Case in this chapter referenced from episode 25/26, "The Fake Kidnapping and Hostage Case" / "The Counterfeit Ransom Kidnapping".
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His initial estimate for improvement turned out to be the optimism of a twenty-something's brain inside of a nearly forty-something's body. Richard did age but mostly recreationally. Numbers mattered in the sense that they'd gatekept him from shit he wanted to do growing up and now gate-trapped him into shit he didn't want to do as an adult, but otherwise society didn't care what age he was unless he went out of his way to be a creep about it.
He discovered a few new numerical limits on the stairs leading down to the office on Friday morning, jarred awake from his nap against the banister by Rachel's shrill pre-dawn bitching. He made it to his office to run a few hours of paperwork and one hour of spectator-yoga before taking another nap on the toilet, waking to her shrill post-school bitching on the other side of the door. She wouldn't let him sleep at his desk no matter how much he explained to her that it was just as comfortable as the toilet. "You have a sofa, Dad," she gritted, shouldering him onto it with the tenderness of a linebacker. "And a bed upstairs. Please tell me none of your clients saw you like this."
"You've spent the last month complaining that I don't take on enough clients and now you complain every time I see one. Make up your mind."
Rachel thrust the flat of her hand out to the side, then the other hand out to the other side to indicate the breadth of the very large fucking spectrum he wasn't on. "You don't have a happy medium either," Richard reminded her. "If you did, you wouldn't have broken my ribs just now without bringing me some donuts from the corner store to compensate. It's always feast or famine with you."
She didn't bring him donuts because Eva's genes had ruined her. She did bring him a bowl of Midori's chunked-up bread in a bath of olive oil and herbs because Eva's genes had only ruined her halfway. Richard went to bed before dinner and woke up with a ferocious need to piss just after midnight. His detour to the kitchen afterwards found him in a rare gravitational dispute between water and liquor; he swayed there, scratching the back of his calf with his foot, blinking drowsily into the light of the refrigerator as he tried to remember why he was there. Conan ended up rescuing him during his own midnight bathroom trip, grabbing onto Richard's wrist to steer him when Richard couldn't remember which direction beds lived.
Apparently news of his senior moment made it through the grapevine, because Rachel was more careful with him on Saturday, the shadow of worry back in her eyes as she escorted him to his office. She left with stricter rules in place, calling from the guidance office around eleven to make sure he'd reheated the tofu and noodles she'd left for him. Aware that his recent bullshit had pushed her out to a lawless emotional frontier where it was probably legal to shoot him, Richard for once obeyed and then spared her his bad mood by shutting himself in his office that evening to finish up his background checks.
It's withdrawal, he realized. Thirst burrowed meandering itchy little woodworm trails under his skin. Water didn't flush it out and neither did seltzer. He nearly caved to the 80 proof on the shelf and was saved by only the barest sliver of self-preservation. He smoked and scratched his neck and drowned for a while in the blue haze on the ceiling.
He ended up knocking back two cans of beer and then spending the next quarter hour white-knuckling a garbage can as his stomach rebelled, and this was probably the closest he'd ever get to copping to his own daily karmic sabotage.
He shoved the rest into the mini refrigerator, cracked open a window to let out the smoke, and bundled himself up on the sofa to sleep off his malfunctions. By the time Sunday morning rolled around, the sky over Beika had finally cleared and so had – miraculously – the last of his fog.
He spent a while longer on his back to see if the world had an agenda for him this morning. He was a little wobbly from caloric deficit but felt like he could maybe do something about it. Sunlight didn't hurt and neither did his stomach. When he got up to pad over to the cooler, the water knocked around his esophagus like a bomb threat but didn't blow up. He was honestly, cleanly hungry for the first time in days.
Cheered, he celebrated with a coffee and a box of baklava from the bakery downstairs. He kept the television off for once and instead listened to the sounds of passersby on the sidewalk below as he thumbed through the morning paper. Sunday unfolded around him with buttery laziness: warm almond baklava and the occasional smoke trails from cigarettes drifting up to the office window.
He'd had been in the process of forgetting he lived with two parasitic botflies when one of them knocked against the door. "We're closed," he grunted around his unlit cigarette, scanning the race results in the corner of the sports page.
"It's me, Dad."
"Schedule an appointment with my secretary and come back tomorrow."
"I live here. And I am your secretary."
"Well you're doing a lousy job," he frowned. "I had to get my own coffee and ignore my own phone all morning. What kind of secretary lets her boss do all the heavy lifting?"
"Can I please just come in?"
He considered this. His secretary had recently gotten a spare office key cut for herself, so locking her out was mostly a formality. On the other hand he was fairly certain he'd left the door unlocked anyway when he'd gone out for pastries and also Rachel's battering ram feet didn't require keys to open doors. "What's in it for me?"
"Oh my god, Dad, would you please just open the door?"
"What, did your hand fall off or something? It's unlocked, just push it."
Rachel didn't push it. Richard spared another glance up as he folded the page over. Her silhouette was lumpy, the jut of her elbow up over her shoulder, as though she was holding something against her head.
He frowned again, tonguing the cigarette to the other corner of his mouth. "Are you bleeding?"
"No."
"Then what gives."
Rachel was conspicuously silent.
Hazard lights flicked on in his head. Richard set the paper aside and swung his feet off the desk. "No, wait," Rachel said hurriedly.
"Is someone holding you hostage? You're supposed to say our safe phrase if someone's got a gun on you."
"Oh my god, of course nobody has a – we don't even have a safe phrase, Dad."
"Sure we do. It's 'Dad, I promise to always clean my hair out from the drain every time I wash it. Kiss kiss, love Rachel'."
Rachel sounded bewildered. "What murderer is going to fall for that?"
"Who says I need them to fall for anything? I'm gonna plug them either way, I just want to hold you to it after they die."
"Dad, I know this is hard for you, but I need you to be serious for like two minutes. I'm going to open the door, okay? And I… sort of need you to promise not to laugh."
"Sure."
"No, I mean it. Promise me you won't laugh."
"Fine. I won't."
There was a moment of begrudging silence. The handle dipped, and with another very cautious, reluctant beat, Rachel eased her head into the office.
Richard roared on the floor with tears streaming down his face as Rachel pelted him with woodchips from the ficus. "I hate you," she hissed. "I'm moving. You're never going to see me ever again."
"Wait wait wait—"
"I was trying to trim my bangs and the phone startled me and my hand slipped and you promised not to laugh!"
Richard flopped over as she tried to storm away, pawing blindly for her ankle. She dragged him across the floor behind her like toilet paper until he coiled around her leg. "Get the chair," he managed, wheezing. He remorselessly used her for leverage to claw his way up until he could reach the arm of the sofa with the other hand. "Shut up. Shh. Get the chair."
"No. I'm moving and I'm not leaving you a forwarding address."
"Get the chair." Holy shit. Richard was dizzy with schadenfreude. He could feel his diaphragm squeaking with effort as he clawed down the sheet from the corner closet. Rachel was scarlet. She waited until he spread the sheet out over the center of the floor before slamming his desk chair down onto it. She seized Richard's hand in a vise grip when he reached out to console her with it or something. "Look, you break my hand and I can't fix it," Richard said.
She was nearly in tears. "You promised not to laugh."
"There are only like three perks of parenting and one of them involves getting to laugh at your kid's dumb shit. If Eva was here she would've taken photo evidence and sent it to your grandma. C'mon, sit down. I won't laugh anymore."
Rachel flounced into the chair and crossed her arms. Richard made sincere efforts to self-lobotomize. He took the scissors from her and angled the chair with bops from his foot to steer her under better light. "I was trying not to bother you," Rachel said, stiff and soft. She was blinking rapidly. "My bangs were getting long. I've done it before. I just messed up this time."
"Why didn't you just make an appointment if you didn't want me to do it?"
"Like I said, I've done it before. I didn't want to spend the money right now."
Richard temporarily lodged one of her bobby pins between his teeth as he hunted around her crown for more. He wasn't about to pretend he wasn't hardassed enough to approve of her restraint, but on the other hand the emotional-support ice-cream he'd probably have to lob at her after this just represented a different type of expense. "You didn't think to check to see if I was up?"
"I knew you were up."
"Then what gives, kid."
Rachel's mouth was still clamped in a fulminating line.
Richard found one more bobby pin and pocketed them all for safekeeping. He plunked his hand atop her head and twisted it around a bit, eyeballing what he'd need to prune to even the hedge, and paused when the realization struck him. "You realize I've cut your hair drunk before, right?"
"Yes, Dad," she sighed.
"Did you think I was drunk?"
"No I didn't think you were drunk. I just didn't want to bother you."
"Since when?"
She didn't answer. "Rachel, I've been wrangling this Shetland mutation of yours for ten years," Richard said. "You really think I'm going to keel over in a faint because you bring me a hack job?"
"I just thought you might still be tired," Rachel murmured. She was blinking rapidly again. "That's all. I was trying not to be a problem."
Richard bought himself an extra minute by sorting through her hair, detangling it at the nape of her neck. He finished and straightened to thumb the corner of his eye for a while, recalibrating.
When he was done he reached over to his desk to grab the box of baklava. Rachel looked up at him listlessly when he shoved the box under her nose. "You've been my problem for seventeen years," Richard said. "I like to keep my problems where I can see them. Like food poisoning. You get a slimy looking hunk of beef, you know not to eat it. It's those fresh-looking fourteen hour old slabs they paint over with gravy in the buffet that end up giving you the scoots in the jon. It's better to see the slime up front so you know what'll give you crap later."
"Gosh, Father," Rachel said. "You always know just what to say and how to say it."
"You want me to book an appointment, I can always phone up Eva and get her to get you in to that place she terrorizes downtown. She's got them scared enough that'll you'll probably get a genetic discount if I twist the screws a little."
Rachel looked down into the box. Richard brainstormed ways to call his wife without actually calling his wife. In the mountain settlements they had those dogs that delivered canisters with written messages on their harnesses. He would've tried to hire one sooner if he didn't suspect Eva would somehow find a way to send him back his own severed hand and also the bill from the mafia for severing it. "I don't mind when you do it," Rachel admitted at last, soft enough that he had to duck his head in to pick up the tail of it. She was fiddling with the edge of the box. "I pretended I did when I was little, but… I always really liked the way you cut it. Mom always cut it too short. You let me grow it out the way I wanted."
Huh. "Maybe you should be paying me for my service, then."
"I do pay you," Rachel said, icy again, and to his relief the sentimentality died before it could become cloying. "With cooking and free secretary work and guard duty and never asking for super expensive trips to the salon like my friends and never, ever calling Mom to tattle on you even when you gamble away all our grocery money. Come to think of it, Dad, maybe you should be paying me once in a while."
"I give you free shit all the time, what gives."
"You're my dad, you're supposed to give me things!"
"Ehhh," Richard said. "Contract from the hospital said I only needed to shelter and feed you. Clothes and books and tuition and haircuts are extra. I just needed to pinky-promise to keep you alive for a while. You'd be surprised what kind of people they rent out babies to in that place."
Rachel looked halfway between homicide and laughter. He solved it for her by palming her forehead and cranking her head back a bit to exchange some eyeballing. "You're not a problem," he told her upside-down face, maybe because she needed to hear it. Maybe because it'd knocked some of the wind out of him to hear her say it. "I mean, I let you keep your pet. I must like you a little."
"Oh my god Dad," Rachel said. "Conan is not a pet. Would you just cut my hair already so I can go die in peace? Please?"
He located one more last-minute bobby pin behind her ear and unselfconsciously repurposed it, pinning his own hair up off his forehead to get it out of his way. Rachel took a piece of baklava out of the box and crammed it into her mouth to nom on it vengefully. Despite her sourpussing she went as still as she always did, head straight as he began to rummage for an entry point, jaw jumping only slightly as she chewed.
He fell into rhythm quickly, ten years of muscle memory guiding him more than actual skill. The damage she'd done to her bangs was hilarious but mostly dismissible. He ended up clipping the hacked-up piece back and cutting another chunk of hair a little further off her temple to replace it until she could grow the other back. After double-checking to see if she didn't just want it all sawed off like a prison inmate or a show poodle, he set about a typical trim as the foot traffic outside began to wane from the morning rush.
Caught up in it, it took a while for him to notice that she'd started bouncing her knees gently. Her expression was closed off but soft, her gaze somewhere off in the direction of their western window. Her legs bounced again as a unit, controlled and slow, rising and falling on the balls of her feet.
Richard slid a piece of her hair between his third and forth finger to snip it and remembered, unbidden, the way she'd swung her legs under the chair to scrape her bare toes against the sheet when she'd been smaller. She'd wailed the first time he'd taken scissors to her hair and had ended up conking out mid-storm because his wife had birthed an ancient sea demon instead of a little girl. She'd wasted a year's worth of allowances in fifth grade trying to gel down her widow's peak to look like the other girls in her class until Richard had pried out pictures of himself at that age to show her his own. She'd owned it after that: highlighting it with headbands and barrettes and – one gloriously stupid and excellent summer – coloring it with a chalky blue dye that had scandalized Eva so much she'd reamed Richard five new asscracks over the phone after visitation.
It occurred to Richard, as it usually did when he wasn't drunk enough to drown it, that the mercurial sea demon child in this chair would very soon be a sea demon adult. She'd probably have the courtesy to leave a forwarding address but who knew what courtesies he'd earned from there. If Richard was going to be honest with himself, he already knew what would happen when Rachel swam out to sea. More to the point, he knew what wouldn't happen. He could pass out on his shoe-pillow or on the toilet and there'd be no bitching on the other side waiting for him. No one would coax him to set up seasonal decorations in the office windows or change the welcome mat for his clients. Lights he turned off would stay off. Doors he closed would stay closed. After nearly two decades of sharing a nest, the only eggshell left would be his own.
"Dad."
He blinked his way back into focus to realize he was holding a pretty significant chunk of her hair between the scissors. "Shaved a bald spot," he said. "Trying to figure out how to cover it up."
Rachel's eyes were knowing. He was saved from platitudes when the other parasitic botfly in his apartment buzzed against the door. "Hey, Rachel?" Conan let himself in, eyes down on the sheet of paper in his hand. "Do you have a second? I had a question about something I saw on—"
Richard watched Rachel smile sheepishly when Conan stopped dead. "Don't mind me, Conan," she said. "Dad's just fixing up my hack job."
"Sorry," Conan blurted. His eyes flickered between Rachel and the pair of scissors like he'd intruded on a hostage situation. "I can come back later."
"Hurry up and shut the door before people think we're open." Richard pulled on Rachel's hair and debated whether to screw it up further. He tided himself over with a piece of baklava from the box and ignored Rachel's sigh when the crumbs hit her forehead. "I don't know. Try a ponytail or something. Do something girly with it."
"Are you okay, Conan?" Rachel slid her hair tie from her wrist. "Did you need help on your homework?"
After another moment Conan shut the door cautiously. He crossed the room towards the sofa. "If you're after the baklava you're out of luck," Richard said. "I don't feed strays. It just encourages them to come back."
"Rachel already fed me." Conan climbed over the arm of the sofa instead of the cushions, which sent a middle finger right up Richard's grill as usual. "It's nothing, it can wait until later. Um, the phone upstairs was ringing, though? I think someone might've been trying to get a hold of Uncle."
"Didn't you answer it?"
Conan shook his head. "Conan, you don't have to be so shy of the phone," Rachel said, softening, still working at her ponytail. "You live here too. You do know you're allowed to answer it, right?"
"Yeah, answer it, Conan," Richard said, and watched Conan turn shit-shoveling eyes onto him. "Come to think of it, why haven't I put you to work yet? I got Rachel answering the phone and making the meals. All you do is run up my gas bill with your motorized backsass. Just what is it you're doing all day?"
"Being a little boy and a wonderful addition to this family," Rachel said, sweet in the center and horrifying around the edges. She shook her hair back out and pointedly handed back the scissors he'd set on the arm of the chair. "It's uneven."
Long having grown bored with epiphanies and personal grooming, Richard stuffed the remainder of the baklava in his mouth for safekeeping and measured again. Conan folded up the sheet to slide in his pocket and scooted back on the arm so that his back was resting against the sofa's back cushions. "Are you going out?" Rachel asked Conan, soft again. "You look like you're on a mission. Are you meeting your friends today?"
Conan only shook his head again. His skinny arms were wrapped around his knees, his chin resting in the cradle of it. He'd been looking at the scene with some intensity since he'd come in. "Just thinking of dropping by Dr. Agasa's."
"What is it that you do over there all day? He's not involving you in any sort of dangerous experiments, is he?"
"I just help him in his lab with clean-up and stuff. He lets me watch when he does things, but I don't get to touch any of the really cool stuff."
"But you are safe when you're over there, right?" Rachel pressed. "I mean, I like Dr. Agasa just as much as you do, Conan, but you have to admit he can be a little… eccentric. He doesn't have you near any dangerous chemicals or anything like that, does he?"
"Nope. Just normal science stuff."
Richard reached for another piece of baklava over Rachel's head. She slapped the lid down on him. "You can be replaced," he told her.
"You're going to make yourself sick, Dad. Just let me make you a real breakfast if you're that hungry."
"I'm not hungry. I just want to eat."
"Listen to yourself," Rachel said.
He didn't have the energy to explain the neuro-mechanics of bingeing and purging to her. He did have the energy to pull her bangs up out of her face until it looked like a poopy pinecone. "You're such a toddler," she sighed, slapping them away from him. "Could you please just finish so I can clean up? I have homework to do and I still have to clean the kitchen."
Richard settled for occupying his mouth with another unlit cigarette as he pruned the last hedge. He caught Conan's eyes following his movements when he straightened up again. "Does he always cut your hair?' Conan asked abruptly.
"Since I was little, yeah." Rachel was testing out the length of her bangs between her fingers. "Sometimes he even does it without complaining."
"I didn't complain until you took away my incentive," Richard grunted around the cigarette. He steered her head around for a last check. "Now it's just unpaid overtime."
"You're supposed to do things for your kids out of the goodness of your heart."
Richard laughed. "I didn't realize he'd be the one cutting your hair all this time," Conan said. His chin hadn't left his knees, his glasses catching a glint from the window. The words were a murmur. "I guess I sort of always thought your mom did it when you visited her. Or that you went to a salon."
"Come to think of it, your hair's getting pretty long too, Conan," Rachel said. "Do you want me to fix it for you while we've got the sheet down? I'm sure it wouldn't take long."
"It's okay. It doesn't bother me."
"If you don't want me doing it, maybe Dad would be willing to do it. I'm sure he'd probably be better at cutting a boy's hair."
"I'm retired." Richard tensed a yawn through his jaw instead of dropping his cigarette into her eyeball. He gave her scalp a final scrub for punitive purposes and tossed the scissors across the room before she could get any more ideas about his charity. "Clean up. If I find one hair in my coffee mug I'm pawning you off for collateral at the drug store."
"My hero," Rachel sighed. She stood up and carefully shook out her hair, combing her fingers through it to rid it of extra strands. "Are you done with all your work for next week?"
"Getting there."
"It's a beautiful day outside. I thought maybe we could take advantage of it." Rachel began gathering up the corners of the sheets, taking care to trap the hair inside. "We could go for a walk if nobody's too busy. What do you think, Conan? Do you think you could hold off a visit to Dr. Agasa's for an hour or two? Maybe we could even stop for ice-cream."
Conan still looked like he was percolating something. At this he blinked his way upwards, looking honestly surprised. He was about to reply and was interrupted by the ringing of the office phone.
Richard set the chair back behind his desk and accidentally knocked the phone off the top with his elbow, then bent to accidentally unplug the cord. "Dad." Rachel smacked his hand away and rescued the receiver. "Hello," she greeted cheerfully. "Moore Detective Agency. Can I help you?"
Richard reached over her to get to the cord and suffered a vicious pinch on the skin over his collarbone, which was just about the most inhumane place one human could pinch another human. He would've admired her mercenary instinct if the pain didn't cause him to inhale six liters of his own spit. "Yes, he's right here." Rachel sobered up. She covered the receiver. "Dad, it's Inspector Meguire. He says he needs to talk to you right away. I can hear sirens."
Richard rolled back over her to curl against his desk. He swiped haphazardly for the receiver until she jammed it against the side of his head for him to hold it there himself. "Yeah," he coughed.
Meguire was to the point. "You still sick?"
"Just abused. What is it?"
"Got a situation here. Wanted to know if you're on the up for a consult or if I need to look somewhere else."
Richard's ears caught the sound of shouting in the background. He straightened a bit against the desk and motioned for Rachel to hand him his pad of paper. She bolted upwards to grab it. "I'm ready," Richard said.
"There was a kidnapping. Seventeen year-old high school student named Nikki McMullins. She's the daughter of a prominent businessman in the area worth a couple hundred million. We set up an operation to pin the kidnapper at Port 22, but something must've tipped them off. Drove the van with the girl into the river. We're dredging it now."
"Any news from the kidnappers?"
"Not a peep. It's gonna take another hour to get the equipment here and set up to extract it. I'd like another pair of eyes over here when we pull it up."
"Have you," Richard began, then stopped when Rachel sucked in a horrified gasp. He glanced up to find her staring down at the name he'd written. "What."
"Nikki," Rachel breathed. Her fist went over her mouth. "Oh my god."
"Do you know her?"
"She's my classmate. She's… she was in my class."
Richard saw Conan jolt upright. He slid off the arm and trotted over quickly. "I can do it," Richard told Meguire, keeping an eye on her. "Are you still at Port 22?"
"The van peeled off up the road and ended up going near Port 18. I'll send one of our cruisers out to get you. Things went pretty belly up here, Moore – I want you to let me handle the bad business with the father. You're here to catch the details I miss."
"Got it."
"ETA fifteen minutes. Kay'll pull up outside."
Rachel was clutching onto his elbow as he hung up. "Is she dead?"
"Not sure, hon." At least he'd been fed and watered that morning. Richard worked a crick out of his neck and sort of wondered if he'd oversold himself. He felt better than he had yesterday but couldn't say with any real authority how much gas was actually in his tank. Either way it was probably more than the van currently at the bottom of the river.
He worked himself up and roamed over to the closet. "Are you taking a taxi?" Rachel immediately crowded his shadow. "What's going on? What did he say about Nikki?"
"He's sending a car out for me. No news on Nikki. Just wants another pair of eyes on it for now."
"But they don't know if she's alive?"
"Not sure yet. Let's not jump to any conclusions until they've pulled the van up."
"I can't believe this is happening." Both of her hands were over her mouth again. It sounded like she was having trouble breathing. "I can't believe this is happening. Nikki was right beside me in class yesterday."
"Meguire didn't say what might've spooked the kidnapper?" Conan was already leaning his bony shoulder against the side of Richard's desk to peruse his notes. "Or what might've tipped them off?"
"Get your nose out of there." Richard snapped a tie off the hangar so roughly the metal shrieked. "Don't you have boogers to pick or something? The van's already in the river, who cares what spooked them?"
"But the kidnapper must have known that if they killed Nikki, they'd never get their ransom. Why would they give up so easily? Didn't Meguire say that McMullins was a multi-millionaire?"
"Dad, wait." Rachel was still colorless but had regained some composure. She pulled on his elbow before he could start cinching himself up for society. "Inspector Meguire said he just needed you there for a consult, right? But I'm sure he's got lots of other detectives and officers there already. Does it really matter if you go to the crime scene? Can't you just look over the evidence later or something and consult that way?"
"I know I raised you to respect the police, but the truth of the matter is that BPD is helpless without your old man. I'm thinking about getting it on a t-shirt."
Conan said something. "Say that louder," Richard said. "Go ahead."
Conan's glasses disappeared behind the notepad. "It just sounds like it's going to be a really big deal with a lot of press and… and a lot of angry people," Rachel said. "Nikki's dad is super rich, right? So it's going to be really high-profile. Maybe you should call Inspector Meguire back and tell him you're not ready for this."
"And give up this paycheck? Are you crazy? Some of us have to work to eat."
"But you just got over being sick. If we need the money so badly, can't we just ask Mom to help with the bills this month or something?"
Richard eyeballed her as he centered the fabric behind his neck. Rachel was still pale but oddly resolute. She firmed her grip around his elbow when he tried to move out from under her grip. "Didn't you say this was a classmate of yours?" Richard asked, curious now. "You'd think you'd want the greatest detective in Beika on it."
"Oh, Dad, of course I'm terrified for Nikki, and I don't even want to think about what she's gone through, but I—" Rachel cut herself off with a gulping little gasp. Her fingers curled in his sleeve enough that he could feel the bite of her nails under the fabric. "Can't the police handle this? Isn't that what they do? Why does Inspector Meguire need you to be there?"
"It could just be they want an independent council there to take some of the heat off the police," Conan said from the floor. He'd gone cross-legged with his back against the desk, tapping a stolen pencil slowly against his cheek. "If this was a sting that went belly up, there's going to be a lot of heads rolling. It'll help to have another set of eyes on there that's not bound by a policeman's code of conduct."
"Does sewage ever stop spewing from your manhole?" Richard snapped. He steered Rachel away and finished cinching up his tie. "Quit climbing up my ass. Rachel, it'll be fine. It's broad daylight and half the force is there. Nothing's gonna happen."
Rachel wrung her hands like a fretful grandma up until the point he was headed for the door. Richard's fatal mistake was a last minute stop for the remaining baklava she'd confiscated from him earlier. It gave her time to make up her mind and park herself in front of the exit while he nommed the contraband. "I'm going with you," she said firmly.
Richard promptly tiger-palmed her forehead with a sticky hand. She snipped it off her and twisted her wrist to wrap up his forearm. He slapped her elbow inwards to collapse it. They rummaged around each other's guards with limbs and directional knees and stooge-pokes while Conan squawked with alarm somewhere nearby. "I—mean—it—Dad," Rachel gritted, yanking his arm behind his back and driving a heel into the back of his knee to drop his stance. "If no one else is going to look after you there, it's going to be me."
He didn't flip her into the bathroom because she'd make him clean it if she discovered how gross it was. He did drop his stance to the floor without warning and turned his shoulder so that she somersaulted off him like a kindergartener. "Rachel, why don't I just go?" Conan said desperately, back up on the couch to watch their mortal combat from a survivor's distance. "That girl is in your class, right? I'd think it'd be pretty upsetting for you to go and see that if something bad happened to her. If I go I can look out for Uncle. I'm littler and I won't get in the way."
"Who says either of you are invited." Richard marveled at all the bullfuckery in his office that'd pranced in uninvited. "Rachel, I'm going to be late. Get over it. It'll be fine."
Rachel's fists were clenching and unclenching. She moved in front of the door again with purpose when he tried to eel past her. "I'm going with you, Dad." She spoke with misleading softness. "And if you try to walk out that door without me again, I'm going to knock you down and sit on you and tell Meguire that you're too sick to make it. He'll believe me."
Richard didn't actually know what was worse: the fact that his daughter was threatening him with blunt force trauma or that there was a part of him that legitimately didn't know if he could best her in a contest of blunt force trauma. It used to not be a question but as pains in the ass went Rachel was fairly malignant. She'd grown and mutated beyond most intervention strategies. "Fine."
She actually stumbled. "What?"
"You wanna go so bad, go. Don't say I didn't warn you."
"Wait, are you serious?" She seized onto him with clawing little hands. "You'll really let me go with you?"
He hooked her freshly-shorn head and drew it in so she could duck her face against him for a minute. He could feel her trembling from her knees to her dukes. "A girl might be dead," Richard told her, eyes fixed over her head. "I'm gonna be working and I won't have time to let you snot all over me if you get upset. If you go, you have to hold your own. I can't babysit you."
Rachel nodded against him vigorously. "Okay."
"Meguire might ask you for some character statements. Things from class, what you know about her, all that. You gonna be fine with that?"
"Yes. I'll help wherever I can. I won't get in the way."
He gave her head a surreptitious scratch and let her go. Conan was still on the sofa, Richard's notes slack in his hand. His gaze had drawn inward behind his glasses as he fixated down on his feet. "Grab your crap," Richard told Rachel, giving her a push towards the stairs. "Coat, gloves, whatever. I don't know how long we'll be there."
Rachel scurried. "You too, brat," Richard said to Conan. "Hurry up. Car'll be here any second."
Conan's head snapped up. "What?"
"Get a move on. Grab your crap."
"You're letting me go?"
"I'm sure as hell not leaving you here to filch the rest of the baklava. Hurry up."
The look on Conan's face was hard to describe. He began to move, hesitated, then vaulted cautiously off the sofa. His stride narrowed as he approached Richard, as though he expected Richard to change his mind and manhandle him back into the office.
Richard didn't like disappointing small children. He hooked Conan's jacket and drew him up to eye level. Conan didn't squall. He blinked at Richard from a few handsbreadths away, a little tense around the mouth. "Police," Richard said. "And a lot of eyeballs. Just saying."
"I know," Conan said.
Richard let him escape and rummaged through the box of remaining baklava until his spawn came back downstairs to confiscate it again. He brushed his teeth in his office to rid them of the crust of sugar and hoped Kay had brought some of Meguire's caramels with her in the cruiser to prolong the sugar high. He had crime to solve or something.
.
The waterlogged carcass of the van was hauled up out of the river just before two in the afternoon. The sky over the harbor had a steely sheen to it that kept flinging light into Richard's eyes as he tried to navigate the crush of badges and machinery; he stood back with the rest of them as the crane painstakingly lowered the van onto the dock, bearings clicking with strain.
Despite his hardassing he did keep an eye out for the kids. Rachel had kept to her word, obediently haunting the periphery with Conan, staying silent unless spoken to and only straying close to Richard when he got too near the edge of the dock for her liking. She hadn't regained much color since that morning, eyes trained on the churning mass down below as the crane had worked. "Inspector." The officer in the wetsuit sounded exhausted but crisp. "We searched the entire area and we're almost done dragging the river, but there are no sign of the bodies. The current may have carried them further downstream."
Meguire had been an unreadable statue for nearly a quarter of an hour, arms crossed, chin tucked against the chill as he'd overseen the retrieval process. His head lifted a little at this, a flicker of resignation in his eyes as he nodded his thanks. "Can't find the bodies?" McMullins exploded. He surged forward, shaking an officer's hand from his shoulder as he rounded the corner of the van with blood in his eye. "You incompetent sons of bitches, there weren't supposed to be any bodies."
Meguire's head swung over to him. A moment later McMullins had him hoisted up with fists balled in his lapels. "I trusted you," McMullins hissed. There were tears in his eyes. "I trusted the police and look what happened. You ruined everything. I was supposed to have my daughter back. Get me my daughter."
Richard felt Rachel seize onto his sleeve from nowhere. In the same instant Meguire's hand shot out to mom-arm Richard behind him, and only then did Richard realize that he'd moved forward with a hand on a non-existent gun to intervene. He instead stood back and watched another officer step in to pull McMullins back, feeling Rachel thread her hands gently through the crook of his elbow to anchor him in place as Meguire redirected McMullins over to one of the metal benches flanking the perimeter of the boathouse. "What a fucking mess," Meguire muttered as he returned, signaling sharply to the officer in the wetsuit. "Get me another dive, see if you can pull up any more detritus that might've spilled out the windows. Go ahead and take the water cam down so we can review the footage later."
Richard angled aside to let the officer jog past him. "Easy, kiddo." Meguire's tone was gentle again as he addressed Rachel. "We'll have some answers soon. If it all gets to be too much, let Kay know and she can let you into the back of the cruiser to warm up."
Rachel was very soft. It was the first time she'd spoken in nearly an hour. "Do you think she suffered?"
"Can't say for sure, but the impact would've been pretty concussive at that speed and it didn't seem like any of the seatbelts were engaged. If she was in there, it was likely over pretty quick."
Rachel nodded. She took Conan's hand and tugged lightly, once again steering them both back out of the main crush. Meguire's hand clapped onto Richard's shoulder, bracing and warm as he passed by. To Richard's annoyance he saw that Meguire's tongue had formed a small lump against the inside of his cheek as he visibly fought a smile. "Careful, Dick," Meguire murmured, undertone, steering him towards the van. "I might start to get ideas that you give a shit."
"I'm future-proofing," Richard said. "You need both hands free to sign my check and signal the department to kiss my ass."
"Let's take a look at this." Meguire again signaled to one of the officers, who straightened up from their inspection of the shattered window and stepped aside to give them reign. He wrapped his hand around the handle without compunction and threw his weight to the side with a grunt. The door groaned open reluctantly, spilling a fresh deluge of water. "I'll be honest, I expected a bloodbath in here. There's a lot less damage than I thought there'd be."
"You're not using gloves?"
"Not a great chance we'll pull prints at this point seeing as it's been underwater so long. I'm putting my money on hair or other personal items that might've gotten jarred loose on impact."
Richard had been a veteran of crime scenes too long to get squeamish, but he'd admittedly been steeling himself to find some pretty gruesome evidence of Rachel's dead classmate. Perusing the entirety of the van with Meguire, flipping back and forth through their notes and at one point stopping to confer with the diving expert, Richard found himself increasingly baffled at the dearth of gruesome evidence and dead classmates. There was no blood anywhere on the seats to suggest that McMullins' daughter had been battered by the impact with the water. No windows had been broken save for the one on the side. There'd been a hammer on the floor that they'd yet to tag and bag, but even that and a broken window didn't explain the logistics of a kidnapper escaping with both their own life and Nikki's in time to avoid detection by the police.
He was reviewing the recording of the final phone call with Meguire when movement caught the corner of his eye. "Rachel," he exploded preemptively, lunging towards the van. Conan looked up at him from the backseat with wide, guilty eyes. "Get out of there," Richard snarled, swatting at him while Conan fell all over himself scrambling to get out. "Rachel, what did I tell you about keeping him in line?"
"I'm sorry, Dad." Rachel was panicked. She surged forward and rescued Conan before Richard could tattoo an asscheek with his boot tread. "I got distracted for a minute and before I knew it he was in here."
"What did I tell you?" Richard demanded to Conan, who blubbered behind Rachel's leg like a repentant vampire. "About police? And eyeballs? You have any idea how much evidence you might've just trampled on in here?"
"Go ahead and take them home, Moore." Meguire finished conferring with the diver and was pocketing his notes with weary finality as he signaled to the crane operator. "I think we got all there is to get for now. I called radio'd in a cab for you, it should be here in a few minutes. Thanks for your help, we'll take it from here."
"You don't need me here?"
"At this point it's a matter of running the labs and seeing what we can turn up. I'll call you if we get anything definitive."
Conan squawked with offense when Richard reached down to fish him up, tossing him over his shoulder. "Get," he groused at Rachel, hooking an index finger in the collar of her jacket to tug her smartly in the direction of the parking bay. "If I'd have known shearing you this morning was gonna shave off your common sense too I'd have left you to sweat out the hack job."
"Are we really going to leave?" Rachel dug in her heels a bit, ignoring Conan's squawks of I can walk from Richard's other shoulder. She'd reached up to capture his wrist tentatively with both hands, easing him to an insistent stop. "That's really it? We're just leaving her here?"
"There's not much more we can do. I'm not a diver and we've already gone over all the evidence we can with the naked eye. It's up to the labs now to make sense of it."
"But Nikki's still down there, Dad. How can we just walk away? How can I go back to school knowing I left her down there all by herself?"
He let go of her collar and palmed the back of her neck instead. She was shivering in the spray of the docks, skin damp under his hand, tottering unsteadily against him when he pulled her in. "I can't just do nothing," Rachel breathed, and he realized with some knife-edged pride that his daughter was just as furious as she was grief-stricken. "I'm a good swimmer. I can go down there too. I can hold my breath for a really long time. I should do something."
"What do you call this? You see any other classmates of hers out here?" Richard softened it by resting his chin against the crown of her head, letting her feel the weight. "Look, you showed up. You did all you could. You want to do more – you want to help more people like Nikki in the future – get the badge. Right now, we just gotta wait. Sometimes that's the only tool we have."
She palmed her eyes roughly and nodded. She guided Conan down off his shoulder and held his hand when Conan immediately tried to squirm away. "You've gotten into enough mischief," Rachel told him, soft but firm. "Are we heading home, Dad?"
"I dunno. Maybe. I gotta eat something." Richard scratched the patch on his jaw that his razor had missed that morning and fought a yawn. The early rise and the rhythmic waves had been working against him since the sugar from the baklava had worn off. "You want to stop someplace or were you planning to—"
"You!"
His arm reacted before his brain. Rachel gasped with surprise as Richard cranked her behind him, shoveling Conan back with his foot as McMullins broke off from the throng of policemen to storm across the lot. Further up the docks under the shadow of the crane, Meguire looked up sharply at the commotion. "I want to talk to you," McMullins told Richard.
Intelligence erupted out of his mouth. "Wha?"
"Alone. Without all of these uniformed buffoons."
Meguire was eating up the distance at a hurried jog, two officers on his heels. "I'm not gonna hurt him, you slobbering pack of idiots," McMullins exploded. "I want to hire him. He's been the only one here that's said anything worth a damn for the past two hours."
"You want to bring my dad on for the case?" Rachel had allowed herself to be manhandled behind Richard earlier out of sheer confusion. She broke rank now to tentatively step in front of him, but the timidity was a lie. Richard could hear her heel scritching a little in the grit as she prepared to relocate teeth with it. "But the police—"
"Aren't worth the taxpayer dollars that polish their badges. I want real detective work done to find out who the hell did this to my daughter." McMullins jabbed Richard's chest emphatically. "I'll pay you three times what these idiots are offering for your consult fee. Just find my daughter and the bastards that did this to her."
Richard blankly met Meguire's eye over McMullins' shoulder and scratched behind his jaw in their old signal. Meguire eased to a halt halfway across the lot from them, tense, eyes trained on McMullins' back. "I don't know," Richard said. "Seems like you're not exactly on the record for keeping professional relationships with the people who work for you."
"What, you want me to kid glove this and waste my breath on polite conversation when my daughter is missing? I care about results. You think I don't know that all you care about is money? Work for me and we both get what we want."
… he did care a lot about money. Richard mentally butterknifed through all the additional shit he didn't want to spread onto an already shitty sandwich. He could sense Rachel looking at him now and bought himself some time by massaging his eye with his thumb. "My driver is on standby with the limousine in the next lot." McMullins took the decision out of his hands. He pulled out his business card and brusquely thrust it over. "I can take you back to the estate now or pay for the taxi to bring you later. Think about it. I'll wait ten minutes before I leave. Contact me within the next hour or I'll find someone else to give my money to."
Richard tucked the business card in his pocket. McMullins threw another dark look at Meguire before storming away towards Dock 17, loafers smacking retorts on the pavement.
Conan was still where Richard had deposited him, a distracted, involuntary hand braced on the back of Richard's knee as he craned his body to watch McMullins go. "Piece of work," Conan muttered.
"Got a lot on his mind." Richard thumbed through his catalogue of wants versus needs and came up somewhere just north of giving a shit. He refocused on Meguire when Meguire finished jogging up. "Sorry."
"That'd be a first," Meguire said. "He spring a leak anywhere vital on you?"
"Nah. Just hit fat."
"Here. Take this before you go."
Richard took the proffered notepad and threw Meguire a questioning look. "Kay's notes," Meguire said. "I already copied them. Run over them, see if anything catches your eye. Let me know. You gonna take the job?"
"I don't know." In all honesty deadlines of any kind psychologically hamstrung him. He wanted the money pretty righteously but didn't like failure to come with countdowns attached. "I'll think about it."
"Let me know if you do go over." Meguire's eyes strayed to McMullins' retreating back as the man stalked to the waiting limousine. The next sentence was a mutter. "Least then I'll know where to start looking for bodies."
Their taxi had arrived by the time Richard had finished tallying up his to-do list. After a last-minute exchange of information, he was plopping into the backseat amidst a sea of pointy limbs and stale air freshener. "Where to," the driver asked.
Rachel was rubbing up and down her arm slowly, eyes fixed out the window. Conan was unusually quiet between them, bouncing the heels of his sneakers against the edge of the seat.
Richard dug out the card and took a look at the address. McMullins' estate was a good twenty minute's drive from here with steady traffic and a half hour with passable traffic. Three times the consultation fee would pay for a lot of booze but also things like not booze. Milk. Bread. Rice. Pie. Maybe a new desk chair that wasn't a complete piece of shit. Rachel's next dental appointment. Conan's upcoming school trip.
The driver met his eyes in the rearview mirror.
There were goosebumps on the back of Rachel's neck. Conan rubbed his hands together slowly, absently, between the bastion of his knees. His expression was closed-off.
Richard propped his elbow on the door panel and breathed out the last of his larceny against the glass. "Moore Detective Agency. 2-4 on the third block in the Uchi-Kanda district."
Rachel let out a sudden sharp, explosive noise that made him jump. When he blinked at her, she hid herself behind her hands, breathing out through what sounded like gritted teeth against her palms. "What," Richard said.
"Dad." Rachel spoke steadily behind her hands.
"What."
"Don't 'what' me."
"What."
"You want the money from Mr. McMullins for this case."
"It's not a big deal. I can get it hooking next weekend. I'll just switch up the tights for fishnets."
"The only reason you're not running straight there is because you're having a sudden weird crisis of conscience and you think you're sparing your daughter more trauma by not taking the case."
Well that and he wanted beer and baklava. Richard's gluttony could multitask with his avoidance. "That's not it. I just think the police can take care of it."
"Dad."
"What."
Rachel spoke with a worrying lack of hysteria. "If this is the point – after literally nothing else in the world has worked up until now – that you suddenly decide to turn into this great parental bastion of decency, I'm going to hijack this car and drive it over the side so I can look for Nikki myself."
Richard handed McMullins' business card up to the driver. It wasn't as if she didn't have a point.
.
McMullins had an arsenal of axes to grind. Over a decade of corporate raiding had earned him enemies in every corner of the country and as far as Richard could discern from McMullins' curt, uncooperative answers, he'd never bothered to keep records of the employees from the companies he took over. Once Richard sent Rachel up stairs to console the secretary, he turned off his judgment for a while and let his brain absorb the facts without opinion. McMullins' anger, as far as Richard could tell, wasn't actually about his daughter's death at all. It was the fact that someone had outsmarted him by successfully exploiting his weakness. The fact that money had been wasted with an unsuccessful retrieval had only pushed the salt in deeper.
Richard navigated the briefing with a fully cinched-up sphincter, submitting to McMullins' anger whenever it flared at him. He caught Conan rolling his eyes at his kowtowing, but ultimately Richard didn't have the energy to explain why flashing a belly sometimes won a battle faster than showing teeth. McMullins had made a career of being the largest man in the room and liked to flaunt that power. Frankly Richard didn't give a crop of tilled shits about outmaneuvering him on his own turf. It was more important what McMullins said and how he said it.
Once they'd headed back to the agency, he kicked the kids out of the office for a while so he could give himself time to think. He exhausted a pack of cigarettes and a shot of liquor and swam in the rivers of his smoke-trails. Eventually he came to conclusions that were convenient for no one. Nikki had not only probably not been in the van, but had likely already been dead somewhere else before the van went in. The money had never been the point. McMullins had enough enemies that'd take pleasure in his suffering that the monetary hit of killing Nikki off would be worth it. As far as the press was concerned, it'd be simpler to just tell them that Nikki had drowned rather than raise the specter of the possibility that Nikki was still alive elsewhere.
By the time the phone rang, Richard was long since separated from sugar and reeling a bit on his back hooves. "I see you got home in one piece," Meguire said. He sounded a little hoarse but alert, office door open to let in the ambient noise of BPD's main floor. "Anything for me?"
"You know this girl's dead, right?" Richard said. "There's no way she was in that van. There'd have been blood everywhere from the impact, never mind the broken glass. It was a set-up."
"Yeah, that's what we got too. Problem is that doesn't leave us much to work with. The labs won't be done for another forty-eight hours and forensics is still coming up empty on hair or tissue samples from the fabric of the seats. Damned river really screwed us over."
"Are you contacting McMullins?"
"Not until we've got something concrete. I've got a feeling he doesn't want to hear from us anyway."
"Did you," Richard began, and stopped when the phone booped in his ear. "Hold on, I've got someone else coming through. I'll call you back."
McMullins' gruff voice crackled in the receiver as Richard switched over. "This the Moore agency?"
"Yessir." He eyeballed the clock. The sky had slivered off into streaks of rain-cloud grey and sunset outside the window. Rachel and Conan would likely be heading home soon if they weren't already. "Listen, I'm glad you called. I wanted to share some of the conclusions I—"
"I'm calling this off."
Richard paused. There was some scuttle on the other end – something that sounded like the clack of keys and a soft feminine voice. He could hear a desk drawer open and shut with a bang. "Sorry," he said. "There was some interference. I think I misunderstood you. Did you want—"
"I said I'm calling this off. Your services are no longer needed."
What? Richard stared at the wall. "They can dredge the river from now to kingdom come and it's not going to bring my daughter back," McMullins said. "Whoever did this got whatever the hell they wanted. I'm not giving them the satisfaction of blowing through my entire estate just to bring them down. They're not taking any more from me."
"Forgive me for saying so, but I really don't think that's the point," Richard said. "If this criminal does this to you and gets away with it, there's no stopping them from targeting other high-profile families in the area. We need to apprehend the suspect before any more lives are lost."
"And what the hell do other people's daughters have to do with me? Nikki is dead. I've already given up everything. They don't get anything more from me, do you understand me? Not my attention, not my tears, not my money, not my estate. The bleed stops here."
Richard blinked at the dent in the wall under the clock. "Have the police send any updates to my secretary," McMullins said, and hung up.
Richard massaged the dial tone against the side of his head absently, watching the seams of the rain clouds gradually hem in the rest of the twilight.
He dropped the receiver back into the cradle and stood, flicking the lamp on and jimmying open the window to air out the room. After hours of tunnel vision the light at the end seemed disorienting. Without any forward momentum to steer him, he eventually settled back in behind his desk with what was left to read of the morning newspaper, cleansing his smoke-drenched palate with coffee he reheated on the hotplate.
He'd successfully phased between time zones when footsteps on the stairs jarred him back in. "Hey, Dad." Rachel sounded as exhausted as Meguire as she closed the door behind them. She summoned a wan but genuine smile for him, looping her keychain onto the hook. "Did you have some time to think?"
"Yeah."
"If everything still okay? I hope you ate something while we were gone."
He rescued a dog-eared takeout menu from his Serious Business drawer and flicked it across the desk to her. "Really?" Rachel's relief was a full-body spasm. She trotted towards him to rescue it. "Oh thank god. I was dreading having to cook."
"Did you make any headway?" Conan had pushed down the hood of his blue parka, scrubbing his nails vigorously through his sweat-dampened hair. "Do the police have any new intel?"
"It's only been a few hours, Conan." Rachel was already thumbing through the menu, looking with fake interest at all the choices as if she wasn't about to pick gyoza and coconut chicken like every other time since grade school. "I don't know if they're going to be able to get anything until the labs are done."
"They might have interviewed some witnesses. We still don't know what tipped off the kidnapper. Plus there's the security footage from the dock to look over."
"It takes time. We just have to be patient."
Richard found two cigarettes hidden under two sheets of scratched-off lottery tickets in his middle drawer. "Kind of quiet, Dad," Rachel said, softening. She set the menu aside for the moment and eased her skinny hip onto the corner of his desk. "What's the situation? Did Inspector Meguire call in with any new information?"
Richard scratched the back of his ear with the lighter for a while. Rachel took it from him, not ungently, and waited. "Look, try not to get too upset," Richard said. "Sometimes cases just shake out this way. It wasn't anything we could've helped."
"What is it?"
"McMullins called me and told me he was pulling the dogs off the scent. He doesn't want any more updates. He said to let the police handle it and send any information to his secretary."
The lighter clattered to the desktop. Rachel stared at him. "I know it's a tough pill to swallow, but if McMullins isn't interested in me sniffing around in this, there's not a lot I can legally do," Richard said. "I don't have any more resources than the police do and I don't have a badge to circumvent any of the red tape he throws up. Fact is I've got nothing."
"You don't have a badge to—" Rachel pushed herself off the desk so quickly his empty beer cans rolled off in her wake. "Dad! What do you mean you have nothing? What is he talking about? Doesn't he want to find Nikki?"
"I don't know what he wants, Rachel. I just know what he tells me."
"Awfully strange he called it all off so fast," Conan said. He'd already parked himself on the sofa the moment they'd come in, sharp little owl eyes directly on Richard. "Did he give you any justification?"
"He doesn't have to. I'm a PI, he's the client. He gets to call the shots."
"Not when it comes to the life and death of a young girl!" Rachel's pitch rose in hysteria. "Dad, this is insane! How could you give up so easily? Doesn't this mean anything to you?"
"I'm not giving up," Richard snapped, nettled. "I just know when I've run into a brick wall. Knowing when to stop isn't the same as 'giving up'. Sometimes life just craps on you and you need to eat it. There's nothing caterwauling's going to do except make it all harder to eat."
Rachel looked dizzy. She swallowed several times, thick, and said, a little more strangled, "Nikki is not dead."
"The van went into the river and was down there for an hour. It's only a matter of time before the body washes up on shore."
"Nikki isn't dead. I refuse to believe she's dead. I can't."
"I don't think she's dead either." Conan slid off the sofa and ate up the distance in a few quick strides. He leaned up against Richard's desk next to Rachel, propping his forearms on the surface to give himself more clearance. "It's all too neat. There's no way the kidnapper got both himself and her out without being detected."
"Yeah?" Richard said. "Prove it. Go on. I'll wait."
Conan's mouth closed slowly into a line. "Look, here are the facts whether you two like them or not," Richard said. "Here or in the river, Nikki is probably dead. At this point it's a retrieval, not a rescue. If McMullins wants to be involved, he can work with the police."
"But you're a consultant," Rachel said tightly. "Meguire asked you to help before McMullins did, didn't he? Your client is Beika PD, not McMullins. You don't have to give up if you don't want to."
… actually. Richard blinked at the top of his desk a moment, displeased to feel a reluctant light flicker on in his head. It wasn't clarity he'd particularly asked for. "Yeah, seriously." Conan immediately smelled his weakness like all small children. "To be honest, McMullins sort of made you look like a huge chump. Are you really going to just take that?"
He stood and turned to the window to give himself the illusion of space. Their twin headlights flooded his rearview mirror. 'Yes' kept coming out in the shape of no. He intended to say yes and was having a hard time pushing out the right syllable.
I'm angry, he realized. Over the past several years he'd forgotten what it was like to experience anything but surface-level irritation. He thumbed his forehead and parsed the sensation. "Okay, you got a point," he conceded. "Let's go first thing in the morning. If just to put a cap on the whole thing on my terms. You happy? Will that shut you up?"
Rachel both bloomed and wilted. She sketched a step back, fists clenching and unclenching, and took in a few hopping little breaths. "Yes," she whispered helplessly.
Richard put in the takeout order at his desk while Rachel was in the shower. He'd nearly forgotten the other carbuncle on his rectum when he heard the rustle of paper from across the room. Conan was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, tucked into the shadow of the ficus, rummaging through a collection of notepads. To Richard's intense annoyance he could see Kay's notes balanced on Conan's knee. Conan must have pilfered them when Richard had been looking out the window.
In some pretty intense limbo, he considered napping at his desk until the food arrived but was ultimately too keyed up to relax. It said something that a van carrying a teenage girl into the river hadn't even been the worst part of his day. He was used to dead people rolling up on his emotional turf. It was more the fact that Richard, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, had become used to solving things when he wasn't thinking about them. Cases that would've taken him weeks back on the force now took maybe a day. He wasn't sure how to psychologically subtitle his dependence on crime-solving naps. He'd braced for his meditation at the dock and again at McMullins estate and had instead remained painfully conscious throughout the entire ordeal. For the first time in months, he was going to bed with an unsolved case hanging over his head.
Conan said from across the room, "It's weird, isn't it."
He snubbed out the last sliver of the cigarette and went hunting around his desk again for another. "What's weird."
"It really wasn't all that windy today, even out on the docks. Even if it was, the river isn't especially deep there. The currents really shouldn't have carried them all that far. Doesn't it seem weird to you that they still haven't found the bodies?"
"You think it's so easy, you go in there and find them. There's generations of litter down there the city doesn't want to spend tax dollars cleaning up. She could've gotten lodged under anything."
"Rachel told me a funny thing," Conan said. "She said Nikki was always one of the first to finish laps in swim class. Apparently she got all sorts of practice growing up because her dad liked to vacation on tropical islands. If she was actually tied up in there, they would've found her body in the van – but if she wasn't… it's like you said. The river's really not all that deep there. If she's used to swimming in oceans and stuff, wouldn't it have been child's play to reach the surface of a shallow river?"
"What the hell about it? Just how successful do you think you would've been swimming straight after getting knocked around in a van going 100k into the water?"
"I'm just saying it's kind of funny. That's all."
"Well, keep your yucks to yourself," Richard snapped, fed up. "Don't you have homework to do? Leave the adult stuff to the grown-ups and quit digging into things you don't understand."
Conan's pencil whispered to a halt. He didn't look up. A moment later he began scribbling again.
Richard propped his elbows on the desk and massaged the back of his neck until he smothered some of the knots. He strongly considered just taping the money to the door and fucking off before the delivery man got there. He wasn't in the mood to be civil and didn't really need a square meal to cap his day. Just liquor or blunt force trauma or both. Whatever could get him to sleep without corroding his morale any further.
"Hey, Richard?"
"What."
Conan's crossed legs bobbed like butterfly wings. He was still cinched up in his vintage little consignment shop parka. "Do you really think Nikki McMullins is dead?"
"Yeah."
"Why?"
"I prefer to."
"Really? How come?"
"Because the alternative is worse."
Conan was silent a moment. He spoke almost to himself. "So you have been thinking she might not have been in the van after all."
"I think it doesn't matter one way or the other if she's dead."
"But she might not be dead. If she's not in the river, and the police can't find her body, there's still hope."
Richard miraculously found a bent cigarette in an old wallet alongside a comb and a folded-up bill. Apparently the delivery man was getting a tip after all. "If the kidnapper still hasn't contacted McMullins for a new ransom deal by now, the girl's probably dead," he said, scrounging for his lighter. "The guy's got a lot of enemies. I wouldn't be surprised if the body turns up somewhere tomorrow in a completely unrelated place. As soon as they can dump it without being caught, it'll turn up on its own. The point was to hurt him, not get money. Either way her odds aren't great."
The silence this time was longer.
Richard found the lighter in his breast pocket. The flare of heat against his knuckle was bracing. An ancient shadow of compulsion had him briefly considering leaning into it a bit further, but something about Conan's presence made him refrain. He set the flame to the end of the cigarette instead until it bloomed.
Conan said, "Why do you do that?"
"Do what."
"Always assume the worst, even if there's still a chance for it to turn out for the best?"
Richard angled himself towards the crack in the window to exhale. The sky was too crowded for stars, but the moonlight beyond the cover was bright enough to skim some of the shadow off the grey. "What if I said I could prove Nikki was alive?" Conan asked.
"She's not."
"But what if I could? Would you look for her then?"
"No."
"I sorta think you would," Conan said. "I just think you don't want to admit it. I think it hurts less to give up on your own terms than it does to fail on somebody else's."
"All right, listen, you fart-eating snotwaffle," Richard said. "I already said I'd head back to McMullins' estate tomorrow. Get off my case. I don't need you telling what to think and how to think it. You want to solve this case so damn bad, do it yourself. Either way leave me out of it."
Conan let out his breath slowly. He carefully shut his notebooks.
Richard didn't look at him when Conan returned Kay's notes to his desk. He angled another smoke trail out the window to watch it join the rest of the grey.
Conan stopped at the threshold with his hand on the door. Richard could see his reflection in the glass. "You know," Conan said, "you're not a bad detective. Not really. I just think you'd maybe be an even better one if you didn't always give up so fast. That's all."
Richard slivered smoke out between his teeth.
Conan shut the door. A moment later little feet were jogging up the stairs.
The cigarette tasted like pocket lint. He snuffed it out with muted violence and leaned his head out the window until the sudden rush of sound in his head faded.
When his blood climbed back down from his head, he picked up the phone to call Meguire.
.
So here was the thing about caring.
He'd asked Eva to marry him while his ears were still ringing and there were still bruises knotting over his ribs. She hadn't looked up from her history text until she'd finished reading the rest of the page because she was a soulless arctic ghoul. When she was finished she'd shut both of their books, packed their study materials away, took his hand, and led him around the back of the high school to the empty equipment shed because she was the most perfect soulless ghoul he knew. She'd removed his school jacket unblushingly and unbuttoned his shirt and had pressed cold, decisive little fingers on every mark his father had left on him that morning. I don't want to be your escape, she'd told him. I have dreams of my own. I'm not your life raft.
He'd gathered up her fingers and had told her he loved her more than anything else on the planet. Her frigidity was a lie. He could feel her fury for him vibrating through her wrist. He asked her twice more after that and she'd only agreed to marry him once he'd told her he was going to enroll in the police academy after high school. He had his own plans. She'd excelled and conquered and had bit resentful tears into his shoulder after giving up her dreams of Harvard to stay with him. They'd loved mercurially. They'd burned and frozen and bled and bloomed for ten years, and for a while it'd been enough.
Richard's motivational bar was low because at the end of the day he didn't give a shit about other bars. Only one had mattered. He'd enrolled their daughter in karate the instant her wobbly little fawn legs could bow to a sensei because ultimately Richard refused to gamble on bars. He'd braced Eva's arms for her during target practice at the shooting range until she'd kissed the frown off his mouth and informed him she'd simply shove him in front of a commuter train if he ever became his father. Cope smarter, not harder, Richard.
It'd taken all the anniversaries and birthdays and Father's Days to learn that caring wasn't necessarily a greater mercy than not caring. Strings that held things together could also strangle. Eva had left, but the strings she'd left behind for him to trip over had felt crueler than a complete withdrawal from his life. Hope was worse.
Nikki wrestled herself away from the officer supporting her weight and sprinted past her father to get to Elizabeth. The warehouse lot was submerged in pulsating police cruiser lights. She hung off the secretary's handcuffed arms and pleaded in hysterical tears for the police to let her go, she didn't mean it, let her go, she just did it because she cared about me, she just faked my kidnapping to make my father care about me too, she did it because she loves me.
Across the lot, Conan looked at Richard over the huddled heap of McMullins' sobbing, gasoline-drenched defeat. His eyes were riverwater clear on his face.
So here was the thing about caring.
Richard—