Known Associates

by Halfpenny

If Richard had to put his finger on it, it was more like he was a costly experiment Conan was expecting something specific from, and he wasn't delivering very promising results.

13. Chapter 13

A/N - Length-wise this 100% needed to be broken up into two chapters but thematically it flows better as one, so have this hilariously girthy chonk with my apologies.

Reissued warnings for suicide discussion, self-harm, and panic attacks. Marathon to a happy ending. Last calm before the final two storms.

---

.

And actually, two more things:

---

.

By the time they reached the on-ramp from Interstate 203 his knuckles had bullfrogged to twice their size and his fingers were responding about as well as his brain. He didn't realize he was out of the car buying cigarettes at a gas station's vending machine until Rachel prevented him from wandering off into the tree line to smoke them. Meguire was smarter on the second stop, ushering the kids inside to use the restroom at a traveler's station and then posting himself within collaring distance as Richard leaned against the side of the car and smoked himself back into the industrial revolution with his good hand.

He lost time on the stretch to Beika-Minami, resurfacing under blinks of neon noise when Meguire took the business loop to connect to the southbound expressway, then again when Rachel tucked her windbreaker down over him from the backseat. Inaction kept resulting in action when he wasn't looking directly at it. He'd used to be able to camouflage his chickenshit in somebody else's coop until his foxes got bored looking for him. Fighting and hiding used to have different pain ratios attached to them. Now his coops were smaller and his foxes were smarter and dodging them just meant he had to watch someone else up the queue get eaten. "Knock it off," Meguire murmured, sparing a hand to rap a recrimination against Richard's wrist before signaling the car into a merge.

Rachel's breathing had evened out in the backseat ten minutes ago. Richard ignored him. He continued working his thumb down against his swollen knuckles to keep himself awake until he heard Conan drop off too, and then the pain was abruptly nauseating instead of helpful. He dug his heels into the carpet under his feet to slow them down and watched momentum smear Beika into watercolor runoff outside his window anyway, and that was the other thing.

---

.

Conan was groggy but unprotesting when Meguire unloaded him at Agasa's for the night. Meguire made soothing filibuster noises in the back of his throat in response to all questions up until it became obvious he wasn't bringing Rachel back to the agency with them, at which point Richard had resigned himself to being outgunned.

He propped his temple against the passenger window as Meguire and Eva spoke on her stoop. He saw them exchange some scraps of written information, saw her reach out to briefly grasp Meguire's hand with a gratitude palpable even at a distance before she turned to follow Rachel up the stairs. Meguire hunched his shoulders grimly against the cold on the way back to the car, and Richard only had to take a single look at his expression to know they were done playacting for witnesses. Meguire didn't bother with the driver's side, circling just in time to hip-check Richard's escape attempt from the passenger door. He waited until Richard tried clambering over the gearshift to lunge in and grab him by the arm, handcuffing his wrist to the ceiling handle an instant before Richard managed to slither out of dodge, and at that point Richard gave up because ripping the handle out of the ceiling would probably earn him a broken nose on top of bruised pride.

The hospital hedgehogged him with fluids and spent the rest of the night on his damaged hand while Meguire filled out paperwork in the lobby. A treated fractured metacarpal later saw him released into the metallic glare of pre-dawn, trying to work the car door handle with toddler accuracy until Meguire opened it for him.

He was inventing new religions under pain meds by the time they made it back to the agency. Meguire cleaned himself up in the apartment's bathroom while Richard drifted in and out of the promised land in front of their coffee pot, keeping himself grounded by listening to the commuter traffic outside the window. He loaded the coffee up with an extra shot of espresso, dug around for Rachel's camping thermos, and filled the container to the brim with liquid hellfire in time for Meguire to reemerge in uniform with a duffel slung over his shoulder. Meguire took the thermos without comment. He used his free hand to steer Richard to the bedroom and ensure he was horizontal on something other than the floor or a doormat before heading into work.

Richard blinked. When he unblinked it was dusk and some conscientious intruder was slaughtering ingredients on a cutting board in the kitchen. He ate dinner without fuss, submitted to something like a shower when Meguire kicked him into the bathroom, and rattled on and off with nicotine withdrawal he didn't actually feel as Meguire paid off the debt from his all-nighter facedown on the living room sofa for the next ten hours.

Eva poured her uninvited taint into his apartment at dawn the next day. She sat on the edge of his bed as they both listened to Rachel try and fail to hide her snuffling under the spray of the shower. "I couldn't convince her to stay longer," Eva said. "Even the one day was like pulling teeth. She couldn't stop worrying about you and Conan no matter how much I reassured her. I weighed the options and decided it was causing more stress for her to be away from the situation than it was for her to be in the thick of it."

Richard kept his back to her for mature and well-adjusted reasons.

Eva's thumb found the back of his neck. She excavated some tension out from the muscles there and carded through the hair on the back of his head. "My firm is handling the case, but I'm too close to this to prosecute this personally," she said. "I'm putting Emerson on it. I'm in near-constant contact with Jamie's mother. It's no replacement for a lost daughter, but I can promise you that we are going to bleed every last bit out of Craig that we can. Marta will be taken care of, I promise. One way or another I'll make sure that she's set for the rest of her life."

He hadn't been touched this way in years and he resented the raw animal need it woke in him. Cigarettes wouldn't help either because Meguire had made sure to store them in the kitchen instead of by Richard's comfortable flammable bed. Richard was surrounded by maliciously solicitous dicks.

Eva's fingertips found the base of his skull where aches lived and slowly cross-examined them. She seemed to choose her words for once. "You and Rachel are... extremely emotionally co-dependent, Richard," she said. "I've thought so for a while, but yesterday truly drove that point home to me. She couldn't be reasoned with at all. If she were still seven it would be one thing, but she'll be heading off to a university next year. If she finds schools that are ideal for her but holds back because she's worried about leaving you behind on your own, it's going to severely limit her choices. If you can't bring yourself to foster more emotional dependency in her, at the very least encourage her to get out more so she's not always so wrapped up in the agency's affairs."

Fuck off. The thunderclap clarity of his anger startled him. It was the most coherent emotion to pass through his head in the past twenty-four hours.

He knew Eva felt it by the way she sighed sharply through her nose, but incredibly she didn't pursue it further. She did continue to scritch the base of his scalp with her nails a while longer but it was mostly to assert dominance. "I'm going to heat her up some of the dinner Joseph made and then take my leave," she said. "Have her call me if she needs me. I've spoken to Midori to make sure she's fine donating Joseph to all this upheaval. She completely understands and is ready to help where she can. You're very lucky to have them."

Aggression had knocked the wind out of him. He balled his injured fist in the sheets to avoid breaking anything else in it.

"I'm sorry about Jamie and Craig," Eva murmured, voice hopping a bit in the middle, and it was the first time in ten years that he felt her composure break.

---

.

Conan's sleeping bag and backpack were back on the floor by dinner. The next morning a shipping box was parked at the foot of his bureau by the door, but Meguire declined to answer questions about it and Richard didn't have the gas to do anything but U-turn from the bathroom back to bed.

Eva must have gotten to her: he sensed Rachel checking in on him from the hall with neurotic regularity, but it took her until well after karate that evening to actually enter the room. She sat on the edge of his bed in a cloud of Eva's lilac body wash, visibly mulling her words as she worked the tangles out of her hair. He assumed she'd Rapunzeled the rest of it down the shower drain and had left it there for an enterprising sewer rat to climb up later. "It's from Scott," she murmured at last, clearing her throat. Her voice scraped. "The box. I just thought you might like to know."

He heard a nature documentary playing in the other room. Something about penguins. He peeled a noncommittal ear and nose up off his pillow to check a few things. "Inspector Meguire said you were tired and this was just the pain medication, but I—" Rachel seemed to need to swallow a few times. "I love you, okay? And I know there's a lot I don't understand, or... or can do, but if you need to talk, I can at least listen. You don't have to do things this way."

Dinner apparently was a raw hank of ginger drowned in sesame seed oil. Penguins had a gland at the base of their tail that produced a heat-trapping oil they spread on their feathers. His hand hurt. "I know you don't want to do anything or be around anyone right now, and that's totally okay, but maybe you wouldn't... feel so alone if you gave them a chance to help," Rachel said. "I mean… you guys are still friends, right? You and Jim and Scott and Nancy? That part hasn't changed, right?"

A group of penguins in the water was called a raft and on land they were called a waddle.

"I hate that he's winning." Rachel's anger was dull. "He shouldn't get to take everything down with him. It isn't fair."

Richard tuned out of lilac and penguins and redirected his focus to a mental list of things that were fair. It was a short list.

---

.

"I'm admitting you if you don't eat," Meguire said bluntly. He stood by with vivisecting caseworker attention as Richard gummed down half the toast and part of the egg before snatching up his coat and heading into work.

Conan was present in the apartment that morning despite it almost definitely being a school day, and Richard finally acquired the wherewithal to realize he was under some kind of well-meaning psych watch. His suspicions were confirmed when Meguire returned yet again that evening, presumably still married to someone regretting those vows, tossing his briefcase on the sofa and immediately getting started on dinner. Rachel, who'd been audibly failing her classes at the table since coming home from karate, took the opportunity to branch out and try out new failures in the kitchen.

This time Conan was the one to break Richard's solitude. He sat atop his sleeping bag reeking of Rachel's shampoo and eyeballed the back of Richard's head until Richard gave up and rolled over to flip him a bird. "I guess I'll cancel your autopsy," Conan said, expression unchanging.

The disrespect was pretty funny. For the sixth time that month Richard generously didn't toss Conan out onto the street to fence his organs for food. "I found some things on my way home from school yesterday if you're interested," Conan said. "Someone tied up a whole huge stack of magazines and set it out for recycling. A few of them looked like stuff you might be into, so I grabbed them for you. I'll put them up here for you in case you want to look through them."

Richard spotted a racehorse on the cover of the first one Conan pulled from his backpack. The second one involved skimpy bikinis and fewer horses and the third was some kind of high-end liquor catalogue, and now some distant part of him was wondering who this fascinating kindred spirit was down the street and if Conan had avoided being caught on any CCTV footage trespassing on said kindred spirit's shit. "Dr. Agasa also sent some medication back with me." Conan rummaged through is backpack again. Two unmarked containers and a water bottle were arranged on the bed stand next to the comparatively less illegal contraband. "They're pharmaceuticals from his lab, so of course he doesn't let the kids take them, but he's been involved in government-funded pre-clinical development for NCEs before. The chemical profiles are pretty much identical to the stuff you can buy over the counter – he just tweaks them here and there to dial them up. If you have a headache or your stomach starts to get upset from withdrawal, these will help better than anything you'll find in your cupboards."

Richard had sincerely never wanted to unpack an interaction less in his life. He violently dissociated from everything Conan had brought into the room and didn't return until Conan wheeled in the living room TV. It strained the everloving shit out of the cable whenever the kids did this and usually resulted in at least one fatality during the night when one of them forgot the cord was there in the dark. "There we go." Conan's mutter was breathless but satisfied. He adroitly hopped up onto the end of Richard's bed, remote in hand and school bag on his back, and Torrential Hearts was playing moments later as dinner began wafting in from the kitchen.

Still dazed, Richard listened to Masao and Risa bicker over whether to have their own child or surrogate for her terrible half-sister first. After the commercial Ash, Kotorou and Jenn brawled their way through a messy love triangle that would eventually be resolved with poorly-written polyamory a few episodes later. Deli Chick went platonic candle shopping with her bearded ex and all the while Conan crunched through crackers with the etiquette of a raptor horking down vole bones. "If you ask me this entire subplot is a waste of time," Conan muttered. His pencil never stopped scribbling. "They're terrible people together, they're terrible people apart, so they might as well just hook up and spare everybody else those bullets."

Dinner was meatballs. Once Conan was asleep in his bedroll and Rachel had stopped muffling her misery against her stuffed animals down the hall, Richard clicked on his bedside lamp and dragged himself upright to look at bikinis. It was more waxed real estate than he'd seen in a while but oddly enough it ended up being the horseracing magazine that caught his attention. His interest fully piqued when he saw Conan had folded a newspaper clipping of track results inside the cover.

He scrounged up a pencil in a bedside drawer and crunched some numbers in the margins while the sky drooled on the roof of the agency. Halfway through his line graph of last month's stats and about to calculate the mean, he realized that he had no idea what today's date was. Some assumptions could be made from the newspaper but while most things he could and did ballpark, charting race results was something he actually did enjoy. If he wanted to keep his metrics accurate he needed to make sure he had his timeline straight.

He pried himself up on calves that quivered and went to splash his face clean in the bathroom sink. Someone had set out his shaving kit and toothbrush on a folded towel next to the basin and this struck him as weirdly presumptuous.

He got stuck there remembering how neither of them worked. He couldn't smoke or drink them. Neither of them were bikinis or horses. There was a gorge in his head preventing him from bridging important neural connections.

He summoned enough fucks to experiment. At first it was clumsy and then after a few swipes his muscle memory came in to rescue him. He finished shaving, wiped down the sink, and held off on brushing his teeth so he could schedule in a smoke. Meguire had apparently gone home for the night, leaving behind a dark kitchen stale with marinara.

Richard wedged himself up against the wall by an open window and lit up with uncooperative smashed hands. After a solid ten minutes of being unable to remember why he'd come in here, he tossed the remains into the sink and managed to clean his teeth before he overdrew his quota of energy. He tripped over the threshold of his room and managed to muffle the landing enough that Rachel didn't burst like bats out of her belfry. It brought him next to Scott's box and because it was habit, Richard turned his failure into an investigation.

He worked his thumb under the tight bands of packing tape until the flaps were loose enough to pull apart. He kept an ear turned while he worked, but while Conan did stir at the noise, it was only to flop over with an open snoring mouth, starfishing on top of his sleeping bag. He'd kicked off one of his socks.

Richard folded the flaps down and let his eyes adjust without hurry. There were three envelopes tied together atop the bubble wrap, two matching and one disparate. Richard thumbed them apart and felt a little dust get knocked off him when he saw Jim's name signed on the outlier.

He knelt there a while as rain swelled and faded against the glass. When he tried and failed six times to open the envelope, he gave up and set them aside for later. He returned to the box. Underneath the froth of bubblewrap were the separately bundled collections of photographs, novelty tins, souvenirs, memorabilia, and yearbooks they'd poured over at the reunion. Scott was a stickler and had kept up their tradition of rotating stewards for it despite the fact that 33% of the club had now either been murdered or arrested for murder. The reason it was Richard's turn now and not Craig's was the same reason that in five years it'd be Jim's turn instead of Jamie's, which would actually save Richard some postage because Jim lived closer than—

The sphincter holding in his emotions for the past several days abruptly unclenched. Richard shared his feelings with the toilet and afterwards lodged himself under the open bathroom window while ribbons of cold air licked the back of his neck. The incoming storm jostled the flanking trees until their shadows maypoled around the streetlights. The tile reeked of cleanser.

Okay, Richard thought for the first time in a while, but that wasn't right either. There was one more thing.

---

.

Haruka and Deli Chick's third date ended prematurely with a run-in with the bearded candleshop ex. Meguire bitched in the hallway on the phone with a colleague and then bitched in the room over paperwork no one would ever read, pausing to reheat the meatballs and split the leftovers between them. Richard ate with the newspaper folded over his knee, one eye on track stats and the other on boobs. "Idiots." Meguire was seething to no one. He flung himself back into the chair with a carelessness that made the frame crack ominously. "Can't handle anything unless I'm directly up every ass in every department. Don't even know why we pay Records when I'm doing half their work for them."

Before leaving for school Conan had left two unmarked pills on the table with a glass and a pitcher of extra water. The scribbled note he'd propped next to them read Agasa says to take these with a whole glass if you feel sick, and for the second time that week Richard found himself parked somewhere between terror and fascination at the sweet-cheeked underage experimental drug muling. He still hadn't taken them, but that had less to do with any particular self-preservation or mistrust of Agasa and more to do with the fact that the fun of the mystery would be over once he did. "Starting to think I won't ever see the bottom of this." Meguire reached over himself and pulled up the thermos he'd refilled at the coffee pot. "Like to be out the other side by next weekend but it's starting to look like I'll be snowed in. Wouldn't be the first time."

Deli Chick pleaded with Haruka that Tatsuo didn't mean anything to her anymore and that they should run away together to open a resin art studio with her inheritance. Leather and motorcycle exhaust were involved. Rachel had hugged him goodbye on her way out the door that morning and had left his sinuses prickling with lemon-verbena. Only when he'd woken the second time did he realize she'd also taken the opportunity to squiggle her childhood stuffed bunny down by his side, presumably to protect him while he slept. It was the kind of extraordinarily darling shit she used to do as a toddler and part of what made her his favorite daughter even on the days she barricaded him inside his bathroom and refused to let him out until he cleaned it.

His plate was empty. He was hot but the window was too far away, so he settled for kicking off the blankets while he hunted around for the fork he'd dropped.

Meguire startled so badly that he nearly dropped his plate onto his paperwork when Richard reached over to steal one of his meatballs off it. "These are better the second day," Richard mumbled, mouth full. His voice creaked around marinara. He picked up the newspaper from his knee and had to fumble a little to keep hold of it when he remembered too late that his left hand was still in a brace. "There's more, right?"

"No," Meguire said. "Rachel and Conan split the rest to take to school. She didn't have time to make them lunch."

"Well make some more."

"You make some more. We don't have any more ground chuck. You want more, you can be the one to go out and blow your paycheck on the ingredients this time."

Richard kept his eyes on the screen. Haruka lunged to catch Mari around the waist before Mari could walk away. The movement disrupted a cinematic flock of birds and by the time the camera had cleared they were gnawing on each other in the fountain. "Goddammit, Richard," Meguire said. He'd set the plate aside carelessly on the edge of the bed to hide his face in his palm. "Three days you don't talk and the first thing you finally do choose to start talking about are meatballs, you son of a bitch—"

"In the time you've been complaining about it you could've already been ordering more chuck from the deli up the street—"

"Get it your fucking self!"

"Where's Rachel?"

"School. You know where you are?"

Vaguely. Richard stole another meatball. Meguire let him. "Saw you opened the box from Scott," Meguire said. "Need to talk about it?"

"No."

"What day is it?"

Thursday. No. Richard counted backwards but not well. It felt like swimming through water that occasionally turned into snot. "Tuesday."

Meguire didn't argue.

Richard polished Meguire's plate off with clumsy swipes, pausing to search for the remote and finding it by his knee. The set was too loud. He turned it down and on the next commercial searched around for a napkin that didn't have unmarked drugs on it.

"Goddammit, Richard," Meguire said, hoarse against his palm.

---

.

Benoit called him the next day while the kids were at school. "He says you're off self-harm watch," Benoit said, tactful as a fistful of car keys to the groin as usual. "Got some new leads here for you. You want me to send it over, or will you be in town sometime this week to pick it up?"

"I'll reimburse you if you'll ship it." That was a flat fib but that's what indentured daughters and baking were for. A shipping box from a TV station he didn't recognize was mummified with packing tape in the cradle of his legs. He was a responsible adult, so he checked to make sure Rachel wasn't around to tattle on him before he started weed-whacking it with a rusty box cutter. "Sorry, I meant to get back to you sooner."

"You were busy. It's fine."

"Did Robesson get back to you from Records?"

"No, got this information the old-fashioned way." Benoit was too hardboiled for pity, but Richard could pick up some sheaths closed around some of his sharper edges. "You get the office back up and running yet? Had a few clients I was going to refer to you but held off."

He considered it. He crooked a knee nearly up to his ear in order to plop a steadying foot down atop the package as he continued to saw. "What numbers?"

"An eight and a nine and a man."

Hot damn. He could probably handle disappointing all three as long as he didn't burn too many calories doing it. He was an equal opportunist. "You can go ahead. Thanks for the business. You did mention I didn't come cheap, right? To weed out the lowballers?"

"At this point most of Beika knows you by reputation, so I'll let people decide for themselves how low they want their ball."

The box cutter lost patience with his bullshit and gutted a knuckle. He also had to use the bathroom pretty bad but that'd been going on most of that morning. Meatballs went through him faster than Triple Sec. Richard tucked his knuckle into his mouth to stem the flow as the phone booped in his ear, and for no other reason besides the fact that he was always on the lookout for cosmic slipknots trying to get around his neck, he felt a sudden swell of foreboding.

He took his knuckle out. "Hey, sorry to cut this short, but I've got a caller waiting. Mind if I get back to you?"

"No need, I'll just send the new material over. Let me know of it's of any use."

"I appreciate it. Sorry I haven't been quicker on the draw."

"Like I said, nothing else to do, and you were busy. It's worth pursuing. Pick up your client."

Richard shoved his knuckle back into his mouth and tapped the cradle with the hand holding the receiver. "Moowah," he said.

"Hey," Scott said.

After consecutive days atrophying on his ass he felt his legs start to mutiny. He leaned his shoulder up against the wall of the hallway to take some weight off them. "Did I catch you at a bad time, or do you have a minute?" Scott asked.

"Bweeding."

"What else is new?" But Scott's laughter was genuine. "I'll wait. I got nowhere to be."

Richard evacuated all meatballs and stoppered the remaining pint of blood inside his body with two bandages and gauze. A tolerant mid-30s back won out over common sense as usual, so he performed a controlled slide down the wall to sit on the floor next to the phone instead of fetching a chair from literally four feet away. "How's Nancy," he said, picking the receiver back up.

"Better. Nancy got, uh – she actually ended up needing the hospital more than I did in the end. The shock of it set off her auto-immune response. You know how it is for her."

"Is she okay now?"

"Better than she was. They tweaked her meds and sent her home. We'll be checking back in with them next week to make sure she's back on track."

"You?"

"I was fine to begin with. Got a hard head."

Richard watched a box elder crawl across the baseboard on the opposite wall. "Tracking says my package got to you," Scott said. "You can send it back if you're not all right with it. I just thought… I don't know. I don't know what I thought. Sorry if it spooked you, I just wanted it out of Nancy's sight for a bit while we figure out what we're doing with all this."

"Nah, it's fine. I'll take care of it. Might as well keep up some semblance of normal."

"Nancy made a joke that she'll make a separate address for herself so when it's her turn, we can still swap between four of us. She's threatening me to not let me see it when it's her turn to protect it. Still can't figure out if she's alluding to an upcoming divorce or not, but she keeps making me dinner, so if she's planning on kicking me out at least she's doing it softly."

"Speaking from personal experience, you'll probably need to shoot more of her legs out first before she actually gets serious about it."

Scott was quiet a while.

Richard scratched an itch on his calf with the opposite heel. He watched the box elder start its climb up into the ficus to birth an infestation that'd make his daughter scream in two to four days. "I tried to call you earlier but got your friend," Scott said. "Nancy was really worried about Rachel."

"She's fine. It's her usual. She's rattled but it'll blow over eventually."

"Jim's been calling here every day. I didn't know what to do with it at first. Kind of weirded me out if I'm being honest with you. He's not exactly the chatty type so it threw me that he suddenly wanted to be in contact so much. But then Nancy pointed out that maybe he and Craig got along better than we thought they had. You know, communicated more between the two of them. And I got to thinking that maybe he and Craig got tight because Jim had that thing for Jamie, and now that both of them are gone he's lost the two people he cared about the most."

The box elder fell halfway up and squiggled melancholically on its back. "I miss her, man," Scott said. "It always seemed like she was going to outlive us all. She had no off-switch, you know? Just momentum for days."

"They get her things back to her mother?"

"Most of the stuff at the hotel was taken in as evidence. Marta would've gotten into the apartment by now, but apparently there's evidence of the… stalking shit in there, so that's been pretty roped off too. I guess Craig's attorneys are going to try to build a defense out of it."

Did Rachel have karate after school? Both kids had been periodically truant that past week and truthfully Richard didn't have a whole lot of direct proof they'd gone to class even the days they hadn't been up his ass. Poor attendance or poor concentration were both equally plausible reasons for why Rachel kept making frustrated pikachu noises over her Natural Science textbook. "I keep going over and over that night," Scott said. "I don't know how you do it. The shit you do every week, just watching the worst parts of humanity play out around you day after day… I talked to Nancy afterwards and she said the same thing. It's like you came to the hotel as one person and then turned into someone completely different by the time the night was out."

"I mean, neither of your were planning on solving it, so I figured one of us should get on it before the hotel ran out of pretzels."

"Yeah, you're a real riot, keep it up—"

"I told you guys I was a world-famous detective, what were you expecting?"

"Honestly? Pretty much nothing at all," Scott said. "You have to admit you've been blowing your own horn off-key since college. Listen, I'm being serious. It's like you just... zoned out and turned into this ace detective between blinks like some kind of circus act. We barely recognized you. What even was that, man?"

"Genius," Richard said. "Look, I know what you're driving at, but there's not any sort of deep psychology here – I just can't afford to be a dick during that kind of case. If I got sloppy it would've given him more opportunities to walk away. It took everything I had not to trach myself with my own foot and he still almost got away."

"They shove those cameras up in your face after you close a high-profile case, and from the other side of the screen it always looked like you were the same clown we knew in college. Just older. But actually being there in person, seeing you do what you do…" Scott made an onomatopoeiac noise that sounded like a shrug. It was a little helpless. "I don't know. It just felt… I don't know. I don't know."

Richard had some anemic social instinct to reassure him but zero chutzpah to actually follow through. The dissociation that'd protected him from the worst of the trauma was still there but also busted apart like stale gingerbread if he poked it too hard. "Did you know it was him the entire time?" Scott asked.

"I mean, not really."

"When did you figure it out?"

"I didn't start suspecting anything until he started checking over my work with Jamie on her time of death. It wasn't until I saw the statue of Benkei that it came together."

"Wait, you mean back in the room?" Scott sounded startled. "You suspected him that early?"

"It was the way he was handling her." Richard had spotted Conan's similarly startled look at this when he'd finally gone over the case with Meguire, but it wasn't a new problem. He'd had plenty of hunches during prior cases that'd turned out to be more or less accurate once the evidence panned out, but tacking up particulars in a clear-cut sequential way just wasn't his strength. It was part of the reason he still held the record at the precinct's firing range. Good aim took practice but all in all guns didn't ask you to fill out multiple-choice questionnaires before you fired them. Targets didn't require spreadsheet analyses to hit their bullseye. You turned your fucking brain off and let your instincts do the walking. "He was acting too squeamish about touching her, almost like he was afraid of leaving evidence on her even though both of us were checking time of death. He didn't even want to get close enough to her to see the entry site. At first I chalked it up to a lover not wanting to see an ex that way, but when he started grabbing my pressure points to get me to shut up it put me on the scent. He's too good a judoka to not know what he was hurting on me. He tipped his own hand by being a dick."

The silence sat between them a moment with static weight. "See what I mean?" Scott said.

"Hunches are the easy part. I get them all the time. The hard part was getting enough dirt on him to get him to confess. Any one of us testifying against him might not have been enough with that badge. I had to break him down to the point where he confessed on his own. That was going to be the only thing that'd put him away and keep him there."

"Look, here's what keeps me up, all right?" Scott said. "I guess I'll just lay it out. What Jamie did was fucked up. It didn't justify her murder, and Craig's still a piece of shit for what he did to her, but the entire way home I couldn't help but keep thinking how little I actually knew either of them in the end. You and Jamie were close, but did you ever think she'd be capable of something like that? Stalking people, threatening them?"

Jamie's cobbled-together mafia warning was still sitting atop his desk unless Rachel had moved it for him. Richard hoped she hadn't thrown it away and then hoped maybe she had. "Craig was supposed to be the best of us," Scott said. "He was always the guy who'd pick up the tab, who'd run up to the freeway if you got a flat, who'd call you up out of the blue to check on you. If a guy like that can go bad, and a girl like Jamie can turn out to be some… some crazy stalker, what does that say about the rest of us? What's to say I couldn't become the group's next killer if life didn't go my way either?"

"I dunno, whatever, don't conflate that," Richard said. "Look, there's no such thing as 'good' and 'bad' people. We're only as good as the choices we make on the day we make them. You don't go through life without finding some sort of axe to grind. The 'good' people are just the ones who are the best at hiding their worst instincts. On a different day, Craig might not have resorted to what he did. That day he did. Doesn't make him good or bad, just means he chose his trigger and pulled it."

"You're saying that if you were in that same situation, you would've done what he did?"

"No, but it's not because I've got some sort of superior moral compass. I just don't have enough things that piss me off enough that murder feels like my only option."

"So you wouldn't kill a guy even if he went after your kids? Or killed your wife?"

"I mean, depends on how much he overcharges for the service."

"Asshole, read the room," Scott exploded. "You really think I want to joke around about this right now?"

"I don't know what you want me to say. Everybody's got it in them to make shitty choices that ruin lives. Nobody automatically exempts themselves from that by calling themselves a 'good person'. Craig made a choice. You don't like the choice he made, don't make it."

Scott was silent for nearly a minute. Richard watched the box elder complete its journey back up the pot and disappear over the lip. "I don't understand." Scott sounded exhausted. "I don't recognize you. I don't know who I'm talking to anymore."

"The world famous Detective Richard Moore, you can-kicking dipshit," Richard said. "How many times do I have to tell you all that I was always the ace of the team? I didn't change, you all just didn't see greatness of Richard Moore in front of you when I showed it to you. Don't make that my problem."

"Fine." It sounded like Scott was crying through his laughter and if so this now qualified as a hostage situation. Richard couldn't even justify knocking a bullet into Scott's leg to get him to shut up, which was his usual modus when dealing with hostage situations. "Look, forget it. I'll get out of your hair, I just wanted to call and check up. I'd been in contact with Jim and figured I'd do my rounds, make sure everyone was all right."

"Sounds like you're on your way to becoming the new captain."

"Oh shit."

"You always were second in line, so I guess the promotion tracks. Congratulations."

Again Scott's laughter was raw misery. "Prepare to never win again."

"Tell Nancy I said hi. Tell her my kid'll bake her something if she's still feeling under it."

"I will. And hey, Richard, what I said in the letter—"

"I haven't had a chance to read it yet."

"Huh?"

"I just started getting back into the office today. I'm catching up with the mail now."

Scott wasn't stupid. Richard could feel him reassessing their entire conversation between blinks. "Sorry," Scott said eventually He was much quieter. "I should've guessed you'd be in the same boat as the rest of us. My bad."

"It's fine."

"Either way, until you do get around to reading it, don't wall off. Like I said, Jim's been calling a lot more and it's helped Nancy to have someone other than me talking to her about it. Just because this happened doesn't mean we can't all be—"

The receiver hit the cradle before Richard realized he'd planned to hang up. His hand was hurting again. It was too much trouble to stand up, so he rolled his way like a mustached cement mixer into the spill of sunlight from the apartment window, then chased the sunbeam slowly across the floor throughout the next hour until his last flop took him up against his liquor cabinet. When the next round of meatballs was ready to come out of him, his hand hurt less and the silence in the room had started to suffocate instead of soothe.

By the time Conan thumped up the stairs after school griping out loud that stairs existed, Richard was back in the agency.

---

.

He'd sloshed a generous bucketful of dominant traits down to Rachel but her aptitude for climbing into his grill came straight from Eva specifically. He'd escaped the cross-examination for a while by virtue of being injured and pathetic, but eventually she started trying to corner him away from Conan. After three nights of takeout she'd insisted on returning to making healthier dinners for them; he'd had plans to hide his dirty dishes in the ficus to feed the box elder rebellion, but she went out of her way to grab them before he'd even stood from the table, obsequiously fawning over him by telling him to rest downstairs because helpful little Conan would stay upstairs to do dishes with her instead, isn't that right, Conan.

Richard recognized a divide-and-conquer strategy, but full bellies made slow prey and honestly cross-examination was better than dishwashing. Rachel's plan ended up backfiring when a solid ten walked into the agency after-hours to solicit Richard's help tracking down her cheating spouse. Spouse hunts were unironically his favorites and the woman's rack was something he usually had to pay out of pocket to enjoy up close, so he cleared his schedule and escaped before Rachel could find out who'd sprung him.

His joints creaked like bike chains up a few hikes to various birds-eye locations, but after two hours of work and a few well-placed calls he managed to pin down the missing blue Nissan at a park entrance. The 'cheater' ended up being an exhausted henpecked businessman who detoxed from his wife every day by feeding ten percent of his paycheck to the park's pigeon population. Richard passed the man a cigarette, gave his client's boobs a discount, and walked away thumbing his fee over the sound of the man's entire feed bag being hurled out over the courtyard. The panicked shrieks of regret as seventy pigeons and seagulls thundered down onto the feast faded by the third block.

Rachel was smarter the next time. While Conan was off at Agasa's presumably harassing him about building a wristwatch able to transform into a hanglider or a pontoon boat, Rachel quickly disappeared downstairs after dinner to flip the agency's sign and lock up an hour early. Richard didn't bother with evasive maneuvers, having already consigned himself to an evening of boring horseshit in his room while boring horseshit played on the radio. "Dad?" Rachel knocked a knuckle against the frame. "Can I talk to you?"

"You already flipped the sign. Come back tomorrow during business hours."

"I flipped the sign downstairs. You're upstairs."

"If I let you get away with those semantics then everybody's going to start ignoring business hours, not just Pied Pipers with racks."

"Husbands and dads don't get business hours. You started a 24-hour family business the day you married Mom."

Technically he'd started a family business a solid month before he'd married her mother, but Rachel had arrived late enough that nobody had squinted at the math too hard. "Fine. Don't step on anything."

Rachel hung onto the frame a minute longer before tentatively pushing herself into the shallow end of his pool. She edged around the perimeter to get to his radio, probably to turn it off.

Richard stored an invoice between his teeth as he fished for a pen, sparing a quick glance around him to reassess from a tattletale's eyes. Track statistics, case files, bills, manila folders with logs of last month's banking activity. He shoveled cleavage and waxed bikini lines under his bed with his foot, but all in all last month's banking activity was probably more tattle-worthy than the fairly obvious fact he enjoyed greasy nudity. "Dad, you should be wearing your brace," Rachel sighed the instant she caught sight of his hand. "Just because they didn't cast it doesn't mean you can take the support off whenever you want. And what did you do?"

"I didn't do anything, it was a box cutter."

"Do I need to schedule you a tetanus booster?"

She definitely needed to schedule him a tetanus booster but not when she said it with that kind of tone. "I already took care of it."

He expected her to commandeer his bed to give herself the high ground, but she instead lowered herself criss-cross in front of him on the floor. She was dressed in overalls and a club hoodie she'd tie-dyed in middle school, hair split over her shoulder in two in-progress braids. She took in his industry with a flickering gaze even as she resumed her work. "What are you doing?"

"Organizing."

She looked unfairly alarmed. "You never organize."

"I organize all the time, jerk, you just don't like my filing system."

"… beer cans, cigarette butts, soggy receipts, and empty lighters are a filing system."

"See? Everyone's a critic," Richard said. "Move. You're squashing my invoices."

"Are you sure you can talk? You seem like you're preoccupied."

"It's fine. I'm just tired. This is boring."

"Then why do it?"

She'd lived with him for seventeen years and in that time had replaced both eyeballs with two additional backsassing bottomfeeding mouths. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to spoil your childhood illusion that elves come by to put electricity in your lightbulbs and water in your faucet."

"Oh Dad, stop, I know you pay bills," she said impatiently. "I just meant why do you have to do this now if you're tired."

Because jokes aside, there was an overdue electric bill by his ankle that actually did horrify him. He'd had to beg up a few trees in the past when it came to Rachel's tuition and he admittedly wasn't all that great with credit card payments either, but he'd moved all seven layers of hell more than once to stay on top of utilities. Solid Ten's fee would have to go straight back out into the wild if they didn't want to cook dinner with Rachel's aromatherapy candles. "You want to do it?"

"God, you know what, fine." She abandoned her braids to cover her eyes a moment. "Never mind. You make it really hard for people to be concerned about you, Dad."

"Then don't. I'm busy being your utilities elf and concern is noisy. Why are you here?"

"It's not enough for me to want to check on you?"

"You said you needed to talk to me."

"I do."

"About what."

She looked a little helpless.

His checkbook was out of checks and this wasn't part of the plan. He'd have to deposit the money and get a cashier's check until he could flag his bank and get another book of his own sent to him. He fished out blindly behind a collection of empty beer cans until he found a summer shandy he hadn't massacred yet. He punched a hole in it with his thumb and shotgunned the summer out of it as he rummaged around for a new pen. After days of calorie reduction the beer hit his stomach like a sledgehammer.

Rachel stirred and blurted, "I," and swallowed the rest. She kneaded the end of her left braid and then took it out to redo it. "I got a letter from Nancy."

He made a noise behind the can.

"It was really nice. She wrote about a lot of things. Apparently Jamie brought me up a few times when they talked, especially after the times she got in contact with you. She thought it was great I was a leader of a sports club instead of just a manager or an idol. I guess it's a generational thing or something - Nancy says they didn't offer full-contact sports for girls when they were in school." Rachel thumbed her ankle. "Anyway, I wasn't in Jamie's will or anything, but apparently Jamie's mother came to visit Nancy while Nancy was sick and brought a few things she knew Jamie would've wanted Nancy to have. She sent one of them to me in the letter. Sorry, Nancy I mean."

"What is it?"

"It's a little resin pendant Jamie made. It has some sand from the salt flats that she took during a vacation to Bolivia after college. I guess she always swore she'd go back and take Nancy with her, but the last couple of years she'd been talking about taking a girls trip with both of us when I was old enough to travel on my own. Nancy thought it'd be a nice gesture to... bring the vacation to me, I guess. Now that it'll never happen for real."

It was exactly the kind of sentimental gesture Nancy would think up. Richard had collapsed into a glutinous mass of used toilet paper and cigarette ash after the case and genuinely didn't know how the fuck any of them had functioned well enough to do anything this well-intended. For Jamie's mother to have the wherewithal to comfort Nancy after losing her only daughter was unfathomable to him. "Can I keep it?" Rachel asked. "It's okay, right? Because I really want it."

"It's fine."

"Are you sure? It won't upset you or anything if I wear it around the apartment?"

"Only if it clashes with your shoes." He sucked out the last drips of beer and interred the can in the graveyard with the other dead beers. He fished out another. There was a lady present or whatever so he activated some Victorian table manners this time to instead pop the tab and get skunked like a gentleman.

He realized she was still looking at him. "She would've wanted you to have it," he said. "I'm not going to break just because I see something that belongs to her. Wear what you want."

"That stuff Scott sent you… it's the stuff we looked at at the reunion, right? The memorabilia?"

"Yeah, it's our mutual collection. We each take turns hoarding it and then bring whatever new stuff we can find each time to add to it."

"That's fun. Kind of like a baton pass."

Richard's grunt echoed over the opening.

Rachel said, very softly, "Shouldn't you slow down, Dad?"

"I am."

"You just got out of a whole… ordeal. Plus you're on pain meds, aren't you? Should you really be drinking so much?"

"I'm not on meds. It doesn't hurt. It's mostly scar tissue there anyway."

"But it's still really hard on your body while it's trying to heal. Shouldn't you be taking it easy?"

"Daddy can hold his liquor, Pumpkin."

"Oh god," she said. "You're already at the 'Pumpkin' stage? It's not even six o'clock!"

"What? I can call you Pumpkin and not be wasted."

"So very infrequently."

"Okay you know what? From this day out you get three Pumpkins a day just so I don't have to put up with this shrill fruitist propaganda," Richard said. "And I can get wasted whenever I want, Mom."

"I'm not saying you—" She cut herself off with a strangled noise of frustration. She kneaded the hair over her temples a while. "I'm just trying to talk to you. Okay? Can't you listen to me for a few minutes?"

"I am listening."

"No you're not, you're a million miles away and I—"

He drained the rest of the beer and rummaged for another.

"Never mind." Rachel was soft again. She got to her knees and shifted the papers out from under her that'd gotten crinkled. "It's really good to see you up and around again, Dad. I'll get out of your hair. I can see you're busy."

The motion had uncovered another handful of faded receipts. He beckoned for them and she handed them to him. "We're having leftovers tonight," she said. "I'll heat them up for you now if you're hungry."

"It's okay."

"Dad, you need to eat."

"I'm fine. Don't bother. I'll have something later."

She lingered by the door a while. He could hear her weight shift on the floorboards as she tried and failed to speak several times. By the time he looked back up again over a new can, the threshold was empty.

The bank wasn't open for him to get a cashier's check but he managed to get everything else squared away that he'd put off. He worked up past eleven, merrily slaughtered himself on six shots of rye, and woke sprawled front of one of the apartment's heating vents where he'd presumably crawled off to warm his loins like a chilly drunk tomcat.

Rachel's bedroom door was closed.

---

.

The call came during an early-morning marathon of Seize Our Days. Having been expecting it, Richard still found himself braced over the sink afterwards to try to decide if it was more urgent to share his lunch with the sink or his breakfast with the toilet. Both instincts won though thankfully not simultaneously. Once he'd loaded a new blank tape into the VCR to record the next few episodes, he placed his own calls, closed up the agency, and headed over to a rental car agency to blow two future paychecks.

Eva was leaning against the side of her car in the Birinmon station by the time he pulled in three hours later, unarmed and violent in a pressed purple dress suit. She took her time looking up from her watch as he stepped out of his own car, but when she did it was nonaccusatory, sweeping him up and down for adjustable errors the way she'd done since middle school. "You don't have to do this," she told him, steering his chin up with the crook of her forefinger so she could redo his tie for him. "You don't owe him anything."

"We already drove all the way here."

"Yes, and we can drive all the way back if you've changed your mind. It's only gas, Richard."

It was only gas in the same sense that utilities were only utilities. He hated wasting money but in all honesty the sun was out and the drive had been pretty pleasant. It'd be even more enjoyable on the way back when his stomach didn't feel like it was cramping around razor blades and cat litter. "You want to see him too."

"Oh, I certainly do, but I'm better equipped to handle what he throws at me," Eva said. "You're not the only one he was unable to defeat in college, you know."

"Still, you may have wasted a trip. He might not agree to see the both of us."

"We're not going to ask."

She was very good at not asking to do things before she did them. "He's got rights too."

"Hubris is his undoing and always has been. He'll allow me, if only just to prove he's not afraid of me. I am certain that he'll eventually ask me to leave so he can speak to you alone, so once I'm finished saying my piece, I'm going to leave of my own volition and deny him the privilege of asking."

She'd put on her lemon-sage perfume today: he picked up the tart bite of it from her wrists as she smoothed her thumbs down over the fussy hair by his ears. It was the scent she'd always spritzed on before a particularly demanding exam in college and still wore to her most high-profile cases in lieu of smuggling actual weapons in past the metal detector. Jamie had privately coined it aromatherapy for assassins. "After you," Eva said. "And remember that he requested to speak to you. You are not obligated to be here, play his games, or let him harass you. If he wants to talk, he keeps a civil tongue in his head."

Richard had already applied pressure on a few of his strings and Craig wasn't an island either: both Craig's feet and hands were shackled and there was a two-way mirror monitoring their interaction, but he sat on the other end of a table instead of a glass panel once the guard let the two of them into the interrogation room. Richard watched Craig's eyes flare with surprise at Eva's entrance. "Shit," Craig said in a tumble of reverent laughter. "You really do hate me, don't you."

Richard sat by for a quarter hour while Eva calmly, meticulously disemboweled Craig in soft tones. Craig endured it in silence, manacled wrists resting on the table, fixated on the space between them. He already looked thinner, skin loose around his eyes and the corners of his mouth. The veins between the valleys of his wrist bones bulged as he convulsively tightened and loosened his hands, but he otherwise didn't move out from under the onslaught.

Eva as promised didn't stick around to watch the blood dry. "He's all yours," she said to Richard crisply, gathering herself to stand. "I'll leave the pleasantries to you. Don't be long. We have more important business to occupy our time today."

Richard violently resented himself for leaning into the vacuum her departure made. It was as reflexive as pulling a hangnail. She strode with purpose across the room, not looking back, nodding her thanks to the guard at the door when he let her out around him. "You good?" the guard asked Richard.

"Yeah, it's fine," Richard said. "Thanks."

The guard followed her out and shut the door behind them, sending a sonorous clank through the dusty acoustics of the room. Richard could hear the air turn over in the vents as the wall clock continued tocking in its cage above the exit.

Craig said into the silence, "Has she even left enough balls on you at this point to bust?"

"These are prosthetic. It's the real reason we only ever had one kid."

"Thanks for coming." Craig's shackles were tight enough to keep his reach well on his own side but allowed him the latitude to scrub his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. "Wasn't sure if I'd see you or not."

"I don't know why you think I wouldn't come."

"I wouldn't have."

"I mean, I assume you wanted to see me in person versus talk over the phone so you could see my face while you needled me," Richard said. "Thing is, face to face confessionals are a two-way street and my ability to hear a lie is worse than my ability to smell one. This plays to my advantage as much as it plays to yours."

"And you get the bonus of seeing me in prison orange," Craig said. "Maybe you can think of this as a last free lesson from your old captain. If you'd thrown your match against me like you planned back at the hotel, chances are you'd be in traction right now instead of getting to see me make a fashion statement in person. Makes you think, right?"

It was the first of many subtle and ubsubtle ways Craig was going to needle him and Eva had already given him permission not to play, so he didn't. "I wanted to talk to you about really happened," Craig said. "You know the gist of it at this point, but I never got a chance to explain how it got to this. You were the closest one to her on the team, so I figured you'd want to hear it from my own mouth before I'm put away."

"Sweet of you," Richard said. "You ever consider you could have told me beforehand what was going on between you two so you didn't have to do this in chains?"

"Oh, we'll get to that," Craig said.

"You sure you want to be doing this without your attorney? You know there's a good chance they're listening to whatever we have to say in here."

"Who cares? What else do I have to lose? I already admitted everything to them. Even if I somehow wiggled out of this, I've already lost my fiancé. I've lost my job. My reputation's destroyed, my friends want nothing to do with me, my father's disowned me. Either way you slice it, my old life is gone. I've got no punches to throw, Richard. All my chambers are empty. It's just you and me and this table. Don't you want to know how we got here? How everything fell apart?"

For an existential moment Richard birds-eyed their interaction. Even broken, Craig loomed over Richard like abrasive bruising sunshine, and Richard knew that some part of him would always stand in the shadow of this. Craig made personalized abuse look like privilege. He had a way of making everyone around him feel both small and too big to fit inside their own skin. It'd made him an excellent captain and an occasionally shitty friend and it was probably what'd prevented Jamie from letting him go until it was too late. Direct attention from Craig warmed like sunlight. Only walking away revealed how much scorched earth was left under the microscope. "How do I know I can trust what you say?"

"Aren't you the one who just bragged about smelling lies?" But Craig's black humor was tolerant. "I'm not trying to avoid my sentence. You won't lose anything by hearing what I have to say, but if you walk out now you'll always wonder. I'm not going to offer a second chance. It's now or never. You don't want to hear the truth, here's your chance to get up and turn your back on it."

Richard didn't respond.

"Yeah, see," Craig said. "The others went on and on about how much you've changed, but in the end you're still the same guy. Always coming back for more abuse when you'd be better off walking away. You and I really aren't all that different."

It wasn't a lie so Richard didn't bother pushing back against it. He waited.

Craig leaned back a little, the chains of his cuffs rearranging themselves with quiet clinks. His gaze found the table between them again and parked there a while, contemplative.

Unbidden, Richard wondered where Eva was. He doubted the guard would let her stand by the door but there was a possibility they'd let her smear her fangs against the other side of the two-way mirror. "Do you remember that championship match we had out in Naruma?" Craig said. "Jim pulled out the clincher – that crazy shime-waza at the end. We went out for waffles afterwards. It was that little spoon off the highway by the valley, with all the trees and the dog park next to it."

"I remember it."

"You know how Jamie and I fought over the bill while you guys walked off the grease in the dog park next to the lot? Said we were going to square it up and would join up with you later?"

"Yeah."

"She and I hooked up for the first time there," Craig said. "After we fought and paid the bill. I'd wanted to wait since the beginning because I was afraid we'd fuck it up and there'd be a kid involved while we were still in school. But we were flush from the win, our blood was up, and after she kept needling me about 'not being man enough' and I finally snapped. I let her push me into that bathroom complex out back – we stole the key from behind the counter. Until then I'd really thought that first time would change everything. That maybe she was just frustrated with me dragging my feet, and if I gave in and gave her what she wanted, she'd stop trying to get it from everyone else. But when we were done, she said she was leaving me. She said she felt stifled and that nothing I'd done so far had made it worth sticking it out."

Richard sensed eyes on them but couldn't tell from where. He kept his mouth shut and dedicated his focus instead to reading Craig's unreadable face. "Looking back on it, I think that's where it all started going sideways," Craig said. "That hook-up in that cramped filthy fucking bathroom when I should've walked away for good. Neither of us were happy. But I didn't. I let her drag me further in, and once she got what she wanted – after I gave her everything she asked for – she still told me it wasn't enough. And instead of listening to her, I kept trying. I thought if we cared enough to keep fighting like this, it must be because we were trying to protect something worth fighting for."

Richard felt something segue into a roundabout in his head. He massaged a seam on his trousers and thought about it. Only after nearly a minute of silence had passed did he realize Craig had been waiting for him to react. "No comment?" Craig said dryly.

"I mean, I can pretend to be scandalized if that's what you want, but I kind of live in a glass house," Richard said. "We all knew you guys were up in each other's space. If anything, I'm surprised you held out against her for that long."

"I didn't want to be just another notch in her belt. I wanted her to know I was different. What I didn't realize until it was too late was that Jamie wasn't impressed by restraint. She was wild and she wanted her partners to go off the deep end with her."

"So you got wild with her and she ended up leaving anyway."

"That was the thing," Craig said. "She told me she was going to, and she did for a while, but even after she'd started hooking up with other guys, she'd come back to me once she was done with them. And of course like an idiot I took her back every time. Honestly… think what you want, but if it'd just been restlessness – if she needed to screw around, come back to me when she got bored or hurt or needed a safe place to land – I would've been fine with that. But once I found out the real reason she was never satisfied, it was the bullet that set off the nuke. Over the years the fallout just got worse and worse. I'd leave then let her talk me out of leaving. I'd chase her down when it was her turn to leave. We were addicts. We couldn't stay out of each other's orbits no matter how close we circled that black hole."

Richard watched Craig's hands pale and flush as they flexed in and out of knots.

"She loved you," Craig said. "It was always a cloud over us from the beginning. At one point I was convinced that I could break the spell if I could just beat you on that fucking mat, but I never managed. You were always one step ahead. Then you got married and that door slammed, and instead of giving up, she took it out on me. Every argument we had, every time we fucked, every time we promised we'd do better… it was never enough. I was always the silver medal."

Richard had to find something else to look at when Craig lifted his gaze. "You have any idea what that feels like?" Craig said simply.

Richard had seen this exact scene in movies enough times to know to keep his trap shut. For a while it was all he could do to fixate on the table and watch it fuzz under fluctuating blood pressure. "Wish I had something to smoke," Craig muttered. He sagged forward enough to scrub his closed eyes with the backs of his thumbs. "Never thought that would be the thing I'd miss."

Richard didn't ask for permission. The guards would either barge in to narc on him or they wouldn't. He dug out his lighter, breathed life into a cigarette until he was able to steal a drag for himself, and passed it through the cloud between them. "Thanks." Craig savored it, closing his eyes and leaning his head back to mouth silent gratitude around a sigh. His eyes stayed on the smoke trail for a few moments longer, chasing its motes with a ponderous expression. No one came into the room to stop them.

Richard watched Craig's throat work, his expression crease and uncrease with perspiration under the harsh lights. He looked old. "I hate you, you stupid fucker," Craig said. "I lost count of how many times I'd fantasize about killing you just so she'd shut up about you. How I'd make it look like an accident. I imagined traveling to Beika, following you around the city until I could catch you at a crosswalk. Pretend to trip, shoving you into traffic. I brainstormed all kinds of ways. And then you showed up half-dead at that reunion with that beautiful little girl who loved you despite the fact you barely knew her fucking name and every fantasy just flew out the window. I hated you for making me feel sorry for you. There would never be a better chance. Getting rid of you that night would've been as easy as getting you wasted and drowning you in the hotel pool. A child could've done it. And yet when you showed up that night—"

Craig bit off his sentence inside smoke. He acted like he was about to stub out his cigarette, then reconsidered it at the last second. He massaged it lightly between his fingers instead, something fathomless and lethal and gentle in his sorrow.

This time Richard was able to meet his gaze when he looked up, but honestly only pretty barely. "You have no idea how good you have it," Craig said. "I might have looked like I had everything, but the things you've built in your life – they've stayed with you. Your friends, your kid, even your bitch wife – when you fall down, one of them comes running for you. I was that friend ten years ago, but if it hadn't have been me, your cop friend would've taken care of it. My entire life nobody's been there when I fall. I have everyone's back, but when it came time to rescue me, that waiting room was empty. No one listened. No one tried to understand or help. I tried to tell people about Jamie and got laughed out of the room every single time, and I knew that if I didn't do something I'd turn that gun into my own mouth, so you know what, Richard?"

Richard flinched involuntarily when Craig abruptly leaned across the divide, shackles clanking a harsh bright note on the table. For a moment, despite their mutually exclusive geometry, he was positive Craig would be able to reach out and snag him a final time. Craig was and always had been a titan. Even shackled he loomed. "You want me to apologize for what I did," Craig said. "I can see it on your face. Eva doesn't give a shit if I'm sorry, but you do. And I'm here to tell you, one last time before I never have to look at you ever again, that I will never be sorry for what I did. She took everything from me and chewed it into ash. And if it'd just been her, if I'd had anyone else to sweep up those ashes… things would've been different. But nobody came. Nobody stood in line to bat for me. Nobody ever returned the favor I loaned them."

There was nothing to say.

"Fuck all of you," Craig said, and snuffed the cigarette out on the table, and blew the last breath between them. This time his eyes were dry.

---

.

Richard ran three background checks and solved the Case of the Wealthy Pampered Chihuahua in time to feed the next monthly installment for Rachel's school uniform. In two more months it'd be paid off in full and anything that happened to it after that would be Eva's problem as per their financial agreement. The electric bill was taken care of and then the gas bill, and with nothing else immediately sticking fingers up into his fiscal grill, Richard found himself in a familiar place he always tried to avoid: having just enough spare time for intrusive thoughts but not enough time for the vices needed to drown them.

In a rare lateral move he allowed himself to be contracted for a weekend security guard detail. Two nights were spent in a cramped glass box with surveillance on one end of the desk and soap operas and pizza on the other while he chainsmoked his soul out through his sinuses. It was honestly the closest to therapy he'd ever allowed himself and he emerged from the detail both closer to death and better-adjusted about life than he'd been for several weeks.

It took until his sleep schedule had realigned to realize that the only hairs he'd seen off Rachel's head in two days had been on the bathroom floor. That night the dinner hour came and went and she still hadn't henpecked him about food, so he parked Conan and his growling stomach in front of a documentary about tornados and fried up eggs for the both of them while he wondered what month it was. It probably wasn't the weekend but he didn't have a lot of solid evidence to prove it. He hadn't checked the date on his newspapers as he read them and there hadn't been any announcements from either of their schools lately to remind him.

He knocked a knuckle against her door and then cracked it open to check that there was nothing decomposing inside. The room was empty. "Yep, she's here," Serena said once her maid had handed the receiver over to her. "Do you wanna talk to her? She's just doing homework in the kitchen."

"No, it's fine."

"Didn't she tell you she was leaving? She's usually suuuper uptight about that sort of thing."

"She might've left a note somewhere. It's fine, don't bug her." He hung up and served the peppered over-easy egg on top of Conan's head, handing him a plate afterwards and ignoring the livid shrieks as he backtracked to the kitchen to plate his own. He added melon chunks or whatever on the second round as well as some slices of cold salami and this time Conan was unfortunately quick enough to put his plate over his head in time to intercept them. "Clean up the kitchen when you're done," Richard said, and went down to the agency to test his theory. There were no notes but there were messages flashing on the machine, and for a revealing moment he paused above the button, heartbeat quickening for reasons he wasn't all that proud of.

He gave up. He straightened the office, attending to the plants with his leftover water from dinner, then parked himself at his desk with his feet up on his paperwork and fought sobriety off him with a steady supply of liquor until a cramping bladder woke him after midnight. Rachel's door was still closed, but when he checked he could see the faint glow of her nightlight underneath.

He kept his hand on the doorknob for a long time. He'd done this a thousand times when she was little. At first it'd been to bust her for reading her Choose Your Own Adventure books by her nightlight and then a little later to make sure he hadn't killed her accidentally with expired food. Sometimes she'd pretend to sleep and he'd stand there burping out drunk duck noises until she started giggling under her blankets. Once she'd hit her teenage years he'd been a little more careful about when and how he intruded that space, but there'd been enough tears on enough nights that he'd found himself more or less right here: hungover outside her door and hoping he was only maybe fifty percent of the reason she was miserable that night. There weren't any audible tears now but the silence had enough weight to make his instincts prickle.

He remembered her expression on the floor across from him and gently tried the knob. It rattled but didn't turn. She'd locked him out for the first time in seventeen years and somewhere in his head another mental window hit the sill with a thud like an arrhythmic pulse.

---

.

He kept himself busy while Beika heated itself into a tense sweaty teenage armpit around them. It must've taken Benoit a few extra days to gather evidence because the box arrived several days after Richard had originally expected it, postmarked only a day earlier. Kind of honestly not in the frame of mind for more uninvited ass pain, Richard jammed the box under his desk to address later.

He'd been putting it off, but the box from Scott was ultimately too big to continue to avoid dealing with. He waited until an afternoon both kids were out before removing all three letters and rummaging around their living space for morale-carrots to put onto this extremely unappealing stick. Out of desperation more than anything else, he ended up making himself some hot chocolate and then ruined its innocence by adding a generous dose of rum to it. He topped off his artillery with a box of baklava from the bakery and then walled himself off in his agency to assassinate himself like an adult.

Opening Nancy's letter first was a misstep. He'd expected some level of personalized trauma from all three, but he'd at least been ninety percent sure Nancy's wouldn't hit bone. Nancy relived memories of Jamie, confided in him that Jamie had always wondered if Rachel shouldn't have lived with Eva instead so Richard could've gotten the help he needed, confessed that she'd known Jamie had been in love with him since college and had kept his picture in her wallet all the way up through her thirties, and ultimately wondered if Richard becoming a private detective had hurt him more than it'd helped him.

It was the worst thing Richard had ever read and by the time he got to the end of it his ego was so obliterated that Scott's felt like an informational pamphlet. Scott reiterated a lot of what he'd said on the phone, though he was a little more forward about how much he'd questioned Richard's sanity after the visit five years ago. He repeatedly offered to make himself available if Richard needed to talk to somebody and signed off with a note reminding Richard to keep the box out of direct sunlight so the photos wouldn't start yellowing prematurely.

It'd started to rain by the time Richard was done and he was long out of hot chocolate. He got up and fetched a bigger mug so he could pack more liquid courage into the second helping. Jim's envelope was fastidiously stern and the edge of the letter gave Richard an additional gutting as he fumbled it out. Both Scott and Nancy's had been multiple pages but Jim's had nearly the heft of a manuscript, most likely typed up in an all-nighter judging by how the whited-out errors exponentially multiplied as the letter wore on.

Richard read through it slowly as commuter traffic waned like clockwork outside the agency's window. By the time the letter was done, he'd gone through an entire pack of cigarettes and his throat was so dry it crinkled like a grocery bag when he exhaled.

He opened the window and retired his entire existence against the sill. Beika fluctuated in soaked monochrome under him. He breathed and when he held the exhalation too long something both warm and vicious in him leaned into the promise of the drop.

He wasn't sure how long he'd stagnated until a voice cut into his periphery. He coughed in surprise and once he started coughing couldn't stop. He held onto the sill and pressed his other fist over his mouth to shudder around the effort. His lungs felt like vacuum cleaner bags.

The voice came in clearer this time, agitated and loud. "What," he rasped, truly annoyed. The sky was a swollen black eye, the streetlights gauzy with rain over empty sidewalks. The last time he'd blinked there'd been a thicket of umbrellas.

"Richard, you have to listen to me, there's—"

He needed water. Half-blind, he fished his way up and for a moment forgot where his feet were. There was something yanking on the seam of his trousers and he blearily shoveled it out of the way to stand, blinking into the darkness for the water cooler in the corner.

A ferocious impact flung him back down into the seat. For a second Richard honestly thought he was going to tip and die backwards out the window. Something seized the arm of his swivel chair at the last second and yanked it bodily back forward, slamming both his knees against the edge of his desk drawers. At least he was awake now. "—tive." Conan was seethingly, spittingly mad. He clung to either arm of Richard's chair with white-knuckled claws and shook it. "Detective Moore."

"What the fuck do you want." Richard cradled his liquidized ribs as he coughed and tried to figure out what'd just attempted to murder him this time. There was a stapler on the floor next to his desk but somehow he doubted that was the murder weapon unless someone had loaded up a brigandine's cannon with it.

"You have to listen to me, Rachel is—"

"What just hit me?"

"I did!" Conan bellowed. "Shut up and listen to me! Rachel is missing, you need to snap out of this and help me find her!"

Gears started tumbling together in his head. He was still coughing. He flailed out and caught Conan's hair by chance and used it to crank him around, just rough enough to shut him up, shoving a toe into his back to propel him in the right direction. Conan was bad at finding his parents but thankfully good at finding the water cooler. He filled a cup and brought it back, shifting his weight with gritted teeth as Richard braced himself against his desk and made shaky guppy O's on the surface until he had enough coordination to actually drink it. "I can't find Rachel," Conan repeated. "She hasn't been home all day. She went to school, but she didn't go to karate afterwards. I've already checked with her friends. Serena says she hasn't seen her since this afternoon. I called the library, the local diners, the school, even the arcade. She's not in any of her usual places."

"Where is this coming from?" Still light-headed, Richard fought down another violent string of coughs and tried again to focus through the gloom at the agency's analog. Conan had only thrown on the lamp by the door in his haste; everything outside the pool of light lay knife-edged with shadows. "She's been late before, she can take care of herself."

"Not this late. It's nearly eleven. I've been looking for hours."

It was nearly eleven? "She's taken late walks before."

"It's pouring down rain, Richard! Her umbrella is still here and her backpack is gone, do you really think she'd be out ruining all her books in the middle of the night just to get some fresh air?"

"If it's been pouring all evening she could be holed up somewhere—"

"Yes, and if so she would have called by now! Wake up!"

He was awake. He shoveled Conan aside again and fought against the gravitational pull of his desk to get upright. The room rocked a little and he didn't have time for it, so he opened his food drawer and medicinally crammed down half a sleeve of crackers until his blood sugar stopped giving him shit. "Did you check the commuter trains?"

"What?"

"To see if one of them stopped for maintenance or a suicide. She wouldn't be able to call if she's still stuck on one of them."

"I didn't think—" Conan's pale little face twisted with frustration. He scrambled for the phone. "I didn't think of that."

Richard booked it upstairs to grab his windbreaker and double-check Conan's accuracy. Sure enough her room was empty and her school bag was missing. Evidently she hadn't even bothered to stop back after classes let out. By the time he returned Conan was hanging up tersely. "Automated response says it's clockwork at the station," Conan said. "I don't know where else to look. Would she call you if she was at her mom's?"

"Yes." Things had been tense and weird around the apartment but he could confidently say not that weird. Rachel knew how sensitive he was to it and at her angriest, there were still just some lines neither of them crossed. Even if she somehow had, Eva would have alerted him of Rachel's whereabouts long ago out of mutually-ironclad decency. "If her mother hasn't called by now, Rachel's not there."

"Fine, then where."

"I don't know."

"Come on! Don't you have any other ideas?"

Richard paced across the room to the window to give himself a loose visual to work with. His heart was jackrabbiting in his throat and behind his eyes and shit. Shit. This wasn't supposed to be on his docket. He'd heard horror stories from other parents but Rachel's teenagehood had so far mostly swerved around clichés. She'd blown past curfew a few times in the past, but it was almost always for study dates and with multiple phone calls assuring him she was safe. This was worse than an anomaly: it was unprecedented. There was a zero percent chance there wasn't something terribly wrong and she'd given him no opportunity or incentive to develop emergency response protocol for this before now.

"Richard!"

"Conan, shut up, I need to think." He dropped his forehead against the cold glass and willed every brain cell he'd composted that day to regrow roots in his mental trash. His hands quavered with adrenaline but he'd patrolled with less in his tank. He'd shot straight with shakier hands.

Think. After-school volunteer work. 24-hour café. He gave Conan the number for the latter and let him handle the inquiry while he continued to brainstorm. Conan had said he'd called her other friends and honestly that was Richard's blindest spot anyway. There was actually a fairly decent chance she was over at Meguire and Midori's and the instant Conan had hung up Richard shoveled him out of the way to dial them up.

Meguire picked up on the first ring. "You all right?"

"Hey." Hearing Meguire on the other end made something wobble in him like a weak ankle. He propped himself against the desk and camouflaged the relief behind a thumb for a second as he sorted his eyebrows. He was acutely aware of Conan eyeballing him. "Sorry for the late call. Got a second?"

"What's the matter?"

"Is Rachel over there?"

"No." Meguire had been a cop too long not to register both the hour and Richard's tone between blinks. "How long has she been missing?"

"Conan says a few hours. I didn't realize what time it was until he told me."

"You two finish the usual rounds?"

"As far as I've been able to draft up. Most of her haunts are closed anyway. I'm going to swing out to some of them to see if she's hanging outside some of them. I'm thinking maybe she took shelter or something, maybe couldn't get to a phone."

Meguire thankfully didn't echo Conan's valid skepticism. Richard could hear him start to rummage around his wardrobe, muttering something to the side; Midori's unintelligible response to him was muffled with sleep. "You still have that phone?"

"What, that brick? No. It ran out of batteries and I tossed it."

"Ran out of – it's a cell phone, you idiot, you're supposed to recharge it!"

"How was I supposed to know?" He looked down impatiently as Conan jarred his leg. "What."

"Tell him I've got it covered," Conan said. His still-damp hair was drying in tufts as he fastened his coat back up. "Don't worry about it. We need to go."

"Brat says he's got a workaround," Richard said to Meguire. "Look, you don't need to come out, we're just going to run a perimeter. I just wanted to know if she was there before I stepped out."

"Shut up." Meguire was clipped. Richard heard the rattle of a jacket and the cluck of keys being slid off a countertop. "I'll take the north block –start by the Orange Line and work my way in. You guys keep local if you're on foot so I'll be able to find you."

"Thanks." There wasn't time to dwell on it but the general accumulation of debt had been skewing their tab for weeks. He needed to address it eventually but in the meantime resources were resources. "We're gonna get going."

"I'm sure she's fine. I'll find a way to contact you if I find her." Meguire hung up without another word.

Conan was digging in his backpack by the door. Richard jogged upstairs a final time to gather some supplies, grabbing one of Rachel's old camping backpacks from their hall storage. On his way out the door he snagged Conan's woolen cap and gloves from the station by the door, thumping downstairs in time for Conan to thrust something upwards at him. The indicator light bounced in pallid little green splotches around the stairwell. "The hell is this," Richard said, turning it over and nearly dropping it when it hummed in response in his palm. "Is this a bomb?"

"It's a combination walkie-talkie and pager. Dr. Agasa made it." Conan held up his own before pinning it onto his jacket. "It's waterproof, so don't worry about exposing it. We'll be able to pick up each other anywhere within a five mile radius."

"You sure it's not going to explode?"

"Richard, we don't have time for you to be dumb. Just trust me. Hold the button down on the back when you want to talk and let it go when you don't, just like a normal walkie-talkie."

They did have time to prevent pneumonia. Richard collared him and ignored Conan's snarl of impatience to lock him in place against the wall with a knee. He shoved the woolen cap down over Conan's enormous cavernous cantaloupe head. "Put these on," Richard said, smacking Conan across the nose with the gloves until Conan ripped them away. "We stick together at first. We'll have to split up eventually to cover the two-mile bike loop, but until then you're not running off until I give you the say-so. She's already going to kill me for letting you wander around alone this late at night. Don't add bruises onto my sentence by turning up dead."

"I'm not the one you need to worry about right now," Conan said shortly, scrabbling to work his pinky through an inside-out finger on the glove. "It'll be faster if we split up from the start. If Meguire is taking the north, you can head west and cover the suburbs and schools in that direction. I'll go east where it segues into the business loop."

"Oh, yes sir," Richard said. "I didn't ask for opinions. Keep up or get left behind."

"Richard, I'm taking my skateboard. If anything, you're going to be the one left behind. I'm fast and I can cover more ground. If you force me to stay with you, it's going to waste time that could be spent getting her home before the storm hits."

"What storm?"

Conan turned his watch to display the tiny radar screen. Richard couldn't make heads or tails of whatever language was on it but he could clearly track the red blob moving in on their coordinates. "Just let me go," Conan said. "Trust me. This will be way more efficient than us sticking together and covering the same ground. Don't you want to find her?"

On one hand it got Conan out of his face faster and on the other hand his bank account wasn't particularly thrilled about the potential hospital visit from little wheels and deep puddles. In the end statistics won. At this point Conan had survived multiple murder attempts and hydroplaning was probably low on his list of concerns. "Okay, fine. But listen." Richard caught him again when Conan tried to eel around him. "You find trouble, you run from it. If she's in trouble, you get me first. Or… page me, or whatever the fuck this is, just don't stick your nose in it. Chances are if she found a fight she can take care of it herself and you'll just be getting in her way."

"Okay. I get it. Let go."

Richard let go. "I'll keep you updated on each block," Conan said, reemerging with his skateboard under his arm. "Take her umbrella with you and an extra jacket so you can keep her warm if you find her."

It was a good plan so Richard didn't give him guff over the bossiness. Conan was gone by the time he made it back down. He shoved a hat down over his own head, zipped up his jacket, and pell-melled out the door to the west to check a few hunches. The air was much more frigid than he'd expected, finding openings in his windbreaker with enough accuracy that Richard nearly succumbed to the urge to double back and grab something with a thicker lining. He let the impromptu exercise warm him instead, biting down gulps of air as he jogged and then ran past obvious dead ends to get to the less-obvious ones.

By the time he'd hit the first alley he planned on casing, his heart was starting to make unhappy hiccups in his chest. He forced himself to slow down and let it adjust, breathing shallowly, reevaluating how effective he was actually being. The fact was that if Rachel didn't want to be found tonight, she wouldn't be found. At this point in her career it'd take about twelve to thirteen trained government-issued combat androids to abduct her and with the mood she'd been in recently he could probably round that up to fifteen. More than likely it was a situation of either getting caught in the rain and wanting to ride it out somewhere dry or an accidental injury in a place secluded enough she hadn't been able to call for help.

When his heart settled he backtracked. This time he was surgical, touring up and down dark alleys and nearby dog parks while the sky started burping up some dangerous treachery from the southwest. The storm would be on them within the half-hour unless it broke up over the channel, and then that'd be its own headache. If she was nearby and outside, things would be getting hot for her pretty quick.

Something was chirping in his ear. It took him a second to realize it was the transmitter he'd pinned on his lapel. "—hear me okay?" Conan said.

"Yeah, unfortunately. Where are you?"

"On Bellvue and Sycamore. She's not here. It looks like a farmer's market was set up here earlier, but the carts are shuttered and everyone's gone home."

"Anyone giving you shit?"

"Huh? No. There's nobody around. Even if there was, I'm too fast for anyone to catch."

"Make sure you're actually looking," Richard frowned. "I don't want to have to go over your work because you're too busy joyriding to do your job."

"Yeah, this is real fun for me. Best time ever. Wish we could do this every night. Can we focus please? Did you find anything?"

"No." He hadn't seen Meguire either but knew it might take a little longer for him to get in the area. The streetlights were in his eyes along with the lattice of rain and fog and the streets were empty and suddenly his heart was in his throat again.

He dropped to the balls of his feet right there on the sidewalk and fisted the damp hair that'd escaped his hat. Focus. He'd never felt resentment and terror like this. It clocked him with ancestral fury straight in the nads. "You're not freaking out, are you?" Conan evidently either had a line of sight on him or had heard something incriminating in his tone. "Because if you are, I can handle this. Maybe it's better if one of us waits at home so we can alert the other if she comes back."

"I'm fine. Just keep looking."

"Okay. I'm going to check the playground over on Birch by the early childcare center. I'll let you know if I turn up any leads."

"Thanks." He let go of his lapel and stole another minute to get his shit together. He stood with the help of a nearby trashcan and blinked rain and whatever away from his eyes. Darkness and fog clotted together and for a moment he genuinely forgot where he was. He had to backtrack to orient himself. West. The storm wasn't helpful but at least under the uniform lamplit misery of it there weren't any shadows to turn him around.

He picked his pace up to a rolling jog, backpack bouncing on the small of his back. He took the circuitous route towards her school, scraping elbows and wrists to scale around walls and fences and barricades, dirtying his knees to check the gaps under padlocked gates. The transmitter stayed silent. After a quarter hour his heart had accepted the change in lifestyle and no longer blubbered like a punctured tire hose. He flew through a four-way stop and uphill as the grunge of the downtown streets brightened to his right, sloping into more manicured drives and affluent greens.

Rain sluiced down his collar. He rounded into the suburbs off the main drag and gasped his way to a halt at the crosswalk, fumbling half-blind past a hydrant to get to the shelter of the giant tree guarding the entrance to the sub-division. He had to force his frigid fingers to close around the transmitter. "I'm by Elm."

"Larch and Beech. 10-101?"

"I'm fine, just catching my breath." Wait. "Don't sling police codes around like you know what you're talking about. This isn't a cop show."

"She's not here. If I go too much further I'll be breaking the five mile radius, so I'm trying to figure out whether to go north or south."

"Turn back. If you're on Larch you're about to segue towards the freeway ramps. Rachel'll kill me if she knows I let you ride your skateboard down there in the middle of the night."

"I'm missing something." The seething frustration in Conan's voice was evident at a distance. "There's something obvious I'm not understanding. This shouldn't be this hard. I know her better than this."

"Look, this threw us both for a loop. I don't have time to blot your snot. Double back and find me. We'll take care of the rest as a unit."

"Fine." Richard heard the terse squeal of friction as Conan reversed directions. "Are you staying where you are?"

"I'm going to check down in this sub-division and peel off towards Elm once I get to the round-about. Just check in when you get closer."

"I still think you should head back. I'm faster and I can cover twice the ground area than you can on foot."

"If you want this over so bad, give me your skateboard and I can show you how it's really done."

"If I did that we'd have a 10-55."

Holy shit. Richard didn't throw the transmitter by narrow margins of maturity. He peeled himself out from the dripline of the tree and back into the tumultuous rain. While his heart had stopped actively telling him he was going to die, it was still giving clear indications that it wanted to teach him what death felt like. For the first and only time since he'd tossed his cell phone, he wished he'd maybe worked harder to embrace the new technology instead of using it as a doorjam until its ringtone stopped reminding him other people existed. He knew Meguire would be somewhere in the vicinity but not knowing whether or not Meguire had found her – whether she was safe and warm and most definitely grounded in the backseat – made this harder than it needed to be.

He'd started up a geriatric jog when the transmitter chirped again. "You did say Elm, right?" Conan said.

"Yeah."

"Is that the same Elm that bisects 8th avenue on the other side? It's got the elementary school in there by the park?"

"Yeah. Why."

"Have you checked that playground?"

"Not yet. I hadn't planned to swing out that far."

Conan was silent a moment.

Silver Maple Elementary. Something clunked in Richard's soggy long term memory. Once again slowed to a stop under a streetlight, ignoring the fusillade of rain on the top of his head as thunder closed in from the southwest. He'd taken Jimmy and Rachel over to the adjacent park as toddlers to play before they'd both tested into Titan. Rachel had loved the giant rooster spring rider and had to be bribed down off it if he didn't want her trying to bite him in front of the other parents. Four year-old Jimmy had been obsessed with calculating the gradient of the curly slide with his pink measuring tape to see if it was betterer or dumbstupider than the curly slide down in Central Park Place. Even after they were enrolled they'd come here for several more years to sit and yap at each other on top of the spring riders.

He'd told Scott hunches are easy and this was why he'd been the best marksman in the academy: he turned off his rational brain and shot himself in the direction of the bullseye before anyone could naysay his instincts. Pavement blurred and intermittent lights one-two punched the night vision from his peripherals. The canopies were swollen with rain and nearly swallowed the entrance in the half-light; he'd run past it before realizing it and had to double back. The flash of nearby lightning clipped him and for a moment he was disoriented again, lost between timelines and thunder. The park was sporadically lit, the hulking shape of Silver Maple Elementary visible in the fog past the cocooning tree line.

Richard's gasps billowed around him in the frigid air as his eyes adjusted.. The paint jobs had been updated but for the most part the equipment was the same: slides, monkey bars, teeter-totter, the carousel spinner that broke a different arm on a different brat every year. A wooden pergola for bored parents. An enormous rectangular sandbox that ate up the eastern side along the fence, community toys padlocked for the night in its built-in wooden storage crate.

"Rachel?" His voice creaked more than expected. He cleared it and tried again. "Rachel, you here?"

Nothing moved. The transmitter was talking to him. He absently palmed it off his lapel and pocketed it to get it to shut up. He sharpened his ears under the war drum of rain, scanning every oblong shadow and too-sharp silhouette. "Rachel," he called.

On the benches under the roof of the pergola, something blue moved.

Richard moved like the thought of god. He took the quickest path straight down the middle, barking the hell out of his knee when he didn't give the teeter-totter enough clearance. Rachel had lifted her head off the cradle of her arms by the time he'd neared. She was wrapped in her light blue windbreaker, hood lank around her neck. Her schoolbag was unzipped but dry on the bench next to her.

Richard bit it on a patch of mud and slid to a stop on his knees just outside the shelter of the roof. Rachel was colorless in the dim light. She stared at him like she was trying and failing to place him. "Dad," she murmured, distant and scratchy. She sounded insultingly puzzled. "What are you doing here?"

The transmitter was buzzing in his pocket. Still on his knees, Richard stared up at her in waterlogged disbelief. The sight of her looking so normal after an hour's frantic search threw his sanity for a quick and dirty loop. "You're soaking wet," Rachel said. "You'll catch a cold. Where's your umbrella?"

He pulled his voice from somewhere unmentionable. "'Where's my umbrella'."

"It's raining. Did you walk all the way?"

"'Where's my umbrella'."

"Are you—" Rachel's eyes slid away as if she'd suddenly regained the ability to read context. She straightened further, swiping her palms across her eyes, and blinked out into the darkness past him.

Richard swayed there, a little dazed. He was so fucking angry his circulatory system had boycotted oxygen. "Dad, I'm sorry." Rachel was still muzzy but rapidly getting clearer. She turned back to him with growing alarm. "Oh, Dad, I'm so sorry—"

"What the hell are you doing, Rachel?"

"I-I don't know, I just came out here to think, it was the place Jimmy and I used to go to to t-talk and I just wanted to—"

"It's eleven at night!"

"I—" Rachel's fists flew to her mouth. She fumbled upwards and flinched at the lightning with escalating horror. "Oh god—"

"Why didn't you call me to pick you up?"

"Dad, I don't know, I was just really tired and I just blinked for a second and then it was night, I didn't mean to—"

"Meguire's out driving all over town looking for you, the brat's been blitzing all over god knows where on that 2x4 organ-donor and you're here on a playground in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm because you blinked too long?"

Rachel started to keen against her knuckles.

Richard surged off the ground. She fell against him and he seized onto her and cradled her brainless head as his soaking jacket steadily worked to soak her too. She wailed with misery against his chest. Shit. His knees clocked against each other like pool balls. He was about to unpeel himself enough to locate the transmitter when he heard wheels drag into a reckless cop's drift outside the entrance. "Call Meguire." He didn't turn to face Conan, better enfolding the back of Rachel's neck to insulate her. "Find a payphone and tell him where we are so he can pick us up."

Conan U-turned without argument. "I'm sorry," Rachel sobbed.

"Okay." The pergola muffled the aggression of the storm until even violence felt like white noise. Richard tucked her away from the thunder and mindlessly rocked her because there wasn't anything better to do while he brainstormed ways to kill her. She fisted her hands in his jacket and wept and through it all he got the same sensation of locked doors and closed windows, of memories tucked down in bubble wrap and cardboard so they wouldn't tarnish under direct light.

---

.

He made his decision before dawn after an all-nighter so he didn't have the energy to second-guess himself. He let both of them sleep in that morning but kicked them both down the stairs for school that afternoon. Once he'd called the guidance office to make sure Rachel had shown up, he got to work. Judging by the lack of luggage in his own room Rachel had evidently unpacked for him after Birinmon, but when he entered her room he saw that her own bags still sat half-full against her wall, her duffel still sporting her travel pillow and toiletries bag.

Richard packed with the expertise of a single dad violently uninterested in hearing little girls whine in the car on vacations. Rachel's childhood stuffed bunny Radish suffered its usual place of honor on top, trash-compacted under a straining zipper and boxed in with CD jewel cases. He managed to fit her portable reading light and several of her most well-worn books in the side pouches before he ran out of space. He let her handle her own personal items, but he gathered up everything else he could think of that she might need and crammed it into her rolling suitcase. Shoes got their own reusable shopping bag. Her desk was fanatically neat as usual, but he gathered what he could of her visible workbooks and notepads along with a random assortment of hopefully favorite pens. He left her diary alone in the vent.

He poured liquor into all the voids in his head and drowned at the kitchen table. By the time he heard trudging feet on the stairs, he'd steamed out most emotion and was hungover enough that the pressure behind his eyes was from dehydration instead of stress.

He placed the call in the hallway, emptied the ashtray and hid it so it wouldn't become a projectile, and went out into the living room to field her storm.

Rachel had stopped dead in the doorway, her schoolbag dangling nearly to the floor in her loose grip. She swept swollen eyes over the array of luggage in the center of the room, lingering on her rolling suitcase first and registering her missing shoes on the rack beside her before her overbright gaze found him.

The betrayal on her face walloped his diaphragm. Richard had to look away. He eased his shoulder against the threshold of the kitchen and folded his arms to insulate himself. "I won't," Rachel said simply.

"Just for a while."

"No."

"A week. Maybe two. Your mom's already cleared out the space for you—"

"I said I'm not going."

Richard counted the last seconds he had to live. The kitchen seemed very bright and fragrant suddenly under the chainsmoke. Yellow and fingerprinted chromes and age-spotted plastics. "I don't want you here."

Rachel's schoolbag hit the floor. It took her two blinks and half as many strides to get into his grill and he stood his ground only because she'd follow his escape out the window and break fewer ankles doing it. "That's a lie." Her shaking hands started to sort out his arms, his sweater, subconsciously finding places to anchor in and throw him. "You can barely take care of yourself. Conan's here and you'd have to cook for him and do all the laundry, you can't do that without me here—"

"I've done it before. You were just too little to remember."

"Things are different now, you've got more work and there are people after you all the time, you're lying-"

"Your mother's already on her way."

Her fist found his collar and there was the force he'd been bracing himself for. It cinched all but a whisper of breath out of his neck. "Why are you doing this?" Rachel was heaving like an enraged horse but the tears in her eyes betrayed a swift collapse into panic. "This can't just be because of last night. I don't get to mess up even once?"

"This isn't a punishment—"

"You get to crash and burn over every little thing and I have to clean it up, but I can't have one night where I make a mistake? You send me away the second I'm not perfect?"

He was starting to rattle up through his dukes. Richard widened his stance and aligned his axis against her gravity. "Look me in the eye and tell me you don't actually want me here," Rachel said. "Tell me that and actually mean it, and I'll go."

Well he couldn't and she already knew that. His mendacity sat roughly at the same caliber as a push-up bra. If calling him out for being a shitty liar were the only requisite to winning arguments he'd have retired seventeen years ago and left her to parent her own tantrums. "You promised." Rachel's voice was starting to shake. He felt her nails score with catlike panic against his elbow, his ribs. "You promised I could always stay with you no matter what, you promised me that no matter what happened—"

"Your mom and I just think it's better if—"

Her fists seized up on his collar again and this time his air was cut off. His instinct to fuck off and just let her put him on the floor was at direct odds with his mission statement to not put himself on the floor until after she was gone. He finally relented, getting a shuto under the weak joint of her thumb to strike her palm, just firm enough to feed himself a ribbon of air. "Since when do you talk like this?" The terrified quaver in Rachel's voice gave her away. "Going on and on about what you and Mom 'think is better' – since when do Mom's opinions matter to you? Why are you doing this to me?"

No answer was going to satisfy so he no longer bothered. Rachel's face dropped color the longer his silence stretched. She searched his face desperately. "I'm seventeen," she said, almost pleading now. "I can make my own decisions about where I want to be. I've been as responsible as an adult for ten years, and after one mistake you suddenly start treating me like a kid you can't trust?"

Unbidden, the way things always came to him exactly when he didn't have time for them, he remembered her bawling disappointment in Birinmon ten years ago when he couldn't afford the cherry pastry at the train station. How sincerely close he'd come to drowning himself or apparently being conscientiously drowned by Craig in the hotel pool before she'd crashed onto his bed the next day blabbing about table tennis. He'd been relying on her so heavily for moral support for so many years that they'd both forgotten how this was actually all supposed to work.

He was honest. "Yeah."

She let go of him so suddenly he had to catch himself against the wall. She paced the length of the room. She spun and seized her hair and let go and visibly tried not to leave fragments of either of them that would need to be steamed out of the carpet later. "I didn't pack underthings or any of your bathroom girl crap," Richard said. "Your mom can buy you more or you can take a second to do that now. Got everything else I thought you'd want, but if I forgot anything I can send it over to—"

She whirled on him with the unmistakable intention of panic turned to action, and despite everything he flinched deeply enough that his elbow clocked the toaster.

Rachel froze mid-stride at the sound.

The all-nighter had drained his batteries so thoroughly his brain had switched over to burning fossil fuels. Richard watched her slow implosion of grief in front of him and realized he'd been feeling mostly nothing for twenty minutes. Emotions had been logjammed somewhere behind his hangover. "Oh my god." Rachel stumbled back. She sank to her heels again a pace away and covered her face, heaving against her hands. "Oh my god."

He left the agency, trusting Eva to follow through where he couldn't. By the time he returned from the track that evening broke and reeking with horse allergens, Conan was sitting bewildered at the empty kitchen table. Rachel was long cleared out of her room, the drawers of her closet and bureau still standing open where she'd pillaged them.

"… we're going to starve to death, aren't we," Conan said.

---

.

Meguire came in with a final update on Craig from his contact at Birinmon PD and panhandling poorly disguised as a welfare check. "You're feeding me," he said bluntly, tossing his briefcase and a travel bag in the chair. "Idiot construction crews ran a truck into the wrong pole and the power's out on our block until they can clear the area. Midori's out of town visiting her mother until Monday and all the food was already rancid by the time I got home."

"Hey, no problem." Richard was honestly relieved to start chipping away at some of the standing debt between them. "Tub's cleaned out and should be ready to go if you want to shower. I'll get something on."

"Hey, kid," Meguire said to Conan. "You still alive or are you a convincing robot?"

"Convincing robot," Conan said. He was on his belly in front of the living room TV, ambidextrously annoying as he split his attention between simultaneously writing in two workbooks and crunching through a tin of cashews. "Uncle sold the real me a week ago to pay for his cable package."

"You got a good deal," Meguire told Richard. "Last time I sold a kid I only got prime time news and the cooking channel."

"You." Richard directed this over Meguire's shoulder, already thumbing through his wallet. He wadded up the bills and that week's grocery list, stuffed them down inside an oven mitt to improve their trajectory, and frisbee'd the mitt into the other room. It hit the TV and ricocheted off Conan's head, making him squawk and knock over the tin of cashews. "It's your turn. Get going."

"Do I have to?"

"If you want to eat anything other than carpet scrapings and used packing tape. Add cooking spray to the list. And get that other crap I mentioned earlier, I forgot what it is."

"We still have an unopened can of cooking spray in the corner cupboard. What crap."

"The crap I forgot to get when it was my turn."

"Can't you specify?"

"The crap I always forget to tell you to get and then forget to write on the list once I remember I want to get it."

Conan sighed gustily but rolled to his feet without further questions. "Soap should be on the edge of the tub," Richard said to Meguire. "You want a shower beer?"

"Quit kissing up." Meguire had already disappeared into the bathroom. He came back out. "Yes."

Richard tossed him a bottle and got to work chopping onions. While they sautéing he changed the channel briefly to the weather to get a sense of what he'd be working with for the next couple of days. A return to colder weather for a while that dipped down nearly to frost on Wednesday night, but it'd warm back up in time for him to do absolutely nothing with it on the weekend. "Not bad," Meguire said when he came back out, empty can in hand and towel around his neck. "That's a microbrew, isn't it? That's a few notches above your usual. Where'd you get your hands on it?"

"Client gave a pack to me as a thank you. Apparently I finally convinced him to divorce his wife and he's already happier living at a hotel."

"What was the problem? Where did you meet him?"

"She'd hired me to track him and his mistress down and it turned out he was just cheating on her with some park pigeons. If I'd known what I was setting him up for I would've sent him a Bat Signal and ogled her rack for free."

"You're a regular marriage counselor." Meguire shook his head as he lowered himself with a grunt on the sofa. He'd yet to put his hat back on; Richard saw the light from the lamp blink off the scar on his hairline. "You want help?"

"It's fine. Just take a load off."

Meguire mercifully counted his blessings instead of arguing with them. Mid-mushroom and occasionally fingertip chopping, Richard finally remembered what he'd been trying to think of the same instant the transmitter chirped on his key ring by the door. "Do you want the normal cones or the chocolate ones?" Conan asked. Richard could hear crowd noise around him, the volume occasionally clipping in the tiny speakers with gunshot bursts of static. "The chocolate ones are more expensive."

"Get waffle."

"Can I at least get something I like this trip?"

"What the hell kind of mutant doesn't like ice-cream and waffle cones?"

"It's too sweet. Can't I get some coffeecake or something? Or even just some ginger cookies?"

Richard considered changing the locks. "Fine. Just make sure they give you change in small denominations this time."

"You two seem to be coexisting well," Meguire said when Richard jammed the keys in his back pocket and rummaged for the garlic press. "Never would've believed if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. I was expecting an SOS from you days ago if I'm gonna be honest."

"I'd bunk with the Zodiac Killer if it meant having to do only half the shopping."

"Any news from his parents? Benoit said he sent you some leads last week."

"I haven't had a chance to look at them."

"Sure you haven't," Meguire said.

Richard swerved mid-recipe and decided to just dump everything he had on rice. He banged his knee on the open cupboard door and swallowed curses as he manhandled the rice bag out from the sliding drawer. "You realize how lucky you were that all went down at the Birinmon PD instead of Beika, right?" Meguire asked.

Probably. Yes. It was a rhetorical question. The situation with Rachel's disappearance had brought the issue back up with blood-letting clarity and given the same scenario a second time, Richard still wasn't sure if he could've done things any differently. Normally it should've been his first instinct to bring in the police in to help him search for his lost daughter. Conan's eyes on the back of his head as he'd dialed up Meguire instead had been the only thing to stay his hand. He could only hope Conan wouldn't think to ask about it because any answer Richard could give was incriminating. There was resenting an inconvenience and then there was actively fighting to prevent it from becoming anyone else's inconvenience.

Richard funneled himself into dinner prep. Their rice cooker's cord turned out to be shot; after slivering the meat and tossing it into the saucepan to chase the pink off it, he set the rice up to steam in a separate pot and hunted around for the lid. "Trade you," he said when Conan returned, relieving him of the shopping bag and shoving the broken cooker at him. "Go keep Meguire company."

Conan grabbed a screwdriver out of the utility drawer before he left the kitchen.

Richard chopped up a majestically half-assed salad in time for the sign-off on the evening news. There wasn't any dressing so he hunted up balsamic vinegar and olive oil and blasted it with pepper until he got bored. He let the two of them dish themselves up at the table as he doubled back into the kitchen to reward his selfless domesticity with 87 proof.

Meguire devoted the entirety of his focus to Conan throughout dinner. It was strongly reminiscent of how Meguire had used to dote on Jimmy as a kid and Richard found himself fixated on the alien familiarity of the scene. Conan was listening to Meguire with rare, open enthusiasm as Meguire regaled him with tales from the force that were only about ten percent unpasteurized bullshit. Meguire was an excellent storyteller and had been lecturing in front of elementary schoolers long enough to know how to keep their attention: Richard left the room several times to grab additional beer and chase dinner down with a cigarette before Conan had even finished his first plate. The absence at the other end of the table dug pinprick pressure into his chest whenever he looked at it too long. "To tell you the truth, I thought I was going to be the one to have to haul him in that time," Meguire said. "He was lucky the guy didn't break anything. The chief chewed him up one side and gnawed right down the other. The paperwork alone was a nightmare, never mind the press."

"Look, it didn't happen that way," Richard snapped, losing patience when Conan turned a shit-munching grin on him. "I didn't run over the guy. He dodged the wrong way and got nailed. I can't help it if he was too cooked to zag instead of zig."

"We were in a goddamn alley and you had to plow over a bike rack to get the cruiser in there, what did you think was going to happen when you gunned it?"

"If he didn't want a grill in his grill he shouldn't have held up the bank."

"What is it with you and bank robbers in alleys?" Conan wanted to know. "How is that something that's happened to you enough that you have a documented police record of it?"

"How about you, Conan?" Meguire speared the last sliver of boiled egg and gestured pointedly at Conan's plate. Conan reluctantly dialed down his hyper-focus and attended to the rest of his food. "Moore here says you've been helping out on a lot of your own cases. You thinking about getting the badge yourself? We could use a nose like yours."

"I don't think so," Conan said. "What you and Uncle do is so scary and I'm not very smart anyway. I could never be a famous detective like him."

"Damn straight," Richard said. "It's about time you learned your place. You want me to print that on a t-shirt for you or do you just want to skip straight to the rebellious tattoo phase?"

"I really like watching you guys solve crime, though," Conan told Meguire earnestly. "It's super cool. All my friends think you're cool too. It's part of the reason they made the Junior Detective League."

"Well, it comes with its ups and downs." Meguire mopped up the last of the sauce from the meat bowl with the egg. Richard had been gratified to watch him hork down three helpings and surreptitiously poke around for more. "I wouldn't trade it, though. Long hours and the psych element can be rough, but I've never once regretted my decision. My father always said the same thing."

"Was your dad a policeman too?"

"He was. Managed to clock in almost thirty-five years before the endgame deskwork bored him enough to push him into retirement. My mother and his mother were both battlefield nurses. He always told me service was in our blood. I've known since I was younger than you are what I wanted to be."

"Why was it that you decided to become a policeman, Uncle?" Conan asked Richard. "Is it because you wanted to run bank robbers over with cars?"

"All right listen, you little snot-slurping pissant," Richard said, the same time as Meguire laughed, "Good look getting that out of him. He's been dodging me on that since the academy."

"Since when does a reason have to be complicated? It paid well and I didn't feel like wedging myself in a cubicle for forty years. Look, shut up," Richard said. "I don't need a hereditary reason to want to get paid and shoot a gun while doing it. Quit busting my chops. I fed you."

"Yeah, you fed me." Meguire shook his head and let it go. He wiped his mouth clean and started stacking their plates in the center. "Conan, you're the farthest thing from dumb. If you want to be a cop, be a cop. You're already twice the detective I'll ever be, if I'm gonna be honest with you. Keep your eyes sharp, pay attention in school, get in shape in high school and enroll in the academy once you graduate. Maybe you'll even break this idiot's record by the end."

Conan had been cupping his hand to scoop dried rice crumbs off the table. He blinked up at this. "What record?"

Meguire grinned at Richard. "You didn't tell him?"

"No one cares about that."

"It's not like you to pass up a chance to peacock. You should tell him."

Conan's eyes were extremely enormous. "Is it his record of running people over with cars?"

Meguire intercepted Richard before he could call up a rental agency to add Conan to the list. "I'll grab the dishes," Meguire said, gathering them up in the crook of his arm and using the other to propel Richard away from the table. "You mind if I use the agency to put in some calls?"

"Just stick the dishes in the sink and I'll do them later. It's fine," Richard said. "You want Rachel's room or a sofa downstairs?"

"Might as well camp in the agency since I'm going to be using the desk. Thanks."

Richard collected linens from the closet to pile them onto the cushions downstairs and checked his phone messages in transit. After giving Meguire a heads-up he was ditching, he made a swift run out to the post office before it closed, dumped some earnings into his thirsty savings account, and then kicked himself for forgetting the paperwork on the background check he was supposed to deliver to a client that evening. He'd have to make an unwanted second trip if he wanted his check on time.

Meguire was successfully kipped in the agency when Richard returned. Conan hadn't drifted far, criss-cross on a kitchen chair next to the window upstairs, eating a slice of coffeecake and idly people-watching the foot traffic below. His completed workbooks sat in a pile at his elbow. "We're out of dish soap," Conan said, mouth full.

Richard spelunked under the sink to check before rummaging through the recycling bin. Sure enough Conan had ignored the smear of soap still coating the bottom. Richard added a few fingers of water to it, splashed it around to make suds, and shook the solution next to Conan's ear and then in front of his eyeballs just in case his ear was broken. "Okay, I get it," Conan sighed.

"You don't want to see me in fishnets, stop making me hook on weekends to pay for kitchen supplies." Richard dug out the plastic basin to make the soap stretch even further and plunked the dishes down into it. It wasn't his habit to be this proactive but honestly this suited his purposes. It'd taken both of them the better part of the week to acclimate to each other's presence without Rachel as a buffer, and while Richard wasn't stupid enough to assume Conan enjoyed his company, he didn't get the sensation that Conan minded it too much at this point either. Conan wasn't running away to Agasa's tonight and Richard had had things to say to him since Birinmon. With Rachel at her mother's and Meguire out of the room, this would probably be the best chance he'd ever have to say them without being overheard.

He opted to bide his time, loading his chambers one by one as he scrubbed the glasses out with the sponge. When he settled on an approach that worked for him, he shut off the water, flipped the towel up over his shoulder, and crossed the kitchen in a stride.

Mid-bite into his third slice of coffeecake, Conan yelped in surprise to be suddenly manhandled. Richard plunked him down atop the counter by the sink and ignored Conan's frantic bitching about the cold dishwater soaking into his pants. "Got pertinent questions," Richard said.

"Spell that," Conan said.

Richard grabbed his nose and honked it until Conan squalled with hatred. "Spell that," Richard said. "And shut up. You've been a pissant all night."

"No I haven't!"

"I cooked you dinner and did your dishes for free, you have any idea how many fainting couches I'd have had to backorder if I'd done that for Rachel?"

"Gosh Uncle," Conan said. "You're right. I wish I wasn't only seven years old because then maybe I'd be tall enough to pat you on the back for all these swell adult things you're doing. Maybe I should be the one to handle the hot stove next time? Or use the kitchen knife that's as long as my arm? I don't know, I'm just so useless."

"Now he gets it," Richard said. "Look, plug up. I'm serious. I don't want a runaround so I made sure everyone else was out. If you don't give me any crap this'll be over quick."

Conan stilled but only very reluctantly. "It has to do with the gun back at Birinmon," Richard said. "Those questions you asked at the hotel - did you really not know what was going on?"

"Are you still thinking about that?" Conan said. "Detective Moore, I know you're still upset about what happened to your friend, but I'm just a little kid. That night feels like forever ago. I barely even remember what happened."

"Fine, I'll buy that."

Conan's eyes flickered. He was still about as open as a hazmat suit but Richard could sense he'd genuinely surprised him. "Really?" Conan said.

"I don't remember much either, at least near the end. If someone as brilliant as me can't retain that information, I'm not gonna expect you to be able to pull out many details either."

"Okay." Conan spoke slowly. He searched Richard's face again. "So why are you asking?"

"Because what I'm asking doesn't have anything to do with memory. It has to do with what you know about guns."

"Not a lot. I know they can be used to hurt people and I know people use them to hurt themselves. That's about it."

"You asked me to show you how a suicide worked. Was that because you actually didn't know, or were you trying to lead me around by the nose?"

"I watch a lot of cop shows, but they don't teach me about real life," Conan said. "I guess I maybe just was confused and scared and was trying to process it by visualizing it in my head. That's all. I'm sorry it made you sad."

To be honest Richard wasn't entirely sure how to parse that. Most conversations with Conan felt like trying to scoop shit from a litter box with a basketball hoop. While Richard could appreciate that Conan was at least being somewhat sincere, there was more shit and not nearly enough litter to camouflage the smell. "So you didn't actually know what happened?"

"I mean, I thought maybe I did. But then nobody else seemed to think that way, and I got scared thinking I was the only one seeing things that weren't there. I'm sorry."

"So you have seen it before," Richard said.

Again Conan's eyes gave a hard, wayward flicker. He was resentful again. "Where," Richard said.

"I think I've given you the wrong idea," Conan said. "I've never seen it in person. Just actors on the TV. And like I said, I wasn't sure. I just thought I knew best just like I always do. You're always yelling at me for being a know-it-all and I should have listened. I guess I didn't want to be right, I just wanted to understand. It just came out wrong like it always does."

Richard figured it was extremely gauche to argue with a first-grader about his knowledge of suicides. Conan was looking at his feet again and while this hadn't been exactly where he'd intended to go, it was actually pretty close. It'd been the real reason he hadn't wanted witnesses and the reason he hadn't pulled muscles at dinner rushing to gloat about his ability to bullseye targets with either hand at the precinct. He'd known coming back that he'd probably multitasked well enough to ruin both kids in Birinmon, but the intensity of Rachel's implosion had raised the possibility for the first time that this was bigger than he could contain. He wasn't sure how to qualify or quantify damage on someone else's kid. This was probably what it looked like. Soaked in dirty dishwater on a countertop in some stranger's kitchen and serving up hardwood-smoked strips of horseshit instead of something Richard could actually swallow.

"Are you…"

Richard blinked back to attention. Conan was staring at him as if suddenly coming to a diagnosis. "Richard, are you…" Conan fumbled. "You're not worried about me, are you?"

"No," Richard said. "You're a bag of dicks. You haven't even answered the question."

"I answered it like eight times."

"You answered it like eight bags of dicks."

"If you're actually worried, you really don't have to be," Conan said. "I'm fine. I know Rachel's upset and needs time to process, but it just doesn't affect us the same way. If you have to worry about anybody, you should save your energy for her. If you had earlier, maybe she wouldn't have felt the need to run away to find answers on her own."

It was the most genuinely hurtful thing Conan had ever said to him and the worst part was that Conan probably hadn't even intended it to be cruel. Just factual. Richard still dumped him ass-first into the soapy basin. "I hate you," Conan hissed.

"Stop clogging up my sink and go take a real bath." Richard was busy. He let Conan flounder his own way out and went out to deliver the paperwork for a local background check, taking a flask of his 87 proof with him to keep his alcoholism on schedule for that evening. Conan was on the sofa by the time Richard returned, hair a damp curtain over his ears while he fussed with his socks. The TV was already on.

Richard was gently toasted and had to pull a double-take as he sat down on the other end with a beer. Conan was drowning in a peach hoodie he'd stolen out of Rachel's wardrobe, presumably either for comfort or because Richard had yet to do laundry for the week. "I want to watch the documentary channel," Conan said preemptively. "The TV Guide says there's a segment about elephants and I was here first."

Richard gulped a burp and drained the rest of his flask. "You know our house constitution means nothing when I outweigh you four to one, right?"

"Why have a house constitution at all if you're just going to treat this like a monarchy?"

"I have it so you two can follow the constitution and dream about how nice it'll be to move the hell out of my kingdom."

"I'm watching elephants." Conan was already handling the remote pointedly. "All the true crime shows are reruns tonight. This is the only thing interesting on except the documentary on the Hadrian Empire."

Richard didn't have a problem with elephants but was required by sitcom law to flail unsuccessfully for the remote. Conan held it sideways over the arm of the couch away from him until he cut it out. "You're dripping on the couch," Richard told him, heaving himself up to find the day's newspaper.

"Sorry." Conan remorselessly plopped his towel back on his head and left it there as he continued to scroll.

Richard fetched two beers from the refrigerator, snagged his tin of peanuts, and flicked off the light in passing on the way back. Conan had tucked his legs up under the tent of Rachel's sweatshirt and was now working on rolling up the cuffs to free up his wrists. "I'll do the laundry tomorrow," Conan said. "I just didn't have time today."

"I'm not worried about it."

"You should be. I can smell your bed from the floor."

"Then sleep in Rachel's room. She's not going to care."

Conan shook his head but didn't elaborate. His hair hooked into his nose and he shoved it away with his palm, attempting to finger-comb it into some semblance of diplomacy. "When was the last time you got that cut?" Richard said, mouth full.

"I don't know. It usually just does what it wants. I can always just go and use my crafts scissors on it if it bothers me."

Richard took down the first can in four swallows and paced himself better on the next one, already blinking heavily against the shift of the living room's shadows. Dinner had wiped him out in the nonspecific way domestic chores always wiped him out. It'd helped to know his effort was paying into a debt but even that had only gotten him as far as shoveling the leftovers into the refrigerator. Cleaning the countertop, finishing the dishes, getting Conan's cashew crumbs off the floor required a change of batteries his morale wasn't inclined to give him at this point. It could wait. There was TV and booze and the phone wasn't ringing and everything else outside of vice and elephants could wait.

Conan existed beside him in the sleepy fixation all kids had after baths. He did stir during a commercial, but it was only to check a setting on his watch. Richard had noticed it'd gained some additional circumference since the last time, a small red knob added to the side along with a green slider Conan was now thumbing. "Agasa tool that up for you again?" Richard said.

"Yes, actually," Conan said, not looking up. "Well, kind of. I have to test drive a few things to make sure it functions right. But it should work better now that I have more data."

"What are you two testing?"

"A genetically modified horse tranquilizer, a flagship navigational system with a detachable tracker, and a device to measure pH in freshwater."

The hilariously aggressive specificity was enough to bring beer up his nose. Richard coughed but drank it back down with gross practice, tolerant enough to humor him. "Who are you tracking?"

"Whoever it is that keeps stealing my snack out of my bag at school."

"You don't need a tracker for that. Just let them have it and keep an extra snack in your pocket."

"The fact that there's a six year-old hungry enough to keep stealing my snack is exactly why I want to track them," Conan said. "I don't care about the snack itself. It's the mystery that's important. Anyway, I was just joking. Like I said at the hotel, this is just something we're having fun with. I don't expect to drive it around town or build houses with it or anything, we're just having fun seeing what we can make it do."

"He charging you for all this?"

"Huh?"

"For all that crap he's manpowering into your watch."

"Of course not," Conan said, a little blank. "Even if he did want money, how would I be supposed to pay for all that? I'm just a kid."

"What's in it for him, I guess is what I'm asking," Richard said. "You're over there almost every day walking away with free cutting edge shit. The guy's loaded, but watches that can read the weather, solar-powered skateboards, two way pocket transmitters… that's not chump change. What makes you so special? He doing this just for you, or do the other kids who visit him get a cut of that action too?"

Conan opened his mouth and shut it. He looked suddenly thoughtful, head cocked as if to get a better angle on the question. Before he could respond the program came back on, and once again his attention zeroed in on elephants while the rest of him peaced like a power outage.

Richard watched elephants and maybe dozed. The next time he surfaced the can was still in his hand and Conan was fumbling through another commercial to adjust the hem of Rachel's sweatshirt back down over his feet. When he straightened up his curtain of hair caught on the nosepiece of his glasses. He hissed in surprise, flinching up to gingerly untangle the strands.

Richard traced the edge of the can and drowsily watched the safari teams engineered a makeshift pulley to haul a baby elephant out of a ditch. He could occasionally hear faint snatches of Meguire's conversations filtering through the vents as he presumably did deskwork at Richard's desk instead of sleepwork or bingework. At the next commercial he stood with effort, groaning, snagging Conan's empty milk glass in transit and dropping the dishes off in the kitchen before heading to the bathroom to grab his shaving kit.

Conan craned around him unconsciously when Richard entered his line of sight but otherwise ignored him out of practice. Richard rescued Conan's damp towel up from the arm of the sofa and spread it out as flat as it would go on the floor in front of them, then turned without preamble to hoist Conan from the couch. Conan's flail of reflexive panic knocked Richard's spleen clear over to the other side of his ribcage but Richard figured he had it coming. "What are you doing." Conan scrabbled at his arm. "Whatever it is I didn't do it!"

"Pipe down." Richard maneuvered him around midair to face the TV before setting him down so Conan didn't suffer separation anxiety from elephants. He plopped himself down on the couch behind him with an explosive combination of a belch and a yawn, rummaging around the kit until he turned up his shears. "Face forward unless you want your eyebrows shaved off."

"What are you going to do?"

Richard fished a fidget-cigarette from his box and popped it into his mouth, ignoring the question in favor of cranking Conan's head back forward manually. After a minute of being mauled trying to tame it bare-handed, Richard began to wonder if some of Beika's most recent disappearances would be solved in Conan's hair. What he'd mistaken for a well-brushed crown was actually a consolidated matted tangle probably caused by poorly rinsed shampoo, zero brushing, and flopping around on an unclean pillow. All things Rachel would've caught if she'd been here.

He changed his angle of attack and instead started untangling it with his comb. Visibly bewildered with the entire process, Conan sat rigid in the cradle of Richard's feet, barely breathing, hand white-knuckled around the remote. He flinched a little whenever Richard found a particularly feral tangle but otherwise made no other attempts to run away.

Richard divided increasingly woozy attention between the haircut and the safari rescue, letting muscle memory take over where concentration failed. Working as systematically as alcohol would let him, he freed up Conan's ears out from under the fringe and then chased the rats out from the nest at the nape of his neck, buzzing the skin there clean after he was done. The bangs were about as cooperative as pool noodles but after some eyeballing he found the part and worked to reorganize from there, only trimming the ones that fell over his glasses.

He was mostly focused on elephant rescue and not amputating ears, but he became peripherally aware of the deescalating tension in Conan's body. At the beginning Conan had seized onto the top of his foot with the hand not holding the remote, nails close to drawing blood. Richard fought for nearly ten minutes to even out the hair over Conan's right ear before realizing that the temple of Conan's glasses was in his way and also he was very drunk. He could only fix one of those things, so he peeled off Conan's glasses and waggled them in his face to take.

It took Conan a solid fifteen seconds to slowly release his death grip on Richard's foot. He took the glasses and cradled them in his lap for a while as though not sure what to do with them. "Forward," Richard said, muffled around the comb in his mouth, and after another beat of hesitation Conan obeyed, baring more of his neck so Richard could snip the rest of the overgrowth out from the crown.

Richard found his rhythm in the last leg. He worked with the light of the TV and the corner lamp to finish deshagging the undercoat and then turned his scrutiny on the wren's tail in the back. It was too tall to fit in with the new trim but also occasionally helped Richard find Conan in a crowd and steer Conan like a shopping cart. He elected to leave it alone and let the kid decide whether or not it embarrassed him.

Meguire had hung up the phone downstairs for what sounded like the last time; Richard hadn't heard his voice for going on a quarter hour. The lights in the building across the street had been steadily flickering off one by one since eight o'clock. By the time Richard was done and thumbing the last stray hairs off the back of Conan's neck, the baby elephant had been pulled up from the ditch to be reunited with its mother and Richard was strongly considering calling in his own safari rescue to help haul him to bed. He'd badly underestimated how much the 87 proof would fuck him up and continuing to add beer on top of it had put the two hemispheres of his brain into two separate states of Tao. "Done," he mumbled, yawning, packing the kit away on the cushion next to him. Evening news at eleven was on and there were no breaking news about Yoko Okino or either of her breasts, which meant it was tine for bed.

Conan didn't react. Richard brushed stray hairs off his knees and the edge of the couch with clumsy hands. When he shifted his weight forward to check if he'd severed an artery, Conan's weight unexpectedly doubled against his shins.

Richard paused to take a closer look. Conan had fallen asleep against him, hand slack around his glasses, remote abandoned next to him. Rachel's sweatshirt had swallowed all but the toes of his left foot.

The cigarette in his mouth was soggy. Richard tossed it in the direction of the nearest ashtray and pulled out another one. The room skidded like soap around him. He got as far as clicking the rivet on his lighter and for whatever reason abandoned his plan at the last minute. He thumbed the ridges absently instead, drowsing in and out, watching the stars continue to muscle through a city-clogged sky.

---

.

Beika's early springtime temperatures fluctuated harder than teenage hormones, so Richard woke up in a drenching brawl with the thermostat for the third time that week. He tried not to linger by the window after Eva's call, distracting himself with a shower and some cursory laundry, but all in all his agency's desk was positioned by the window specifically so he could avoid work and look out windows. Rachel ended up being delivered home in Eva's rarely-used navy sedan just after nine in the morning. Eva stayed in the driver's seat and kept the car running as Rachel pulled her duffel and rolling suitcase out of the trunk, stacking them both up on the sidewalk.

Still in his laundry-day sweater and itching a little under the sun, Richard shifted his weight in the doorway of the complex and tried not to project impatience. Rachel leaned back in over the passenger seat to presumably volunteer herself for a snakebite. She shut her door, waved through the window, and clung to the handle of her suitcase as she watched her mother drive off.

Richard braced himself. Once the car was fully out of sight, Rachel slung her duffel and purse up over her shoulder and took the handle of her suitcase to tilt it onto its wheels. She started pulling it to the entrance and stopped dead when she spotted him.

Richard remembered reading something about how some Jurassic predators hunted strictly by movement. There was only one entrance to the agency and he was in it, but if he didn't move she might just think he was a plant or a stack of shipping crates and would go around him. "You're up early for a Sunday," Rachel said softly. "Did Mom call ahead? I told her to let you sleep."

He continued to avoid her gaze because plants didn't have eyeballs. The wheels on Rachel's suitcase thumped over the cracks in the sidewalk and then she was in front of him, waiting.

He didn't move. Rachel waited another moment, then very slowly lifted herself up onto her tiptoes to manually bring herself into his line of fire. He was forced to finally avert his eyes once their gazes met. "Ah hah," Rachel murmured darkly. "Blew your cover."

She didn't appear lethal but neither did undertows. He reached for her suitcase and she tolerantly passed it to him, still watching him. He collapsed the handle into the unit and lugged it upstairs by the side handle as she thumped up behind him. "I'm going to take a shower," she called as she dropped her duffel off into her room. "You can just leave that by the door, I'll grab it later."

Richard was an extraordinarily masculine specimen that didn't buy pastries as bribes to appease women. He left a box of welcome home baklava on the kitchen table for her as well as hot chocolate for non-bribe purposes and then locked himself downstairs in his agency to do detective things in his locked bathroom. Less than a half hour later Rachel thumped downstairs and used her key to get into the agency. Richard had stockpiled several unread local newspapers as well as a week's supply of rations under the sink and felt pretty okay with the development actually. His only oversight was not bringing in an extra light bulb to replace the one over the sink if it burnt out, but even if she didn't go to school she ultimately couldn't stay awake forever. He could grab a box from the utility closet at the first sign of a tactical opening. "Dad, this is stupid," Rachel said. "I know you're in there."

He didn't turn the light on. The baklava he'd stolen last-minute from the not-bribe box upstairs smelled great. Without taking his eyes off her silhouette through the glass, Richard crunched through the crispy layers of the dessert slowly to avoid making incriminating beaver noises. "God, you know what? Have it your way," Rachel said. "I don't have time for this. I have to meet Serena today for a study date and god forbid we actually talk for the first time in ten days before I have to head out again. Conan left me a note that said he was at a museum with his friends.. I'll be back at six to cook dinner. Would you please grow some chest hair while I'm gone and manage to say two whole words to me by then?"

He slowly reached for a second piece and watched the jut of her widow's peak.

Rachel blasted out a string of technically groundable offenses and stormed away. He tracked her progression across the agency as she attended to the chores, turning on the coffee pot and yanking the blinds off the windows with teeth-rattling clacks. She took several minutes to play and presumably copy down the messages that'd been left on the agency's phone since yesterday, then straighten out the furniture he'd slept on and water the ficus with the water cooler in the corner. The coffee aroma slithering under his door was foreign and he presumed she'd brought a new flavor back with her from the uppity shoppes near Eva's agency. It made him feel a little bad but mostly he wished he'd been smart enough to drag his coffee pot in with him. Rachel had become a regional champion specifically due to her talent for exploiting battlefield weaknesses. "I'm leaving," she said. "If Conan comes back, make sure he gets a good lunch. You need to answer your messages while I'm gone. Some of them sound really urgent."

He was out of baklava. The coffee was a sexless siren outside the door.

"I can't believe this," Rachel muttered, and left.

Richard heard the door slam and lock behind her. He sat in the bathroom in the ensuing silence for a good ten minutes longer, feeling slivers of fresh-smelling air worm their way under the door alongside the coffee. She must have opened a window to air out the office.

When he couldn't resist any longer, he scuttled like a tarantula over his bag of chips and pile of newspapers and silently unlocked the door. Sticking his head out revealed a desktop of fluttering but paperweighted busywork amidst a cleaner and more organized office. She'd moved the room's three plants temporarily closer to the window to take advantage of the strong eastern sunlight, something he routinely forgot to do for them when she wasn't there. Their soil was visibly damp at a distance.

He crouched there a while longer, but it was clear the office was empty and his addictions generally made the final call when it came to personal safety. He crawled out on all fours, rocked up onto the balls of his feet, and made his cautious tip-toe way across the room to investigate the new bag of grounds sitting out by the coffee pot.

His peripherals blurred like old film reel. An instant later the breath flew out of his body as he was slammed back against the wall, Rachel's palms on either side of his head. "Got you," she seethed.

"Did you just come in from the fucking window?"

"So you're just going to take advantage of the things I bought you but not have the decency to look me in the eye?"

"I wasn't going to touch it, I was just going to smell it!"

Rachel fisted his sweater and yanked. Richard stumbled forward and then was caught when she hugged him. His heart slammed against the pressure and he knew she could feel it by the way she at first froze and then firmed her grip. Richard felt every nerve in him sputter like oil in a pan. He surrendered enough to drop his chin onto the top of her head, closing his eyes to let himself unravel a minute. "Do I really scare you this much?" Rachel whispered.

"No."

"I'm not mad at you, Dad."

He didn't want to test drive that. Childhood ghosts muttered at him under the restrictive pressure. Rachel thankfully diagnosed his discomfort as impersonal and tolerated him pulling away, though she didn't let him escape from the wall. "Hi," Richard said, for lack of anything better to say.

Her eyes instantly flooded. She angrily palmed the tears away. "Hi."

"How did it go at your mother's."

"It was fine. She worked late, so we ordered out most nights. She only cooked on the last night, but I helped her in the kitchen, so it turned out to… not be a problem."

"I can cook non-lethal without supervision," Richard said. "I'm also home early so I can help you with things like homework and bully trouble. I also buy you your karate shit and am a famous handsome detective."

"You haven't helped me with school work since sixth grade, I haven't had bullies since third grade, and it's not a competition, Dad."

"I'm just saying."

"And I'm not mad at you. I know why you did it. I…"

Still on edge, Richard watched her warily as she cut herself off with a breath. "I don't want to talk about this here," she said quietly. "Let's take a walk, okay? I'm willing to bet you haven't been outside for a couple of days and I could use some sunshine too."

"I thought you had a study date with Serena."

"I lied."

"You're grounded," he frowned, genuinely offended. "Every time I send you over there you pick up bad habits."

"If I'm grounded I can't go out and shop for dinner, and then you won't get a nice meal."

His stomach ungrounded her as he changed his shoes and scrounged up his wallet. Rachel packed his coffee to-go in a thermos and was waiting by the door by the time he was ready. He expected gumflapping from her right away, but she seemed content with the silence as they walked by the park on the way to the Blue Line. "Where are we headed?" Richard said.

"I don't know." She smiled at the shrieks of laughter as a young father took turns giving his twin daughters underdogs on their swings. "Let's just feel it out. Enjoy the journey."

He was starting to strongly suspect she was leading him out into an abandoned wheat field to shoot him. "Shouldn't you be resting at home to detox from your mother's? Full-body tremors are the next step after uncontrollable vomiting."

"I already told you she didn't poison me. She's actually gotten a little better. She didn't even mistake salt for sugar this time."

The crowd was definitely thinning. "Shouldn't we stay with the group so we're not targeted by assassins?"

She turned in place and walked backwards, hands tucked behind her back to beam up at him. Her words weren't quite as sweet. "Your fear of me is obnoxious and insulting."

"You held a knife to my throat once when you thought I was stealing your bagels."

"You were stealing my bagels, and the knife was to show you where knives lived in the kitchen. That way you could stop using your gross finger to take the peanut butter out of the jar to spread on the bagels you were stealing."

"That was an extremely fancy way of saying you once held a knife to my throat," Richard said. "Where are we going."

"Dad, I say this because I love you literally more than life itself," Rachel said. "Shut up and get some exercise. I swear I have no idea how you and Mom stay so thin. You're both slobs."

"Look, you can be replaced with a newer model as long as your mom's plumbing is still up to code. And don't compare me to her. The only exercise she gets is spelunking up my ass with stolen bank pens. At least I actually go out and pound pavement to solve crime."

"You and I both know you're not willing to raise another kid."

"You literally brought someone else's kid home for me to raise."

She looped her arm through his and dropped her forehead against his bicep as they walked. Her sweatshirt was sun-warmed, almost hot, the sweat on her redolent of lemon-sage.

Richard focused up at the still-blossoming canopies and blinked intermittent blues and greens and chromes from his peripherals as they continued north. The sun warmed the tips of his ears and the side of his neck and there was something sweet and flowering in the air that'd probably ravage his sinuses later. He wasn't moving forward of his own volition but for the first time that week the momentum didn't feel like running away. "How was your coffee?" Rachel asked.

"It was all right."

"Just 'all right'?"

"I mean, it could use more booze if that's what you're asking."

"Gosh, why didn't I think of that, I'm so stupid," Rachel said. "Downers always bring out the flavor in uppers. Get a grip, your heart is almost forty."

"If you'd lived through the 70s you'd understand why my heart is still as wasted as the rest of me," Richard said. "Coffee was pretty good. I liked the cherry whatever that was in there."

"Really?" Rachel brightened. "Oh, I'm so glad! It was kind of expensive and I had to work for it, so I'm really excited you like it. If you're done with your thermos I can take that."

He obediently drained the last smears and handed it over. She wadded up a tissue from her travel pack, tucked it into the mouth, and stored it in her purse. "Here is good," she said cheerfully, nudging him sideways. "Right through here."

Richard recognized the park he'd used to take her sledding at and immediately charted all the secluded areas she could lead him to before she shot him. "We should stay on the path."

"I'm not going to shoot you in broad daylight. I'm not even mad right now. I just want to talk."

Both the prescience and the multiple loopholes in that one sentence created a sucking sensation in his head. He tried to turn and she captured his elbow again, and for the second time today he flashed back to Birinmon: guided panicked breaths filled with knives and a garden that pressed in on him until all he could hear was the blood pulsing in his ears. "God, you're a nervous wreck," Rachel murmured, the veneer of good humor gone. "Dad, this is pitiful. I'm serious. Did you spend all week like this?"

"Are you kidding? It was a vacation. Nobody was on me to clean the bathroom or change the bedsheets or cut my toenails. If I'd known parenting would be this easy without the kid I would've made adjustments a long time ago."

"All of that was gross and yes I will be checking two out of three of those things, but you're not getting out of this conversation by annoying me." Rachel steered him a last time past the trimmed hedges and into the ancillary play area. "Okay, we're here. Dealer's choice: see-saw or swings."

"I'll chuck on both of them, so it depends on whether you want my vomit to rain on you or get shot at you from a trebuchet. Let's just sit on the bench."

"You'll be more honest with me if you're distracted."

Who the fuck told her that. "You're grounded for colluding with your mother."

"If you don't want to swing then just push me." Rachel plunked her purse by the swingset pole and climbed into the tallest one before he could say anything. He could hear children calling to each other somewhere past the wall of trees, but the newer playset and Bored Parent pagoda built by the sledding hill had drawn most of the Sunday traffic. "I wonder if this will get torn down soon," Rachel said, again reading his thoughts. She gave her legs a little kick, hiking up her knees a bit so her feet didn't drag. "The newer one is so much bigger. I don't think this one gets a lot of maintenance anymore."

"I'm not giving you an underdog."

"If I allowed you to try to give me an underdog I'd be responsible for negligent homicide. C'mon, push me already."

He wished he'd worn something lighter than his sweater. Rachel gave a tolerant little kick of her legs to help him along when she turned out to weigh somewhere between a Jeep and a speedboat. "I saw that you fed Conan," she said. "I know you wouldn't have let him starve, but I still wanted to thank you. Unless Inspector Meguire did it, but that didn't look like his cooking when I opened up the containers."

"I told you I'd be able to cook for myself just fine."

"I know. I'm just saying thank you." She wriggled her feet on the next pass. "Are you ready to talk?"

No. It'd been so long since he'd pushed her or any other kid on the swings that the experience thankfully didn't trigger anything maudlin in him. Just sweaty and logistically intensive effort. "Dad, I know why you did what you did," Rachel said. Her hair floated and brushed past his ears as he stepped back to make room for her backswing. "I'll be honest, I was… really mad at first. I got over at Mom's and I told her I wasn't ever going back, not even if you begged me. When you said you didn't want me there, something just kind of… unraveled in me and I told her that I didn't want to be in a place I wasn't wanted, and I— Dad."

He'd bailed without realizing it. He came back to himself only when he heard the chain squeak and both of her feet slap to a landing on the woodchips behind him. "Okay, bench it is," she sighed, steering him back around with a fox's grip on his chickenshit carcass. "I guess I sort of thought maybe you'd have the decency to finally listen to what I have to say, but we can do this the hard way too."

"I don't want to hear this."

"Well I've earned the right to say it." She shoved him down on the bench and pinned him there with a foot against his stomach. It didn't strictly hurt but her expression was point-blank buckshot.

He could probably escape at this juncture but her eyes held him more than her foot. "Dad, everybody bent over backwards for you after Birinmon," Rachel said tightly. Slowly. "Mom, Inspector Meguire, Midori, Conan, even Dr. Agasa. Even Scott and Nancy. Everybody went out of their way to make sure you were okay and you just didn't care. And the second I tried to talk to you about how I felt about the whole thing with Jamie, you ran away or got wasted so you didn't have to deal with me. I didn't want to bother Inspector Meguire any more than we already had and I couldn't talk to Serena about it because I didn't want to be away from the apartment any longer than I had to. So I took a walk that night during the storm to clear my head and I tried to call Jimmy from the payphone and I couldn't go through with it. I wasted so much money trying. I didn't want to let it ring into his answering machine because then it'd prove to me once and for all that nobody was there."

Richard could vaguely feel the sun scorching his right hand on the bench and insects batting up against the sweat on his neck. "There are times I feel so alone even if you and Conan are in the same room," Rachel said. Her foot was unerring concrete but her voice wobbled and then to his terror broke. "And I hold it together because I know that's what Jimmy would do, but Jimmy isn't here. And you and Conan don't want to hear about it and Serena is tired of me talking about it too, but I have no idea where Jimmy's parents are and sometimes it feels like I'm the only one in the entire world who's actually worried that he's gone. It's like Jimmy just… never existed. Nobody at school talks about him. Dr. Agasa changes the subject whenever I bring him up. It's like people want to forget him, and the worst part was that you got famous right after he disappeared."

Her pain this close was petrifying. Richard couldn't look away. "He stopped being useful, so people didn't care about him anymore," Rachel said. "And it's all so wrong and I hate myself for resenting you for that because it's not your fault, but I don't know how else to feel, Dad. I don't know what to do. And then Nikki, and Jack, and then Jamie dying and Craig being a murderer that I was sitting right next to that whole time you were playing table tennis, and then afterwards you just… disappeared in your head for three days and it was all just too much for me, okay? So I panicked and I m-messed up and the second I did, you sent me away. And I know you were worried and I know you did it for the right reasons, but it didn't feel that way. It just felt like one more thing I cared about being taken away from me when all I needed was for someone to be there."

Rachel violently strong-armed the tears off her face. Her legs were beginning to shake. "I'm so tired of broken promises," she breathed. "I'm so tired, Dad."

Holy shit. The raw anguish in his daughter's diatribe finally flipped his on switch. Richard palmed her knee and ankle and rotated her stance. Rachel let herself be swiveled towards the bench and collapsed like a doll onto the seat, burying her face against his shoulder.

He floated there like a fatty lukewarm piece of shit for the next quarter hour while she sorted herself out. She seemed content to just snot on him, so occasionally he brushed a thumb by her ear and the nape of her neck to let her know he was still awake and caring about her snot. When she was together enough to get vertical, he handed her his handkerchief just to hear her laugh. "You're the only one I know who still carries these," she said, scrubbing her face with it briskly. "It's so old-fashioned."

"That's what everyone says until they start bleeding out their bullet holes. Not a lot a pack of tissues can do for you then."

"So you only carry this around in case you get shot?"

"I carry it around in case I get snot. Bullet hole packing is just the bonus."

Rachel leaned against him again. He took his snotty gross handkerchief back from her as a form of penance. The playground was still empty but he'd heard the uptick in traffic outside the clearing as the day warmed into afternoon. It wouldn't be empty for long. "I'm sorry," Rachel said. "That was kind of a lot, wasn't it."

"Yeah, but what I'm getting is that it's mostly Jimmy's fault," Richard said. "That makes it pretty easy to solve. We just need to take you to a hypnotist and steam the memories out of you so they don't bother you anymore. I'll pony up for that."

"I wish you were joking, but you're dead serious and it doesn't help," Rachel said. "Jimmy might've been the last straw, but there were a lot of straws before that. I was really hurting from what happened with Jamie and I just... needed someone to talk to, and you sending me away to stay with Mom when I needed you to be there was the worst possible timing."

"You needed to get out of the agency."

"I know that, Dad. I already told you I understand why you did it. But just because it was the right thing to do doesn't mean it didn't hurt me. Especially saying what you said to me. I know you said it to get me to leave, but it still hurt. Even if you didn't really mean it."

He was starting to fishtail again. Vice was his only doctor on call, so he waylaid his flight response by medicating himself with a cigarette. Rachel didn't fight him. It took several tries with uncooperative thumbs, but once he'd directed the stream away from her he felt something in him braid back together in the fray. "Can I finally tell you what I was trying to tell you on the swings?" Rachel said.

He didn't run away. "What I was going to say was that I was upset with you at first, but I got to thinking about your side of it," Rachel said. "The longer I stayed at Mom's, the more I started to realize that my anger was actually just me being scared. I've gotten so used to you making irresponsible decisions for my entire life that it really caught me off guard when you just… didn't. And I know it's awful to say this, but usually if I get in your face enough, you back down because you don't want to waste energy fighting me. But this time I couldn't get that to work. I couldn't get you to budge even though it was so important to me. And in that moment, I realized that all the power I thought I had here is just in my head. You've held the cards the whole time. I can be sent away any time you want and there's nothing I can do about it. In a year you can kick me out entirely and I can't do anything about that either. I can't find Jimmy. I can't keep Conan if his real parents come. I can't stay with you if you don't want me there."

Rachel gave a listless gesture that ended in a loose fist in her lap. "I can't do anything," she murmured helplessly.

Richard had thoughts. He tried to speak but she'd roundly knocked the wind out of him. "I've been thinking about ways to honor Jamie," Rachel said. She cleared her eyes again with her palms. "Maybe a foundation, or… some kind of memorial. I thought about calling her job but she was so new I doubted they'd do anything for her. I wrote a letter back to Nancy while I was at Mom's to ask her about maybe setting something up at your university. It's probably unreasonable to expect they'll rename anything after her, but I thought maybe I could at least get a plaque in the Judo room. Or even just a portrait. I don't know. I just don't want her to be forgotten, so—"

"I'm not sending you away."

Rachel stilled. "Don't say that to me ever again," Richard said. It was hard to manage words. If he wasn't as angry as he'd been back at the pagoda he was at least skating along the same blunt edge. "I didn't break any promise. I sent you to your mother's because I couldn't give you what you needed and I knew Eva could handle you better. I never said it was forever and I sure as hell haven't given you any hints I'm kicking you out. You can pin blame on me for just about everything else, but you don't get to fire that shot at me."

Rachel was silent. He felt her fingertips flex a bit in his sweater.

Richard sat there amidst the dusty patchwork sun and shadow and rusty chains and woodchip dust from their feet and tried to turn his utilities back on in his head. He felt like someone had stripped his skin off and rewrapped him with visqueen. Eva had left and maybe literally the only passable parenting he'd done in seventeen years had been to keep Rachel in the dark about just how hard he'd fought to keep her with him in that agency. How many hours he'd spent on the line with debt collectors. How many of his own keepsakes he'd fenced on the side to pay for field trips and new shoes and laundry soap and utilities. At one point he'd nearly handed her over for a few months to accept a nighttime security guard gig but even floating that possibility by her had resulted in panicked screaming tantrums. I want to live with Daddy. Overnight stays with Eva in the beginning had ended in the same pigtailed nuclear fission.

What the fuck else do you want from me. He'd absorbed an entire additional goddamn human into the budget because like all kids, Rachel had handed him an insurmountable problem and expected him to turn it into a miracle. It was the same thing all kids expected of adults, but Richard wasn't so much an adult as he was simply someone who'd grown big enough to carry his own karmic bag of dicks independently. He didn't have it in him to play therapist for her on top of trucking his own baggage.

Rachel murmured, somewhere under his arm and outside his periphery, "Okay."

"Don't say that to me again."

"Okay."

"And as far as I'm concerned you're staying in the agency until you're too old to make me a grandfather. If I thought you were having doubts I would've chained you to the kitchen stove so you'd get the hint. You're not going anywhere unless you want to go. And honestly maybe not even then. Depends on what dipshit tries to trick you into thinking marriage is a good idea when I've spent your entire life proving to you that it sucks."

She sounded on the verge of tears. He felt her fingers dig into the sweater over his ribs again. "Okay, Dad," she whispered.

He waited. She seemed content to massacre him only once apparently. "Was that really all that was in your craw? Jimmy and having to stay at your mom's for two minutes?"

"I had a question that night I came to talk to you," she said. "Well... two questions I guess. About you and Craig and Jamie."

"What."

"…they might make you mad."

"Yeah, maybe you haven't sussed this out yet, but I'm already plenty mad," Richard said. "You might as well just finish flinging shit against the wall to see what sticks."

"Are you mad because I talked about Jimmy or are you mad I was worried about you kicking me out?"

"Yes."

Rachel lifted her hand to massage her eyes. "Rachel, I don't know what you want me to do about that kid," Richard said. "I might be a famous detective but he's an apprentice famous detective. If he wants to stay hidden, he'll stay hidden. There isn't a lot you can do about it except wait for him to finish picking the fruit out of his jam."

"If I had a cell phone, maybe I could call him," Rachel said, but the suggestion was listless. "I know they're expensive, but there are already kids at school that have some. If both of us had a way to contact each other, then maybe…"

"He already has a way to contact you. He's done it before. Idiot's probably hiding out in his mansion and ducking your calls because he's found some other girl to string along. If I were you I'd just cut my losses and let it go."

"Jimmy deserves at least one person on his side who's actually worried about him. I mean, Dad, Jimmy was over at the agency so much growing up. I know you see him as competition, but he's still just a kid. Don't you care about him at all?"

That was a trick question. A flat no when she phrased it like that would be monstrous and middle-road disagreement would honestly be almost as bad. Yes, Richard cared if he squinted at it. Probably a lot. He also couldn't do anything about it and it wasn't his habit to beat his head against the wall to protest unsolvable problems. Drinking led to the same nihilistic conclusions without the cranial trauma. "It wouldn't change anything either way. Worrying about it doesn't help. Ten to one the brat pops up back in school one day talking about the Sherlock Homes retreat he went to in New Zealand and laughs at you for rolling yourself into knots over it. You'll be pissed off, you'll throw him out the window, and then everything will be back to normal. Spare yourself the grey hairs and let him come back on his own time."

"That does sound like Jimmy," Rachel admitted, laughing weakly. He felt her fingers flex again, bringing more of his sweater into her fist in a nervous tic. "Knowing him, he probably has no idea how much time has passed. I don't even know how he's still enrolled. He's missed so much school I can't imagine they'd let him pass, even if he's doing his homework somewhere."

"I don't know, his parents have money. Put enough grease on a wheels and the cart stops bitching about its load." He was exhausted and hungry and frankly needed to piss. There were enough kids milling around that he wasn't inclined to risk it in these trees, but trees had a lot of thirsty secluded cousins and it was a long road of opportunities back to the agency. "Can we go now?"

"Not yet. I have two more questions."

"Then can I pee?"

"You can pee in Windham's. I want to pick up chocolate covered pretzels on the way home for Conan."

"What did he do that was so great?"

"He put up with you and your apparently uncut toenails and unwashed bed for ten days. If anything he deserves a chocolate covered Purple Heart."

"Look, if we just get started now we can beat—"

Rachel asked, very quietly, "Were you in love with Jamie?"

Starlings had found the playground and were starting to congregate in the branch of an elm. Richard watched them rummage around each other as they fought for space, then fly as a uniform cloud to a different tree. His side prickled with sweat under Rachel's weight and a taut sensation on the back of his neck suggested he was going to need lotion for sunburn later. "No."

Rachel turned her chin a little to observe his profile. "You had to really think about that."

Richard lifted his opposite shoulder. He was mostly thinking about pee. "What Craig said about you and Jamie…" Rachel hesitated. "It wasn't true then?"

"No."

"You hadn't… done anything? At the hotel? Like he said?"

"He was just saying all that to get under my skin so I'd back down. I set myself up for it by bringing you in there."

"So it wasn't true?"

"No."

Rachel's thumb massaged her knuckle. "Was it… almost true?"

He was a bad liar. The starlings lifted en masse and went to clog another tree.

Rachel took the silence in with surprising grace. She readjusted herself slowly, temple against his shoulder. It took her another minute to speak. "I didn't tell you, but the reason I was so anxious to go this time was because I knew it'd probably be my last time. I was still a kid this year, so it made sense to take me, but in five years I'll be twenty-two. Even if I'm still living at the agency, I'd be an adult, so it'd be weird if I went."

"I figured that was the size of it."

"Then why did—" Rachel made a deep-fried noise of teenage rage in her throat. "Why did you fight me so hard? I had to spend all day convincing you and you complained the entire way on the train there!"

"Because I wanted to go by myself, jerk," Richard said. "I didn't want the brat there and I didn't want to have to worry about who was eyeballing you in the hot springs. And guess what happened: I was right. Conan got an eyeful and lost two pints of blood, you were traumatized, and I never redeemed my free drinks at the store. All so you could go to the hot springs."

"The last time we went, Craig promised me that he'd tell me more funny stories about the Judo club," Rachel said. "He said I'd almost be an adult the next time he saw me, so I'd be old enough to be able to hear more of the secrets he had to censor for me as a kid. I was really looking forward to it and didn't want to miss out on him telling me more stories about your time in college, especially because you're usually so closed-off about it. It wasn't just about the hot springs."

Richard kept his eyes on the starlings and blinked red from his peripherals for a minute. "When did he say all that to you?"

"Say what? The stories?"

"When he talked to you about being 'old enough to hear secrets'. Where did this happen and where was I?"

"Oh, god, Dad, no, it was just in the table tennis room," Rachel blurted, finally growing alert at the tonal shift. "You were there the whole time. It wasn't anything inappropriate, I promise. I was begging him for more stories and it was just his way of telling me I was too young to hear some of them. That's all."

Richard figured that was pretty good because all in all it wasn't too late to revisit Craig and lend his eyeball another cigarette. Either way he'd still have to pee first. "What's your question?"

"He told me there was one person in the Judo club he couldn't beat, but he refused to tell me who it was and made a game out of me figuring it out before the weekend was over. I was thinking it had to be Scott because Scott was the co-captain, but then when Craig was attacking everybody in the room he avoided you until the end."

"It was me." Richard was already bored of the game. "Just in practice, though. He would've probably beaten me if he'd gotten me in front of a big enough crowd, but it never came to that so we never found out for sure."

Rachel pulled away from him.

Occupied with starlings and pee, Richard was a little surprised by the intensity of her eye contact as she shifted on the bench to face him. "Really?" she pressed, strangely insistent. "You're not exaggerating like you usually do? Craig really could never beat you, even once?"

"Why does that surprise you? I already told you I was good."

"You didn't tell me you were the best."

"Clean out your ears, I've been telling you that literally every single day since you learned how to poop," Richard said. "What is it this past week with people telling me I've been lying to them? I'm the exact same as I've always been. It's not my fault people don't pay attention."

"But you're never serious and you know it," Rachel said. "You're always bragging about being the best at this or the greatest at that and you're such a show-off about everything, it's hard to take you seriously when you actually are legitimately good at something. And when Craig went after you and you didn't fight…"

Richard and his bladder truly had no idea where she was going with this tangent. Rachel seemed to sense it and retreated, mouth tense, massaging her thighs with her fists slowly for a moment. "I just thought he was going to hurt you," she said simply. "And it would've helped to know that you knew the whole time that you were going to win, because then I wouldn't have had to be so scared for you. That's all."

Well there was literally nothing he could do about that whatsoever. It seemed like a personal revelation and Richard was caught between sympathizing with her misery and telling her to fuck off and walk this particular injury off herself. Whether he'd stayed on the second floor or traveled headfirst out the window, he still would've won against Craig. One just involved more paperwork and shrapnel. "Whatever." Rachel sighed and stood before he could decide. "We can go home now. That's all I had to say. Thanks for listening."

"I don't know what you want me to do."

"Not really anything," Rachel said. "I think I just needed to get some of that off my chest. I've done a lot of thinking, and now that I've accepted this, I… think I just need to get used to the fact that this is my life now. I just need to stop trying to make sense of it."

"I mean, it doesn't have to be that way. If you're stressed out I can just give you to a commune or sign you over to a church to be a nun. The only thing they murder over there is fun."

"Yes, joke," Rachel sighed to the sky. She looked murderously blissful as she violently realigned her chi. "It's fine. This is fine."

"Can I pee now?"

"Yes, you can pee. But hold it until we get to Windham's."

Richard raised the water table for the entire county while Rachel drained his bank account to feed panhandlers. For not at all personal reasons Richard intervened at the last second to add snickerdoodles despite Rachel's protests of I can make those for you myself. Orange slices and strawberry wafers were the last to be added and the box was heavy and straining in Rachel's arms with crimes that were not at all Richard's fault. "For the record, I have no idea what we just talked about back there," Richard said. "If you're expecting something different from me from now on, I'm probably going to start disappointing you."

"Oh, Dad." Her expression was strangely tender. She was going to need lotion for sunburn too if the tips of her ears and the bridge of her nose were any indication. "You've never once stopped disappointing me my entire life."

"Thanks."

"I love you, Dad."

"Thanks."

She let him steal one snickerdoodle and slammed the lid of the box down on his hand when he tried to sneak in for a second helping. He loved her too but only just barely. "I just need you to listen," Rachel said. "That's all. Everything else – the cases, the murders, Conan, even Jimmy – I can handle. I've decided to face it head on. I just need you to listen when I come to you for help."

"Fine."

"Just listen, Dad," Rachel said.

---

.

Conan thumped back up the stairs just after seven in the evening, backpack on his back and skateboard under his arm. He smelled like the outdoors. "I forgot," he said.

Richard had liquefied off the sofa in his doze and spread his puddle of limbs out over the coffee table. The news had since ended and ceded its airtime to a cop drama with a poor junk to boob ratio. Richard clumsily shifted his heel away from the thicket of beer bottles and tried to get upright on the sofa without property damage. "To tell you, I mean," Conan said. He was stiff and grudging, not making eye contact. "Or ask you I guess."

The room promenaded around him. Rachel had made curry for dinner and he felt it violently repositioning his intestines in order to have its way with him. "Ask me what."

"I have to go to Dr. Agasa's for a while. I'll be back a little after ten. Rachel went to bed early and I don't want to wake her up."

"Bullshit you need help on your schoolwork," Richard said. "You spoke French in your sleep last night. What are you really going over there for?"

"Schoolwork. I told you. And he wants my help working on some stuff. It's an exchange."

"Look, whatever you have, just give it to me. It's first grade curriculum, you don't need a physicist to help you misspell countries on a blotchy map printout."

"I'll be back a little after ten," Conan repeated. "I'll call if I'm going to be late. We have a lot of work to do so it might run over. Don't worry about me if it does."

That sounded very much like telling and not asking. "Wait, did you already leave?"

"It's habit," Conan said, immediately bristling. "I'm not used to asking to go out. I still don't think I should have to, but I don't want to upset Rachel right now. I have to go, he's expecting me."

"Fine. Nine. I don't feel like waiting up for you."

"Nine—" Conan's jaw dropped. The betrayal was rank. "But I came back to tell you!"

"Yeah, and now I'm punishing you for being honest and doing the right thing. That's how parenthood works."

"I could have just kept going instead of asking for permission. You're wasted, you wouldn't have even known I was missing."

"You sleep right next to my bed, you booger-munching terrorist," Richard said. "Nine. Quit giving me crap."

"Ten." Conan spoke between gritted teeth. "I have a lot of work to do. Even making that's going to be almost impossible with the transit time."

"I know you wish that was my problem, but I checked my calendar and it's still yours," Richard said. "Your bad time management, your fault. Just go tomorrow after school if you can't get it all done in time."

"Them my stuff will be late!"

"Who cares."

"You do. And Rachel does. You'll complain when my grades tank but you won't help me keep them up."

Richard emphatically gave no shits about grades. "Fine. Nine-fifteen."

"Nine forty-five."

"I don't haggle with terrorists. It's nine-fifteen or go upstairs."

"Nine-thirty and two slices of diner—"

Richard had been trying to extricate his left knee from the crotch of the sofa. He stopped at this and looked over.

Conan stood at the doorway looking bewildered with himself. He blinked at the floor, fingers flexing around his skateboard, mouth opening and shutting.

Richard felt something waft in and out of his head like smoke. "Fine," he said. "But make them lemon. And don't tell Rachel."

Conan's throat worked a little. He licked his lower lip, made near eye-contact and aborted. His smile was sudden and weak. "Silence costs one slice," he said, and left.

Richard watched the mostly boobless cop show until his blood alcohol level pulled him back down his own drain. He woke sometime after with his discarded suit jacket draped over him and a slice of lemon diner pie on the coffee table. A half-melted milkshake sat beside it with a spoon and straw anchored in the middle.

The box from Benoit sat under his desk.