Eames: Okay, but really, where the hell has she been this time?

Goren: Apparently *checks notes* editing her novel?

Eames: FOR NINE YEARS!?

Goren: Oh, no, I read that wrong.

Eames: Thank god.

Goren: She spent nine years avoiding editing her novel.

Dutton didn't know if she still believed in life after death, but if there really was a Big Guy up above he was having a real staffing problem with guardian angels, and if there was a hell, she was willing to bet that ninety percent of its inhabitants were the people who made the chairs for police station waiting rooms.

She shifted again, trying to find an angle where the rivets on the back didn't dig into her shoulder, or the shredded vinyl of the seat didn't stick to her thighs. The stuffing leaking out the edges itched whenever it came into contact with bare skin, and she tried as hard as she could not to think about bedbugs.

She fucking hated police stations.

Bobby's lawyer friend, some Amazonian blonde with legs for not just days but at least a full year, had blown Dutton off within minutes of meeting with her to speak with "her client," and only the fact that she knew Bobby wouldn't leave without her kept Dutton waiting in this chair, in this room too small and enclosed and trapped, like the trunk—

She fucking hated everything about police stations. She hated how they were always too hot or too cold, how everything from the coffeemaker to the copier seemed to be broken except for the guns and whatever army surplus the government had given them for an early Christmas present this year. She hated how everyone looked at her, the complaining civilians like she had a disease and the drunks in the holding tank like she was meat and her fellow hookers like she was about to snatch food out of their mouths, and the cops like she was nothing.

Like she was less than nothing.

The door creaked open and Dutton's eyes snapped to it, her relief dying quickly when the frame looming there was not Bobby or even his snob lawyer but one that was, unfortunately, much more familiar.

"Moran."

"Dutton." Pleasure creased his piggish face. "Couldn't believe it when they told me you were in here, and no charges. You miss us already?"

"It's a friend, I hear." Sure enough, there was Copeland, like a rat skulking in the shadows waiting for scraps to fall from Moran's mouth.

Dutton felt her pulse kick into high gear, her fingers clenching at the arm rests of the chair. She kept her face still. No cameras. No exit.

"Is that right, Dutton?" Moran asked. He was smirking; he knew it was right. He would have just come from talking with Bobby's big, fancy lawyer who apparently couldn't keep her damn mouth shut even when specifically told not to mention her name. "Now that hurts my feelings. I thought we were the best of friends."

"Let me guess," Dutton said. "You want a friendship bracelet and it'll all be forgiven. I do a mean Double Chevron."

Moran's eyes were hard as he laughed, walking all the way into the room while Copeland closed the door behind him. "I've missed that smart mouth. Thought we slapped it out of you last time." His hand went to the cuffs at his belt. "You do give me an idea bout bracelets…"

Dutton tasted bile at the back of her throat. She pasted on her most ingratiating customer service smile; it felt as sincere a as a papier mache mask. "What'll it be today, boys?"

Moran leered. "I was thinking—"

The door swung open, and Moran and Copeland both leapt back from her as if they'd been electrified; if would have been funny if she hadn't been having trouble remembering how to breathe. The lawyer sailed in with Bobby in tow, talking a mile a minute, and Dutton didn't think she'd ever been happier to see him, or his friend the human embodiment of the Statue of the Liberty, who was now falling silent and raising a single questioning eyebrow at Moran and Copeland that skewered them like butterflies on pins.

"Be seeing you, Dutton," Moran said. "Wear that leopard print I like."

"I'll be counting the hours," Dutton said, privately resolving to burn that leopard print skirt at the first opportunity. Her hands, under the table where the cops couldn't see them, shook.

She saw Bobby noticing her hands shake, and gave him a smile that was more real as the cops exited. I'm fine.

"Dutton, isn't it?" The lawyer handed her a business card, flashing a brief professional smile that told Dutton the other woman was mentally editing her appearance to pretend that she was also wearing a sharp business suit and a much lower pair of heels. "You'd better keep a hold of this; he'll use it as a bookmark and before I know it I'll be getting a call from the next person to check out God Desired and Desiring by Juan Ramón Jiménez."

"That's…specific," Dutton said with a raised eyebrow.

The woman gave a much more genuine smile then. "It is, isn't it?" She turned to Bobby. "And you—try to come down from Cloud Cuckooland once in awhile for drinks, all right? If only so you occasionally remember what it looks like to us mere mortals in law enforcement when you strike up a conversation with a nubile young lady of the evening."

"They got him for soliciting?" Dutton asked, trying to catch up.

"They tried to get him for soliciting," the lawyer corrected. Her smile turned into a frown that she leveled at Bobby like a gun. "You're lucky you're white and the captain owes me a favor for getting his ass out of the fire when his detectives misplaced the evidence on the Simpson case. The assholes in this precinct will bust you for rolling out the wrong side of the bed in the morning."

xxxxx

"So…you're mad at me?"

The car ride had been almost entirely silent until this moment, Eames stewing in a potent mix of anger, relief, and lingering adrenaline. When Bobby looked at her with those puppy dog eyes as they pulled into his parking spot at the apartment, she couldn't help but snap.

"Let's see—I've been up all night, worried sick about you; I had to go down to my least favorite place in the world looking like I was ready to audition for the part of Hooker #3 in a cheap crime show; it's four a.m. and I haven't slept; I've lost a night's worth of income; I have to be up in three hours to help with the morning rush because I took Antonio's shift at Connie's. And I find out it's for getting friendly with a pro right where a goddamn Boy Scout could tell Vice was going to do a sting. Why should I be mad at you?"

Bobby ducked his head a little. "Sorry. I, uh…sorry." He dug into his pocket for a crumpled flyer. "I saw her handing these out, and I thought—you might be interested."

The flyer was a disaster, not just crumpled but waterlogged—she wondered if they shoved him to the wet ground when they arrested him, and had to tamp down the fury that sparked in her chest—but she could see that someone taken care with it, impassioned editorials crammed into tiny font and hand drawn graphics carefully scanned in. There was a photo of several women holding protest signs, looking impossibly young and confident and multiethnic-ly gorgeous.

The words at the top of the flyer read PONY: Prostitutes of New York. Founded 1976.

"You probably already, uh, know about it," Bobby said, rubbing the back of his neck. "I mean, obviously you know a lot more than me about, about all these things, and I'm not saying you need to join a union or anything, it's just your working conditions—and I think solidarity is very important—there's a lot of crossover with racial equity and transgender rights—"

"You have the weirdest sweet gestures, you know that? Most guys go for chocolate." Eames folded the flyer carefully and put it in her back pocket. "I'll think about it."

Bobby looked like he wanted to say more, but he just nodded, more times than was necessary. "Good! Good." He paused, and then plowed ahead: "What was—what was going on with those, those cops? The ones who acted like they knew you."

"Ugh." Eames let her head fall back against the car seat. "I need another eight hours of sleep if we're going to go into that. Let's just say I'm not surprised they arrested you."

"They didn't."

"What?"

"The arresting officer was a woman." He gestured, as if trying to sculpt her likeness out of thin air. "Medium height, African-American, hair curly but like…ringlets?"

Jeffries.

Eames automatically scanned the traffic behind them for one of the painfully obvious undercover cars that Monique had to settle for whenever she wanted to maintain a low profile. Nothing.

Bobby was watching her when she looked back. "What's that about?"

"Who says it's about anything?" Eames snapped.

Bobby just looked at her.

Eames sighed. She could feel all the adrenaline seeping out of her, all the anxiety and fear that had been building and building all night with nowhere to go finally draining away like week-old snow slush, thick and stained. "Monique Jeffries. She wants my help."

"With…"

-the trunk, the darkness so deep she can taste it, and it tastes like gasoline and blood and the musty rag shoved into her mouth and her arms are screaming, twisted at an unnatural angle behind her, the duct tape yanking at the fine hairs of her arms as she saws it against the ragged metal edge poking through the upholstery of the junky car, it's not going to be enough and her tears are hot and choking as they run down the blindfold she doesn't need into the gag that she doesn't need, because there is nothing for her to see in the trunk and wherever she is—dead dead dead she is dead she is already dead, good as dead—there is no one who will care if she screams—

"Eames?"

-Monique slams her hands down on the table in front of her, making her jump. "Damn it, Dutton! Girls are going to die"—

Dutton swallowed down the memories like bad medicine, shoved them down into a dark corner where she didn't have to look at them. She could feel her heart hammering; her fingernails had dug into the armrests. "With doing her own damn job for her."

"Something happened."

Bobby Goren, the master of understatement.

She gave a cracked laugh. "Doesn't it always."

Hesitation. "Do you want…help?"

She resisted the impulse to bite his head off; gave his arm a friendly shove instead. "Not right now. But maybe sometime." She took a deep breath, and pushed open the car door. "Come on, Marian the Librarian. The least you can do after all this is make me breakfast."

xxxxx

It was a slow morning at Connie's when Jeffries strolled him and commandeered a table, smiling as a waiter gave her the complimentary coffee and flicking her eyes significantly over at Dutton, who had just punched out for her fifteen.

Dutton had been expecting this, but that didn't mean she had to like it.

She strolled over to the table. "I'm expecting you to buy the waffle platter after that stunt you pulled."

"I'm watching my gluten."

"I meant buy me the waffle platter. It's the least you could do." She eyeballed Jeffries hard across the table. "And I do mean the least. Pulling in my friend on a trumped-up charge? You're really stooping that low these days?"

"Well, you weren't answering my calls."

"Do you think that might have been a hint?"

Jeffries slapped a photo down on the table on the table so hard Dutton had no time to mask her flinch. The girl in the picture—and it was a girl, Dutton would eat her apron if she was over seventeen, no matter how she tried to hide it with her short skirt and slathered-on makeup—had been filleted. Organs spilled out of a blood-stained halter top; glassy eyes staring accusingly.

-in the dark and no escape and any second he would be back unless she suffocates here, dies all alone, back any second and then—

Dutton sucked in a slow breath, willed her face to stone. "People are trying to eat here."

"And I'm trying to save lives," Jeffries snapped, but she moved the napkin holder so at least a random customer wouldn't be losing their lunch if their eyes wandered as they ambled up to the counter for another straw. "We both know that Gage wasn't operating alone."

First rule of dealing with cops: admit nothing. "So you decided to arrest Bobby to blackmail me?"

"Not at all." Jeffries leaned back in her seat, a slight smirk hovering over her lips. "I thought he was good for it."

Dutton scoffed. "Marian the Librarian?"

Jeffries ticked off the points on her fingers. "Big guy shuffling down the street in a trench coat. Makes a beeline for the pros like he's on a mission. Spends fifteen minutes in conversation with one of them. Follows them down the street to a dark corner, where items are exchanged."

"Flyers."

"Sure, I know that now, after his lawyer gave an impassioned three hour speech about the right to unionize. Anyway, I follow him for a couple hours, and look who lives in the same building as him?"

Dutton clenched her fist under the table, her nails biting in her palm. "And naturally you thought, Dutton, she survived a serial killer, bet she decided to shack up with him?"

She might have said it a little too loud. The tourist in the booth next to her looked at her like she had grown three heads. Since this was New York, though, everyone else ignored her.

Jeffries gave a long-suffering sigh. "Before you showed up at the station to pick him up, I thought you might be trying to investigate it on your own."

"So you arrested him before I could get myself killed." Dutton confiscates Jeffries' cup of coffee and takes a long draught of the caffeinated sludge. "Classic ham-handed cop bullshit."

"A thank you would be nice."

"Thank you," Dutton said. "Never help me again." She took another draught of the coffee, the scalding bitterness like a touchstone; if she kept drinking this shitty instant coffee, she would stay in this shitty diner with this shitty excuse for a friend having this shitty conversation, and she wouldn't be back in the trunk, back in the dark, back in the pain and the certainty of her death… "So what made you realize Marian was a no go?"

"This conversation."

"What?"

"He got let go because he's white and he had a lawyer, Dutton." Jeffries looked suddenly beyond tired, utterly exhausted. "You know how the system works. The effort I'd have had to put into getting a conviction…captain decided it wasn't worth it. Didn't want to fuck with the precinct's numbers. Not when there's easier prey around."

Dutton thought about pointing out that calling people 'prey' didn't exactly fit with the whole 'serve and protect' image the NYPD copaganda machine was constantly trying to pull, but she bit her tongue. If any cop already knew how true that was, it was Jeffries. "So your dramatic photo reveal was supposed to…what? Jar loose suppressed memories that would give you evidence to arrest him again?"

"It was supposed to show me your reaction," Jeffries said. She waved away an approaching waiter; Dutton's stomach grumbled. "So he's your friend?"

She didn't put any sauce on the 'friend,' but Dutton felt her hackles rise anyway. "Yes. And he's innocent."

Jeffries raised her hands in the universal 'hey, I'm helpless here' gesture; Dutton didn't buy it for a second. "Thing is…a lot of people still thinks he looks good for it."

Dutton clenched her jaw. "Oh, do they."

"Mm-hmm."

"And I don't suppose you'll be telling them this new evidence you have of his innocence."

"Oh, I'll tell them." Jeffries sipped her coffee like she didn't have a care in the world. "But you know us cops. Bull-headed. We get a guy in our sights and it's just so hard to pull them out of the crosshairs. Not without overwhelming physical evidence."

"I was wondering when we'd get to the blackmail part of the conversation," Dutton said.

"Think of it as doing your civic duty."

"I already pay my taxes."

Jeffries raised an eyebrow.

"What? Even criminals don't like to get in bad with the IRS. Remember how they brought down Capone." Dutton sighed. "What do you want me to do?"

"Nothing dangerous," Jeffries said. She pushes the photo across the table to Dutton, follows it with an envelope with papers peeking out the edge that look like photocopies of case files that definitely shouldn't have left the station. "Poke around. Ask a few questions."

Dutton grabbed the photo and the file off the table before anyone else could see it; the last thing she needed was some witness telling cops about the lady with the torture porn pictures in a local diner. Jeffries had been right about one thing: cops were bullheaded, and they didn't like any subtlety or nuance when it came to character judgments about people they'd made their minds up about years ago.

"I'll think about it."

xxxxx

The problem was, she couldn't stop thinking about it.

In the middle of a customer ordering hash browns, she would see that photo before her eyes, the young girl staring out unseeing with blood dripping down her bleached hair into the concrete, and when she wrenched her mind away, she would be standing in front of the coffee-maker with the boiling water about to cascade over the glass onto her skin, a blank order pad clutched so tight in her other hand that her knuckles were white. Half of her tables complained about their orders, and she tried to make her mouth smile and apologize, and all the time behind her eyes she could only see the darkness of the trunk, the way it had seemed to close in around her—

After the fifth time she found herself standing in front of a table not knowing whether she had already greeted them or taken their order, she begged off sick, and Anya, who was typically a dragon about shift schedules and wouldn't approve leaving early unless you had literally just vomited onto a customer's plate full of scrambled eggs, was so disgusted with Dutton's performance that she approved it.

"Don't come back here until you've come down from whatever the hell you took."

Dutton didn't bother to correct her.

She kept thinking about it as she stumbled down the sidewalk, the sunlight glaring in a harsh mockery of the memory of the trunk and how the darkness had swamped her like a tide, certain to swallow her up and who would remember her, just one more hooker to scrape off the sidewalk, less expensive than legislation and just as pleasing to gentrifiers. The passersby parted around without making eye contact, a survival tactic so ingrained as to be unconscious: don't touch, don't look. If you don't look at the crazy woman, at the homeless man, at the ranting preacher, then they won't exist and they won't be your problem and you won't ever have to consider the insanity of living all piled up against each other like this, clamping our hands over our ears to keep out the screams of almost eight million people crammed too close together, fighting and screwing and dying—

Killing—

You won't ever have to see—

When she managed to wrench free of the memories again, she looked up to see that her feet had taken her to the library.

She almost turned back around again. Despite the refuge she had taken there that cold night she met Bobby, the building seemed forbidding: cold marble, chiseled with Latin that she would have learned as a kid if she'd been the good Catholic girl her parents had wanted instead of ducking out to play baseball in a back alley. It loomed over her like a reminder of all the things she could have been, all the paths she could have taken that were now padlocked shut with 'No Trespassing' signs.

(And a distant part of her mind that could still form complete sentences shrieked: Don't go anywhere anyone you know can see you, don't let Bobby see you, you think he's not already tired of playing nursemaid to a sad whore who's not even giving it up—

But the voice was far away, and buried under memories that screamed so much louder that it became a near-indecipherable whisper)

"It's a public building," Dutton muttered to herself without really understanding why, and steadied her shaking hand to push open the door.

The silence of the library interior fell over her mind like a soft blanket. She made her way as quickly as she could past the circulation desk and into the stacks, past Teen Fantasy A-F and into the forests of nonfiction bookcases tall and looming as mountains. Was this what Bobby loved about his job, she wondered absently as her breath slowed, the empty spaces between the bookcases seeming to breathe with her—that there was a place for everything? That no matter what might be taken, or lost, it could be found again, and brought home?

She kept walking and walking through the calm of the library, and it was all fine until it wasn't.

There was a book on the re-shelving cart, cover out, the author's name twice the size of the title and done in a font like dripping blood that should have been cartoonish, that should have made her laugh, but it was dripping down onto the picture of a young girl, lying prone in a rainy back alley with her legs splayed open and you couldn't see her face and her body was in a halo of light with everything around it falling into darkness; Dutton was going to fall into the darkness, she was going to fall into picture—

"Eames?"

The name hit her like a dash of cold water. She was no longer in front of the re-shelving cart, but in a corner of the library she did not recognize. She was standing in front of a portrait of a severe woman with black hair. She was still clutching the book.

Bobby cocked his head, peering down at her with his brow furrowed.

"How long…" Her throat felt dusty, disused. "How long have I been standing here?"

The furrow in Bobby's forehead deepened, but he didn't ask questions. "I'm not sure—a few minutes? I was just passing by and I thought I recognized you—" His gaze shifted to the book in her hands. "Did you want to check that out?"

She laughed, then, too high, too loud. She barely managed to bite it off.

"Sorry," she said. "Sorry. It's been—a day. And it's not even noon. I didn't mean to come bother you. I don't know why I came here. There's something I have to do—"

"It's not a bother," Bobby said. He reached out, gently tugged the book till it slipped from her stiff fingers. Glanced at the cover; kept his face neutral as he placed it down on a table. "I have a, a lunch break coming up. Do you want to go somewhere? Talk about it?"

"I'd rather not," Eames said. She took a deep breath. "But I think I have to."

#

"There are parties," Dutton said. They were sitting in a forlorn corner of the park, a view of dumpsters rather than the pond. If she'd had any appetite for Bobby's offer of half his sandwich, the smell would have killed it.

It suited her fine; less chance of interruption.

"It's all a joke to them," she went on. "The people who throw the parties. A theme. Dirt-cheap hooker night. They could shell out the dough for the classiest escorts money can buy, but that would miss the point. You know the way rich people will pay thousands of dollars for hot dogs with gold leaf crumbled on top? It's like that.

"Plus, streetwalkers aren't likely to know anyone influential.

"It wasn't my scene, but a friend of mine had been going for years, and she gave me the hard sell—there'd be champagne, good food, more money in one night than I'd usually see in three months. So I caved; Mom's medical bills were high and they'd cut my hours at Connie's, some bullshit about giving the newbies more rush experience but I knew it was because I had a higher hourly rate from seniority and some asshole decided to pinch pennies—anyway, for just one night I figured I could stand kissing the ass of the rich and the famous. Literally or metaphorically. One night, and I'd be all set."

She gazed out over the dumpsters. A cloud of flies had settled on top of a ripped black bag, buzzing like a dark orchestra over the spilled pizza slices and apple cores.

"But that's not what happened," Bobby prompted after a few minutes.

"You can say that again." She hacked a laugh. "I should have known from the start. They had more security than the president. They picked us up at this shady bar—half the girls were already sloshed to keep the management from kicking us out—and put us in this van with blindfolds. I almost split then, but this other girl kicked up a fuss about the blindfold and they didn't mind, just pulled over and let her out at the nearest corner and I figured they wouldn't do that if they were planning any nasty surprises; who would want a witness who could tell the cops what they'd looked like? Penny didn't drop till later that they were doing a completely different cost-benefit analysis. They didn't want us all to get spooked while we were still somewhere semi-public.

"I don't know where they took us. It was fancy as hell, though. They didn't take the blindfolds off until we were all the way inside, in this big ballroom with pink marble floors and fleur-de-lis wallpaper and a chandelier with enough gold on it to make the Sun King jealous." She caught Bobby's start despite his attempt to mask it. "What? Your house is made of books. I was going to read one eventually." He quirked an apology smile, and she sighed. "There was even a goddamn fountain—crystal clear water shooting out of gleaming white marble swans' mouths. Made us look even cheaper in comparison, in all our vinyl and rayon and fishnets. They'd hung white silk over the windows and it looked like it was just some kind of fancy touch, but it kept us from seeing any landmarks. Must have been in the city because we didn't drive long enough.

"It seemed pretty normal at the start, or at least what my friend had told me to expect. There was a lot of playacting—the booze was flowing, and men would ask to "buy you a drink" and talk to you for a few minutes. If they liked you, they'd take you into a back room. I'd been downing ginger ales at the bar, but that wasn't going to fly here, so I sipped some of the best damn Scotch I'd ever had and flirted a mile a minute to keep them from noticing that I hadn't had more. Some of my worst johns have always been the rich boys who've never had anyone tell them no, so I knew there were about a million ways this could go bad. I wanted to stay alert. I kept my eyes on the exits just in case."

Dutton squeezed her eyes shut. She could still feel that low-level adrenaline pulsing through her veins, reminding her that the ballroom was just another street, and the wolves were still wolves even when they wore Armani.

In the darkness behind her shut eyelids she could still hear the buzzing of the flies, but she could also hear Bobby's breathing, steady and even, though a bit faster than before she had begun talking. In the distance there was the whirr of swift bicycle wheels, and the rise and fall of childish voices by the pond.

"It went pretty well. I wasn't the most popular, but that was fine by me—we were all getting a flat fee, half up front and half at the end. There were enough guys into small women that I wasn't sitting off the side for long, to make people think they should maybe throw me out early—I saw that happen to a couple girls who didn't excite anybody enough. Didn't realize they were the lucky ones.

"Later in the evening this guy strikes up a conversation. Some kind of psych professor at NYU—he said, anyway. Not the smartest idea to advertise your actual job and contact info at these things, but some guys think with their dick." The voices at the pond rose and fell. Bobby's breathe rose and fell in ragged counterpoint. The park, she was at the park with Bobby, and safe. She was never going back into the trunk. "But it might have been true. I don't think he intended for me to survive the night."

She opened her eyes, knowing that she was going to have to plough through the rest as quickly as possible to get it out. "Rookie move—left my drink unattended. Started to get dizzy, and he guided me away from the ballroom—I remember thinking he was going to rape me, and I was so angry, why do men have to do that when the whole point of the party—but I was too weak, and then I was out. Woke up in the trunk of his car, listening to him talk on the phone. Stayed as still as I could so he wouldn't know he'd got the dose wrong.

"He was upset. Yelling. I could only catch every third or fourth word, but it was something to do with his job. He maybe didn't lie about it after all—sounded like some kind of student emergency. He sounded so concerned." She gave a humorless laugh. "I think I blacked out—the drug still in my system, and trying to breathe through my nose, and—when I woke up again, he was gone. I had no idea how long he'd been gone, when he'd be back. I was a mess. I wanted to scream but—not a good idea even if I hadn't had duct tape over my mouth." She took a shaky breath. "I managed to rip it off my arms, and it took so long I was willing to bang on the trunk to try to attract some attention, risk him hearing me if he was coming back. But no one came…I thrashed around and that ended up dislodging the cushion in the backseat, it was one of those ones that come down, barely enough space for a kid, but…" She laughed, and it hurt her throat. "I've always been small.

"I made it into the backseat, enough room to get the tape off my legs, kept thinking I heard him coming and I wouldn't finish fast enough. Threw the door open and ran, drugged and in heels. Lost the heels and nearly twisted my ankle ten times but I didn't want to stop running. A cop flagged me down I don't know how many blocks way, what direction. I was running so fast I didn't stop until he had the siren on.

"He arrested me.

"No one believed me, of course. No evidence. Not that they bothered to look for any evidence. Why would they? They knew everything they needed to know the second they saw me running down in the street in my ripped skirt and no shoes, tripping over my own feet, crying. Just another hooker, high as a kite. Out of her mind on drugs and spinning any sob story she can to make a cop go easy on her. And even if she is telling the truth, so what? Killing hookers? That's almost a public service. Practically doing their job for them, cleaning up the city.

"No one would miss them."

There is a long silence then. Not really silence—you didn't get silence in New York City. But the absence of Bobby's voice once she had let her own lapse felt deeper than silence. Felt like a chasm she might fall into, never climb out of.

Then, gruffly: "You would be missed."

She opened her eyes. Bobby wasn't looking at her. He was looking out over the park, at all the happy people living their happy lives.

He didn't look sad, or tender.

He looked furious.

"You would be, be missed," he repeated, his words tripping over themselves as he forced them out, his hands clenched at his sides as if he wished he could pummel them into the cold concrete and steel of the city around them instead. "Not just by me. By me but—I know you're not close with your family anymore, but you talk to them, and I, I can tell you love them, they love you—and your friends, I know you're friends with the people you work with, you look out for them, you worry when you don't see them—"

He looked at her then, his brown eyes imploring as all his words fall apart, and he reached for her hand instead, squeezed almost too tight around her fingers as if he could make that say everything instead.

There was a lump in Eames' throat, and she wasn't ready for it. For the way he saw her, his eyes spearing down to a truth in her like she was some secret to be ferreted out by slow and careful research until suddenly apprehended in a flash of light.

She put on a shaky smile, punched his shoulder lightly. "You give a hell of speech, Marian."

She saw the moment in his eyes when he saw the deflection, and the moment when he decided to let her have it.

She was almost more grateful for that than the hand.

"Well, I did Speech Team in high school," he said.

Eames raised an eyebrow. "Not Scholastic Bowl?"

"Oh, that too. Anything with facts you needed to memorize—I was there."

Eames let out a low chuckle, and allowed her hand to relax under his.

His fingers stayed tense, though, as he stared down at their joined fingers. Finally, he huffed a breath and said, the anger coming through in his voice like the sizzle of water simmering over low heat, "And Jeffries wants to put you right back in the middle of that."

"Monique's not all bad," Eames said. It felt a little weird to defend a cop, but Jeffries had stuck her neck out a few times for her, looked the other way a few more. If she ran a little roughshod, well, that was all that warrior bullshit they slathered on top of the donuts for the cops to gobble up, and Jeffries at least tended to look a little askance at the Kool-Aid she was asked to drink before gulping it down. "She's just tired of finding corpses." The memory of the photographs hit her again, a cement block in her stomach. She dropped her head in her hands, admits to the dry skin there and the dirt below: "I'm tired of it too."

A long slow breath, the kind she heard sometimes just before he filled in an answer on the crossword puzzle. "You're going to help them?"

"Maybe…" But she knew even as she said it that the answer was yes. That the even truer answer was that it had never been a choice. She had tried to run from the memory of that night, but it had grown in her instead, a dark seed with deep roots choking off every hope she had for the future, because she knew how quickly it could all be taken away… She thought of the flyer Bobby had given her. That might be a place to start. Make like she was interested in joining, drop in a few questions about the most recent death while she was at it, like she was just interested in what the union was doing to increase safety... "Playing private dick isn't the biggest skills stretch I've been asked to make. Could be a good retirement plan too. It's that or take up knitting."

She waited for the pushback: all the reasons, probably alphabetized, why it was a bad idea for an unarmed hooker with PTSD and a long rap sheet to go after a group of serial killers with money and connections and probably a hell of a grudge for the one who got away.

"Let me help?"

Eames choked back a laugh; found to her surprise that it was halfway a sob. She swiped away the wetness in her eyes. Stupid chivalrous asshole. "No offense, but what the hell is a librarian going to be able to do?"

Bobby didn't seem to take offensive to the laugh, just raised his eyebrow with a sad smile that seemed like a pale reflection of her own. "Come back to the library. I think I need to show you something."

xxxxxx

Eames forgot how to breathe.

Pink marble floors spattered with light from a chandelier golden as the sun, slender white marbles swans arching their necks as if waiting for the blow of a cleaver as the water shoots from their mouth, catching the light with a sparkle like diamonds…

"Eames? Eames, are you all right?"

"How…" She struggled to bring air into her suddenly dry throat. Her hands were shaking at her sides. Not in the room, just a picture, just a picture, not in the room… She tore her eyes away from the computer screen in Bobby's office; looked at him instead. "How did you…"

He clicked away from it, back to a Google search. "I thought I recognized it from your description. The wallpaper…we had a conference there once. Big donor's third house…gave us access for the day." He waved back at the screen, almost a spasm more than a gesture. "And…research skills. Librarians have them." He tilted his head at her, just a little to the side. "Let me help?"

It was a terrible idea. They were both going to get themselves killed.

But it was a slightly less terrible fucking idea than trying to go it alone.

"A hooker and a librarian: together, they fight crime!" She sighed, and gave him a light punch on the arm. "Let's go catch a serial killer."

A.N. Hi all, Daystar here! It's good to be back, though to quote Elizabeth Bear, I should really put down that monkey's paw first next time I wish I had more time to write. Reading back through this story to prepare to bring it to its long-planned conclusion, I experienced a mix of emotions: nostalgia for my college years (despite the fact that they were very stressful), pride that I used to be able to crank out fanfiction so quickly (admittedly, mostly because I was pulling all-nighters procrastinating doing the stressful college things), and some embarrassment at my inexperience and naivete. These days I actually know some people who have done or are doing sex work, and it's a much more mundane and common thing than I ever imagined. As I return to this story, I hope that I'll be able to incorporate some of the new things I've learned, while staying true to the original tone of the piece.

If you're interested in learning more about the wide range of experiences within sex work, I'm a big fan of the podcast Criminal, which has two episodes on this: "Cecilia" (episode 115) and "Jessica and the Bunny Ranch" (episode 116).

I also recommend that episode about how some owls may have committed murder, because holy shit you guys, some owls may have committed murder! (They probably haven't, but don't harsh my squee.)

It's been a really tough year for all of us, y'all. Take care of yourselves, and each other.