Alex POV

I woke to the ringing of the phone and I felt completely disoriented.

"Phone," Bobby muttered, although he didn't make any move to get it.

Of course, in his defense, it was the landline, which was on my side of the bed.

"I can hear it," I grumbled. "What time is it?"

And yeah, it was a stupid question because the clock was on my side of the bed, too.

Right next to the phone.

So if I would just roll over and answer the obnoxiously loud piece of equipment then I'd be able to see for myself what time it was.

"Don't know," he replied.

He had his arm thrown over my waist, anchoring my hips against his, and his face was nestled against the top of my head.

The room was dark which told me that it was too damn early for the phone to be ringing.

And yet it was.

It stopped after six rings.

"Oh thank God," I mumbled as I slipped a leg in between his. He responded by running his hand down over my backside, squeezing me even closer to him.

"I think I'm awake now," he whispered as his hands began to roam over me in earnest.

"But the alarm hasn't gone off yet," I argued, even though I had a pretty good idea of how he wanted to spend the next however long we had until it was time to get up.

"Exactly."

I tilted my head up and he brought his lips down onto mine for a slow, easy kiss.

And yeah, I like my sleep, but if the alternative is this, I don't ever need to sleep again.

But then my cell phone started to ring.

"You have got to be kidding me," I said as I forced myself to pull away from him so that I could turn to retrieve the phone.

The clock showed that it was four-fifty.

"It could be Ross," he offered, and even though I now had my back to him, he continued to run his hands over me.

"It had better not be."

I picked up the phone

"Goren," I answered, not making any effort to mask my grouchiness.

"I was almost hoping you'd answer Eames. You know, to make it feel even more like old times."

"Captain…"

"Um…it's Chief now," he corrected, and I could just hear him smirking.

Of course, I knew the title change. I was just being difficult since he was obviously enjoying the early morning phone call.

"Right. And it's Goren. So as much as you probably wish I'd kept my name…"

"Still not a morning person, I see," he chuckled.

"That's right. And we don't start for at least three more hours. There is no way we're on the call list."

"You're not. And I'm sorry to bother you, but there was a special request for you two, and I approved it since…well, like you said. You're on in three hours."

Because yeah, we were going back to Major Case.

Bobby and I had reached our decision over the weekend leading up to our Monday morning meeting with then-Captain Ross.

Mike and Carolyn had made the same choice so all four of us had to report for duty at eight o'clock this morning.

In the meeting that day, Ross had suggested that we not start until April so that we would have plenty of time to get our business ready for the transition.

And by transition, I mean get it ready for my dad.

Because we weren't ready to complete dissolve it yet, so Bobby had suggested that we use Dad to watch the store while the four of us went back to playing detective.

Dad had been thrilled.

"You want me to take over your business?" he'd asked. "So you're going back to the department?"

"For now," I'd told him. "Ross wants us to do it on a six-month trial period to make sure that it's working for everyone. So we don't want to close up shop just yet and Bobby thought that you might enjoy getting back into the mix."

That was a little over three weeks ago.

Over the course of the next few weeks, my dad came to the office every day so that he could get a feel for how we did business.

He brought in his old partner from back in the day and said that between the two of them they'd be able to keep up with our same work load.

The work load that the four of us did.

"We won't be wasting time making goo-goo eyes at each other," my dad had explained wryly. "We'll be able to knock out cases in no time."

"Just don't get in over your head," I'd warned him, although I loved his enthusiasm.

It seemed to have given him a new zest for life.

But right now, I wasn't thinking about that.

Right now, I was wondering what in the hell had made me want to go back to getting calls in the wee hours of the morning.

To getting dragged from a warm bed.

To being interrupted mere moments away from early-morning sex.

"Special request?" I questioned Ross.

And as I spoke, I sat up in the bed. Bobby did, too.

Because yeah, even though the first moments of being awakened unexpectedly are a little rough, I knew exactly why we'd chosen to go back.

We loved working for the NYPD.

We loved having our badges.

And I don't just mean the hardware itself, because yeah, we both still had those.

But we wanted all that those badges stood for, too.

For the longest time, working for the department had been all I'd ever wanted to do, and the fact of the matter was that neither of us would've ever left if things had been different.

If Ross had been more accepting of us, sooner.

If Moran hadn't tried to screw Bobby over.

If it hadn't suddenly felt like it was me and him against the entire NYPD.

But sometimes it takes leaving to put things into better perspective.

And that went both ways.

So after three months away, we were ready to go back and they were excited to have us back.

Because resuming our positions at Major Case now…with Ross firmly in our corner…it was going to be great.

"A request from your brother," Ross answered. "Kevin. An acquaintance of his was found dead an hour ago."

"Who is it?" I asked immediately. I certainly didn't know all of Kevin's friends, but I knew quite a few of them.

"Dominick Eckhart. Do you know him?"

"No."

"Good. I wouldn't want there to be a conflict of interest. Kevin insisted that you two work the case."

"He insisted? Why didn't he just call me?"

But even as I asked the question, I knew the answer.

Kevin was as straight-arrow as they come. He went by the book, at all times, without question.

As kids, he'd been the one Dad would look to when he wanted the truth.

Sean would just flat out fabricate the most fantastic story imaginable.

I was more subtle, but still creative with the facts.

Cathy would just burst into tears and never say a word.

But Kevin…he would always come clean.

You want to know what happened to your car, Dad? Well, see, Alex thought it would be a good idea if…

How did the window get broken? Well, Sean was playing baseball and…

So even though he'd decided to ask for me and Bobby, I had no doubt that he'd still gone through all of the proper channels.

He'd probably called his captain, and then maybe even taken it one step further and called the division chief, and then offered to call the Chief of Detectives himself.

"He wanted to make it official," Ross replied, confirming my suspicion. "And actually, when I say that Eckhart was found dead, I mean that Kevin was the one who found him. He called it in."

"Eckhart is a firefighter?"

Firemen were considered to be ours. If one was murdered, it was automatically a Major Case.

"That's right. So, are you awake now?"

"I'm good. Where?"

He gave me the address, which I committed to memory.

"We'll be there in an hour," I told him.

"Great," he replied. "And Detective…it's good to have you back."

I hung up with Ross and glanced at Bobby, who was now up and heading for the shower.

"Kevin got us assigned," I told him. "A firefighter's body was left in Hell's Kitchen."

"On duty? Or off?"

"Off. But that's all I know," I said. I got up and followed him into the bathroom.

He turned on the shower water and then caught my eye.

"Okay," he said with a nod. "So, we're back."

"We're back."

An hour later, we arrived at the scene of the crime.

And I have to admit to getting a bit of a rush from the moment. We got out of the car with our badges clipped to our jackets and the beat cops who were guarding the perimeter parted like the Red Sea.

Bobby held up the crime scene tape for me and I slipped beneath it. I saw Kevin on the other side of the street talking with an officer, but I wasn't ready to hear his story yet.

Of course, he was my brother, and this had been someone he knew, so I did take a moment to make eye contact with him.

He seemed like he was holding it together okay.

He gave me a nod and a look of appreciation and then turned his focus back to the officer.

I continued down the alley with Bobby right on my heels as we headed for the body which was still laid out on the pavement.

"Detectives Goren and Goren," Rodgers called out to us with a half-smile on her face. "We meet again."

"It's nice to know that Ross is non-discriminatory when waking people from a sound sleep. He got you out of bed, too, huh?" I replied as my eyes scanned the area.

The area was going to be a nightmare for CSU. The alley had most likely been a squat for addicts, so there would be plenty of evidence to gather. The difficult task would be determining which of the collected evidence would have anything to do with our victim.

And besides that, what the hell had a firefighter, a friend of Kevin's, been doing here?

"Do we really want to open that door?" Liz teased in reference to my question.

And it was nice to see her back on her game.

She'd struggled a bit over the past month. Dealing with the psychological ramifications of not only being the victim of a brutal attack, but also knowing that the attack was meant as payback on someone else, well…tough was an understatement.

But Liz was a fighter and she seemed to have learned the fine art of communication, too, so I thought that she was making progress.

And now, to hear her joking about her and Ross in bed together, well…I was thrilled to hear it.

"You're right," I said. "I'll save it for ladies' night. So what have we got?"

As I asked the question, I continued my visual scan of the crime scene.

But the more I looked I decided that crime scene wasn't the right term.

Dump site would be better because it didn't look to me like there was enough blood for him to have been killed here.

Which answered my question about why Kevin's friend had come here…he hadn't.

Not until after he was dead.

"Your victim has multiple stab wounds to the back," she began, switching easily into professional mode.

"Not much blood here," Bobby commented, obviously having picked up on the same fact as me.

He snapped on a pair of gloved and squatted down next to Liz.

Three months gone and yet we were right back in our groove. He always liked getting a closer look at the body while I inspected the surroundings.

I think that it used to make Liz feel like he was checking up on her, making sure that she didn't miss anything, but by now she realized that that was just Bobby.

The bodies seemed to speak to him and he could gather more insight from his five minute inspection of the victim than most ME's could in an autopsy.

"Exactly. This is not your murder site. See this?" she asked, pointed at the exposed forearms of the man. "He's got drag marks on his arms. Nothing extensive, but…"

"Like someone parked and then pulled him out," Bobby supplied.

"It's like you never left," she responded dryly.

"So what's the TOD?" I asked her.

"For now, I'm going to put it at around midnight. But he's either been here for awhile, or he was in a car in the exact same position," she told us. "The lividity fits this precise prone position."

I looked around the alley again and decided that I need to amend my previous burning question.

I knew what had brought our victim to the alley.

His killer.

But what the hell had Kevin been doing out here at this time of night?

TBC...