Notes: If you forgot what this story was about, well that's okay, I did too. Most recently, Sharon told Jack she was filing for divorce and Rusty told his mother the full truth about his past, and neither discussion went particularly well.
When the Winds of Changes Shift
rosabelle
Chapter XXI
Jack showed up at a quarter to three on Monday afternoon.
Unexpectedly, of course—though that was to be expected.
When he waltzed into the murder room wearing a visitor's badge and a forced smile, a sheaf of rolled up papers clutched in his fist, Sharon was listening to Lieutenant Flynn recount his notification to their victim's wife and son.
"She says he'd been going out a lot," he told the room. "Then last night, he calls on his way home from work to say he's stopping by the bank, only never makes it home. She tries to report him missing, but it's only been three hours."
"Did she know where he was going?" she asked him.
"The gym," Provenza announced, with an air of skeptical disdain.
"Ah." She heard footsteps approaching from down the hall, and willed herself the patience to withstand a lecture on overtime or cooperation with the media or whatever particular issue it was that Chief Taylor was himself being lectured on by the mayor and Chief Pope today. "Well, why don't we—"
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a person round the corner and she turned towards them—and stopped short. "Jack."
If only it had been Taylor instead.
"Jack," she repeated, slowly, stalling, buying herself time. He always did this, showed up when she least expected it and where he didn't belong because he could take advantage of her surprise and he knew it. It always worked, just a little. "What are you doing here?"
He had the nerve to chuckle. "I can always count on a warm welcome from you."
Sharon grit her teeth.
Out of the corner of her eye, she swept a quick look over her team. With affected disinterest, Provenza was pointing out something on the board to Andy. The time of death, she thought. Dr. Morales had placed it at around nine thirty the night before. Detective Sykes was listening to the conversation Flynn and Provenza were having. Detective Sanchez was searching for something in one of their databases and conferring with Lieutenant Tao, who held a phone to his ear in such a way that indicated he was on hold and unhappy about it.
All told, they were doing an excellent job of pretending not to listen.
Sharon took two steps to the side, and lowered her voice. "What are you doing here, Jack?"
"I just wanted to discuss these—" He held up the papers in his hand, waving them under her nose. "With you."
He made no effort to speak quietly.
"Ah," she said. "Well, I'm afraid that this is a very busy time, Jack, and we're in the middle of an investigation. I thought they would be fairly self-explanatory to a lawyer such as yourself. Are they not?"
"Well, did it ever occur to you that maybe I was in the middle of something too, when you had—"
"Jack—"
"Divorce papers sent to my office?"
The room had was suddenly incredibly silent.
He knew. He knew how uncomfortably exposed she would feel if he showed up and made a scene in her workplace in front of people whose respect she needed. He knew, and he was hoping that—what, she wondered. That she would change her mind? That she would invite him to stop by the condo later for coffee and dessert?
"This isn't the time, Jack."
"We need to talk about this, Sharon."
"And we will," she said, through gritted teeth. "At a more appropriate—"
"You can't just—"
"Jack." She cut him off, already tired. God, but were the next several months going to be like this? Probably, she decided grimly. "I don't have time for this right now. I'll be in touch."
She turned away from him.
His hand closed around her upper arm.
Sharon stopped mid-step. Everything was very still, then, and as she turned back to him, her mouth half-open in surprise, there was a loud ringing in her ears that dulled other sounds.
Even Jack seemed to know that he had just crossed a line. When their eyes met, he dropped his hand, releasing her as though she burned him.
"Ma'am?" Detective Sanchez was standing at her shoulder.
"Yes please, Julio." She gave him a tense smile, then leveled her gaze at Jack. "Detective Sanchez will show you out now. If you need to speak with me... call my attorney."
For once in his life, Jack went without further drama.
Lieutenant Provenza stood and followed Detective Sanchez.
Her face was uncomfortably hot as she turned around again, and there was something unpleasantly like weakness in her knees. Sharon cleared her throat, and did her best to ignore that the three remaining members of her team were watching her in open concern.
"Have we seen the security footage from the bank yet?" she asked, opting to continue as if there had been no interruption. "I would like to know if Mr. Dodd did indeed make it there before he was killed last night."
"It's with Buzz," Tao confirmed, and she gave him a grateful smile. "He says he'll be ready or us soon."
"Great," she said, and slid her hands into her pockets where no one would see if they trembled. "Amy, you were looking into his finances?"
She needed some tea.
Rusty thought the fish were supposed to be soothing.
They weren't really.
He always gave the tank a wide berth when he came to his therapy appointments, preferring to wait in the far corner of the waiting room and angle himself so that he didn't have to look at it. It was like he was afraid of fish. He just didn't like how they stared at him.
He'd complained to Sharon once. She'd laughed and told him that her therapist had had fish in his waiting room too. She hadn't sounded too fond of them, either.
Rusty spent a lot of time staring at his phone, avoiding the eyes of the fish and of the other patients that were sometimes here to see Dr. Joe's colleagues. The waiting room was empty today, though, and he was grateful for the solitude because it meant that there was no one there to give him irritated looks as he bounced his legs up and down and thumbed through the games on his phone. Chess with a computer was more mind-numbing and frustrating than it was soothing, and now it reminded him of those really terrible months he'd spend last year with nothing else to do, which didn't really help.
Every once in awhile, he checked his messages. Just in case. He could've accidentally set it on silent instead of vibrate and somehow, or he could've missed the notification. Sometimes his phone glitched. There were never any unread messages, and he knew he was being ridiculous at being surprised that she hadn't tried to contact him because really, what had he been expecting? This was his mother's thing now. She dumped him whenever he and his life inconvenienced her.
But there was that little part of him that persisted in being surprised anyway.
Rusty bit down on the inside of his lip until it hurt, and then he wondered what Sharon would say if he told her he'd thrown his phone into a fish tank.
Sharon waited an appropriate amount of time before excusing herself to the break room. She offered coffee. No one took her up on it. Once alone, she filled the electric kettle with water and closed her eyes as she waited for it to heat.
Damn him, she thought, and not for the first time. Damn Jack.
Her career was the only part of her life that he hadn't made a mess out of. Realistically, she knew that he didn't have the clout to ruin her professionally even if he wanted to, and she actually doubted that he did. She was sure that he'd fantasized about it a time or two, but actually doing it required more follow through than she was used to seeing from him.
She was just so tired of being embarrassed by him and his behavior.
Sharon rubbed her forehead and opened her eyes, then opened the cabinet and contemplated her collection of mugs before she could think too much about having to go back out there and face them all. There was nothing else to do except to do it, and dwelling on her wounded pride wouldn't help.
She chose the largest mug, the white ceramic one, and then reached for the nearest box of tea just as there as a quiet knock on the open door behind her.
"Yes, Lieutenant, what is it?" she said stiffly.
"Thought you'd want to know Buzz has the security video from the bank across the street ready to review," Andy told her. "He's ready whenever you are."
She gave him a curt nod and relaxed. "Thank you. I'll be there in a moment."
"I'll let him know." Andy turned to go, then paused. "Hey, if you need a minute—"
"This is a minute," she said, and ripped open a teabag.
"I'll see you in electronics, then."
She smiled at his retreating back, though she knew he couldn't see her. Then she inhaled, exhaled, and took her cup of tea, intending to leave it in her office before heading to electronics because Buzz would have a fit if she tried to bring it in there. She never made it there.
Provenza was waiting for her when she returned to the murder room.
"Ah," he said, and adjusted his tie. "Captain. I have some good news and some bad news."
Sharon paused. "Where's Julio?"
Oh God, they hadn't arrested Jack, had they?
"He's waiting downstairs," Provenza told her. "We had a chat with the folks downstairs, and your, ah, husband won't grace us with his presence a second time."
"Thank you," she said. "I'm assuming that's the good news."
"You're very popular today," he said. "There was someone on her way in to see you when we got there."
A stone dropped into her stomach.
"And then I just... left." Rusty stared at the floor as he finished talking. "I haven't seen her since then. She hasn't called. I haven't called her."
Dr. Joe gave him that sympathetic almost-smile and a calm nod. "Would you like to?"
"I don't know."
"What would you like to say to her?"
"I don't know." Rusty swallowed. "She thinks I chose to... do what I did. And—and I know we've talked about that seriously like hours already, but she—when she said that..."
"It felt like she might've been right?"
Rusty nodded.
"How do you feel today?"
"I... don't know." He looked away. "I get where you're coming from, when you explain, and Sharon tried to explain..."
"You've talked to her?"
"Not really," he said. "A little. It's... weird."
It wasn't super fun talking about this stuff with Dr. Joe, either, but at least he was a guy. And not his... whatever Sharon was to him. He wasn't sure about that anymore, but he was definitely, definitely sure that he never wanted to talk about anything that was even sort of sexual with Sharon. Ever.
"She said what you said, pretty much," he said. "And like I said, I get it, but—sometimes it feels like, if you'd been there and seen how it really happened..." Seen how he'd acted. "Sometimes it just feels like—" Rusty hesitated. He knew this was what the therapy was for, okay? It was to help him clear out all of these thoughts in his head, but sometimes he felt safer with them locked up. "Like I can't get away from it."
Sometimes, it felt like his old life had happened to someone else. His life had become something almost normal. He'd graduated high school. He'd gotten a job. He would be going to college. Maybe he was a year behind everyone else, but plenty of kids took an extra year to graduate. On the surface, his life was starting to feel like everyone else's.
And then, other times, it felt like it had happened yesterday, when he tried to think about actually doing something about the guy he sort of liked and his stomach got twisted up in knots because he'd done all kinds of things but dating wasn't one of them, or when he got separated from Sharon in a crowd and almost stopped breathing.
Those times, it felt like no matter what he did, he couldn't leave his old self behind.
Rusty's mother.
Silently, she and Sharon sat and surveyed each other from opposite sides of the desk. Sharon knit her fingers so tightly together she saw her knuckles whiten.
"You should know," she said at last, "that Rusty's asked me not to discuss with you what happened at dinner."
"He did?"
"Yes."
"That's not why I'm here."
Sharon waited.
"I just wanted to know—" Her face twisted. "Did my little boy really do those things?"
She felt moved to try and say it gently, though she wasn't sure why. "Yes. I'm afraid he did."
"Oh, God." Sharon Beck flinched at her words and then lowered her face into her hands. "Oh my God, my poor baby."
Sharon watched silently. How many times had she seen this sort of performance?
Some of the guilt and the grief was real. But this, this was about her, not Rusty. This was so that Sharon would feel moved to comfort her. She'd seen it from suspects. She'd seen it from Jack.
The question Sharon really wanted an answer to was why Sharon Beck was here in her office bothering to put on the act at all, because had she gone anywhere else she would've found the sympathy she was looking for.
With a bleak sort of humor, she wondered if Sharon Beck and Jack had passed each other in the lobby downstairs.
Then, silently, she crossed her arms and sat back in her seat. She was willing to bet she had the patience to sit there silently all afternoon. She wouldn't say the same for Sharon Beck.
She was right.
It took some minutes—at least five, Sharon confirmed with a quick glance at her watch—but Rusty's mother stopped crying abruptly and raised her head. Her eyes, uncannily resemblant of Rusty's, met Sharon's in the same sort of challenge she was used to seeing from the woman's son. But what she would tolerate from someone who was practically still a child—a child who was trying to unlearn years of unhealthy conditioning, at that—was something that was less excusable in a thirty-five year old woman. Sharon Beck might well never catch up to her son in terms of maturity.
Sharon inclined her head towards the tissues sitting on her desk, but didn't offer one. "Is there anything else I can do for you?"
She kept her words civil, but her tone was cool. Sharon Beck bristled at her words, and crumpled the tissue she'd taken in her hands.
"This is hard for me," she said stiffly. "For your information."
Sharon didn't reply.
"I love my son."
"I know."
"I got better for him, you know." She twisted the tissue in her hands. "I missed him. He thinks I forgot him, okay, but I didn't. I thought about him all the time. I came back to make it up to him. I was going to. But I guess he didn't need me after all."
So that was it. Sharon Beck had come back for her son... but Rusty hadn't been waiting for her, and he hadn't needed her to save him.
Sharon resisted the urge to press her fingers to her temples.
"Doesn't it bother you? Knowing what he did?"
"Of course it bothers me."
"He didn't have to do those things. He could've stayed where he was. In foster care. It wasn't my fault."
That Rusty had told her what his mother had said, that she knew enough not to be surprised, didn't make it easier or any less infuriating to hear. Sharon swallowed hard, setting her jaw.
"I understand that your perspective was distorted." That was as gracious as she could possibly be.
"It was hard," Sharon Beck said. "Raising him on my own. He and Gary never got along."
Sharon knew all that she wanted to about Rusty's past. If he ever came to her and wanted to share, that would be difficult but it would be different and she would listen because it would be what he wanted. She didn't want to hear it from someone else, because he needed the ability to set that boundary for himself. And—truth be told, it hurt to hear. She didn't want to know how he'd been beaten bloody or raped, because it filled her with such helplessness and anger that she wanted to lock him up forever to keep him safe.
It was always all she wanted. To protect her children. And sometimes she found herself unable to, because they had already been hurt. That was the worst.
"I think we're done here."
Rusty caught a glimpse of himself reflected in the elevator doors on the ride up. He looked about as happy as he felt, and the only thing he was looking forward to was having a snack and eating it in front of the TV before Sharon got home. Or dinner, maybe, if she was having one of those murders that was going to take forever.
He should've stopped and gotten a hamburger on the way home. That usually made him feel a little better.
He was considering turning around and going out to get one when he came around the corner at the end of the hall and saw someone standing at their door. Someone he was pretty sure that Sharon didn't want to come home and find standing at their door.
Rusty slowed. "Jack?"
"Rusty!" Jack stopped knocking at the door and instead turned towards him with a friendly smile. Too friendly. "How the hell are you, son?"
"Uh... great." Rusty gave him another look. "Sharon usually texts me when she's on her way home. She's still at work."
"Oh," Jack said. "Well, that's all right. I can be patient."
Rusty hesitated. The last time he'd let Jack into the condo, he'd mostly talked for an hour about how Sharon both was and wasn't a terrible person (it suddenly occurred to him to wonder if maybe the problem was that Jack was the one still crazy about Sharon), and then he'd pissed her off enough to divorce him.
He was pretty sure that Sharon would be unhappy if she came home and found Jack in the condo again.
Sharon had gone through a lot of trouble to make him happy.
He could do the same.
"Okay," he said. "We can wait. Out here."