Chapter Thirty-two

"Okay, Peter, I'm sorry, but I have to know…why does Sawyer hate you so much?"

"I arrested him."

"Yeah, you arrested me too." Neal pointed out. "You've arrested a lot of people, that doesn't make you mortal enemies. It's something more than that. A nickle on the insid…"

"Don't talk like that." Peter interrupted.

"Sorry." Neal chuckled. "Five years in prison doesn't seem like it would be that big a deal to someone like Sawyer. He has violent career criminal written all over him."

"Being a criminal isn't a career." Peter said firmly.

"Peter." Neal rolled his eyes at Peter's elusiveness. "Come on, what happened with you and Sawyer?"

Walk back towards their room Peter didn't answer right away. Usually Neal would continue to press until he got the story but under the current circumstances he was willing to let it go if Peter didn't want to talk about it. He'd made his interest known and was waiting to see if Peter was willing to share. When Neal cut him some uncharacteristic slack Peter managed a slight smile.

"Sawyer's girlfriend conned me." Peter admitted.

"I knew there was a good story here." Neal smiled. "She must have been good, you're not easy to con."

"She came to me seven month pregnant and supposedly heavily battered."

"Supposedly?" Neal questioned.

"When all was said and done it turned out all of her bruising was done with special effects make-up."

"She was good."

"She played the part of a frightened victim so well." Peter said sadly. "She first approached me on the street timidly explaining that she had overhead me on the phone and asked if I was a cop. When I explained I was a Federal Agent she got nervous and apologized for bothering me, all the time looking around like she expected someone to attack her at any minute. She had applied regular make-up over the purple that she had put around her eye, but just enough so that once I was paying attention I could see the bad 'cover up'. Pretending to spook it was all I could do that day just to talk her into taking my card."

"And then you didn't hear from her for three days."

"Almost exactly, how…"

"Classic tactic." Neal explained. "Three days is just enough time for you to have stopped really thinking about her and yet still fresh enough in your memory that when she calls you feel guilty for having moved on with your life."

"Well it worked, I felt awful. She still didn't give me any names or even really ask for help, she was extremely skittish."

"So a long con?"

"I don't know the cut off for 'long con', but for three weeks this we went back and forth, she didn't really want to talk to me but she kept calling, we even met in person a few times in public settings. Each time she had more 'bruises' and she started to hint that she thought her boyfriend might be getting into more trouble. She never gave me enough detail to start a proper investigation, and despite my best efforts she wouldn't leave him or accept any kind of protection."

"That must have been frustrating for you." Neal said sympathetically.

"It was driving me insane. I didn't know what to do, I'd only been an Agent for a few years at the time. I wanted to help her but I couldn't get close enough."

"I assume you didn't bring anyone else in on the case to try and keep her comfortable."

"I told Hughes about her and he agreed that I needed to try and earn her trust on my own."

"So what happened?"

"After about a month she called me in the middle of the night in tears about her most recent beating and in the course of the conversation she finally gave me Sawyer's name. I spent an hour trying to coax her into leaving, I was willing to meet her anywhere, but she refused. Nothing I said could convince her to leave. I wanted to get her away from him before he killed her or her unborn child...so I broke protocol."

"You confronted Sawyer?" Neal asked surprised.

"No, getting into the middle of a 'domestic' was way outside my jurisdiction and I knew I'd probably just end up causing more harm than good if I physically tracked him down, but I did ask around the Violent Crimes office to see if Sawyer was on anyone's radar for anything and found that he was a suspect in three bank robberies over the past month and that they were closing in on him after the last one hadn't gone smoothly."

"And you told her that."

"I didn't even think about the connection between her opening up to me and the botched robbery being so close together. The next night when she called I told her that he was on our watch list, I was hoping that it would be the push she needed to leave him…and in a way it was."

"Of course, that's why she targeted you in the first place, she wanted an 'insider' to see if Sawyer was close to getting caught. She wanted to make sure she could get away with the money before that happened. That's cold."

"It was natural to believe that Sawyer was abusing her, but it was really the other way around. She had a tight psychological hold on Sawyer. Before he met her he had a host of lesser charges against him, mostly drunk and disorderlies, but she pushed him into escalating into more violent crime to 'provide' for her."

"So she left him when she heard the FBI was getting close?"

"No." Peter shook his head. "She knew she couldn't just leave him, he's the vengeful type."

"Clearly."

"She helped us catch him, she said she didn't have any evidence of the past robberies, but she gave us all the details of the next one. I took lead on the case because technically she was my CI. I pleaded with her to come in the morning that everything was happening and she said that she would only come in once we had arrested him. I believed her."

"Instead she took the money he'd already stolen and ran." Neal guessed.

"Nearly two hundred fifty thousand."

"Not a bad score."

"Luckily Hughes wasn't too upset at me for falling for her broken wing act."

"Anyone would have." Neal agreed. "How do you know he wasn't abusing her?"

"When we carried out the warrant on their apartment we found the special effects make-up and forensics on the computer showed she'd been researching how to apply it."

"Did you ever catch her?"

"No." Peter shook his head. "She vanished. Sawyer's not angry at me for arresting him, he's angry because he blames me for the fact that he never got to meet his child."

"Assuming it was his." Neal pointed out. "If she knew that kid wasn't going to come out looking like Sawyer she would have had even more reason to want to make sure that he was behind bars while she ran off with the real father."

"It doesn't matter," Peter sighed "he believes the child was his."

"I don't understand why he thinks this is all your fault, clearly she wanted to bolt. She's the one who set him up, not you."

"Sawyer doesn't see it that way. As far as he's concerned she did what she had to by leaving when he got arrested. Sawyer thinks I took something irreplaceable from him. I never worried about him coming after me in the real world, he's violent but not that stupid, but down here..." Peter trailed off not wanting to finish the chilling thought.

"I don't suppose you ever tried telling him what really happened?"

"No."

"Probably too late for that, I doubt he'd believe you now."

"I doubt he'd care. At this point he has another motive to kill me."

"What's that?"

"Bragging rights."