Notes: I've come to accept that I'm good at writing hard boiled thrillers, not so much fluffy/sappy stuff, and this particular story has been bouncing around my head for months. A series of what-ifs peculate through the story: What if Nick had been accepted as a Junior Scout and never ended up a hustler on the streets of Zootopia? What if Judy had never met him when she had still been a starry eyed rookie? What would their relationship look like if they encountered each other later on as much older adults, set in their ways and glued to their faults? This is a Zootopia murder mystery set 15 years later, hard-boiled and violent at times, and sweet and awkward at others. I've thrown in some "Silence of the Lambs", a little known movie from 1988 called "Shoot to Kill", and Tom Brown's wilderness survival books, and mixed it all about. This work won't update as often as my other Zootopia Thriller, The Measure of a Mammal, but I'll try to put out a short 1500 word chapter once a month.

Languidly, his green eyes laughing, he slid his crimson paw down her ivory navel and hooked a claw under the hem of her panties. She sighed as he tugged slowly up against the elastic, pulling it tighter and tighter against her mound, until at last it slipped down into her slit and...

BEEP… BEEP… BEEP…

DAMN IT! She screamed to herself, as she jolted to full wakefulness.

THWACK!

A small gray paw slammed down on the old digital alarm, cutting off it's shrill clarion. The owner of the paw groaned painfully into her pillow, before raising her bleary eyes in to stare at the display in unfocused disbelief. It couldn't be time to get up yet, not yet. She was having SUCH a nice dream, only to have it rudely interrupted by a cheap mechanical nanny.

She slid to the edge of her bed and sat upright in the pre-dawn darkness, rubbing her eyes with the back of her paws. As she sat there, she pondered the laughing fox that tormented her dreams for the past year. She wasn't sure what her subconscious found so goddamn attractive about the damn vulpine: his scent, his broad paws, strong arms, or maybe it was those canine teeth.

Maybe it's just the simple fact he is completely unavailable, out of town and out of your life. Face it, Judy. Every adult relationship you've ever had in the past fifteen years has ended in tears and scorched earth. The best relationship you could ever have with him exists only in your fantasies. Besides which, you know next to nothing about him, where he is or what he does. You have no idea if he'd even be interested in such a sad, lonely, and desperate bunny like me.

She had met the fox known as Ranger Nick Wilde last year while she was teaching a summer course at the academy on criminal psychological profiling. He had been part of a group sent over by the Parks and Rec department to update their investigative skills. Criminal gangs, squeezed out of their territories on the Zootopian streets by the ZPD, had been moving their activities further afield. One of those most affected by this change had been the Parks division, where they had to contend with clandestine and illegal grow operations as well as increases in smuggling of contraband through the swamps and forests that border Zootopia.

Chief Bogo had arranged the course work in his quest to reduce the amount of overtime his burdened department had to pay to send officers out into the field. Detective Judy Hopps, for all of her sins, had been tapped to teach one of those classes. It had been a very trying ordeal for Judy. Not because they were raw and ignorant recruits, far from it. The vast majority of the rangers had been model students, straight from the ranger recruitment posters. Attentive, alert, and respectful.

All except… Him. She could swear that he thought everything was a joke. She just couldn't impress upon him the seriousness of his training. He was disruptive, never took notes, and generally worked as little as possible. He always knew, just knew, how to say just the right thing at the right time to leave her completely flummoxed at the podium, the rest of the class tittering away as she froze in those great green headlights of his.

But some how, some way, he passed every test she threw at him with flying colors, even earning high marks from all of his other instructors. She was sure he was cheating, somehow, but she couldn't pin down how. She tried taking it up with the academy instructors overseeing the summer program, but they eventually turned up nothing in their investigation. He just blew sunshine up their collective asses and came out of it smelling of violets and victory.

She hated him. Really, really hated him. She had been so pleased when the summer course work had come to an end, and he went back to his beloved forests, and left her to return to her detective work in blessed silence. Her life was so peaceful without his snark echoing in the back of her head.

And then the dreams had begun, and somehow, somewhere, she began to realize an ugly, horrible truth. She also wanted him. Desperately. Wanted all that creative attention he had showered on her. Craved it. She found that the blessed silence that she had retreated back into as she returned to her work in the concrete jungle had turned into crushing loneliness. She missed him terribly like no other mammal before him.

But every time she tried to run a scenario through her mind it just would end up going sideways. Hi, Nick? Ranger Nick? Remember me? The short acidic cop with a nicotine addiction that tried to fail you last year for being a jackass in class ? Well, you've been in my erotic dreams for over a year, and I was wondering, since I have n't been laid in the past year, if I could take you back around that tree there and yank off your pants so that I can have my way with your canine genitalia?! I want to see if it's as big in real life as it is in my dreams!

Um… No. What a great way to get a restraining order, Detective Hopps! I can just see Chief Bogo now, sighing as he sits at his desk trying to explain to me the difference between expressing romantic interest in someone and criminal stalking.

With a sigh, she hopped down out of the bed and walked over to her dresser. Slipping off her soaked panties, she dumped them in the hamper on the wall, and ducked into her bathroom for a quick, and very cold, shower.

Judy slowly stalked down the sidewalk toward ZPD Precinct 1, the collar of her dark ZPD trench coat turned up against the bite of the chill early spring wind, a stubborn cigarette smoldering in her lips. She paused at the lone ashtray, set the legal sixty feet from the entrance, and determinedly puffed the last of the peppermint and catnip blend that she imbibed in lieu of breakfast. She'd grab some coffee before she got to her desk, and if she was really hungry maybe a stale doughnut to nibble on, before going over patrol reports turned in last night, looking for subtle patterns. Maybe if she's lucky she'll find something interesting, like a smuggling gang transporting stolen artwork or a serial murderer operating in Tiny Town. Something, anything, to take her mind off of her lonely bed and aching chest.

She walked up to the small mammal door and hit the handicap button, opening the door to an expansive lobby that had been the first room she's seen every work day for the past fifteen years. Once the lobby had been a magical place, where she would have walked in and been filled with a sense of mission and purpose, but now it was just another mundane room filled with all sorts of mammals that ignored her as they rushed back and forth, intent on their duties for which she cared not.

"HOPPS!"

Judy's eyes snapped up at the sound of her Chief's bellow. Out of pure knee-jerk habit, she glanced up at the balconies that ran overhead, but he wasn't there. Her ears quickly swiveled to locate his tense breathing, and she found him standing at the reception desk, his ZPD windbreaker still on. He was surrounded by the members of the ZPD crime scene unit who were all babbling excitedly.

She quickened her pace and scampered over to him. "What's up, boss?"

He immediately started stalking back toward the vehicle bay, as she hurried to keep up with him. The CSU team straggled along behind them, picking up their cases and slinging their backpacks over their shoulders.

"Apparently our brothers and sisters over Parks and Rec have run into something they can't handle and their first reaction was to call and ask for you. Since you weren't here yet, I fielded the call." He barked at her as he strode down the hall.

"Sir, if they had a question, you could have passed it through to my cell phone. I would have been happy to answer any questions they might have had." She huffed as she tried to keep up. Damn it, she couldn't run and talk at the same time anymore.

Blasting through the doors, he stopped at his personal command cruiser and turned to her. "They didn't have a question per se, no, not a simple question at all, Detective. Actually, no, they found something buried in the middle of the forest, something that they think only you can help explain." He gestured for her to get into the cruiser.

Uh Oh. He only called her Detective if the shit was about to hit the fan. "What did they find?" She asked as she paused at the open passenger door.

He looked down at her through the cruiser, a frown etching his muzzle with worry.

"Bodies, Detective Hopps. Lots and lots of mammal bodies buried in the ground."