GREAT BARRIER

The mother lifted her child high and young legs clasped her waist like a belt; pubis tucked over hip bone, nature's shelf. The little girl felt as light as whipped topping. Even with a mile to go, and a juggling a large bag, there was no stoop in the woman's frame, no fatigue in her gait. The mother ran her fingertips through her child's hair, a luxurious golden thread. It cascaded down the narrow neck and back. It rolled, in soft intoxicating waves. It seemed too bountiful for the waif it came attached to. And although the net effect of that hair was truly metallic, there were threads of pure white woven through. Those pure white veins played with the sun, and with the eyes of passersby. People routinely stopped to give them a rub. They couldn't resist. The child's head was like the lure of cashmere, it needed stroking.

The mother was the same, only magnified. She too had golden waves, slightly darker, that bounced around her shoulder blades with each step. Together, on errands, in Brisbane central, this duo rarely escaped comment. "Beautiful like her mummy." Or, "Simply gorgeous ladies."

The pale skin of the child's shoulder shaped elegantly to the bone, with all the ease and contour of an ivory tusk. She was perfectly made, and perfectly innocent, as are all children of that age. The mother's tight grasp skewed the child's pink petalled sundress, to reveal a strappy X of even fairer flesh on her back. These pale strips, were a reminder that her little body had been tattooed by hours spent outside. This little girl lived a charmed, sun-kissed life. She wore a wardrobe comprised almost entirely of light dresses, and itty bitty bathing suits (occasionally paired with a fashionable stole or jacket). Also, tiny golden heart-shaped studs, winked up from small earlobes, and patent leather daisies bloomed on open-toed sandals. And the pair of flowers, danced back and forth on the breeze of knobby knees.

By all accounts this child was loved.

Ro and Nikki still occasionally referred to their girl Charlie (or Charlotte Grace) in months. She was little more than a baby. Her existence was barely a blush, 37 months next Wednesday.

"Shall we get an ice lolly and take the boat to Straddie?" The woman asked with a playful twinkle. And the child nodded emphatically. It was a favourite day trip, this jaunt to Stradbroke Island. They did it once or twice a month, since Charlie had begun to toddle. Sometimes as a pair, sometimes with daddy. The boat, or rather the ferry, made a routine commute to and from the port at Cleveland. But for this wee thing, the ship wasn't a necessity of metal and engineering, rather it was a magical experience.

"Yook..." Charlie shouted (still struggling with L's) and Nicole did, down at the turquoise shimmering sea, with it's blobby navy depths, at a school of sleek dolphins, bouncing and skipping in the frothy wake.

Nicole set her child down on the outside railing, then she bent at the waist and perched there too. She let her elbows both support her, and grip the little hips. She dangled her loose wrists over the Bay. Nicole flexed and relaxed, adjusting the tension of her hold on Charlie. She felt dizzied by the sea. Like many before her, she fought the inexorable draw of the water, that strange vertigo of height times rush. She briefly imagined what she would do if her baby tumbled back and slipped beneath the waves.

"Give me a kiss." The mother commanded. There wasn't even a breeze between the request, and Charlie's supple lips upon hers. Then boney arms went around her neck. Nicole still marvelled that. There was never a bargain with this little one, never any manipulation, only this absurd openness. Charlie was a lamb. The term lamb had been coined for this docile sort of innocence.

The ferry docked and they walked off hand in hand. The ride across Moreton Bay was almost free, if you didn't have a schedule or a car. And once docked in Dunwich there were island buses that left every hour on the hour. The pair caught one immediately, as if fated. Charlie was vibrating with excitement. This was the kind of transportational extravaganza that children dreamed of. The whooshing ship, and now a grunting bus. She clapped and grinned and squealed. They found a pair of seats on the half empty bus, and Charlie secured the window. They wound across that width of the island, and up Dickson Way. The bus had loose suspension, it tossed them about and the child added extra bounce to every bump, propelling off her seat with glee.

"We're almost there. Almost there." She chanted, though she had no real concept of time or space, and the journey was as good as the destination. And Nicole eyed the young specimen with amusement. Nicole was a student of life and her daughter was an enthusiastic subject. At last, they found a nice spot on the beach. Then two towels, two straw sun hats and a small bucket appeared from inside mum's large pink tote. Charlie set to work, busily heaping dry sand into a pile, unconcerned as it slid back down the sides and never really grew.

"Building a big castle." The child murmured, to no one in particular.

Nicole watched. Nicole fidgeted. Nicole yawned. Then Nicole waited for the ideal moment and did the oddest thing. She slipped away unseen, and hid behind a doon. She sunk low in the shadow, and held her breath, and quietly watched the rise of the sandy mound above her. Seeing, for quite some time, only the tufts of tall brown grass that thrust up through the surface. Then at last (bloody ages later) her girl crested the rise. She watched Charlie stand there. She watched the child's head dart all over. She watched the child's eyes gloss. She watched the child's lip distend. And she watched how forlorn she looked, all alone on this desolate public beach.

And still Nicole hid.

She wondered how long it would take, for the first tear to fall. She shimmied lower and mentally counted. 1 one-thousand, 2 one-thousand, 3 one-thousand, 4 one-thousand, 5... She wondered if Charlie would wander around, or if she would sit down in defeat. The latter. When the child sat and began to cry, then wail, only then did the mother come forward, and offer comfort.

"Don't cry goose." She flopped down. "I was only playing hide and seek." Nicole let the girl crawl into the hollow of her crossed legs.

"Hide and seek?" Charlie offered, with a quizzical brow and full wet cheeks.

Nicole nodded. "You hide now."

It ended up being a game of tag. They dashed about in the sand. Kicking up clouds of grit as they fled, and fell, and rolled. It was silly and surreal, with only the occasional roar of a 4x4 tearing up the landscape over yonder, and the dot of a parasail on the horizon. It seemed Monday afternoons in the sunshine, were exclusively the property of stay-at-home-moms with their charges, and tourists. But both were in short supply at this off-season, unmanned, stretch of heaven called Deadman's Beach.

"Shall we take a dip?" Nicole asked at last.

Charlie nodded. Nicole shed her tank top and white cotton capris, to reveal the body of a woman that appeared to never have passed a child (that was how she thought of it, like passing an accidentally swallowed fruit pit, or passing a nuisance kidney stone). No, this woman was smooth and golden and lean.

The water was refreshing and buoyant. They spread like starfish, floating, letting their blonde tresses fan out thinly. The hair massaged the surface like thousands of gentle fingers. "Hold on tight." Nicole cautioned loudly to her daughter, her ears below the waves. But short moments later she slipped free of the weak little fingers. Nicole let her head loll to the side, to watch the tide float her girl away. The child's body was like a piece of driftwood, then at other times, her psychedelic bikini - all turquoise and fuschia and chartreuse - might have been a parrot fish nipping up to the surface. And that hair, it was the tricky gleam of booty from a wrecked pirate ship. Nicole quite admired the child's ethereal beauty, in an abstract way.

Charlie then realized she was floating off, and she lost her posture. And with that she sunk under the surface. She thrust up and coughed. Then sunk and rose again. Nicole kept a single brown eye above the waves, watching. It was a shrewd, flat, disc, filled with aquatic knowing, like that of a whale, but with arguably less humanity. Nicole stayed consumed as the child struggled to live. She watched her soundlessly rise and sink again. It was the myth of drowning dispelled. The wild flailing and terrified screams were absent, there was only the truth. It would eat her. The ocean would eat her, the way we eat flecks dust and bacteria all day long. Then it would carry on, forever swallowing, walls of water folding over on itself, again and again.

Eventually Nicole paddled over. She grasped her child's hair. She fisted it, wrapping it around her hand, and pulled the small head up high above the break, and into the relief of oxygen. Charlie sputtered and hacked. The mother comforted that tiny trembling body. "I told you to hold on tight goosey." The girl's eyes were red with strain and salt. "Let's go get that lolly, and go home to daddy." Nicole said, towing her daughter back to shore. The child managed a hoarse laugh of excitement. "Did you have a fun day?" The mummy asked.

"Yes." She looked up earnestly. "I yiked the waves and the sand."

"Do you want to come back again? Maybe with daddy?"

"Yes!" This time it was a shout of bliss. Charlie could easily imagine the three of them together. She imagined sitting high on daddy's shoulders. She imagined his medium brown hair, and how it felt against her cheek. "Daddy." She repeated, with such sweet soft wistfulness. A wist so beyond her years, that Nicole locked her in her sights.

"Do you love daddy very much?" She asked.

The child nodded, and spread her thin arms wide. "This much."

"What do you like best about daddy?"

The three year old considered that with all the solemnity of a scholar. "I yike bedtime."

"Bedtime?" Nicole raised her eyebrows with maternal surprise.

"We hug tight and read stories."

Nicole frowned. "How tight do you hug?"

The child giggled. "Really tight." Silly mummy. Charlie didn't have the language to describe the PSI of a preschooler grip. "Yike this." She pressed her face to her mother's abdomen and wrapped both arms firmly around her thigh, wriggling.

Perhaps it was that nose so near her groin. Perhaps it was the thought of a man and child in bed together. Perhaps it was watching the girl undulate naturally, as she tried to reenact her 'crushing' bedtime grip. But in an instant Charlie was wrenched away by her forearm, then strung up on her tippy toes. 'Stop it! Just stop it! Is that the kind of girl you want to be?" Nicole wrenched the arm against the joints. "A dirty little girl?" Her grip grew tighter and angrier. 'A vile little thing?" The baby hung limp, a chicken in the mouth of a wolf. Nicole twisted and shook her more. "A filthy tease who rubs against…"

At that point Nicole felt, rather than heard, the pop of disengagement. She felt, rather than heard, the shallow crack. She felt, rather than heard, the screech her girl made. And no wonder. The arm looked as boneless as rubber tubing. And now Charlie was screaming, a piercing kind of nightmare from her wide dark mouth. "Don't cry, don't cry." But even Nicole could see it was too late for that. When she dropped the arm, the sad thing fell lower than the socket. "Don't cry." The mother tried again. "I'm sorry."

And God was was she loud!

To Nicole it wasn't a human anymore, it was a demon mid-exorcism. "Stop! Just Stop!" Nicole yelled. But nothing closed that mouth. So she backhanded it. She backhanded the mouth, just to make it stop. She did it, perhaps, with the same amount of force it would take to knock a sturdy lamp from a table. But it took Charlie (who was 29 pounds of air) right off her feet. And down hard against an outcrop of rock. It was bad luck all around. That, that particular ridge of stone, hit that particular child, in that particular spot. It sliced, long and shallow, into the skin of her scalp. And she began to ooze blood. Soon much of that blonde angelic hair was a crimson mess. The child lay still.

It was an underreaction not to run for help.

It was an overreaction to believe the child was dead.

This was the trick of the head wound. A puncture, that no matter the size, yielded tides of blood. All those vessels feeding the brain, vines thrumming under the skin. Nicole knew this. Nicole understood human anatomy. When Nicole looked at people, she saw something else entirely. Sometimes, while in line or in the streets, it was as proletariat pigs, with their unwashed jeans and breakfast stained hoodies. Other times she saw them sexually, as a grouping of orifices - sloppy mouths, and puckered anuses, and slick vaginas. And when she was going in for the kill, she viewed them in a third way, the way a vampire might, as bones wrapped in juicy flesh, full of coiling, forking tubes of blood.

No.

Nicole was no innocent.

Which was why she stood, and looked down dispassionately at the mess she had made. Nicole said something under her breath, it might have been "shit". Then Nicole looked up and down the empty beach. She knelt and kissed her girl's lips. She caressed the line of her girl's delicate throat, exposed, arched over the rock. Then she shoved the heel of her hand there hard, until Charlotte Grace was dead.

Goren and Eames ascended the narrow stairwell together. The whole second floor of this walk up, was sign posted to 'Accoutrements Boutique,' a secret clothing store in Soho.

"May I help you?" Asked the shopkeeper, a trendy fortysomething, with a tapered boy cut and dark rimmed glasses.

"Was there a man in here, about an hour ago?" Eames pulled her badge.

"I've had one customer all morning. A woman who tried on seven different outfits, but didn't buy anything."

"She spent the whole time in the dressing room?" Goren asked.

"Yes."

"What did she look like?" He was picking up a scent.

"Late thirties, nice figure, dark brown hair, glasses, lively eyes. She said she was from LA."

Bobby walked over to the window inside the dressing room. And looked down onto the jewellery store, the scene of their thwarted robbery. "It's a perfect view. You talked to her?" He asked the boutique owner.

"Yes, she was curious about my daughter, I have a picture here." She handed him a gold gilded frame. It featured a girl and a European streetscape.

"She's a musician. This is in London. There's a London taxicab." Bobby said and the woman nodded.

"I'm going to visit her next month. She giving a concert outside of London at the... I forgot the name of the hall, the Shell... Shellbourne? Something like that."

"The Sheldonian."

"Yes that's it. The woman from LA said it's a beautiful old theatre."

"She knew it? She'd been there." Now he was all but certain, grimly so.

"Yes she seemed very cultured. She had a little accent."

"The Sheldonian is in Oxford." Bobby offered.

"That's right. This woman was very funny. She said that when she was younger, she spent a couple of weeks there chasing boys."

"That has a familiar ring to it." Alex said and as she did something rancid attacked her throat.

The bitch was back.

Outside on the sidewalk Alex coughed hoarse and hard. There was a tallon stuck in her larynx. Nicole's professionally waxed, buffed, lacquered tallon. Alex stood on imaginary milk crate at Broadway and Houston and made a silent speech to the citizens of New York. There's a syringe wielding nut job trolling the subway system. But don't worry she only knocks off liabilities and competition. Also, sorry suckers you're on your own. Alex wasn't naive enough to hope for a resolution this time. Fairy tales of an arrest, a trial, a lethal injection were gone, long gone. She didn't plan to engage Nicole. She just wanted to get out unscathed.

"Nicole." Bobby muttered beside her.

"Nicole." She murmured back. And they moved like there was lead in the soles of their shoes. "Feels like just yesterday we were all together." Alex mocked nostalgia.

"It's bold." He marveled. "Coming back here."

"You expected fear? She didn't get that gene."

"Yeah, but she must be back for a reason."

Alex scoffed. "You! She's back for you!" Nicole was already sprinkling out those titillations. Just for him. And Bobby was already wearing that look he reserved for her, a premium blend of: horror, intrigue and anticipation.

"Me?" He looked at Alex.

Okay, so we're playing dumb. Best to lay it all on the table right now, because this time, when he started fucking around, Alex wouldn't be making a clandestine road trip north to prove a point. This time she would bow out, permanently. Her voice held all of that old anger. "Cut the crap. This is, and always will be the Nicole and Bobby show."

"She toys with you too." He said, in a lame attempt to diffuse her.

Alex rolled her eyes. "She thinks I'm your secretary." But for the first time Alex realized that she was real competition, a potential mark. If Nicole got a whiff of it... What that demon would do with their secrets. "And keep it that way." Alex barked at him, with the latitude of the long suffering. "Don't so much as look at me when she's around."

Their eyes met and shouted: Jude.

Alex talked herself down. There were no loose lips. Hardly anyone knew about their family. She'd been telling select, benign, people that she was getting married (her personal banker, her doctor). She had an elegantly fabricated tale about her fiancé when they asked. She'd been wearing her ring, a lot. Now she slipped the diamond off again, and dropped it into her change purse, amidst the nickels and dimes. She massaged her finger. She needed to let it expand. She wanted to put a band-aid around it, to bury any weakness under layers of plastic and adhesive. Nicole read weakness. Without permission Alex's mind went on a trip, remembering how they'd ended up here. That trial. That stupid, stupid trial. It had gone so wrong. Alex saw the coup de grace in her head…

Nicole's lawyer had the face of a bulldog, all jowls and teeth in an Armani suit. He'd come very close to Alex, in court that day. He planted his hands on the oak witness stand and leaned in.

"Isn't it true detective Eames, that this whole case hinges on a vaccination, that either was or was not, issued by a civil servant in Brisbane, Australia almost 3 years ago? Isn't it true that your case against my client doesn't offer one shred of corroborative physical evidence on this continent?"

"No. This whole case hinges on bloodwork done right here in the USA." Alex fired back. "The science doesn't lie. This woman, Nicole Wallace has been vaccinated for anthrax. Her alias Elizabeth Hitchens never was."

Nicole sat virginally still, in a navy blue pant suit. Her shirt collar a spray of white lace doily, high on her neck.

The lawyer turned casually to the jury. "I had my passport renewed just last week, the wife and I are finally making a trip to sunny Costa Rica. When I finally got the papers in the mail, it turns out Uncle Sam thinks I was born in 1930. I'll admit, I'm feeling my age, but I'm pretty certain that I'm not 73 yet." A twitter of laughter floated up from the 12 captives. 'How many of you have experienced these annoying bureaucratic mistakes?" A few nodded. "We submit for your consideration, amended documentation showing the vaccination of Elizabeth Hitchens. It was performed at the Department of Health in Brisbane, Australia." He turned to the judge, an evidence bag in hand. "It was issued for an expedition to Tanzania, Africa for a research project involving livestock. A research project that was subsequently cancelled, and the paperwork for which was mishandled." He turned back to Eames.

Alex shifted uncomfortably. She felt a fist in her gut. "That paperwork didn't exist two months ago." She said.

"Or maybe you and your partner were just so confused and overzealous two months ago, that you didn't do your due diligence."

Believe it or not, the embarrassment of that moment still stung. Nicole could fabricate anything. Nicole could escape a room with no windows or doors. Alex was done with her. Alex had thought a lot about their reluctant menage a trios. She wasn't as harsh about Bobby's attraction to Nicole as you might think she'd be. Nelda Carlson? Now that was tawdry, pathetic even. At least Nicole was a worthy opponent. Oh, Alex wanted to stick a fork in the woman's eye (and twist it), that was certain. But Nicole was her own worse enemy. Nicole didn't play clean. She murdered copiously and by some mysterious agenda. She had jeopardized Bobby's career. She routinely made fools of them. Nicole's ruthlessness had created a natural buffer between her and Bobby. Alex knew he understood that she was a savage.

Unfortunately Nicole wasn't done with them. She was fixated on Bobby. Not that he was innocent. She was his 'white whale,' his periodic obsession. But what was the hunted without the hunter? Blissful and safe? Perhaps in the animal kingdom, where having no natural predators was a license to thrive. But this was a disgusting, contrived drama. This woman wanted to be chased, and therefore she needed her Ahab. It was just a game for her. And Alex had developed a saying when dealing with Bobby over the years: Give him a game, to keep him sane.

"I know what you're thinking." He said. "I'm not going to lose my head." He read her mind as he aways did.

"Good."

Alex moved alongside the SUV. He followed her and boxed her in. He put his hand over hers on the chrome latch.

"I'm done trifling with Nicole. It's too risky. Believe me." He implored. He brought her palm to his mouth and kissed it.

"I do."

"No you don't. But I promise."

She couldn't get over how boyish those words sounded. It got her, right in the heart. Bobby really was soft. This was where they dovetailed, at compassion. It was the pipeline that fed their partnership. His for those below, and hers for those above. He was on a quest to understand the weak-minded. And she to champion the innocent. Bobby was always trying to prevent people from committing crimes against themselves. And Alex saw life as a meritocracy, if you wanted to squander yours on criminal activity, or drugs (or by refusing help for your insanity) that was your choice, but she didn't want to share a planet with you. Time and time again, his sensitivity got them into trouble, and her laser focus saw them out. Alex had the gift of clear sight. Alex was sane, frightfully sane sometimes. Lucky for him. And right now she saw that compassion had to fall in the hierarchy of virtues. With Nicole lurking, strength and loyalty were far more important to their survival. Alex would be watching him.

"Trust me." He said.

"Okay." She murmured. "Okay. Let's take another run at her. But screw the outcome."

He smiled, "Right, screw the outcome."

"The greatest detectives in the world. You have to wonder about people who need so much positive reinforcement." She paused. "I missed you at the reading of the verdict. Then again, it wasn't one of your best moments."

"Well none of us have been at our best lately. You've gone from multi-millionaires to street urchins."

Oooh good one. His words stung her sweetly, like linguistic lovemaking without lubrication.

The first time Nicole Wallace saw Robert Goren it had rocked her world. She was a woman as keenly cultivated as a greenhouse full of strawberries (in the arctic). There was nothing natural in her poise, in her knowledge, in her discourse. She put herself in the most awkward scenarios because she relished dancing on a rapier's edge. It was what she wanted. It was what she'd always wanted. To be enviably accomplished, enviably intelligent, enviably present (with that sparkle that only the best ones had). She had always wanted to be someone beyond common reach. And she was. She was aspirational.

Except with him.

Bobby talked to her and gazed at her, and he did all of it right through her facade. Even when he was factually off base, his observations were emotionally on point.

She found couldn't tuck him into one of her categories. He didn't fit. He wasn't messy or vain, he wasn't a conquest or a kill. She tried to relegate him constantly and failed every time. That had never happened before. She found herself wanting nothing more than to verbally joust with him. He wounded her pride, and she found she liked that. It felt like therapy. And she realized then, that it would be impossible to hurt him. Physically anyway. She had contemplated many times how she might kill him, and never once acted. Especially when he'd caught her by the toenails and dragged her to court. Court. It was a laughable place for a woman like her. And yet she'd played by the rules, and she'd done it all for him. To see him testify. To watch him move. To speculate about what he was thinking. Court had been a treat, not an ordeal. For the first time in her life, Nicole wondered if she was in love. She relished the irony, that it would be him, a champion of the victimized, coveted by the ultimate victimizer.

Not that she saw herself in that role. When she referred to herself as a 'victimizer', Nicole was simply reading a meme. She killed people, and therefore by societal standards she was evil. But Nicole really saw herself as karma. As a hand meting out justice. Saving the weak from their weakness, knocking the pompous from their pedestals, and eradicating the deviants - the secret sex freaks that paid for perversion, or diddled kiddies. By her measure the world might thank her. Or at the very least study her.

Enter Bobby. He watched her as though she were the only subject in a indefinite study.

On the heels of her intellectual appreciation of him, came the physical. Nicole was surprised to realize that she saw him as beautiful. That was a first. For her, there was a fine aura around him that no one else had. It didn't eclipse the truth. She still saw him as large, awkward and imposing. But it was all juxtaposed by the curiosity of her fascination.

She liked his face, she didn't see veins, she saw a heavy jaw and almost symmetry. She liked his body, she didn't see angry orifices, she saw the male animal, perfect in his proportions - wide shoulders, neat hips. She'd liked this breath on her ear when he'd said "Evil Nicole, is also unrelenting in its pursuits." At that moment he'd smelled faintly of mustard, likely Dijon. She'd felt the bite of horseradish, just before she'd felt the build of cream between her thighs and the swell of arousal.

It was this infatuation with him, that kept her away for years at a time. He compromised her. He made her question her goals. He made her feel like a tramp, plodding all over the planet without purpose. He couldn't even be compared to Ro or Gav (the men she'd actually married and domesticated herself for). For her they had been unions of strategic gain, financial and national documentation. Bobby was in a class of his own.

If anyone, he rather reminded her of Bernard. She'd fucked Bernard (of course they'd fucked) but not for love. It had been like contract negotiations; who's on top. Bernard had shared her goals. They'd had a manifest destiny. A big dream. A big delusion. To take a bite out of the world. To Nicole, it felt, with Bobby, like they also shared a dream. But a microcosm of her other one. This dream was only about self. It was the same manifest destiny, but instead of unleashing it on the world, she and Bobby had an agreement to pick each other apart, until they had conquered themselves.

"My child drowned," She leaned in tight, and spat the words in his eye. "You're insane to think anything else. Who helped you concoct this theory, your mother?"

"In her wildest delusions she never spawned anything like you Nicole."

Now the ocean was made of blood.

Both of them slit from stem to stern.

Robert Goren was very philosophical about Nicole Wallace, for the most part. He had long ago acknowledged her physical attributes and dismissed them. Yes, he found her pretty. Yes, he found her compelling. And yes, she was infinitely fuckable. But he wouldn't put his dick within a ten mile radius of that opening. Even more then his libido, even more then his loyalty to Alex, even more then Nicole's unapologetic malevolence, even more then the notion of self-preservation. Was the weight of duty. Bobby had a deep awareness of the weight of his life. It seemed preordained, that light, or inconsequential choices would allude him. Every decision he'd ever made seemed to be infused with matters of life or death. He wore the gravity of his job, the lessons of his past, and the intricate network of secret choices that marked his present, everywhere he went. And because of this grand grasp of reality, he needed to be hyper-sentient, and hyper-responsible.

Enter Nicole, an archetype of instability.

At some point in the evolution of popular culture, a certain glamour had grown attached to instability. Perhaps it was the charming on-screen depictions of weird and wounded geniuses. Perhaps it was the idea that greatness only came on the heels of chaos and nonconformity. Perhaps it was envy of those able to throw off the yoke of convention. Regardless, something about unstable, tortured, souls had secured a warm spot in people's hearts.

Only, Bobby knew, that to live it, to stand on a spinning plate (that was losing momentum) wasn't exhilarating, it was impossible. To not know who your mother was at any given time of day (A vicious bitch? A pious priestess? A slumdog millionaire?) she had so many faces. To not feel safe sleeping in the bed across from your brother. To wonder endlessly where your father might be. Then to internalize all of that off-kilter energy. To amalgamate it into your portrait of yourself, and to find, that because it, you were ruined for the company of regular people. That was it exactly. All that instability had both made him, and ruined him.

So no. Nicole was not charmingly unstable. She was destruction personified.

And yet, part of him thought that they were fated to bump up against one another. He had been chosen to both hold her at bay, and draw out her morality. He had been chosen to save the world from her. Bobby felt (quite validly) that he was the only one on the planet that could do it. His German was getting rusty from lack of use. But it was still there. 'Es muss sein.' A theme of great musical compositions and great works of literature. In English, 'It must be.' Fatalistic and fact.

He tried desperately to remember if he'd always felt this way, or if rubbing up against Nicole made him more morose. Surely he had romped once. He had once been carefree. He had after all, spent couple of weeks in Oxford chasing girls. That didn't sound very 'Es muss sein.' But ah, if he hadn't done that, then he wouldn't have told Nicole the story of it, in that sub-let penthouse off Hudson University. And Nicole wouldn't have been able to weave his brief international flirtations, into her rouse at the Accoutrements Boutique in Soho. And that shopkeeper wouldn't have coincidentally had a daughter in Oxford about to play at the Sheldonian. And that theatre, wouldn't have been one he had himself once sat in, beside one of those young British girls, while enjoying the strains of Beethoven's String Quartet No. 16 in F.

Unbelievable, but true. And that was 'Es muss sein'.

He pled with Ella Miyazaki. "I know that she's overwhelmed your sense of right and wrong. Nothing is too insignificant to escape her attention. She even has you writing malicious letters to your family." When the girl's brow furrowed, the satisfaction Bobby felt was so immense, that for a moment he felt light enough to levitate. Because this really was the best he could do. He could only plant the seeds of doubt and rebellion in her. "Your grandparents received a letter from you about your mother's abortion. Would you like to see it?"

When Bobby warned off Ella, he felt like a scarecrow waving his straw arms frantically at the birds. But not to save the crops. No. It was because the crops had been poisoned. He looked across the interrogation table. He looked straight into the eyes of that rebellious baby. Oh sure, she's 'tough'. She has crazy hair after all. And she's fallen off her bicycle. And she's been scolded by her intelligentsia parents. God. He was staring at the definition of naivety. He was staring at a child who craved love.

Then Nicole's people burst in and swept her away, and that much closer to her death. And Goren weighed a million pounds again. His fate (his 'Es muss sein') was starting to stoop him with all of it's unrelenting weight.

"People like you and me just aren't fated to have children."

"Yeah well don't count me out yet."

He got a phone call later that night. He was at home, sunk low into his sofa and already two beers deep. Licking his mortal wounds, while considering Nicole and Ella's.

"Goren." He barked into the phone.

"You've moved house Bobby." Nicole said. He knew it. He knew it. Dead my ass. Tricky girl. And she never played by the rules, let alone business hours. It was 10pm. His elation at being right, was quickly devoured by dread. Like a good cop, he immediately considered, taps and traces, and all the other devices at his disposal. He immediately thought of Alex in the bedroom breastfeeding Jude. But instead of summoning her, or the calvary, he took another long calm swig of domestic beer.

"Yeah, high rent and too many unwanted visitors." He dug at her.

She laughed. "You're unlisted as well."

"That didn't seem to stop you." His heart pounded.

"Very little stops me. It wasn't easy to track you down, but I'm alive. I couldn't stand to think of your worry."

His breath hitched. He wondered if he should warn her off hard, or play it cool. He decided on a mix. "Remember, I sleep with a gun under my pillow."

"Oh the mistrust. The perils of being a police officer. Careful to keep the safety on." There was a long pause. "And Bobby?"

"Yes?"

"Kiss that little boy good night, from me."

Click.