room. Hawkins shifted his position past the open door so he could get a better view of the inside.

He was sitting crosslegged on the ground, squinting and holding one hand up to shield his face from what was probably more light than he normally saw in a week. He was dressed in a bright orange jumpsuit, an outfit that hung loosely on his frame, although the contours of his arms suggested he still retained some muscles. He was bald, his skin gradually turning the pale shades that came when too much time was spent indoors. Otherwise he was very plain, the kind of person you wouldn't think to look at twice were you to pass him on the street.

Hawkins felt a chill go down his spine. I've run that scene through my head so many times, and I still don't remember seeing you there.

The man was staring at Brown with intent bemusement. "It's too early for my daily glimpse of the outside world," he said, "and I somehow doubt you're here to inform me that I've been released." He shifted his legs on the floor and folded his arms over his chest. "So should I wait for you to explain, or would you like me to guess?"

"John-Michael Kursick," Brown said, bending down into a crouch and pressing his hands together. He stared at him for a few seconds, as if waiting for some kind of answer. The other man stared back, one eyebrow gradually going up in his own form of a question.

He was about to answer when Brown suddenly put out a hand. "Special Agent Joseph Brown, it's a real pleasure to meet you finally. I've heard quite a bit about you." Kursick stared at him warily before tentatively returning the gesture.

"What is this?" he asked with a slow, simmering anger. He slid back, his gaze studying Brown without seeming to find any kind of crack in his facade. If there even was one. For the first time he noticed Hawkins and seeing him brought a little bit of light into the man's eyes. In the dimness, a part of the pupil could have gleamed.

"Oh," he said, the anger subsiding abruptly and replaced by a calculating placidity. "You. You, I know. You look just the same as when I last saw you." His smile became somehow both smooth and jagged. "Of course, you were also pointing a gun in my face and shouting the last time, if I'm remembering correctly." He tapped his head, the smile drawing itself inward. "Ah, my memories are about all I have in here now. Fortunately I have a good one. One does lose track of time while one's in here, though. How long has it been?"

"Not long enough," Hawkins found himself gasping out, almost reaching for his gun before remembering that he had checked it at the guards' gate. He wondered if Brown had kept his own, but suspected that the man had arrived here without any kind of weapon.

Kursick swiveled his head so he was facing Brown again. "I don't think he likes me very much." His voice was somewhere south of oily, with just enough grains in the flow to bring a coarseness to every word, one you didn't feel until the sentence was out and covering you.

"I don't see how that's possible." Brown rocked back on his heels, letting his back rest against the wall. "You strike me as a likeable fellow. Perhaps you two just got off on the wrong foot."

"I'm not even sure why he hates me so much," Kursick replied, caught somewhere between playing the game and lapping up Brown's attention. His eyes narrowed slightly. "But he's the police and the police have never really liked me. We don't understand each other."

Brown frowned, glancing down for a moment. "Well, I'm not the police, so maybe things will go better with us."

"I hope so." Kursick looked over at Hawkins, a pout almost evident in his face. "They kicked my door in, didn't even let me explain." His fingertips were stroking the floor, practically petting it. For some reason the motion made Hawkins sick to his stomach. His eyes went somewhere glassy, a thin film spread over the irises. Stroke. "And I would have explained, if they had let me." Stroke. The motion was a slithery whisper. Stroke. "It wasn't like she could have. It was too late."

"She?" Brown didn't take his eyes off the other man. But he made a quick gesture with his fingers that indicated Hawkins was to jump in.

"His, ah, his last victim." Hawkins did his best to achieve the professional flatness that used to come so easily, but right now seemed to be eluding him. The scene kept coming back to him. the pristine darkness of the room as he had kicked the door in, the shivering stillness of the air that day, glass waiting to finally crack. "Sally Purcell, thirteen years old. Had run away from home the day before." And the smell, the kind that crept into your awareness slowly, that let you soak in it before the realization of what it was finally hit. "She was probably cold and hungry when he came across her, probably promised her some food, a place to sleep for the night."

"It's all true," Kursick said, his face somehow gone rounder. "She would have told them that." Stroke. It was a snake curling, unwound and unbent. Inside out. "But she didn't have any words left." Stroke. One hand kept clenching and unclenching, massaging empty air. "I squeezed them out of her."

That hand snapped up, almost independently of the rest of him, grabbing the space inches from Brown's nose. The man never flinched., although he did blink and refocus. With deliberate care he pushed the hand away, gently guiding it downward. "Right," Brown said, without expression. "But you weren't going to stop there, were you? They interrupted you before it was over. Hm?"

"Yes." He made the word more than one syllable, running his tongue over the pronunciation until it was a caress. "I couldn't get them all out. She was too stuffed." The bathroom had smelled of residual vomit, too recently cleaned and spliced with the acrid scent of fresh alcohol. "I was going to cut out the rest, like I had done with the others." A glower came over his face, a petulant sneer. "But they stopped me. Them. Him and the other one."

"He had strangled her," Hawkins explained, even as Brown didn't acknowledge him. With the cell door wide open the tiny room was still stifling, lacking all ventilation. Hawkins could remember the killer's room exactly, how all the curtains were drawn, the splintering sound the door had made as it busted open, the charging cadence of the footsteps behind him. Them. It hadn't been just him, that was right. There had been another. "I . . . we, when we searched the room we found a variety of knives, most laid out neatly on the kitchen counter. Some of them had been used recently. The rest had been freshly sharpened."

Kursick gave a little shudder, both hands flat on the floor now. He seemed to be expanding in the space available, crowding the rest of them out. "This, this one here . . ." he pointed at Hawkins with a stiffened finger, "he was angry, he was so mad when he came in. But the other one . . . " his expression changed to a shape both put-upon and innocent. "What he felt, I don't know what to call it. He never shouted, he never raised his voice but he . . . he took me and he . . . " the man winced at the memory, "slammed my head against the counter. Once, no, twice. He, ah, he cut me and it went . . ." he rubbed a finger over the trouble spot, as if the scar still remained. The image wasn't clear in Hawkins' mind, it was a light shown against frosted glass, smeared afterimages in frozen air fogging the scene. There was another man, of course. He wouldn't have gone in alone. But what had he said? "It went into my eye. The blood did, not the cut." Kursick giggled, sharing his own private joke. "And he kept saying to me, this wasn't supposed to happen." His gaze darted from one man to the other. "But I don't think he was talking to me. Maybe he was trying to tell her?"

"Do you think he knew you?" The question seemed thrown out at random, Brown flicking it out like a discarded cigarette. Kursick blinked again, too slowly, as if using his eyelids as movie screens to run the scene past him again.

"Him? Hm." He licked his lips, first one, then the other. "Oh." A smile trickled onto his face, a door opening to let a crack of light into the room. "Why, yes. Yes, I did. Once before." The smile still wide on his face, he turned to stare at Hawkins. "He wasn't as chatty the second time, was he now?"

"You're lucky he didn't kill you, you son of a-" Hawkins stepped forward, unsure of what he was going to do, or at least unable to admit to himself.

"No." Brown snapped the word out without even looking up, and the tone of it was enough to break Hawkins out of whatever had been happening to him. He let himself step back, letting out a shaky breath. I really don't want to be here. Where the hell are you going with this, Commander?

"That's right," Brown added, speaking to Kursick again, almost sliding forward onto one knee. "You saw them once before. Remember that day?" His voice had gone soft, veering toward a soothing hum. Kursick nodded just slightly. "What was her name?"

"Jill. Jill Hodges." Hawkins felt his stomach clench listening to the other man pronounce her name with sort of longing. "She looked just like someone I used to know, especially in her laugh. It was just like . . ." His gaze went distant, and then he seemed to shake himself with his own mirth. "I wanted to hear it again, to prove that I was better than it. That it wouldn't bother me anymore." He rubbed his hands together, creating a slimy slick sound.

"He dragged her to a warehouse," Hawkins found himself interjecting. "It had been closed recently and even the security guards were gone. Nobody would have come around until Monday." He pinched the bridge of his nose, wished again that his gun was on him. "He brought her in on a Friday night. By Monday he had dumped what was left of her outside."

"I took my time," Kursick said proudly. "I had all the time in the world." His fingers made whisking motions, sharpened flesh knives. "Getting the laugh out was just a matter of finding it first. You have to be very methodical or you'll lose it. It's important to do these things right, you know."

"Absolutely," Brown agreed flatly. "There were so many of them, too. The world kept giving you so many chances to get it right." Suddenly he was staring at Hawkins. "Give me a name."

"What?" What game are you playing here?

"A name," Brown hissed. "The other victims. What were their names?"

"Oh, ah . . ." Hawkins hesitated for a second, feeling unsteady. He didn't want to admit that he knew them, but of course he did. None of the names ever escaped him. "Gregory Burls."

"Oh, he had to be a football player," Kursick noted without prompting. Brown was watching him very carefully. "Such a nice smile, and those broad shoulders. And it was just the kind of sound his head made, loose and hollow."

Hawkins swallowed to tried to get rid of the bad taste in his mouth. "Robert Greyson."

"The one with the glasses." His voice ventured toward a singsong tone but veered away at the last second, thankfully. "He loved those, cried when I broke them. At least I think that's why he cried. Wore a white shirt that day, it was such a bright day. But the shirt . . . wasn't a good idea. The stains never come out." Sinking into his own memories, he seemed to be forgetting that he was even in prison. Seeing him so contented was straining a piece in Hawkins near to breaking.

He couldn't take anymore of this. "Sir, what the hell do you think you're-"

"One more." Hawkins expected Brown to prompt him again but instead the man forged forward. "And what about . . . Jessica?"

"J-Jessica." For the first time Hawkins saw some hesitation in the other man. "I . . . I remember her."

"Of course you do." Brown curved his body so that crouched he was almost bent around the front of the killer. "As you've demonstrated, you have such a good memory. So why don't you tell me how you killed her?"

"I, uh, I killed her," he repeated, licking his top lip. He hadn't seemed nervous before, but now it was flooding into him. One hand kept twitching, faster and faster.

"You killed a lot of people. But this one, come on, she was special, wasn't she?" Brown's smile had gone somewhere past danger. "You've got so many details locked up in your head and you've been so forthcoming so far . . . why not share with us here? How'd you kill her?"

"She . . . she was the cop's daughter," he blurted out, looking to both men as if for a reward. "Right?" The nervous smile, fading against Brown's relentless gaze. "I got her at the gym, that's where I found her."

"That's right," Hawkins whispered.

"Of course it is," Brown replied. "That's the story everyone knows. Each and every person involved could repeat that detail. But there are some details that only you know, John. So . . . what are they?"

"She's dead. Because I killed her." The fist closed, opened again, closed a little bit tighter. Hawkins found himself feeling braced but there was nothing to lean on. The whole atmosphere had become pinched, squeezed between two fingers that he couldn't see. "That's . . ."

"What were her last words?" He pressed ahead, forcing the other man to flinch back. "Did she cry, call out for her father, curse at you, which was it? Why don't you tell us?"

Kursick stammered. "Don't . . . are you making fun of me?" He shifted, pulling his legs in so that he could stand up.

"Why can't you tell us?" Brown asked, half-standing himself. "You can remember the details of every single person but you can't get your act together enough to tell me about Jessica Miller?"

"I know, I know," he insisted, his gaze going hard. "But don't you dare, don't you dare make fun of me-"

"Then tell me how she died," Brown shouted. "You fat sack of-"

With a roar Kursick lifted himself off the ground, far faster than Hawkins even thought possible for the man, both hands immediately reaching for Brown's throat in a blur of jumpsuit brightness. Hawkins went for a gun that wasn't there and leapt forward anyway, not even sure if he was shouting.

Brown danced back a step, rocketing to his feet and grabbing Kursick by one arm, twisting to the side and pulling him closer with a jerk. He got out of the way just in time to wind up behind the other man, letting his face slam into the wall. Coughing and sputtering, pawing at his face, he backed away even as Brown kicked his legs out from under him, forcing him violently down into a sitting position. Hawkins had only taken a step, was about to move into the second.

"She's dead," the man blubbered. "And I killed her. Isn't that enough? Isn't it?" He put his face in his hands. "He shouldn't have talked so much. He shouldn't have."

"Listen to me very carefully." Brown was behind him now, crouched with his mouth near his ear and both hands on his shoulder. "If you're lying to me, I will make you suffer." The man stiffened a little at the rasped underside of his words. "I won't kill you, because you want that, because it's your only way out. But there are other ways." One hand went down to a place somewhere on his back. Kursick gasped, despite himself. "A little pressure and a vertebra goes out of place, just enough so that you can still move. But it will hurt, every second of every day. For as long as you live. And I will ensure that you live a very long time." He became inches nearer, and gaining. "So I'm going to ask once more . . . how did Jessica Miller die?"

Kursick's lips moved for several seconds before words finally came out. "I don't know." Even in the hushed space, it was difficult to hear. "I killed her. That's all I know."

Brown's face betrayed nothing as he stared straight ahead, past Kursick's shoulder and even past Hawkins. "Right," was all he said, when he did speak. Smoothly, he stood up and stepped around the killer. Kursick, not ready for Brown to go away, almost fell backwards, catching himself at the last second.

"Let's go," he said to Hawkins, tapping the man on the arm and indicating the way out.

The two men had almost reached the door when Kursick's now small voice came at them. "Hey. Hey."

Turning, they found him staring at them with his hands folded, a child looking for approval. "You . . . you won't tell them, will you? That I didn't know? Please, don't."

Brown looked away for a second, biting his lip. Then a razor's smile came onto his face as he met the man's stare. "Don't worry, I won't say a word. They won't take it away from you."

His face broke out into a huge smile. "Oh, thank you," he said, clasping his hands together, rocking back and forth a little. "Thank you so much, thank you, thank you, thank-"

Brown closed the door, shutting it with a loud clang that mercifully cut off the rest of his praise, although the image of his grin seemed to linger in the stale air for just a few seconds too long. Hawkins relocked the door while Brown leaned against the wall, arms folded over his chest and regarding the empty air.

Hawkins decided to breach the silence first. "He didn't remember a thing about her."

"No, he didn't," Brown agreed. "Unlike the others. Just enough to know the basics of the story." He drummed his fingers against the wall. "And I don't like what that means. Because it's more than just him."

It took Hawkins a few seconds to realize that Brown was staring at him with something more than just casual study. "Wait . . . what do you mean?"

"He said that Miller was there with you when he was arrested. You agreed." Hawkins said nothing, unable to dispute the fact. Brown pushed himself away from the wall, striding over until he was shoulder to shoulder with the other man. He tilted his head to the side, letting the question drift to the surface. "But how could that be, if his daughter had just been killed? He would have been taken off the case. Right?"

Hawkins could only nod as Brown put one hand on his shoulder briefly and walked past. "Come on," he called back, his words caught in a cone of echo, "we've got more work to do."

* * * * *

With a grunt Hawkins heaved himself through the window, almost losing his balance and landing on the floor head-first. He twisted at the last second and managed to come in with a fashion somewhat resembling grace. Looking up as he regained his footing, he saw that Brown was leaning up against the wall, one foot propped on it. He seemed to be whistling a soft tune.

"Is there a reason we had to break into my own job?" Hawkins asked, glowering a bit at the other man.

"Well," Brown noted, "we obviously couldn't have you being seen with me. That would just raise questions that you probably don't want to answer."

Hawkins considered this. "Okay, but why couldn't I have just come in the front door and met you inside?"

Brown grinned and shrugged. "Perhaps I thought you needed the practice." He tapped the man on the arm and started to walk down the corridor, a lanky slashed shadow in the dim lighting. Casting his voice back, he said, "How many people knew that Miller had a daughter?"

Hawkins jogged a bit to catch up to Brown's long-legged strides. "Most everyone, I think. Miller was a . . . bit of a talkative man. A lot of times he would stop people in the hallways to tell them about his latest case or ask them about theirs. I always used to find him in the lab, going over stuff with the technicians or trying to get them to let him fiddle with the newest equipment. A lot of stuff just fascinated him, it seemed."

"Hm," was all Brown said. They were in a row of offices now, all the doors shut as either the daytime shift had gone home or the nighttime shift was out in the field. The place was eerily quiet, almost like they were existing between moments. It wasn't something Hawkins had felt for the longest time, ever since he had gone undercover and let himself get restricted to this time zone. A certain sense of stillness existed, where seconds became frozen and hovered like the aftermath of an invisible snowstorm, the crystals numbing the skin without being seen.

"He was here all the time," Hawkins continued, not sure if Brown's quiet was his way of prompting for more details or his way of processing. Either way, the extended silence was wearing on Hawkins. Perhaps I was more used to Miller than I thought. "Or at least it seemed that way. I used to wonder when he'd sleep, I asked him and he said, who has time for that."

"Name three things about his daughter," Brown suddenly ordered. He was going from door to door, much like he had done in the prison earlier, examining each and every door.

Almost instantly Hawkins said, "She liked gymnastics. I remember him saying that during our last conversation out in the field. He went on about it for a while, like she had just started it." He frowned. "Although the one he kept talking he made it sound like she had been doing it for some time. But that was the first I remember of him mentioning it."

"And what else?" The edge of his mouth twitched. "Other than that she was a girl. Dig deep, I know your memory is good, Hawkins, that's partially why we assigned you here. What she was like, any details? If he talked about her all the time, there must be something. Favorite color, stuffed animals, funny or cute things she did. Fathers never stop talking about every thing their daughters do, no matter how much people don't care." Hawkins didn't respond, and Brown moved onto the next door. "But I bet you're not going to have any stories like that, are you?"

"If you know the answers why do you keep asking me?" Hawkins did his best to keep the frustration out of his voice. "Why do you even need me here, then?"

Brown frowned and tried the lock on one of the doors. It didn't budge and he took a step back. For a moment he thought the other man was going to kick it in. "Because I've got the pieces, but right now they're all from different puzzles. And I can't put them together in a way that makes sense. But I know they have to somehow."

Hawkins raised an eyebrow. "And you think I can?"

Brown laughed roughly. "Don't take this the wrong way, but at this point I'll take what I can get. Miller could show up and explain everything and I'd be okay with that." He lifted one foot but then appeared to change his mind, forging further on down. "You've got a ground perspective that I don't, Hawkins, being here. So there's a chance you might see something that I don't. The key to all of this."

"If there's even a key." Hawkins scraped the floor with one foot, trying not to hear his own whispered voice. Every sound was too loud here, where they never stopped analyzing. "I've found from working here, from these cases that . . . it's never just one thing that decides the solution. It's all the little pieces adding up, it's the mistakes that people makes and the details that they leave out. All of that makes the big pictures. You don't need the pieces, but the flaws and the cracks between them."

Brown smiled at him. "Very nice, Hawkins. You are getting good at this." He stepped back again, inches from the wall. "Although there is a way you can help me out immediately."

"Yes?" Hawkins responded cautiously.

Brown cupped his chin with one hand. "Tell me which office I need to break into."

Hawkins actually laughed this time. "I was wondering when you'd get to that." He walked to the nearest door, putting one hand on the glass. There was a name of it but it wasn't anything that he cared about. "But I didn't know where you wanted to go. Miller's been gone now ever since his daughter's . . . since whatever happened. All of his stuff is gone."

Brown squinted thoughtfully. "Maybe. Maybe not. Which office used to be his?"

"This one here." Hawkins walked a few more doors down, to one that was tucked in the corner of the corridor, a bit separate from the others but with the same utilitarian design sense. Blinds over the door glass kept anyone from seeing inside. "But it's occupied now, they gave it to the new guy."

"He got replaced awful quickly," Brown noted, his voice neutral. He had joined Hawkins at the door, running his fingers over the name on the glass, but not tracing the letters. Instead he seemed to be tracing whatever name used to be there, or even the one before. "Are crime scene investigators that easy to come by?" He bent down, nudging Hawkins aside as he began to play with the lock on the door.

"We generally have lots of applicants for any given positions, but it's a pretty strict set of qualifications. They won't just hire anyone." As he talked Brown kept fiddling with the door, his attention apparently focused on the task at hand. "They did get this guy fast, but I think it was just a matter of good timing."

"And you believe that?" Brown asked. The question slid out of him easily, almost casually.

"Like you said, my job isn't to look for patterns. On some level everything is a coincidence." Distantly he heard a gaggle of voices mingled and compressed. Oh, no. As much as he tried to pretend they weren't growing closer, after a few seconds it was clear that was the case.

"Mm," Brown agreed absently. He reached into his jacket pocket and taken out a slim device, almost like a metallic toothpick, and began to poke at the lock with it from all sides. There was no urgency in his actions, in fact they were almost languid, as if this was just some familiar ritual he had to undergo before the portal could be opened.

From the edge of the corner, a group of shadows speared the floor, stretching until near the opposite wall and slowly becoming stouter. The voices were drawing nearer, words breaking out of the distance imposed static.

". . . hear about the prison . . . my buddy in corrections . . ."

"Ah, sir . . ." Hawkins said, staring at the shadows at the far end of the corridor as if he expected them to suddenly bend and reach for them.

". . . key went missing, he said . . . or less tore the place apart . . ."

Brown was probing the lock delicately, one eye almost closed. "You're not trying to ruin my concentration, are you, Hawkins? Because I'd hate to have to start all over . . ."

". . . were trying to keep it quiet but notice how we did no transfers today . . ."

He'd be able to explain his presence here, but Brown wouldn't be so easy. If he could convince the man to hide in a closet until they went by then he could clear the others out and give them more time to work. Looking around, he did his best to gauge how long he had to get Brown out of the way.

". . . yeah, whole place was just locked down but you know what the funny part . . ."

Of course, that meant he had to do two calculations, one where Brown went voluntarily and one where he had to drag the other man down the hallway. Neither of which gave him much of a window. The voices were so near now that he could hear the footsteps underlying their tones, the constant slippery rhythms of their tappings.

". . . and this is why they're better off locked in the box over there, honestly . . ."

Almost around the corner now. "Listen, sir," Hawkins said breathlessly, "we're going to have to-"

"Ssh, Hawkins," Brown said irritably, cursing under his breath and jamming the device in from another angle. "Whatever it is, I think it can wait a minute."

". . . after locking the place down and almost throwing the whole place into a panic . . ."

It was like he could see the glints of their badges and hear the squeak of their leather shoes right up against his back, the floor's glistening reflection revealing distorted visages growing clearer. A river of souls under their feet finally becoming freshwater. "Ah, honestly, I don't think it can . . ."

". . . want to know where they found it . . . no, come on, try and guess first . . ."

Brown stood up suddenly, a limp reed gone abruptly rigid, forcing Hawkins to dart back a step. "Fine, then," he said, jamming the device back into his pocket and sighing. "If this really can't wait, Hawkins . . ."

". . . well they found it in somebody's extra pair of pants, over in the locker rooms . . ."

Shaking his head, he reached forward and turned the doorknob. With a click, the door opened easily, swinging in without even a squeak. ". . . then I guess we might as well discuss it in here."

". . . I mean, honestly, are they idiots or something, it's like they don't look . . ."

With a truncated flourish Brown swept into the office, motioning for Hawkins to follow suit. The other man did without a word, casting one last glance toward the approaching shadows.

". . . like they can't see what's right in front of their faces no matter how hard they-"

The door quietly sealed, cutting off all other sound.

* * * * *

Inside, Brown stood perfectly still on one side of the door, gesturing for Hawkins to stand on the other side. The footsteps came closer, although the words weren't distinct anymore, merely garbled moments of cut-up language. He put a finger to his lips, even though Hawkins had no desire to do anything that resembled speaking.

A pair of shadows grew large, loping across the translucent glass. Brown watched them carefully, his eyes tracking their movements, the only sign that he was anything other than a statue. The darkness didn't soften his features in the slightest, instead making them more severe and oddly timeless.

The voices went by in a slow-motion Doppler parade, finally receding after what seemed like an hour. The only sign that Hawkins had stopped breathing was his gasp when he finally started again.

Brown was the first to act, moving into the office with a sudden crisp efficiency. "We should be quick," he said, pacing around the contours of the room, his eyes darting back and forth as if looking for an object he only vaguely suspected the existence of. "I'm close to blowing your cover as it is. I'm sorry, I . . ." he stopped himself, letting the rest of what he was going to say dangle into the unknown.

Something in his voice made Hawkins step forward. "Sir? Joe?" The man didn't answer, instead pivoting in one corner of the room, examining a bookshelf in the dark. "What do you mean by-"

A slim bright light snapped out suddenly, forcing Hawkins to blink in surprise. Brown had taken a tiny flashlight from somewhere up his sleeve and was illuminating various portions of the room. In the oval haze, different shades of books appeared, a glass jar containing an object that went by too quickly to be identified, and a few displays of pinned butterflies and other bugs scattered neatly on other shelves.

"This guy's got some interesting hobbies," Brown commented, the light darting from one spot of the room to another, quivering almost in anticipation of what it might reveal next. "Who is he, again?"

Hawkins walked over to the desk, noting how everything was arranged, existing in an almost organized clutter. It made a certain sense, if you stared at it long enough. "Gil Grissom. A forensics guy out of Los Angeles."

"Really?" Brown knelt down, shining the light into a wastebasket, the blowback from the light casting oblique highlights on his face. "That's not exactly close by. What prompted the sudden move?"

Hawkins shrugged. "Don't know. Word I heard is that he was trying to get here for a while, then the department went out and actively recruited him. I keep hearing different stories."

"He sure had good timing." Brown rooted through the papers in the trash for a few seconds before swatting at the can and standing up again, shining the light toward the ceiling. He picked up what appeared to be a jar of bugs preserved in amber that was sitting on the desk, letting a cone of light shine through it, projecting a darkly speckled splatter of gold on the opposite wall. "And he certainly doesn't seem like the type to have a beer with the boys when his shift is over."

"No, he tends to keep to himself." Hawkins wasn't sure if he was defending Grissom or making a case that he was somehow involved. "But we all do in our own ways." He shuffled some papers absently, the room feeling smaller by the second in the darkness. "You have to, in this job."

"In this job, or in your job?" The question was suddenly, acutely probing. Hawkins glanced over to see the light pointed down at the floor, wrapping Brown in a glistening darkness.

Hawkins stood so still that he felt the air moving through his body. "This isn't the time for an evaluation. Sir."

"Just checking," Brown said offhandedly, sweeping the room again. "Cover's not easy. You have to become involved in order to fit in but you don't want to get too attached because it just makes everything messy. It's a fine line to walk. I did cover for a few years and I didn't really enjoy it that much. You're yourself but not all of yourself." He opened the middle drawer of the desk, started rooting around. There came the sound of clattering pens. "And the parts of yourself that you are, you sometimes find you don't like very much."

Hawkins sniffed and backed away, nearly tripping over a spare chair that was draped in various books, the pile tilting unsteadily. The room was growing smaller with every minute they spent in here. "It's been fine, here. I've been acclimating without any trouble."

"Mm." Brown shut the drawer carefully, as if unwilling to disturb the contents further. "Be careful, Hawkins. Don't ever let things get too normal, you start to forget that you're only a guest here. The first rule of this, you're only just passing through, even if you're here for years. Otherwise, you start to think you've always belonged here." He flipped open a folder on top of the desk, let the light play over the papers inside. His eyes held no reflections, not even the tiny dots of brightness refracting off the desk. "You make decisions that aren't necessarily the best."

No matter what angle he stood, Brown's face revealed nothing else. "What are you suggesting?" he asked quietly. One of his hands was touching the desk and he refused to look at it. It wasn't shaking, of course. It was too dark to tell.

Brown blinked and looked up at him. "This Grissom, how's his performance been?"

It took Hawkins a second to shift gears back again. "It, ah, I haven't really worked directly with him yet but everyone says he's pretty stellar. A little unorthodox at times and maybe a bit too focused on his work but nobody's complained so far." Hawkins paced around the desk, wishing his eyes would adjust to the dark. But Brown kept flashing the light around so that every time he came close, the brightness came by and he had to start all over again. "But I don't think he's behind this. Whatever this turns out to be."

"Maybe." The light swept up and then back down again, strobing the room in slitted shades of amber. He was writing letters on the air that couldn't be seen. "But look at it from my perspective, Hawkins. You've got Miller, with a daughter that shouldn't exist." He was lifting papers up, rearranging the desk so quickly that all the components were returned to their original positions before it was even noticeable that they had been moved. "The daughter is killed and Miller winds up leaving, going who knows where." He started opening the drawers on the sides, pulling open the first one and ruffling the objects inside. "Now you've got this hole in your department that needs to be filled, everyone is reeling, nobody is quite sure what to do." He slammed the drawer shut, revealing more frustration in that action than his voice allowed to leak out. "And then suddenly, magically, this new guy appears to fill the position. A new guy that appears just as elusive as Jessica Miller was, who does the same job that Miller used to do, but better." Another drawer slammed, he was working his way to the other side now. "It all fits together so nicely, you couldn't have written a better ending to it." He bent down to stare deeply back into the top drawer, squinting even in the dark. "Except for the one big gaping hole in all of this. Mister Grissom. Who is he?" Another drawer, open and violently shut. "What kind of person is he?" There was one drawer left and Brown grabbed it like it might stop his imminent descent. "And what could possibly bring him to-"

Abruptly, he halted. "Oh," he said, shining his light into the desk. "Isn't that something?"

"What?" Hawkins snapped around quickly, in direct contrast to how quiet Brown's sentence was. He had been reaching for his gun before he realized he was enacting the motion, shoving his hand into his pocket to cover the aborted action. I'm on edge, and I don't know why.

Brown lifted a small frame out of the drawer, holding it up so that the picture inside was facing toward him. From his vantage, Hawkins couldn't see exactly what it held. But Brown was making a small whistling noise, sounding like a radio set to the wrong station.

"Looks like our boy Grissom here has a kid." He glanced up at Hawkins, something between contemplation and amusement dueling over his face. "How about that?" He slid the picture back into the desk and pushed the drawer shut with more care than he had shown earlier. "Did you know about that?"

"A . . . kid? Honestly?" Hawkins ran one hand through his hair, looking around again at the items displayed all throughout the office. Bits of science, collections of bugs, pieces with no discernable origin, all of which spoke of a man devoted to facts and odd portions of obscure esoterica. "I had no idea, he never talks about it . . . nobody else does either."

"Doesn't that strike you as odd, Hawkins?" Brown swept his light across the desk, casting everything in brief long shadows. "You're a father and yet you don't have any pictures displayed of your daughter? Except for one that you bury inside of your desk, like you're ashamed of her?" He tapped the penlight against his upper lip, the motion driving his face into negative silhouette. "Who does that?"

"I . . ." Hawkins hesitated, not exactly sure how to explain. He glanced toward the door, as if expecting someone else to come barging in. "It might be a . . . departmental thing. Personal lives aren't really . . . encouraged." Even with most of his features hidden, Hawkins could still sense Brown's raised eyebrow in the dark. "Even before we were kind of told to . . . to keep our personal lives at home, not to bring them here. And after Miller's kid got . . . with what we thought happened to her, it became almost a rule. We don't tell each other about our families, when we walk in the front doors everything that isn't work related ceases to exist." Brown still wasn't saying anything. "It's . . . it's just the way things are."

Brown shook his head slowly, a tinge of disgust in his stance. "So the fact that you knew very little about Miller's daughter made perfect sense. You weren't supposed to know." He stared at Hawkins hard, like he might be able to pin the man against the wall. "How are you supposed to help each other if you don't know anything about each other? How do you trust each other when everything is a secret?"

"We focus on the work," Hawkins said quietly, hearing a part of himself that he hadn't known existed to this extent. "Solving the cases and getting the work done, that's what matters."

"Which is all well and good, until someone decides to take advantage of that." For the first time he seemed honestly irritated, his normally active demeanor achieving a strange blurriness at the edges. He banged his hand on the desk in a light, sharp motion, too fast for Hawkins to even react. The sound was hollow in the cramped space, having nowhere to go. "Damn it."

"Why does this matter?" It was asked so softly that Hawkins didn't even realize he had spoken at first. But Brown had heard and his gaze went to him with an icy smoothness, revealing nothing but the command to hear more. Hawkins licked dry lips and did his best to continue. "It . . . how do you know that Miller didn't just . . . he didn't pretend to have a daughter for some crazy reason. And he just orchestrated it as a . . . so he had an excuse to get out? It's, it's a crime, yes, but why does it need to involve you, or us?"

Brown stared at him for a solid minute, each tick of the clock a jackhammer in a frozen space. Then with a sudden flurry of motion he switched off his light and stalked toward the door, the fabric of his pants practically snapping crisply as he walked.

"Come on," he nearly snarled, opening the door and striding out without even checking to see if anyone was nearby.

"The problem is," Brown was saying as his footsteps echoed off the hard corridor floor like snapping bones, "you can't solve anything until you have all the facts. You know that and I know that. You are more than a badge and a uniform and a desire to catch criminals, but if that's all anyone sees you as then when you need people to get into the parts of your life that aren't those things, nobody is going to be able to find the roadmap. Because you didn't show them." He was making right and left turns almost at random, passing by occupied offices and some of the labs. Most of the people didn't even look up at his passage but those that did let their gazes linger on him for just a few seconds, often with a question mark furrowing in their brows. If Brown noticed, he would give a hard glare in return and many would look down quickly and return to their work.

"They're good people, Joe," Hawkins insisted. "I've worked with them, you haven't." He didn't want to defend them, or anyone. He wanted matters to stand on their own, and be clear. But there was a dead child who might not be dead and who might not have ever been a real child, and a coworker who was either lying or delusional. Maybe more than one. "You don't have to know everything about a person in order to-"

"The new guy has a daughter you didn't know about until five minutes ago," Brown shot back, taking a turn so fast that Hawkins thought he was going to clip the corner. "From what you tell me he's been discouraged not to talk about her ever." Brown brought himself up short, one hand pointing at Hawkins. "If that kid's in trouble, you think he's going to you people for help? The people who can't even be bothered to let him admit that she exists."

"It's for the safety of their families-"

"And as far as the rest of you know, Jessica Miller still died." Brown's voice was a thunderclap in the thin hallway, his final words echoing violently. Through a tinted window, Hawkins could see a lab worker look up sharply and then back down again just as quickly. In a quieter voice, though shaking underneath, Brown added, "And none of you knew enough of his life to even think to begin investigating the story."

He stared at Hawkins for an uncomfortably long time and it seemed that without moving his eyes he was scanning every detail of the man, memorizing him for some later instance. "We thought she had died," Hawkins said softly, feeling that something had to be said. "What were we supposed to do?"

Brown only shook his head, his jaw set and drawn in a tight line. "I'm disappointed in you." It was needles buried in cotton.

And then he was off again, spiraling down the corridor in his rigidly careening fashion.

The impact of it wasn't immediate at first and Brown was halfway to the next bend in the corridor before it even sunk in that he had left. "What did you want me to do?" he shouted after him, not caring who heard at this point, not caring if he blew his own damn cover and got kicked out of here. Hell, wait a hundred years and he could come back and not a single person here would even realize it, because they'd be gone and he would just be a memory. They would all just be memories. That's all Jessica Miller is. It came to him cold, a piece of ice lodged in his chest that refused to melt. She never became anything else.

"Ask questions," Brown called out over his shoulder. Hawkins was already running to catch up. How the hell big was this place? It seemed to twist in on itself forever, in ways that the building outside didn't suggest, in ways that he had never noticed ever since he had started working here. You're yourself, but not all of yourself. "Did you even look at the autopsy report?"

"There wasn't time." The excuse sounded lame even to his own ears. "The gap between her getting killed and Kursick getting caught was so slim, it was only a day or two. If they did one it was fast but . . . I don't think they did." And the parts of yourself that you are, you find that you don't like very much.

"I'll bet they did," Brown retorted, still ahead and around the corner, his voice floating back like the ghosts of past-time, reminding him of mistakes that he had made, finding him no matter how many angles he put between them. Finding all the right cracks in the skin, and the muscles that refused to heal. The aches that never went away until someone reminded you of the soreness. "And I bet if you look at it there's no pictures, just a plain text report stating the injuries, the possible causes of death. It will be stamped and signed and look exactly like it should. People will even remember working on it and being in the room and how that felt."

Around the corner again and Brown was gone, veering past another branch of the building. Where was he going? His steps echoed ahead, tracing out aural paths that he had no choice but to follow. But he could walk away, right? He could blend it and do this, forever. But that was the problem.

"What about the funeral?" For a second he thought Brown was behind him, the words reaching him from somewhere beyond the walls. "What was that like?"

It was like he had travelled back and returned already knowing the answer. Hawkins didn't want to respond except he knew that Brown was waiting. And protocol demanded certain reactions. "There wasn't one." He kept his voice flat and low and it didn't matter. Everyone heard. Everyone who needed to and those that never had a need. "It was private, and I think the body was cremated. Or maybe it wasn't." The last fact just cinched it. "I don't know where she was buried." Because she wasn't. The sudden flush caught him again. "Now are you done proving to me what I should have-"

He stopped as he came around the corner, nearly walking into Brown's back. They were in an older section of the building, the gleaming glass walls and softer lighting giving way to drab paint and harsh splattered illumination, flickering like it might go out at any second. Brown was standing before a plain wooden door, looking down.

Against his better judgment, Hawkins ventured a question. "What exactly are you doing-"

"Wait here," Brown ordered and smoothly stepped forward, flung the door open and went inside. In that moment Hawkins bothered to stare above the door and see what the sign read above it.

Personnel Records.

"Oh, no," he whispered, taking the few steps to the door almost at a run. But even before the first step was taken he could hear Brown's voice reverberating from inside the room, a storm summoned without warning.

". . . and I said that I need to access the records-"

It was a smaller voice that responded, steady but pulling back in on itself. "Well, sir, you have to requisition them through the proper channels, you can't just-"

"Do you honestly think I give a damn about what the proper channels are?" Hawkins could hear the sound of the rafters bending under the weight of his roar. "I've been on this job for only two goddamn days now, I've got Ecklie breathing down my neck and I really don't have time for this."

"But I don't even know who you are-"

"Who cares?" The sneer was a slim line drawn in a razor's swipe, stinging and sharp. "I have no idea who the hell you are either. Do you think I have time to learn every person's name in this place? All I know is that you're delaying me for no good reason and I'm starting to lose my patience."

Wood rattled, and Hawkins imagined Brown slamming his hands down on the desk. "So, you know what? Let's do this, you go and find Ecklie and have him explain to you why this is so important. Because I'm sure he'll be thrilled to find out why you're wasting his and my time."

"I'm just saying it needs to be done through-"

"Then stop blabbing and go find those channels!" Brown shouted, and there was the sound of a chair scraping back more than a few inches. The voice swung around, a fire on the end of a string aimed for your head. You could see it coming but the heat might still get you. "Go on, go!" Footsteps shuffled unevenly, unsure. "Come on, I don't know what the hell you do here but I know I don't have all day." A second swayed, unable to tell which way to fall. Brown made the final decision for everyone. "Don't just stand there, go and-:

The door suddenly slammed open all the way and a feverish looking man scuttled past, not even seeing Hawkins there. He watched the man dash down the corridor and nearly fall going around the corner, his footsteps fading like stones tumbling rapidly down a mountain.

Cautiously, he went into the room. "We probably don't have much time," Brown was saying, already going through a filing cabinet. "So we probably should make this fast before he realizes that I should be the one going for the authorization." His tone was the polar opposite of earlier, the resoluteness still present but all the sparking anger stripped away.

"You looking for Miller's records?" Hawkins asked, and Brown nodded quickly, flashing a quick grin to the other man.

"Good, now you're starting to pay attention," he said, flipping rapidly through bundles of file folders. "He's gone too recently for them to be purged or hidden in some warehouse so I'm gambling that . . . ah." Dipping his fingers deeply into the packed drawer, he tugged out a relatively slim folder, grimacing as he struggled to free it from the crowd. He held it up. "This is it, here."

Hawkins gave him a quizzical stare. "But what exactly do we need it for?"

"I'll explain when we're somewhere that isn't here," Brown replied, flipping the folder open and quickly skimming the pages. A cacophony filtered its way through the walls, beginning to resolve into coherency. "I just want to make sure this . . . ah, yes." He snapped the folder shut. "This all looks very familiar."

Something about the way he said it put Hawkins on alert. "Wait . . . what do you mean? Why would it look familiar?"

"Because," Brown said, already starting toward the door, one step ahead of the pursuit that hadn't arrived, "I helped write it." He was already in the hallway before he realized that Hawkins hadn't followed. Framed by the door, he somehow seemed to stand outside the world, halfway into another place. He looked to his right, eyes narrowed, then met the other man's stunned gaze with eerie calm. "That's why I'm here, Hawkins. Miller . . . he's one of us."

* * * * *

". . . see, I had him go to a college across the country so it wouldn't be easy to double check their records, plus the smaller schools aren't as organized so I find I have less trouble sneaking new records in." The contents of the folder were spread out on the diner table between them, bracketed by several cups of coffee and the half-finished remains of a greasy meal. Brown pointed to another part of the page. "I did my best to give him previous jobs that were either out of the county . . . hence the brief stint here with the Peace Corps, or that had supervisors that I could count on . . . either people that owed me favors or if I was lucky someone we already had undercover. I must have did a good job because he passed the vetting process." He sat back, slouching in the booth slightly, both hands folded across his stomach. "You've been very quiet during this, Hawkins."

Hawkins rotated the folder so that it was facing him, staring at it as if he could somehow puzzle out some hidden meaning between the lines. But the paper just held words and the words would only claim to mean what they were designed to mean, and nothing more. "I . . . I just find it hard to believe it, that's all. Why would you have two cover agents in the same spot?" He glanced up at Brown. "Were you keeping an eye on me or was he-"

"Neither, as it turns out," Brown replied. The explanation didn't appear to assuage Hawkins' confusion. "Right, you're still new to this." He took a fry off Hawkins' plate and smeared it in the ketchup, popping it almost delicately into his mouth. "Miller wasn't on assignment, he was on leave. This is . . ." he pressed both his hands together, tapping the edges of his palms on the table. "As you know, we're essentially immortal, barring accidents. But you can't keep someone on duty for thousands of years or else they're going to start losing it. So the solution we came up with was to rotate the teams out every couple hundred years, and put them on leave until their time comes up again. This way they get to experience what normal life used to be like for a little while before going back into the madness again." Brown shrugged. "If that's what they want. Some officers go find a cave on some remote planet and sleep for eighty years. It's really up to them."

"And Miller?"

"He'd been a police officer before he got recruited and wanted to get back into it again for a little while, have the career that he never got a chance to have before we swooped in." Brown slid some more papers out of the folder, holding them up and regarding them with a furrowed brow. "But now I'm starting to wonder if that was his real reason," he muttered.

Hawkins started to ask what his reason could be when the waitress came over with a fresh pot of coffee. Brown smiled pleasantly and tipped his cup forward, letting her pour more in. Hawkins covered his cup with his hand, politely declining.

"I would have gone for the extra cup," Brown noted after she had left. He downed almost half of his in a single gulp. "I think we're going to be in for a long night." The steam curled in the air between them, and Brown swatted at it idly.

"He always seemed to love police work," Hawkins said, picking at his food without eating it. "Like I said, there were times when I thought he lived at the precinct. What other reasons could he have? Was it because he made us all think he had a kid?"

"Kind of." Brown stared at his coffee for a few seconds, trying to read messages from the wavy lines of his own reflection. "There aren't really any rules to going on leave, other than we'd appreciate it if you came back alive. We also ask folks to not overthrow any governments either but for most soldiers that gets old after the third or fourth time, so they're not interested in freelancing." His words were coming in a loose chain of phrases, rattled off one after the other like leaves blown off a tree. "Obviously, you don't get to meet a lot of people careening around time and space, so a lot of soldiers come down for leave with a desire to find someone, get married, whichever." His fingers drummed against each other silently. "And that's okay, but we don't . . . encourage them to make children part of that equation."

"Because they'll be born like we are?" Hawkins asked, choosing his words carefully to see if anyone was listening. The diner was mostly empty at this time of night, the booths dotted with a few spare souls absently smearing their food onto plates or drowning themselves in coffee, or even staring out the window and watching the subtle variations in the stilled night.

"No, I've never heard of that happening." He tapped the rim of his cup with a fork, his eyes seeming to follow the spiraling ring up into invisible air. "Although that would be interesting. It's just the opposite problem. If you're got a . . . lover, you will watch her grow old and die, but that's . . . it's expected. With adults, one always expects to outlive the other. That's life." His face darkened slightly. "But, kids, it's different. We're not wired to live longer than our children and that notion can make things complicated. It always hurts to watch someone die that you care about but its easier to walk away once it's over. You snip it and it's clean and you go." His words kept pushing up against barriers that Hawkins couldn't see, as if Brown was trying to piece together exactly how it went together on the spot. "With children, when do you walk away? Do you fake your own death, do you just abandon them . . . what if they have kids of their own down the line. Now you've got descendents . . . do you visit them, be involved in their lives? You probably want to, but you can't. We can't stay forever, no matter how much we want to. Children make things messy."

"But isn't that why we have them?" It came out before Hawkins could even think to pull it back.

"Yes." Brown propped his elbows on the table and placed his chin on his hands. "But for other people, not us. It causes too many problems. Some of our agents aren't totally linear and to be with your child, then take a step and see them as a grandmother, then take another step to when they were six years old, then a hundred years after they died . . . we can't do that. We can't let the soldiers do that to themselves."

He talked about her that day as if she were the most important thing in the world. The waitress came over again and Hawkins realized that maybe another coffee wasn't such a bad idea after all. "I never realized, I guess I never really thought about it."

"Nobody really does." There was a frown on his face that suggested he wished it were otherwise, but on some level it was wishing that the ocean could some day stop being wet. "We all come from normal lives and a long time has to go by before you realize that things are different. We're not used to extrapolating the consequences of the things we do down the line a hundred years, a thousand years, before we can't wrap our heads around the fact that we're still going to be around that long. It took me a while just to even start to consider the concept and it's part of my job technically." He laughed but the admission was a fledgling thing, partially covered. And it was merely a shield for the seriousness that then emerged. "I understand we all left lives before coming here. In some cases, we had no real choice."

Some nights the roar of it still came to him, a screaming leviathan plunging toward the surface from the bottom of the darkest lake. "If the car hadn't stalled, I would have . . ." he was unable to finish the sentence.

"But it did," Brown said, as if he had been there for it, had been the one sitting next to him while the train took up his entire driver's side window, frozen and looming and ready to crush him. Explaining the situation to him calmly while time shivered around them, holding itself in place with the desperation of someone clinging to a crumbling cliff. You could die here, and that's fine. We get what we get. Or you could come with us, and maybe do some good. "A lot of people came in the same way you did, and they had to leave everything they knew, families and friends and the rest." I'm not allowed to say goodbye then, am I? No, I'm sorry, but you did this morning when you left the house and kissed her for the last time. That's what she'll keep and it'll be enough. "And I can't unwipe the clean slate, the break has to be final for it to work. But it's not fair to let them never have lives again. So we try to give them a chance, for a little while." But how will they know I'm okay? They won't, that's the way it has to be. But you can do something better. You can make sure they're okay. Forever.

Hawkins found himself tracing out old names on the dirty surface of the table. He stopped himself before the final letter was completed. "And you, sir . . ." the croak of his words wasn't him but it remained no matter how much he tried to keep it out, "what did you leave behind?"

Brown let his hands drop to the table and stared briefly somewhere over Hawkins' head. "Nothing," he said, his voice tightly clamped. "Some people they take because they're already gone and some . . . are recruited because they've already made the break. And there's nobody to notice their absence." For the first time Hawkins realized how much younger Brown was than him, at best barely out of his twenties. But his eyes spoke for more years than his body could conceivably carry. Questions that he probably shouldn't ask swirled around in his head but before any of them could be spoken, Brown's gaze dropped back to the folder, spinning the contents back toward his side of the table.

"So what I'm trying to notice here . . ." his tone going back to the business cadences of before, the weighted knowingness slid behind shrouded curtains, ". . . is exactly where Miller's information deviates from what we put in here." His finger went down to tick off each line of text. "Hometown, training, all the scores for the police and forensics' tests . . . this is all exactly how we put it in originally."

"You do this much work for everyone who goes on leave?" Hawkins leaned over the table to get a better look at the file. "My cover story wasn't this detailed when I was assigned."

"No. We're generally fairly thorough but most of the time people on leave they just ask we dump them in some place and time. We arrange an eventual pickup and don't see them again for a hundred years or so." He put his lips together tightly. "Miller had very specific requests on how he wanted his leave to go and we did our best to accommodate. And it looks like he kept to that story . . . but let's see . . ." he flipped over a few pages, sucking at his cheek thoughtfully. "Maybe the section on his personal life will reveal something. Hm . . . here's . . ." he lifted a paper up, staring at it intently. "Hm."

"What?" Hawkins said, leaning even further forward and nearly knocking his coffee over in the process.

"Psych evaluations. The department must have given him one early on. In here he talks about . . . hm." He ran one finger down the page, his lips moving rapidly in time with the silent words. "His childhood, how he grew up in an orphanage after he was abandoned as a baby. That wasn't part of the story but it's not the first time someone embellished . . ." He kept reading further. "He talks about being married, at least once . . ." he brought the paper closer, "twice maybe? He's kind of vague here, or the psychologist wasn't sure. But his wife wasn't able to have kids . . . did they divorce though, there's no follow-up."

"He never talked about being married," Hawkins noted.

"The way your department runs things, you could be working with your lover for years and nobody would know you were sleeping together," Brown shot back. Turning his attention back to the evaluation, he continued, "He comments that he's been a lot of things in his life, but he's never been a parent. And that by being a police officer, he could kind of become a parent to entire city . . ." He looked up from the paper, over it and across the table. "That should have been a red flag, don't you think?"

"I always felt like my parents were the police," Hawkins commented, hoping that it came off more as a joke. Brown's gaze was steady but didn't indicate how he felt about it. "They probably marked it as something to watch out for but he passed everything else. And in the field he was fine."

"Hm." Brown flipped to another page. "Apparently so. Let's skip ahead to the next year's evaluation. What do they say . . . hello." His eyes were rapidly going from right to left as he skimmed the page.

"What?" Hawkins felt a pit open in his stomach. Thus far it was easy to treat this all as an academic exercise, a scenario that couldn't possibly come true. Easier, especially if it turned out that Jessica Miller was never real, because then nobody had been hurt and it was all just a misunderstanding. But underneath it all was the notion that this really did happen and there were reasons for it. And the reasons might not be so pleasant.

"Okay, we've fast forwarded a year, they must have done a follow-up evaluation and . . ." he was speaking faster, sentences piling on sentences like the ones in front had to scramble to get out of the way. "Listen to this, all right . . . he's talking about parenting again but now he's going on about what a blessing it is to be one, how his daughter is the brightest part of his life and makes it worth getting up to go to work every day. How he loves watching her grow up, he learns from her more and more than he ever thought he would . . ." He slammed the paper down on the table, flattened away the wrinkles with one hand. Both men were silent, Brown staring at Hawkins and the other man not daring to look at the paper or his companion.

Brown drew out each word like it was being pulled from between cracks in the mortar. "A year before all he could talk about not being a parent. Then suddenly he's teaching his kid how to ride a bike." His gaze was tiny nails being driven into Hawkins, pinning him to the seat. "What happened between these two evaluations? What happened in that year?"

"He could have adopted . . ." Hawkins ventured but Brown was already shaking his head.

"No," he said, placing his fingers on the folder, like he was trying to hold it in place. Like it might run away if he didn't keep his eyes on it. "That would have come up, it would be in here somewhere. Instead he talks about a wife who . . . who isn't there. A girlfriend who moved across the country, the story keeps shifting."

"Maybe he just made her up . . ."

"Then who died?" Brown hissed, his hand wrapping around the folder and getting ready to crumple it. "Who the hell did you all think was killed? You thought he had a kid, you all did."

"Maybe he kidnapped someone else's, maybe he was lying when he said he didn't have one . . . sir, I don't know." Hawkins did his best not to hear the strain in his own voice but it was rattling amongst the cords in his throat. "I wasn't looking for this, how the hell was I supposed to know something like this was going on?"

Brown didn't say anything at first, merely started sliding the loose papers back into the folder. "You were put under cover for a reason, Hawkins," and there was a level edge to his voice. "But that doesn't mean you go blind to everything else. Nobody noticed this, and yes, it probably has something to do with your department wanting you to pretend that you don't have lives outside the job but . . . they don't have your training, Hawkins."

"We're all supposed to put pieces together," Hawkins said quietly, bowing his head and letting his fingers dig into the sides of his neck. "Nobody did, sir."

"No, nobody did." There was a measure of regret to this. "But I'm not in charge of them, Hawkins, I'm in charge of you. And I told you, I expected better." The fact that there was no anger in his words made it somehow worse. He picked up the lone piece of paper he hadn't returned to the folder. "This is the last note in here . . . 'I always wanted to be a cop but I never knew why. Now I know. It's to keep people like Jess safe, to give them a world worth living in, one without fear and without harm. If I can give her just a piece of that, then I've done my job.'" Letting the words trail off, he slipped the paper back in and smoothed the crease of the folder without further comment. Without really seeing the table he stared at it, as if trying to read the solution in every old coffee stain and spot of grease, every discarded grain of salt and unwashed smear.

"Maybe . . . maybe he was lying before." He wanted Brown to acknowledge him. He wanted Brown to walk away and solve this without him. He wanted something simple and easy, a missing person, a crime of passion, a hit and run. Ones with definite answers that lingered over a horizon that could be breached, if one had the right tools. This was different, it belonged to another rulebook entirely. "About having a kid. Maybe she was there all along and he was just afraid to say something."

"I wish that was the case." There was a grinding quality to his motions as he stretched in the seat. "It would raise more questions but the answers would be simpler. Except that's not how the world is. Not how this is." He picked up the folder, bending the edges of it slightly toward himself. "Where did you come from?" he asked quietly. The washed out lighting overhead, sickly and flickering, was giving him a translucent sheen. He might fall out of phase at any second. "And why did you go?"

In an action both slow and sharp Brown tucked the folder under his arm and stood up, signaling for Hawkins to do the same. The waitress was just coming over with another pot of coffee but Brown motioned for the check and she scurried to go tally it up.

"What happened to him after she died?" he asked, his body turned toward the outside-facing windows, watching the play of neon and tarnished shimmers that made up the Vegas night. "You caught who you thought was her killer but then what?"

"He resigned right after that." The events were so clear in his head but now he wasn't so sure how true they were. And if they weren't, what else was false? If his memories could be inserted or changed so easily, what else might have been done to him? Maybe the train was never . . .

And it started to take him to places that he wasn't ready to contemplate.

"I never even saw him go," Hawkins continued. "I walked in one day and his resignation was taped to our supervisor's office door. The only part I could read was I can't take this anymore. It's not right. Someone told me that he had moved away, but . . . I have no idea if that's true or not. Not anymore."

"Good, you're not assuming." Hawkins wished the flatness of the statement would betray something but Brown was clamped down and tightly controlled. A car whisked by, splashing bright lights all over the pulped iridescence. "Then you can probably guess what our next step is." The waitress came with the check, placed it on the table between them without a word.

Hawkins thought for a second, wishing it gave him some kind of triumph. But he suspected there would be no winning here. "There's an address in the file."

This time Brown did smile, even as he reached into his pocket to toss a handful of bills on the table. Eyeballing them, he appeared to do a mental count before turning back to Hawkins, satisfied with the amount. Nodding, he said, "And for guessing right, you get to drive."

* * * * *

Glass doors opened into a stout corridor of brick and colors that had once been vibrant. A second set of identical doors beyond opened into the building proper, showing cracked flooring and rows upon rows of doors on both sides of the wall. The whole scene seemed frozen, an exhibit that the curators had forgotten to disassemble. This is the twentieth century, it said. This is what you don't see, because you don't remember how to look. There was a smell somewhere between mold and a drying wetness, pricking at the nostrils. A set of stairs rose up to their left, escalating into higher reaches on narrow metal railings, the edifice promising nothing but more of the same.

"I should have known." For some reason Hawkins felt a need to keep his voice down, even though the building was devoid of sounds. There were no clankings of old pipes or the clattered tappings of invisible footsteps, the ricocheted arguments heard through too thin walls. Just the quiet wheeze of its breathing just under the skin.

"Known what?" Brown was examining one wall taken up by mailboxes and buttons that probably acted as buzzers. Most of the names seemed to be scratched out and replaced by others, often taped on. For some, this seemed to have happened several times.

Hawkins walked past Brown, toward the stairs, craning his neck to see if there anything in sight around it. But all he saw was the bottom of the stairwell, blocking any view. It wasn't even clear where the light was coming from. "That he was one of us. There was an incident, once . . . the two of us were chasing after a suspect. He had been in a hit and run, and we were trying to deal with the running part." He went up the first few steps, hearing his own echo become squashed in this place. "It was only later that we learned he had been in an armed robbery, which also explained the running." Up another few steps. How many people came this way every day and never noticed the stains on the wall, the chippings that looked uncomfortably like bullet holes? How many heard the noise and looked the other way, turned the television up a little louder? How many never questioned what they never bothered to see? And, in the end, was he any better?

All the pieces were around you, but you never put them together.

No. No, he couldn't say that he was.

"Miller got ahead of me. He never waited for backup and normally it didn't matter. I'd yell at him for it and he would just laugh. We're the police, he'd say. Who's going to hurt us? I hated his laugh, honestly. It was obnoxious." He could keep going up, everyone always thought that going up meant things would get better. But all it meant was that you reached the top. And discovered there was nowhere to go but down. Stay low, his father used to say. "I lost track of them, we were in a maze of streets and buildings. I didn't want to break radio silence and give him away if he was hiding but backup was scrambling, they couldn't find us either." He wanted to hear his father's voice again but the man had been dead for years. But there was a way he could, an option he could take. It was possible, he had never promised. "Then I heard the shots, rapid and sudden." Hawkins tore himself away from the steps, went to the lower doors and put his hand up against the glass.

Brown jerked a little, as if the shots were still echoing. But maybe it was just a chill. If he was searching, he hadn't found what he was looking for yet.

"I heard them but the way the area was set up . . . you couldn't tell where a sound was coming from, it just caught all the retorts and scattered them. I ran in the direction I thought it was, but that wasn't right. So I tried another." Silently, he wished for the scene inside to move, to give him some notion that humanity was here somewhere. Otherwise all they had were stale stories and doors that didn't go anywhere. "On the fourth try I found him. I don't know how much time had gone by. They were both on the ground, the suspect was lying on top of Miller. Neither of them were moving and under them was a spreading pool of blood, like their lives were just oozing away. Both of them were holding the same gun.

"I ran over, shouting for Miller, thinking that he was already dead. The guy on top was definitely gone, I was only a few feet away when I saw he had that limpness that dead bodies always have. Still yelling, I pulled him off and saw that the guy had been shot in the throat. Miller was covered in blood and he wasn't moving either. Everything was so quiet, even the sirens had gone silent. I remember . . . I remember checking for his breathing and not finding any.

"So I started shouting into my radio, signaling for an officer down, shots fired, every applicable code I could think of to get them there faster. But it wasn't working." If he opened the door and stepped inside, would that ruin the mirage, or would that get the clock to start ticking again. But then Time would run down and everyone in those doors only had so much. Was that fair of him, to make them rush forward when he had nothing but new days before him? "He must have started talking about his daughter, because I remember thinking about how terrible it would be for her to grow up without a father. It's funny what comes to you in those moments." Suddenly he needed a reflection to appear in the dirty glazed glass, an acknowledgement from the world that he existed. "And just when I was in the middle of calling one more time, someone reached over and put their hand on my shoulder, saying, Thanks for getting that guy off me, for a fast runner he sure felt like he ate a lot of doughnuts."

A certain scuff made him look up and to his right. Brown was staring at him, leaning against the rows of names, his arms folded over his chest. How long he'd been standing like that was impossible to say.

"You found the apartment?" Hawkins asked and suddenly it was much harder to talk.

"Finish your story," Brown murmured, with all the force of an order.

He swallowed, massaging his throat. "It was Miller, he was fine. His shirt was covered in blood and he had a huge bruise on his face but otherwise it was like nothing had happened to him. Backup arrived right after and the paramedics checked him out but there was nothing to find." He banged a fist lightly on the door, dismayed that the vibrations stopped at his knuckles instead of going all the way to his shoulders. He was too young to go that numb. "He told us that they had both struggled with the gun and it went off. But the shock of it knocked the wind out of him and so they both went down." Hawkins leaned against the door, put his head on it. A hollow shushing came to his ear, like the building had stopped breathing and was just exhaling because it had nothing left to give. "Everyone accepted that story. Brass gave us both an earful for not following procedure and things went on." He looked at the floor, then back to Brown. "But he wasn't breathing when I got to him. And the bruise on his face wasn't from getting hit with the gun."

Brown's expression gave nothing away. "What do you think?"

"He got shot in the head." It was a brick dropped into the river, where the moon's image never even wavered. "And he regenerated before I got there." Hawkins felt a muscle shudder within him, a pipe near to bursting. "All the little details . . ." he held out a hand before his face, as if those details might be etched somewhere in the lines of his palm. Without seeing he felt something in Brown's stare change, a certain hardness that only came at him from the edge, stringing a boundary until it was only defined by razorwire. He had to explain, somehow. "I just thought he was lucky, sir. I didn't have any reason to think that he-"

But it was trying to convince an avalanche to veer at the last second purely because you had so much more to live for. It wasn't that you were in the way, it just had other concerns.

"I think I'll be pulling you off this assignment," Brown said, with a blunted care to his words that wasn't normally present. Hawkins felt his throat go dry, his nails digging into his skin. "When this is over . . . I don't want to decide now." He stepped away from the wall, an angularity to his stance, tilted in a way that the world refused to bend. "But chances are you'll be sent somewhere else, to brush up on your skills."

"Sir, you can't do this." He shouldn't have said a word. He shouldn't have said a damn thing. Brown stalked past him like silence was the only currency they possessed, his boots ringing out on the stairs. "I can't just leave here." He didn't raise his voice, of course he would never do such a thing. "I've can't just pack up and go, sir, I've got-"

"What?" From the halfway point of the stairwell Brown's voice was a brick cascade, tumbling down with frictionless abandon. "What do you have, Hawkins?" There was a taut control to him, a wire pulled flawlessly in the space between two atoms. "Tell me there's a reason you can't leave here right this second, if I decided to recall you. Tell me one."

Hawkins held his ground, pressing his lips tightly together. Brown searched his face, needles dotting at every skein of thread, pulling the edges apart to see the pieces fearfully clustered inside. What you wanted me to be the best at wasn't what I was good at. I couldn't do both.

When he did speak again, his voice was low and rapid, his usual cadences polished to a darkly opaque sheen. "You're not here to have a life, Hawkins, you were here to do a job. A job that requires you not just to fit into a role and inhabit it but still be yourself, to notice the things that other people don't because they don't have our experience. "

Hawkins put one hand on the railing, squeezed it like it might conform to his dismay and at least leave some mark of his behind. "How was I supposed to expect any of this?" He didn't want it to see sound like a plea but no matter how he turned the words, it did. "Every clue I ever had was in forensics. The things we used to see, out there, nobody speaks that language here."

"And how do you know I didn't assign Miller here to see how well you were paying attention? To prove that wasn't the case, ever?" The question came down barbed, impossible to dodge. Hawkins stood in between the moments, unable to move to either side. The stairwell sighed into a static of old air, musty and tumbling and looking for an escape. But every exit was blocked and all it could do was bump up against the barriers again and again, weaker each time. "We exist in a world where anything can happen, in any place and at any moment. If had I wanted just a cop here, I would have hired one. It's that simple."

Hawkins refused to look down, even as the sandblast effect of Brown's stare whittled at him. "I'm sorry, sir." The building tried to take it and shove it down, change every feeling and emotion into squared lines and slowly thickening edges.

"It's all right, Hawkins." There was a quiet shift in his voice, the color of a wave changing that you never saw because it was riding so far down. A dollop of compassion buried in the leaves of the highest tree. "You weren't right for the assignment. We should have realized you weren't ready yet." He leaned on the railing, putting more of his weight on it than seemed apparent at first. What's going on out there, that you aren't telling me about? How bad have things become? One arm stiff, he pivoted, turning around and eventually letting go, almost reluctantly. "We'll figure out what to do when we're finished here." He was already around the corner, just the faintest edge of his sharp form as it cut the air the only sign that he had been near. "Come on, let's see this through."

Without the implied vibrancy of his stance, the weariness in his voice seemed even more pronounced, floating down to him among the peeling painted walls and cracked stairs. Hawkins stared up at the empty space, at the footprints Brown and others had made that he couldn't see. He saw them and debated following, wondering which route he needed to trace now.

I wasn't right for the assignment, he thought, unable to move. But what if I discovered I was right for something else?

And without answering the question to anyone's satisfaction, he let himself be tugged up the stairs, free of time and resolutely linear.

* * * * *

The door was just like any other apartment door, brown and wooden and solid, with only the number separating it from the other bland entryways. Faceless, it could belong to anyone and probably exchanged one tenant for another all too easily.

Easily was also the way to describe how it buckled under a single kick from Brown. The splintering was like bones being broken in the hallway, fingernails scraping jagged paths along the cracking walls, the sound filling the space like a poison gas attack. Hawkins expected every single door to swing open in that second, heads poking out to see what the disturbance was, people finally being roused from their stupor.

Brown, meanwhile, followed the drunkenly swinging door, moving into the room like an ejected shadow. It all happened in a matter of overlapped seconds, not giving Hawkins any time to react. Wait, he heard himself not saying, Brown already inside and red-shifted ahead of his speech. Wait, it's Miller's apartment but he moved away. He left the city after his daughter was-

And then Hawkins was through the door, carried in the other man's wake. Carried through to find Brown standing in the center of the sparse living room, hands in his pockets and regarding it all with an analytical slant to his stance.

Hawkins edged forward cautiously, breaking a stray splinter in the process. It was a stake being driven through the floorboard and he only avoided flinching through a conscious decision. A half dozen phrases came to him right then, suggestions and warnings and statements that could potentially turn the tide of the investigation.

But all he could think of to say was: "Ah, they're going to notice the broken door."

Brown shrugged. "Let them. We can always produce a warrant after the fact." Like it was that simple. Hawkins had been doing this job long enough that he had become used to the way things were done in this time and place, and Brown's casual disregard for all of that wasn't a thought process he could get himself back in synch with. Maybe he's right. Maybe I am forgetting. "But I'm starting to get worried about where this is all taking us."

Hawkins came further into the room, easing his hand from his gun. It was a simple apartment, a basic living room with a coffee table and a single couch, a television and a set of austere lamps at each end of the couch. Other rooms could be seen further beyond, presumably a kitchen and a bedroom at the very least.

"But this place belongs to someone else now," he said, moving past a bookshelf filled with volumes that seemed to possess perfectly unbroken spines. "He's not here, Miller moved out right after what happened with . . ." he stopped, seeing a framed certificate on the wall. "What happened with . . ." Moving closer, he finally realized why he didn't need to finish the sentence. "Sir."

Brown had picked up a stack of magazines on the table and was sorting through them, tossing each one limply down one by one, letting it land with a faint slap. "Yes?"

"It's his." Hawkins reached out to let his hand trace the fine wooden frame, feeling just the thinnest layer of dust. His fingers suddenly ached to make a mark. "His police academy diploma. It's still here." He turned to face the other man, who was straightening up and continuing a slow sweep of the room. "He never left, did he?"

"Doesn't seem that way, does it?" It wasn't clear if Brown already knew this fact. He certainly didn't seem surprised. He picked up the television remote and started flipping through the channels, the rapid fire static crawl of images immediately heading for the gap in the wall the broken door made. But no one came by, either nobody was home or they had learned not to be curious. "This is turning into a puzzle, Hawkins, and the problem with a puzzle is that no matter whether you like the final picture or not, it's the only way that this can turn out." He switched the television off and tossed the remote onto the couch. A second later he followed, bouncing onto the cushion as if hoping he might be able to achieve a velocity that might get him out of here. "It feels broken in," he noted, bouncing a couple more times. "Something tells me this place wasn't just a front."

"But has he been here recently?" Hawkins wondered. "Maybe he left but the lease wasn't up, so he just kept paying in case he wanted to come back later . . ."

"A good theory, except those magazines were all ones that came out in the last week or so." Brown leapt up from the couch. "So someone has been inside lately." He moved toward the adjoining room, which was a small kitchen comprised of high, tight cabinets, a stove in the corner and a pale white refrigerator. A sink was in the opposite corner, containing a few scattered dishes piled haphazardly. Brown opened the fridge and took out a small quart of milk. Shaking it a little, he opened the container and sniffed at it.

"Still good," he said, putting it back. "No, he's been living here fairly regularly."

"Maybe he just got tired of police work and wanted to do nothing for the rest of his leave," Hawkins ventured, moving back in tandem with Brown as they went into the next room.

"Why not simply quit, then?" Brown asked, somehow ahead of him. Away from the strained glow of the living room lights the short hallway to the back of the apartment was arrayed in graying and splayed darkness. A rectangular slit sprang up, Brown having already vanished into it and his voice emanating from somewhere unknown and too near. "Why not disappear and move across the country? He had so many options available why would he bother to be so complicated? As I keep lecturing you people back home, it's a tangled enough world on its own, don't go making it worse." Inside the room there was the sound of shifting and thumping as Brown seemed to be trying to find his way. "But even with all that, it still doesn't explain . . ."

The darkness was peeled back and the opaque gauze was stripped away.

". . . this," Brown finished, sweeping his arm out to indicate the room.

It was a bedroom, but it clearly wasn't for Miller. The walls were a light shade of blue, the trim near the ceiling showcasing a parade of dancing bears. A light pink dresser was on the near side of the room, with a mirror and a variety of combs and brushes. The mirror faced a petite bed that sported a pillow with lace trim, the sheets neatly tucked in and made. A rather dour looking stuffed giraffe stood guard over the mattress, eyeballing them uneasily.

"His daughter's room . . ." Hawkins breathed, hardly daring to speak loudly for fear of disturbing the shivering hallowed quality the room seemed to possess. On the dresser he found a little jewelry box, the lid of it opened and revealing a simple locket with a tiny inscription on the metal that said Jessica. He picked it up, feeling the calm weight of it. It's more real than you are, he thought to the absent child, the kid who had never been.

"Yes. And that's what's been bothering me about this." Brown slid open the closet door, running his hand along the rows of small shirts and dresses, all in bright colors, many of them appearing to sport cute animals. "This was more than a charade he was putting on for the benefit of everyone. All of this goes way beyond simply trying to fool people." He closed the closet, resisting the urge to slam the door shut at the last second. "But why? Why make people think you had a daughter and then make everyone think she died?"

"You said there was only way for the puzzle to go together." But Brown was already leaving the room, staring at a distracted angle. Hawkins stood there in the empty room, surrounded by the life of a child that was so far only imaginary. And yet there was real weight to the place, a sense of soaked memories, of games played and laughs shared and bedtime stories told, of nights when being tucked in was the most important end to the day there could be. When staying up late was a rare gift and celebrated with cookies and maybe a favorite movie.

"There is." Brown was in the other bedroom, much more spare than the previous room. Compared to the other, this was more a museum piece, put aside merely as a placeholder, something to fill the room with so that it became a room. "But right now there's a big hole in the center and I can't figure out what's supposed to go there. I don't have the exact shape of it." He ran his hand along the bedsheets, looking at the imprint the motion made. The pillow was perfectly fluffed, as if it had never seen the dent of a heavy head.

On top of the room's only dresser was a thick book, the edges of it worn and frayed. A single chair held his uniform shirt and gun belt, the dress pants neatly draped over the seat. The gun was missing, of course and as much as he wanted to feel nervous about that, it seemed the least of their troubles now. The walls contained no pictures and the single window stared bleakly out into the complex's parking lot.

Brown laughed inwardly. "God, I never really liked puzzles." He tried this closet door and found it nearly empty, with only the bare essentials hanging up inside. Hawkins tried the first dresser drawer, finding an array of wrinkled shirts, some of which appeared to be stuffed in there any way they might fit. "Every time I tried to put one together, I'd dump it all over the table, spread them out nice and neat, prop the box cover up so I knew what I was working with . . . and got to business."

The second drawer held much of the same, although these shirts had a certain grayness to them, a thin layer of dust that clung to the skin even when you got close.

The curved echo of Brown's voice was a reflection of its own rebound. "I'd sit there for hours, doing it the usual way. Get the end pieces first, work yourself into the frame and start to fill in the center." He was rifling through the pockets of the few shirts that were in there, pulling out what seemed to be lint and discarding it with a disgusted wave of his hand.

The third drawer was empty and for a moment Hawkins thought it might contain a secret compartment. But a few seconds of knocking around the inside of it to find the hollow spot revealed nothing to him. Damn, he thought.

"And just as I reached the end, I would realize that I only had one piece left." There was only one drawer left and it was stubborn. Hawkins tugged at it, not sure if he heard anything rattling inside. There's probably no point to this, it's just as uselessly empty as the others. "One stupid piece that I probably dropped and even though it didn't really affect the picture, I always felt like I was missing something vital. Instead of making it look like a picture, it just made it look like a bunch of parts thrown together that just happened to make a scene." No, wait, he could get this, the drawer was just twisted a little. If he just . . .

"My mother would tell me it looked fine the way it was, but I'd try to tell her, you never know how important the missing piece is until it's back in the picture."

With a pop the drawer burst free, the force of it catching Hawkins off-guard and sending him nearly sliding back into the board of the bed. He heard something tumble forward, ratting against the front of it. He scrambled back to his feet, craning his neck so that he could see inside.

"Which is when she'd tell me to go play outside and stop bothering her."

"Sir," Hawkins said, the word just falling out of him. Vague purple and green light painted the contours of his face. How he found his voice he'd never be able to explain. "Sir, I think you need to come see this."

"What is it?" Brown slipped back into the room like a shadow finding a new phase, his movements deceptively quicksilver. "Did you find . . . don't touch those, Hawkins."

Hawkins yanked a hand back that he hadn't been aware was reaching out. All of a sudden Brown was next to him, crouching down and reaching inside his jacket. The whole time he was swearing under his breath, in what sounded like different languages, or at least words that wouldn't come into fashion for another hundred years.

There were what looked to be ten jewels arranged inside the drawer, slightly oblong and translucent, each one possessing its own quiet inner light. If he stared too closely at them he thought he could see movement inside but that might have just been a trick his eyes were playing on him. They looked as if they might be warm to the touch but remembering Brown's warning Hawkins kept his hands close to his sides.

He heard a snap to his side and saw Brown pulling on a pair of gloves, staring into the drawer with a grim look on his face. "Whenever I'd solve a puzzle, my mother would come up to me and ask what I had accomplished. It looks just like you thought it would and now you have to take it apart so we can use the table to have dinner." He reached inside, plucking up one jewel carefully and holding it up to his face, squinting to examine it with one eye. "So what did you actually learn? I never had an answer for her."

"And what would you tell her now?" From a certain angle the light was blinding, a pinpoint directed right toward the center of the brain. Too long and it started to give him a headache.

"A lot of things," Brown murmured, taking the jewel in both hands and rolling it around in his palms. "We haven't talked since she died." He picked up another one, weighing the two stones in each hand. "But she was right, in a way. Getting the final piece doesn't tell you the story, the reason behind the picture. But . . . it is a start."

"I've never seen these before," Hawkins said, feeling brave enough to lean on the drawer with both hands on the edge of it. "What are they?"

"A start." Brown gathered up all ten, scooping them in both hands and taking them over to the bed. He laid them out on the sheets in a straight line and in the brighter lighting the jewels seemed to be pulsating even faster. "I believe you're looking at Jessica Miller."

Hawkins hoped his double-take wasn't as blatant as it felt. I think you keep doing this to me deliberately. "What . . . you're saying she's in those jewels?"

"She is those jewels," Brown corrected. He bent down so that he was eye level with them. "They're insertion stones from the Memory Merchants. It's been a while but I recognize the craftsmanship." He prodded one with a single finger, letting it roll backwards and then forward again. It glimmered in time with his motions. "They have perfect imaginations and aren't able to sleep. There was a war and they lost their entire history so they spend all of their time coming up with memories, trading them back and forth amongst each other in the hopes that they might be able to put together what happened to them." His eyes narrowed. "Which was fine with me but lately I've found they've been starting to freelance, selling custom memories to anyone who will pay."

"That's bad?" Sitting on the bed, the stones seemed so innocuous, merely a set of pretty paperweights. But every so often he'd glance at them the wrong way and maybe get a glimpse of an eye, or an open mouth, or a sunny day that never really existed.

"Very. Memories have consequences and ripple effects. People treat each other based on how they remember them, the collective movement of a species is determined by everyone remembering where they came from . . . you start changing memories, you start altering things, you can start determining what is real and what isn't." He turned to the side, tapping his chin with one gloved hand. "The problem is, they're like children . . . having no real memories of their own they don't understand its effects. It's all a little game to them, seeing what happens. That's why you don't get involved with them, because there's always a price, one that they aren't always upfront about. Their curiosity gets the best of them and they start asking what if." He picked up a stone and held it between two fingers, as if trying to stare right through it. "So why did you do it, Miller? You've been around long enough to know better."

Hawkins stepped a little closer. "But how do they work, sir, they're just-"

"Here." Before Hawkins could react, Brown tossed the stone right into his bare hands. It didn't feel warm at first but that was because he couldn't feel the heat over the tingling that started in his palms and became a prickling like tiny dancing mice that became a heat rushing up the lengths of his arms riding his nerves like highways seeking the base of his brain like missiles with only one target and the target was the heat and the heat was cold and the cold was

the first blast of a winter's day when you walked outdoors chilling and stinging and

rocket fires on rocket fires peppering the fields that were never barren I told you I asked what was

-Daddy she says and the view turns and there's a little bit of snow in your eye, it's coming off the sky in quick arcs over the roof of the house out of sight where all the magic comes from

the seconds that I last saw her sometimes when it would rain I would walk along the sidewalks and in the puddles I could see her face and it never changed and it will never change no matter how old I

-Daddy come look at what I did and it's the scent of the snow crunching under your boots the clean taste of frozen water melting at the edge of your mouth her voice as crystal

keep closing the doors and reading the newspapers to find out if every year I was in the right time to find out what happened to see how the story kept on going without me

-Daddy I'm gonna name him E-oar because he looks just like him as your vision swings around through the curtain of perfectly distinct flakes to see a lump of snow that you aren't sure what it looks like but are fairly sure it's not what she describes it as and

it's just like that day on the beach when she leaned in close to me with just the barest gritty grains of sand on her hand on my shoulder and she said to me in a voice that sounded like the descending horizon as the kids ran forward into the endless ocean

-Isn't he pretty, I wish we could take him inside as its falling on you as its coating the world and the two of you and when she looks at you again in her purple snowsuit and pink hat and violet gloves its like she's seeing you for the first time

getting lost in the sunsetting light smearing all details away I can still hear the whisper of her voice in a pressure in a tiny probing soft needle on my ear saying to me that we need to come back, we need to do this every year

because just like that she's running toward you kicking up tiny bits of snow and leaving footprints that will and will never go away throwing her arms around you in a tight coldwarm hug with your name just the force of air against the buttons of your coat

every year we will come back and do this I promised as the kids became frozen in the moistening light and the air tasted like simmering surging passion I will come back I told the scene

as she says your name is –Daddy and she will never stop saying your name is –Daddy because that's what it is and that will never change

but the scene gave way to this pockmarked ground and I never came back and I'll never go back

and the part he loves

and the part I can't accept

is that

it will

be that way

for

ever

"Ah!" Hawkins shouted even as Brown struck his hand and sent the stone sailing across the room, where it landed on the floor before tumbling up against the wall. Once it stopped moving it looked perfectly safe once again, merely a pretty piece of jewelry that someone how might have kept as an heirloom.

"That was . . ." Hawkins struggled to find words even as he swayed on his feet a little, nearly touching the bed to remain upright before remembering that more of the stones were on the bed. Even now, the firewood burnt scent of the winter's day kept sneaking back into his nostrils. "That was . . ." he bit his lip, staring down at the floor before finally letting himself meet Brown's eyes. "He did that? To himself?"

"Sure seems that way." Brown walked over to retrieve the fallen stone, placing it back onto the bed with the others. "The stones transfer memories by touch, you hold them long enough and it imprints on your brain." He scratched at the back of his head, frowning. "That's probably how they got the rest of you to go along with this. If we scanned the stuff in your office, I'd imagine there's a coffee cup or something that's made from this stuff. You hold it even for a little bit every morning and suddenly you're just as convinced that Miller's got a kid."

"But these are all . . . for Miller?" Still trying to shake off the effects of the stone, Hawkins wandered back over to the dresser, taking care not to bang into the open drawer. The way he felt right now, it wasn't unlikely. The scrapbook was still sitting where he first found it. He ran one hand over it, somehow still hearing the child's laughter. My God, what did you do? "Why so many?"

"If I had to take a guess I'd go for the simple explanation." Brown pushed them closer together, counting them without touching. "There's ten here. How old did you say Jessica Miller was?"

Hawkins didn't like how it hurt to swallow. This wasn't what he wanted to get used to, all these constant adjustments of what he knew. The first time he had gotten a papercut here he had almost blown his cover by mentioning it. One of the secretaries had gone to get him a band-aid and he had been forced to come up with a reason why the cut wasn't there a few minutes later. He had settled into that life and now this one was raging back to him, threatening to sweep away everything that was familiar. But wasn't that the whole point of signing on? So that nothing was familiar ever again?

"Ten. She was ten." But he didn't need to say anything at all, really. Feeling numb, he opened the first page of the scrapbook, finding a title page in cursive print with the heading of "Daddy's Little Girl." In the corner of the faded whiteness of the paper was a neat scrawl that said I'll find you, wherever you are.

"Well, there you have it, then," Brown said quietly. "With the level of detail involved he must have had one fashioned for each year."

"The perfect kid," Hawkins murmured, one finger poised to flip the page over but not quite able to bring himself to do it. "You can have all the memories but when it comes time to let go and go back there's no body to bury, no one to watch grow old. You can just stop her like a video tape and move on."

"Except he didn't." There was a note of frustration creeping into Brown's voice. "He let them create a memory that she got murdered. Why? That makes no sense."

None of this does. Taking a deep breath for reasons that he couldn't quite articulate, Hawkins turned the page over, revealing the first of the photographs. They glistened underneath the plastic coating, a different form of memory held in stasis. Pictures of a little girl sitting on a bed hugging a stuffed animal. Falling asleep on the couch. In a tiny dancer's outfit, arms held out in a impromptu hula attempt. Small bright eyes shining with life in every scene. He could almost hear her and that wasn't possible.

"If that's what he wanted, they would have done it." Brown was musing, his voice dropping so low that it almost went out of range. "I said, they practically have no consciences, no real sense of right or wrong because they have no memories to tell them otherwise. In a way, this is all just fun for them."

The next page showed her posing proudly behind a birthday cake, part of the icing already smeared all over her face. A shot of her sitting under a small Christmas tree, grinning broadly while holding a wrapped package, clearly waiting for the shutter to click so she could tear it open. Outside in the slanted summer's day, trying to ride a bike without looking back. The same smiling child in every photograph, staring at her beloved father, at someone who was her favorite person in the world.

"But something went wrong."

Sitting in her bed all by herself. The same beautiful child. Playing with dolls, making two of them talk to each other. The same child. Caught in an arced moment on the swing, feet striving to kick the sun. The same-

"Or the part that frightens me just a little bit . . . maybe it's gone right."

Wait.

The pattern didn't hit him right away, it was only by seeing each page in quick succession that the repetition began to come to him as something more than just a series of moments saved for all time. The one aspect that all of these photos had in common and the one factor that made them completely wrong.

"Sir." Brown zeroed in on the sound of Hawkin's tone like a radar with cable wire tied to it. "We said that Jessica Miller was ten years old, right? That's . . . we all knew that, that's the memory we were given."

"Yeah." He drew the word out cautiously, as if the solution was starting to break the surface. But if they acted too quickly it might dive too far below again and none of their efforts would be sufficient to get it back. "What did you find?"

"In these pictures, she's not ten." He stepped to the side, fanning the pages out so that the pictures flipped by in some kind of temporal stop-motion. "I mean, she wouldn't be in all of them, but there's not a single one where she looks ten. She looks half that age." Brown took the book from him, his expression unreadable but beginning to be creased with faint lines of worry. "In fact, she looks the same age in every picture."

"That's because she is." Brown grabbed a handful of pages and with a quick gesture tore them out of the scrapbook, spreading them out all over the dresser.

"They're recent, too," Hawkins pointed out, tapping one picture that showed the little girl doing a twirl on the sidewalk with her arms in the air, caught in that bare second when motion has taken you over and you've no choice but to ride it. It appeared to be raining that day, her form strafed with diagonal thin lines. "See that restaurant in the background? It only opened in like the last six months." He stared at Brown, who was studying the girl intently as if his gaze was enough to draw her out of the photographs to answer all his questions. "This isn't Jessica Miller. Then who is it?"

"I don't . . ." but before he was able to finish the sentence his eyes went wide and he jerked away from the pictures with enough severity that Hawkins thought he had been struck. He swore and backed up against the bed, one fist up but not finding anything to hit.

"Sir . . . Joe . . ." Hawkins took a tentative step forward, but the man's face was locked into a view that he couldn't witness. Were the pages trapped? No, that can't be.

"Right in front of us," Brown murmured, then swore violently again, as if trying to eject a corrupt spirit from his body. But it had hooks on his organs and wouldn't let go. "We stood in front of the damn answer and never realized it. You stupid, stupid . . ."

"Who is she?" Brown didn't respond and Hawkins somehow found it within him to ask again, but more forcefully. "Commander, who's the girl?"

Brown turned to face him with haunted eyes. "I saw a picture of her earlier, Hawkins. In that office we searched. The other kid that nobody knew about." He paused but it was already sinking in and Hawkins felt his own expression starting to match Brown's. "This is your buddy Grissom's daughter."

Hawkins struggled to find his voice and when he did, he found it was barely hanging on. "But . . . she's real." For some reason he wanted Brown desperately to confirm that and he wasn't doing that fast enough. "Isn't she?"

"I think so . . ." Brown said, pulling off the gloves one by one and discarding them on the floor. He had calmed down from his earlier outburst but Hawkins thought he could see the man's hands shaking ever so slightly. "These pictures are of a real girl, as far as I can tell. But why would he . . ." he flipped through another page, at another row of presented pictures. ". . . have them make up a memory of a girl who was already real?"

It came to Hawkins like a dagger scraping against the space between his ribs. He felt the words get dragged out of him and he wanted to take them back, as if it was the speaking aloud that made them real. "Maybe . . . maybe it wasn't his idea."

From the look on Brown's face, it appeared that the same idea had occurred to him as well, and he was no happier for realizing it. Splaying his fingers across the page, he closed his eyes, whispering, "Dammit, Miller," through clenched teeth. "You should have known better. They've always got a price."

"What should we do now?"

"Now?" He turned a few more pages, reaching a section where they were all blank. "I suggest we find Miller and get him back home before he does something that nobody is going to like."

"And Grissom?"

Brown ran a hand through his hair, flipping another page absently. "He'll probably be fine. If they were using her as the template, chances are he thinks she's dead anyway. And this Grissom guy seems fairly secretive, so I doubt Miller knows where he lives anyway and . . . what?" He stopped, realizing that Hawkins was staring and gradually followed the man's gaze.

On the last page that Brown had turned to was a picture of an apartment complex, not the one that they were in now. One of the windows on the upper floors was circled in a red pen and near it was scrawled, Here is where he took her. Written on the page around the photograph was found her and found her and here she is.

"Does this officially mean we have a problem?" Hawkins asked, trying to ignore the sense of his stomach dropping.

Without answering, Brown turned to the next page. It was also blank but there were black squares drawn on it about the size of photographs. And running in between them were the words, For the good times to come in the future.

"Oh, I'd say so," Brown said quietly. Standing up into a sudden straightness, he snapped to Hawkins, "Okay, then we've got to move on this before he acts on whatever the hell he thinks he's going to do. I'm going to need you to go to Grissom's place, find some excuse to hang out there."

"But we barely know each other . . ."

"Improvise, Hawkins," Brown barked, stalking past him to the opposite wall. "Maybe its time he made some new friends. Find a reason to get inside that apartment and stay the hell there until I give you the all-clear. I'm going to scramble together an extraction team to secure him but if he does get in, you're going to need to take care of him and you're going to need to do it in a way that buys us time." Brown put his forehead on the wall and braced one arm on the surface. "Please tell me you know what I'm talking about."

"Don't restrain him." Hawkins felt the world recede, warp without the contours really changing. "Just shoot him in the head."

"Right on the first guess," Brown replied, with the nearest to humor he might get to now. "Don't feel bad about it, he'll get better." He smacked one hand lightly against the wall. "All right, let's do this then before-"

That was when they heard the clatter in the living room. Hawkins looked and Brown and started to ask what that was when they both knew full well what it was. There was no point because Brown was already starting to move, was out of the room and running through the hallway, maybe shouting a name, maybe not, because his words were far ahead of him and the best Hawkins could do was race to try and catch up.

The shadow flickered in the doorway out of the living room, a small piece of solid that turned the corner and was out of the apartment even as both men reached it seconds too late.

"Miller!" Brown shouted, diving through the door and nearly hitting the wall, pushing himself back with one hand. Hawkins joined him a moment later, just in time to see the door to the stairwell slam shut. Brown was running again, his body a blurred pair of scissors.

He practically shoved the door open, stood there with it ajar and screamed down the stairs. "Miller, don't do this! It's not what you think!" All the while came the typewriter chattering of descending and receding feet, faster and smaller and faster. Brown went a few more steps down, both hands on the railing and almost leaning over the edge. "We can help you!" His echo was a lighthouse wailing begging you finally not to crash. People should have been staring but nobody was coming out. Either you didn't care or you had made the decision not to care. That was the world where these phantoms moved.

In one motion he vaulted over the railing, dropping down nearly the whole flight of stairs and falling into a near-run. Hawkins followed via the safer route, only seconds behind but maybe seconds were what counted in this game. He had all of them and it wasn't enough. They were slipping away.

Outside, he finally caught up to Brown. The man was standing there breathing heavily, one arm out and letting the wall hold him up. He was favoring one leg and the ankle of the opposite one looked twisted. But it would fine in a minute. In time, nothing was permanent.

"Where . . ." Hawkins asked and Brown pointed even before the question was properly formed, the sound of screeching tires marking the punctuation of the sentence. Down the street he caught a glimpse of red tail-lights streaking around the corner, peeling away and blurring into a smeared shift. The night closed around it and smothered all other noise.

"Get the car," Brown breathed, standing on both feet and wincing. He stared off down the road, the last flicker of the disappearing car seemingly reflected in his eyes. "I think our plans just changed."

* * * * *

Brown didn't speak the entire trip there, staring resolutely forward as Hawkins raced down the streets. The splattered neon of the streetlights played over his face, the city constantly scanning him and trying to see if he fit. He didn't, of course, none of them did. They had removed themselves from the world and no angle of flexibility could make them fit properly again. All they could do was pretend and convince people that it wasn't pretending. But the world kept trying to eject them, to remind them that they were foreign objects lodged in unfamiliar ground.

He leapt out of the car even before it stopped moving, the pain from his earlier twisted ankle no longer evident. Gone like a shadow too fast, the night pulled down in blinding blankets. Hawkins skidded the car to a halt, letting the door scrape against another parked car before jumping out himself, not even bothering to switch the vehicle off. Let someone come and get it. But nobody would probably dare. In this town you always hid the important things, all the stuff that was out in plain sight just wasn't worth it. That was the allure and the lie of the city.

Brown had managed to get the apartment complex door open when Hawkins arrived and was nowhere to be seen. At least wait for me, he thought, stepping into the lobby and faced with a sheer flight of stairs. There was an elevator off to his left, but none of the lights on it were blinking. There was a stifling sense of compression to the place, that all the apartments were stacked too close together, a grimy feel that pressed down further on your chest the deeper you took a breath. He had never liked these places, the people who wandered them always looked like they had entered by accident and were never sure how to get out.

"I'd make sure your gun is loaded." From behind Hawkins, Brown detached himself from a corner that he was sure the man hadn't been in a moment before. "I've got a feeling that this isn't going to end well."

"Are you armed?" For some reason the idea of someone else being able to make the decision on whether to shoot or not was comforting to him. He had never discharged his weapon thus far in his career. But the weight of it was still there against his hip, reminding him that nothing lasted forever.

"No." It was hard to tell if the admission bothered him or not. "I thought it'd be safer to travel light and . . . I didn't expect things to go this far." The frustration underneath the statement was simmering like a cracked furnace.

"Maybe he'll come quietly." Under good circumstances the sentiment seemed laughable. Brown didn't even answer or look at him, just motioned for him to move and then dove up the stairs, taking the steps two or three at a time.

Grissom's apartment was easy enough to find, set squarely in the middle of the hallway. There were windows only on each end of the corridor. One end faced nothing but the alighted dark of the brightened pollution that hid the stars, while the other side must have been near the blinking red-yellow sign of a motel, washing the tailend of the narrow hallway in bleeding garish colors. They kept flickering in a cycle, giving the impression of a slow dirty fire.

The apartment was also not difficult to spot because it was the only one with an open door. Moving carefully and silently, Brown crept forward and slipped in through the crack created by the ajar door, with Hawkins following.

It was dark inside, the opaque flatness of it gradually turning into other shades as their eyes adjusted. But even before that occurred, it was very evident where the body was.

He was slumped in the chair nearest to them, a clean-shaven young man. He had been thrown into the chair, judging by the sprawl of his posture. The rest of the room was bare, with only a single couch in front of a television and a small table. There was a video-cassette on the table of An American Tail, the edges of the box worn.

Hawkins immediately ran over to him, crouching down to get a closer look at him. "It's Grissom," he whispered, glancing over at Brown. "But I think he's-"

Brown ignored him, stepping deeper into the center of the room. The apartment was small, with a tiny kitchen in view, as well as two other rooms that were probably bedrooms, arranged on different sides of the same corner.

"Miller," he called to the back of the apartment. "Enough of this. You can come out now."

Nothing happened right away and Hawkins found himself tensing against the possibilities of what not to expect. Part of him wondered if he needed to close the door in case someone wandered in. But if anybody did they would just see a play written in a language that they didn't understand and populated by actors that they didn't care about.

Brown took another step forward. "Miller. Don't make me ask again-"

The darkness shuffled and from the nearer room, someone emerged.

It was him. Even though he hadn't seen the man in some time, Hawkins knew him instantly. They had worked together enough. Burly and craggy, he was still somehow able to stay good-looking despite it. Tall and broad, but there was something different to him now, a subtraction that gave his clothes a certain rumpled looseness and a pallor to his face that seemed to take in the meager light in all the wrong ways. There was a clamped wildness to his eyes, they kept darting around even while they remained completely fixed on Brown.

"I'm here, sir," he said, his voice gone cavernous.

Brown came another step closer and pointed to Grissom. "What's going on here, Lieutenant? This man better not be dead."

Miller stared at him with a slowing quickness, blinking almost in reverse. "Oh, no," he said, dredging the words up from somewhere shifting. "Merely secured and unconscious." Hawkins had just figured that out by checking a pulse. It was steady and slow, but present. "This is non-lethal mission, sir." Like he had to remind Brown of something obvious.

"It's not a mission at all," Brown replied, with some hardness coming into his voice.

"Of course it is." He took a swayed step to the side, then went back again. Brown tensed, one fist clenched at his side. "It's a rescue mission. It always has been." There was a dense lightness to his voice, as if he might sink through all their arguments and still come out ahead.

"Miller, listen to me, it is not."

"She's in the other room," Miller blurted out and his drifting calm broke just a little. "He's had her all this time and it's not right, you know. It's just not right." He laughed quietly, wiping one hand on the wall and then rubbing his fingers together. "He even gave her a different name, like I wouldn't figure it out. Like I wouldn't know my own-"

"She's not your daughter," Brown suddenly snapped, keeping himself in check with only the tightest effort. The distance between them was closing in fits, a inch divided in half and in half again. You'd never really reach but you'd somehow get near. Maybe that was enough. "Listen to me, she is not your daughter. She belongs to this man. You never had a daughter."

"Of course I did . . ." Miller said, his eyes tracking lines on the wallpaper that nobody could see. "Her name was Jessica and she was wonderful, all you could ever ask for in a kid. And now she's in the other room waiting for me and . . ." the punch came so fast that there seemed to be no motion involved at all, just the hint of action and Brown's reaction as he fell backwards against the couch, blood spreading like liquid roses over his face. ". . . don't you ever say a damn thing like that about her."

Hawkins went to stand up but just as suddenly Miller was holding a gun on him, on the both of them. In the near-dark he couldn't tell if it was a standard police firearm or something from back where he originally came from. Either way, he wasn't all that inclined to get shot. Not with an innocent bystander between them and possibly a kid in the next room.

"Hold," Brown ordered to no one in particular, scrambling to his feet, the back of one hand pressed to his face.

"I'm going to . . . take her," Miller continued, "and I'm going to go away with her and we're going to be a family again, the two of us." His laugh was the soil going fallow, filled with rocks and gnarled roots. "They tried to trick me, made me think that it happened in some other way but . . . I knew better. I know lots of things." He stared at Hawkins. "I knew who you were right from the first moment I saw you." Laughing again at Hawkins' bewildered expression, he said, "You don't fit well into anything, you're just a second off, no matter how hard you try. I have no idea why they even put you into this, you're just pretending that you know what you're doing."

The derisive way he said it rankled at Hawkins, who heard himself saying, "At least I wasn't dumb enough to mouth off and get my kid killed."

"Don't you . . ." he came rattling forward, the gun held out ahead of him. The barrel loomed large in his face, big enough to put a hole in him that would take some time to recover from. "You little bastard, don't you say a word, why the hell didn't you stop me, you were supposed to stop me-"

"How could he stop you?" The gun swung back to Brown as the man came forward, blood spotting the lower half of his face, even if the flow had ceased. "He didn't know about the deal."

Miller said nothing right away, but the tip of the gun shook in his hand. Hawkins eased himself around the edge of the chair, aware that Miller was still watching him out of the corner of his eye.

"I never had a daughter," Miller said softly, the lines on his face growing deeper. "I had . . . I had a son, once, before you knew me. But he wasn't born right, he was missing . . . he was missing stuff he needed and he . . . they wouldn't let him survive. He couldn't . . . I held him a few . . . a few hours before he went and the whole time he just kept looking at me, with his small eyes and his weak breathing and he kept asking me with his eyes, why is this happening to me, why can't you help me?" He wiped at his face, making a small noise deep in the back of his throat. "I can't even . . . visit him, sir, he never got the chance to get young. He's nowhere to be found."

"I know," Brown said gently. "But this isn't the way to fix it." His eyes kept flickering from the gun to Miller and back again. Hawkins wished they had been given a chance to put together a better plan, or if Brown would signal exactly what he wanted them to do here.

"I had always wanted a daughter," Miller said, waving his weapon conversationally. "I always meant to but I could never find the time and then . . . it happened. It happened to me. And you found me." A grey sadness came over his face, out of step with his body language. "And then it wasn't possible anymore."

Brown went to take another step closer but Miller brought the gun up stiffly, halting the other man. "It's not fair, what you did." If not for the strangled cant of his words, it would have been a shout. "All I wanted was a chance to see someone grow up, to celebrate birthdays and holidays and . . . teach them how to ride a bike and watch them get married and . . . you were never going to let me do that."

"If we hadn't found you, you wouldn't have gotten the chance anyway," Brown said evenly. "Don't try to blame us. The fall would have been fatal."

Miller kept talking like Brown hadn't said a word. "I was told it wasn't allowed. But if we can't have kids, what the hell good are we?" His eyes narrowed accusingly. "What the hell is the point of being alive then? You get this space and when you're gone there's no one around to carry you forward. What the hell kind of deal is that?"

A muscle worked in Brown's jaw but he didn't answer. Whether it was because he didn't want to or because he didn't know what to say was impossible to tell.

Miller stared at Brown for a half-minute, waiting for him to speak. When he didn't, he made a disgusted noise and turned away, although the gun still kept shifting between the two of them. Hawkins debated rushing him, wondering at what angle he could run in and not have the bullet hit something fatal if it went off. But Miller was probably smart enough to anticipate that and just shoot him in the chest. And then with his paranoia engaged, shoot Brown as well.

"It's not right," Miller muttered, shaking his head. He was backing away from them again, moving toward the kid's room. "So these guys came down, with voices like spun summer and smelling like a dry night full of stars, so clear. They found me . . . I don't know how, but they did and said they could make it possible. That I could have a kid." As he spoke his face was gradually brightening, the new day's horizon being pulled closer. "I didn't believe them at first, I mean, it sounded crazy. But they said to get everything ready and they would make it happen. And it did." The hope and joy in his face was almost painful to see. "Sir, you need to see her, I have to bring her out. When you hear her laugh, or talk to her favorite stuffed animal . . . she calls him Winkie . . . you'll see I did the right thing. You'll see. Just let me-"

"Take another step and I will take you apart, Lieutenant." Weaponless, the slash of Brown's voice halted Miller a few steps from the door. "Do not go into that room."

"You . . . you can't do this, sir." Miller was shaking his head out of time with his words. "You can't separate a father from his child. It's not right." There was a deadening slackness to his face, a dangerous lack of impulse. The gun was pointed unwaveringly at Brown's head. "I won't let you do this." His finger was tightening on the trigger. "With all due respect, sir, I . . ."

"Miller!" Hawkins tensed, expecting to feel a bullet enter his body at any second. But the man only let his gaze slide over to him, the gun still aimed at Brown. Probably figures he's the bigger threat. He's probably right. "Listen . . . I, listen . . ." he was trying to talk fast and trying to talk slow and neither was working properly. "I know how you feel. What they're doing to us, it's not right, you're absolutely right."

Miller blinked too slowly, perhaps processing every phrase all wrong. "You? How the hell do you know what they're doing to us?" The snarl was a grater shaving all the fine edges from the statement, paring the lock down so that only the exact shape would get you in. This would be a good time to jump him, Hawkins thought, but Brown remained still, seemingly content to see what would happen next.

"Be-because . . ." a dozen answers that would only get him shot in the face came to mind and for a second he was choked with those possibilities, unable to give voice to any of them. How the hell do I know? Miller was waiting and he only had a second, maybe less than that. The rumbling backfire was already echoing against the inside of his head. How do I know?

And then somehow it came to him. "Because . . ." there was nothing but sand in his throat but he forged forward regardless, ". . . I got the same offer, and I turned it down." The end of the gun twitched, a warning or a resolution. "And I'm sorry that I did."

Watching Miller's face was seeing a stuck switch finally shaking off the rust and finding a new position. Almost instantaneously his expression changed. The gun wasn't lowered but he was staring at Hawkins differently, a sense of recognition dawning that may or may not have been earned.

"You too?" Miller asked, eyes going wide.

"It's . . . I know how hard it is," Hawkins said, trying to keep the stammer out of his voice, trying to maintain a calm in the face of a ceaseless churning inside. "You sit in the park or . . . or in the diner and you see them pass by, the little ones running around their parents, everyone laughing and happy and . . . you don't get to be a part of that. And you want to be, you want it so badly." Miller was nodding along, unnervingly silent. "I always looked forward to having kids, you know? It was the one thing I wanted, like, it gave me a kind of purpose, I figured if there was a reason I was born, it was to be a father. But . . . they don't want us to."

"Right? People like him . . ." he pointed at Brown, who barely acknowledged the gesture, ". . . they won't understand. They'll never know how it feels to have them stare up at you and . . . and love you, not because they need anything from you, but because of who you are and . . . you can't help but be a better person." He put one hand on the end table, as if growing heavier. "That's all I wanted. Didn't you?"

"Yes," Hawkins hissed, with more inflection than he was expecting. "And when the . . . the merchants came and made the offer, I . . . I was so tempted, you know? Just, just make a space in your life for her, they said, and they'd fill it . . ."

"And I did," Miller insisted. He sounded so beaten now, remembering. "I made her room up and, and I got a crib and . . . and a bed for when she got bigger. I painted it colors that I knew she would like and bought a bunch of toys . . . I never knew so many toys existed." His knuckles went white around the gun. "I've still got them, it's all still there just as we left it. Let me get her, I could bring her back now and it'd like she never left. It would . . ."

Brown was inching around Miller now, trying to put himself between the man and the child's room. Beyond their voices the apartment had gone totally silent, to the point where Hawkins' own pulse was booming in his ears, a countdown that wouldn't tell him what the final number would be.

"I could have done it," Hawkins said, trying to talk over the other man's steady spiked drone. "But I wasn't strong enough for the terms." Not taking his eyes off Miller, he stepped forward, letting one hand trail against the couch, as if it might secure him somehow.

Miller's mouth worked for a second without any words emerging. "She was wonderful," was all he said, shaped as shards to push all other thoughts away. "One of her toys, it made music and she would . . . she'd squeeze it and start dancing. All over the apartment, she tried to get me to join in. The two of us and . . ." he winced, trapped against the edge of a pain he couldn't relay. "They didn't sound so bad. The way they put it, it wasn't so bad."

"No, it wasn't, if you were strong," Hawkins said, trying to sound sympathetic. "But I was too weak and I didn't think I'd be able to . . ." he let the sentence dangle, for just a second. The pause to collect.

And so it came. "It sounded so easy," Miller protested, and took with it a little deflation. "Don't say a word. That was all. She'll be your daughter forever, as long as you never say." His knees bent slightly but he didn't fall. "It should have been easier." Almost as an aside.

"I thought it would be, too," Hawkins said, leaning an inch closer as if trying to share a secret. "Especially at this job."

Miller only nodded, unable to speak. One hand went out to touch Hawkins on the shoulder but stopped just short, and what was hovering in the space between went unsaid. "That's why I took it," he answered, with the same hallowed hushedness. "With you, with all of you. Because none of you ever . . . ever talked about your families, about the people you cared about. You kept it all . . ." he tapped Hawkins hard, right in the center of his shoulder, "inside. And that's what I needed."

"So you thought," Hawkins heard himself say. He couldn't even see Brown anymore, the man had reduced himself to a slash of absent light, lurking in those seconds where your attention wasn't totally focused. He might arrive, or simply exist. "But . . . you had never been a parent before and you didn't realize how . . . hard it would be . . ."

"Every day . . ." Miller's voice had gone swollen, ". . . Jess would do something, and I'd want to tell everyone but I . . . I couldn't. I thought it would be easy, just to keep things between me and her, but . . . but it doesn't work like that, I . . . I wanted to tell everyone how great she was and . . ."

"But you did good," Hawkins said in a low voice. "You did fine, until that day."

Miller closed his eyes briefly, searching the dark they created. "Yes," he murmured before opening them, staring at Hawkins with the fear of a man grasping for something that had already fallen too far to be retrieved. "She was in gymnastics and she, she'd cleared the parallel bars for the first time and . . ." the glazed slant to his gaze spoke of nothing but loss. "I had to tell someone, Hawkins. I had . . . I had mentioned her, a couple times before, but I don't think anyone really believed me. And nothing had happened and I thought, I can say a little bit, just stick to the minimum. Just the bare facts." He pressed both hands against his face, the barrel of the gun caressing the bridge of his nose. "And then, that day, it was just the two of us and I couldn't . . . I couldn't keep quiet any longer. I thought it would be okay and it . . ." his sentence fell apart at the end and his mouth opened wide, a tiny frail cry struggling to come out. "Why couldn't I tell anyone about her?" He looked at Hawkins, desperate. "I thought it wasn't too much, Hawkins, but it was. And now, she's . . . they've made everyone think that she belongs to . . . to him . . ." he pointed at the still unconscious Grissom, oblivious to all the events unspooling around him. "But it's not true and if she saw me . . ." he was pivoting, backing away, the gun swinging wide. "If they saw me with her, they'd know that I was her father . . . they wouldn't be any-"

He turned away, feet twisting into a sprint. Hawkins went to dive forward but close as he was, he wasn't close enough.

"No." Brown was already there, standing right at the corner of the wall, steps from the door. He caught Miller's wrist, the one holding the weapon. He stood perfectly straight, his face still and his body refusing to bend. "You didn't follow the terms, Miller. You have to let it go."

The other man struggled for just a second, one arm straining against Brown's grasp. Then all the fight seemed to go out of his frame and he started to sag, all the supports inside breaking down and collapsing.

"I can't . . ." he said, so hoarse it was another language entirely. His face searched Brown's expression, looking for some way in. But the man had closed himself off completely and you couldn't even catch a reflection. "Why would they do this?" he begged. "Couldn't they see how . . . how much I wanted . . ."

"I know," Brown said, surprisingly tender. Hawkins stepped back, keeping the area clear. But his presence hardly mattered anymore. It was all inertia now. More of the weight was shifting to Brown, he was leaning backwards even as Miller kept trying to press toward the room, to the place where he thought his daughter was. "And I'm sorry. But you just have to remember what you had. That's going to have to be enough."

"It's not," the man rasped, dry-sobbing. "Jess . . . I just want to hear her call me . . ." he wasn't able to finish, his legs finally going, the mess taking him down even as Brown shifted his arms to catch him, guiding and controlling the gun hand the whole way to the floor. "Oh God . . . God damn it, sir, I . . ."

"It's fine, Lieutenant," Brown said flatly, now on one knee. The man was embracing him roughly, both arms circling around his ribs. "It will be fine." Brown put one hand on the back of Miller's head.

"Why would they do it?" Miller said, his face practically buried against Brown's chest, as if he were trying to burrow his way into another place, if he could find his daughter through another door.

"Because they're just like children," Brown muttered, his voice low and soothing. "That's all. Because they wanted to see what would happen." The man slumped against him further. "Or because they thought it would be funny. It didn't mean anything to them. In the end, Miller . . ."

The shot, muffled as it was, came as a burst exploding in a too contained space, the walls shivered as they struggled to absorb it.

". . . it was nothing personal." Brown sat back as he finished, taking the gun away from Miller's forehead. He eased the man down onto the floor, taking care not to let the wound touch anything. The hand that had been covering the back of his head came away covered in blood and burn marks. "Just like the rest of us, they still have to grow up," he added quietly.

It was taking a second too long for this to all sink in for Hawkins. "Sir, he . . ."

But Brown was already moving on. Holding the gun with the barrel pointing toward the floor, he emptied out the clip, putting the rounds in one of his pockets. Almost absently he wiped the blood off on his shirt, flexing his fingers as if trying to work the feeling back into them. The skin was mottled and raw where the force of the blast had caught it. Reaching inside his jacket, Brown took out a small device and start to speak low and quickly into it. "Lieutenant Miller has been subdued, get a fix on our coordinates and be ready to get us out of here on my mark plus five. Got it?" Deftly, he tucked the device back into his jacket.

Then he turned his attention back to Hawkins, saying, "Sweep the place and make sure everything is clear before you leave." His tones were clipped and he seemed somewhat distracted, not taking his eyes off Miller.

"And . . . him?" he asked, indicating Miller.

"By the time he's fine, he'll be in a place where we can take care of him." For a second he looked like he didn't know exactly what that meant. But he recovered, adding, "We'll discuss the disassembly of Miller's apartment later. All right?"

Hawkins could only agree in the face of it. "Yes, sir."

Brown nodded, still not seeming in synch with the surroundings. "Fine, then." He flexed his hand again. "I'll be seeing you, then, Hawkins. And next time-"

With a ping of inverted air, his and Miller's forms blinked and then surged out, vanishing an instant later. Hawkins stood there in the middle of the room, hearing the silence somehow deepen and not sure what to do next.

Just as, across the apartment, a little girl began to cry for her father, plaintive and too far away.

* * * * *

"Daddy . . ."

The call penetrated Grissom's stupor like a weight dropped into the ocean from a great height. Blinking, he shifted in the chair, wincing at the stiffness in his legs and neck. What the hell? Had he fallen asleep watching that movie again? He was lucky he hadn't starting having dreams where he was a mouse trying to start a new life in America. Starting one in Las Vegas was hard enough, most days.

". . . Daddy, where are you . . ." she called out again, softer now. It wasn't an emergency. He knew the timbres of her voice and what they meant. She had been frightened earlier, probably by a dream, but like all bad dreams they eventually passed and things went back to normal. But sometimes you needed someone to tell you that.

That's what I'm here for, Grissom thought, standing up in his small, empty apartment, steadying himself amongst the small details that made it not so empty at all. Almost the opposite, he thought wryly, stepping over yet another toy.

"I'm coming . . ." he said gently, before his daughter could call out for him again. And so he went to her, like he always had and like he always expected he would.

* * * * *

It took Hawkins more time than usual to figure out which key was his to get into the house. Weary, he almost fell through the opening door, stumbling to his right and into the kitchen, finding his way only by touch. His hands ran across the counter, only stopping when he came across the contours of an unfamiliar piece of paper. What the? He plucked at it clumsily, bringing it closer to his face so he had a chance of reading it in the dark.

It said: Difficulties with Miller, but progressing. Will speak further about reassignment soon and necessary extraction cover. May be needed elsewhere.

And scribbled a little further down: Good work on closing this and talking him down.. Will talk soon. – Joe

It was dated two days from today. Hawkins stared at the note for what felt like a long time, before tiredly shaking his head and crumpling the paper up. He stuffed it into the garbage can on his way out of the room and headed upstairs.

He tried to make as little noise as possible as he slid into bed, just wanting to put his head onto the pillow and wake up into a new day. But he felt a stirring on the other side even as he settled in, a quiet murmuring of someone half-asleep responding.

An arm slid around his shoulder and he felt a heavy warmth resting against his back. Curls of hair tickled the back and sides of his neck and a current of breath passed near his ear.

"Hey," she said, gradually rousing.

"Hey, honey," he whispered, taking her hand and kissing it lightly. "I just got in, go back to sleep . . ."

"I thought you'd be back hours ago." Her words were slurring sleepily, but she wouldn't slip away. "I waited up, I had something to-"

"It was a late case," Hawkins tried to explain, closing his eyes. "It's been a long day and I've got to go in again tomorrow . . ." He used to be able to make himself fall asleep instantly, out in the field. That hadn't been the case for a while. "It's been a long day, just let me . . ."

"But, no," she said and suddenly she was pressing up further against him, her voice nearly inside his brain. "I've got to tell you, it couldn't wait, I just . . ." he could feel her trembling excitement through his bones. "Honey, I'm pregnant," came her exuberant hiss. "Me, finally."

Hawkins eyes' opened wide.

"Isn't that great?" He didn't answer, even as she leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek. "It's what we always wanted. I'm so excited, aren't you?" She squeezed his hand one more time. "You're tired, we'll talk about it more in the morning, okay? I love you."

Hawkins let her slip back and cuddle against him, listening to her breathing go from regular to steady to slow. After a while when she couldn't hear, he finally murmured, "I love you, too," without really breathing. Outside, the wind sighed over the house, creaking wood spat groans into empty rooms, vents hissed tiny songs to absent ears, time pressed forward. Nothing moved, nobody stirred.

And in silence Hawkins kept cradling his wife's hand, staring at it in the dark as if waiting for one of them to fade away. Because, in any possible second it could be true.

THE END

- MB

December 2008-February 2009

North Arlington, Plainfield, Verona, RP