Chapter Thirty Six
Chasing Shadows
"Dispatch please be advised that this is now a homicide."
When Kate looked up at Rick, all of the color went out of her face and her eyes went wide with terror when she noticed that he was bleeding.
"Rick..." Kate managed to choke out, barely able to work his name past the lump in her throat, horror clearly visible on her face as she clutched his right arm, tugging at it to find the wound that was dripping blood down the sleeve of his leather jacket and dripping off his forearm.
As if for the first time, Rick looked down at his shoulder as Kate slid the sleeve off of his arm in a panicked haze, saw the graze from the high caliber round that had nicked him just before striking the dead body on the floor that had once been John Raglan. Kate pulled a bandana out of her coat pocket crumpled it in her hand and pressed it into the wound muttering nonsense words to herself over and over, before pulling her radio up to her lips in her other hand, finally finding her voice.
"Dispatch where is that ambulance, dammit?" her voice shook as she kept pressure on the wound. "I have wounded on site!"
Rick placed his hand over hers on his shoulder, as much to offer reassurance to Kate that he was ok as to take over applying direct pressure to the wound.
"Kate it was just a graze," he whispered into her hair, using his wounded arm to tug her shaking body to his, making her release her death-grip on it as he slipped his other one over her head, applying direct pressure both to his wounded shoulder and to the woman he loved. Her arms wrapped themselves around his waist instead.
"It's all right, Kate I'm going to be okay."
He hadn't seen her like this since the night he came back from his interrogation at the New York field office several weeks ago. It simply wasn't like her to lose it like this at a crime scene, as if she was seeing something entirely different that what was actually happening.
She had refused to talk about the nightmare she had obviously had that night, the one that had her running down the stairs in her bare feet to his room in the middle of the night. Seeing him bleeding had obviously set something off in her. Something dark and terrifying.
By the time they heard the approaching police sirens, Kate had stopped shaking, and began to put her own professional walls back in place. As the police cars and the ambulance became visible, she ducked out from under his arm and walked with him toward the exit of the diner. Before they stepped outside, she turned and planted a soft chaste kiss on his cheek.
"I'm so glad you're okay." she said in a hushed tone barely above a whisper.
"We'll talk later." Rick said quietly before he was descended upon by the paramedics, who walked him to the waiting ambulance to see to the superficial wound on his shoulder.
As he was whisked out of her sight, Kate barely repressed a shudder at his sudden absence. The nightmare she thought she had put behind her weeks ago, a vision of him broken and bleeding to death in her arms, his whispered "I love you." in his last shuddering breath flashed unbidden into her mind. It took every ounce of willpower she possessed to keep the abject horror she felt off of her face.
Any other man in her life would have been sent packing the instant she felt anything near this strong about him. She would have walked...no...run away as fast as she could, before they left her or were taken from her like her mother was. She had spent the majority of her adult life shunning serious relationships to prevent her from ever again feeling the pain she felt when she lost her mom. She had been afraid to love, or be loved for fear of this exact circumstance.
Yet here she was, so desperately in love with this man that her need for him, a man as broken and as damaged as she was, had finally overridden her fear. She was, for the first time in her life, more afraid of hurting him than she was of losing him, though the thought that she might have lost him today scared her to death. That the last memory of him alive that she would have had was of a senseless, stupid, ridiculous argument they had had, a hastily packed bag and a slammed door.
Though her face and her body language gave nothing away, her true feelings were betrayed as a single tear wound its way down her cheek.
….
While Kate was waiting next to the ambulance for EMS to finish stitching up Rick's upper arm, leaning against it with her arms across her chest, shoring up her self control, Captain Montgomery walked up to her and asked how she was doing.
"I'm fine, I'll be better when they're done stitching up my partner." she said quietly.
"I thought it was just a flesh wound?" Montgomery asked.
"It is." Kate replied, "he was grazed in the upper arm by the shot that killed Raglan."
"I don't like this," Montgomery said tersely, "a retired NYPD cop gunned down in front of two of my people, one of whom, a federal agent, no less getting wounded in the process. That means I'm gonna have to do a damn press conference."
Montgomery gave her a hard stare, "Tell me the two of you didn't come down here without backup?"
"Sir...I..." Kate began, stumbling over her words.
"We were backing them up, Captain." Ryan said, appearing as if out of nowhere.
"Yeah," Esposito chimed in, "we were...uh... just down the block when it happened."
"Yeah, uh huh," Montgomery muttered, not believing a word of it.
"What the hell am I gonna do with you?" he asked her rhetorically, but she responded anyway.
"You're gonna let me work this case." Kate stated, her words coming perilously close to sounding like a demand.
"You're too close to it," Montgomery replied, "it's written all over your face. You're thinking 'what was Raglan gonna tell me before he died' when you should be thinkin' how you're gonna catch the guy that killed him."
"Sir," Kate pleaded, "Raglan was killed because he was gonna tell me something about my mother's case. Nobody knows it better than I do."
"Yeah, but I know you!" Montgomery shot back, "You wanna pick up those scissors and run around the house with em! But I'm telling you now, walk don't run. Go where the evidence leads, not the other way 'round."
He looked deep into eyes before finishing with, "Do you read me?"
"Yes, sir," Kate replied, "Loud and clear."
"Your partner has already bled for this, Beckett, tread carefully before anything worse can happen."
Though she was very careful not to let the Captain see it, she shivered involuntarily at his last words as he turned his back on her and approached the reporters to make a statement.
After making a quick trip to the loft, which consisted of Rick running in to get himself a fresh jacket, and Kate a clean shirt, they drove to the precinct in silence, an uneasy unspoken agreement to talk about the personal things later when they could clear the air. They even shared an entirely humorless joke between them about taking a rain check on their make-up breakfast. What needed to be said, the air that needed to be cleared between them would have to wait until they could afford to be vulnerable and distracted.
They both knew that this certainly wasn't the time.
….
Rick and Kate had just come back from talking to Gary McCallister who had given them the name of a drug kingpin at the time of her mother's murder named Vulcan Simmons.
"Assault, attempted murder, extortion, possession with intent, witness intimidation..." Kate began.
"And those are just the charges in New York City, his FBI file makes for very interesting reading." Rick jumped in, the two of them falling into a familiar pattern, in spite of themselves.
"Yeah but then it looks like it just dries up, nobody's booked him in years." Kate said back, the look between them deepening with every new piece of information they added to the mix.
"He got smart, you mean," Esposito added, "started swimming in deeper waters."
"Likely he's got other people to do the heavy lifting for him, now that he's one of the bigger fish." Rick interjected.
"Guess he's come a long way since Washington Heights." Ryan stated flatly, having tangled with Simmons' organization a time or two when he was in narcotics.
By the dark look in his eyes and the flat, even tone when he spoke, they all knew whatever it was had ended badly for him. That even Ryan had dark, painful memories he would rather keep to himself.
"Wait, what?" Kate asked emphatically, "Did you say Washington Heights?"
"Yeah, back in the day Simmons used to run the drug trade in Washington Heights."
Rick and Kate shared a knowing look between them, they had hashed and rehashed all of this during the summer they had spent in Los Angeles. How her mother and her colleagues had run a "take back the streets" campaign to curtail the drug trade in Washington Heights. It was all beginning to make sense to her now. Or at least she thought it was. She was thinking about her mother's murder, the hired hit man, and trying on the scowling face of Vulcan Simmons in the mugshot on the murder board on for size for the man that hired him.
The emotions ghosting across her beautiful features were enough to break Rick's heart. He had seen the same expression on Jake's face the last time he had come to visit before he died. She was teetering on the edge of the abyss now, he could see it. He would need to make sure he was there for her, like he hadn't been for his friend, if he wanted to keep her from falling over the edge into the black pit beyond. He knew deep in his heart, if anything happened to her, he would descend into one of his own, one from which he would never crawl out of.
….
"You've painted since the last time I was here." Vulcan Simmons said with a confident, no nonsense look on his face, as his eyes landed on Beckett, "You'd have been about sixteen, wrestling some pimply kid in the back of his daddy's wagon, wondering if you were going to give it to him or not."
"Hey...that's enough." Rick said menacingly, his expression darkening. Simmons seemed unimpressed. A smile slowly spreading on his face that was beginning to push Rick's buttons.
"Your pet fed is sweet on you." Simmons stated coldly in his low rumbling voice.
Rick realized in that instant the game that Simmons was playing, trying to take control of the interrogation, so he clamped down on his ruffled pride and indignation. His features hardened till they betrayed nothing. He had once stared down a serial killer in the box with this same ice cold expression, reduced him to a quivering wreck by staring at him with no emotion whatsoever.
He didn't think it would have the same effect on Simmons, though, but it was better than giving the bastard the satisfaction of thinking he was getting to him.
He could tell, however that's Kate's self discipline was beginning to wane. He could see the anger beginning to fester inside of her with every exchange of words between her and Simmons. He was seizing control of this interrogation and he knew that he was powerless to stop it without compromising her. Every time Kate tried to assert dominance over him, he came back with a step by step, by the book description of what she was doing without so much as a hitch in his smooth baritone delivery, all the while seeking to push her buttons by trying to bait him.
It was working.
"Johanna Beckett was murdered along with two of her colleagues. They were professional hits...carried out on your orders, and you had the cops on your payroll bury them."
Still Simmons betrayed nothing, he was a study in calm and self control. Kate, however was coming to the end of hers, Rick could read it in her body language, her clipped tones as she spoke, the flare of her nostrils, even the patterns of her breathing. Events were spinning out of control and he could see it, as she dug her mother's crime scene photo out of the file and set it in front of him. Daring him to admit her remembered her.
"You know, Detective Beckett," he said smoothly, leaning forward into her personal space, as if telling her a secret, "I think I do remember her...bled out in an alley like the trash she was." a smile beginning to grow on his face.
Kate's voice came out as a harsh raspy whisper, "Mr. Simmons, you better..." but he cut her off, the smile sliding away to reveal a darker, more predatory expression, not unlike the one Reginald Jacobs had leveled on her at his arraignment, with similar results. A hint of malice growing in his voice as she struggled vainly for control.
"Rich bitch from Uptown on safari in the Heights...somebody shoulda warned her not to feed or tease the animals. If they had, might not have gotten eaten."
Rick could see her muscles coiling, but was unable to prevent what happened next.
"From what I hear though," be began as he got up and turned toward them, a wicked smile of genuine amusement growing on his face, "she was pretty tasty."
Kate was up in a heartbeat, grabbing the lapels of his jacket, slamming Simmons into the two way mirror so hard the glass cracked. The large, shit eating grin, however, never left his face. In fact it grew wider. This is what he'd wanted all along, the result he was hoping to bait her into.
"Beckett, no!" Rick shouted just an instant too late.
"Back off, Rodgers!" she shouted angrily
"Remember your old life, Vulcan," she hissed at him, her face inches from his, "savor it...because I'm gonna take it all away!"
Vulcan Simmons laughed right in her face as Ryan and Espo ran in to pull her off of him, kept right on laughing as she stalked angrily from the room, her self control completely gone.
He had won, and he knew it.
Vulcan Simmons was going to walk.