A/N: The next few chapters are a total descent into melodrama. Sorry, I couldn't fight it!
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"Thanks," Eames said as the detective dropped Dr. Li's date book on her desk. "I thought these things went out of style when Palms were invented."
"Some people . . . have a hard time adjusting as adults. Younger people are more malleable."
"Malleable," she mimicked, opening the book. "Those students didn't look too flexible to me. Ok, here we go . . . February of '06. He died on the . . . 16th?"
"Yeah."
She flipped through the pages until she found the page for the day before Li's death. "A lot of illegible scrawl," she sighed in defeat.
Goren craned his neck to see what Eames was looking at. "Red pen, his favorite."
"Oh yeah?" she said, looking up at him.
"Sara King showed me one of her graded papers. Coveredin red."
"Poor girl," she said, shaking her head sympathetically. "I still get the urge to cry when I see red pen, and I've been out of school for more years than I want to count."
"And all the writing on her paper," he said, pointing to the page they were reading, "was just as contorted as this stuff."
"I was just going to ask about that." She slid the book across to him. "Can you decipher any of it?"
Leaning closer, Goren studied it for a few seconds. "The eight a.m. slot says something about . . . 'secretary' . . . maybe 'meet with secretary'?" Tracing the writing with one finger, he said slowly, "See, this here could be a pointy 'm,' and the next two letters look the same."
"Eight is too early for him to have taken the drug, though," she pointed out. "He'd have been dead well before midnight the next day."
"True." He scanned the rest of the page, mumbling the occasional word to himself. "Here, look at this," he said after a few seconds, pointing to something written near the 7 p.m. slot. "Capital 'R' . . . 'w'," he began to read, ". . . slash . . . 'ldk' . . . semicolon . . . 'c' . . . and the number two"
"Rwldkctwo?" Eames shook her head as she tried to pronounce it as a word. "No way. Either you're reading it wrong or it's a seriously obscure abbreviation."
"Here, you try." He passed her the book and watched as she squinted at the handwriting.
"I'm seeing something like 'Rulnkc:z'."
"Which . . ."
"Doesn't make sense either, I know." Dropping the book back onto her desk, she tipped her head back and sighed. "It's really hard to crack a code when you can't even read the encoded- What?" she asked as Goren stiffened.
"You gave me an idea. We need someone to analyze the handwriting before we can analyze what it says, right? Well, doesn't the department has a graphologist on retainer?"
"Uh . . ." She flipped through the rolodex they shared. "Here we go, under 'H' for 'handwriting.' A John Simmons, address in SoHo," she read. "How trendy."
"Let's give him a call," he said, holding out his hand for the address card. "Maybe he has enough experience with messy writing to translate it."
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"Hoo, boy," John Simmons whistled later that day. "This is about as bad as I've ever seen it. The guy a doctor?"
"College professor," Eames corrected.
"Ah, the group with the second-worst handwriting. Of course." He eyed the transparency he'd made of the date book page for a moment, then laid it on the projector humming in front of him. "This was fun, thanks for calling me."
"So you were able to transcribe it?" Eames asked.
"Of course, Detective, uh . . ." He trailed off, waiting for Eames to supply her name.
"Detective Eames. But call me Alex," she said, offering him a smile.
Goren blinked, taken aback. Call me Alex was not usually something that came out of her mouth when she was talking to a professional associate other than him. His interest piqued, and feeling vaguely jealous, he studied Simmons through narrowed eyes.
John Simmons, an insurance investigator when he wasn't assisting the NYPD, was a few inches shorter than he was, which would have put him at about six feet tall - small compared to Goren, but still much taller than Eames. His hair was dark brown, with hardly a hint of silver showing. Goren touched his own graying hair reflexively, reminding himself that it was genetic. Besides, Simmons appeared to be quite a few years younger than him, which gave him an automatic advantage when it came to signs of aging.
"Goren?" she said from beside him, staring at him curiously. "You alive up there?"
"Huh?"
"The screen's this way," she said, reaching up and gently turned his head to the right. "You won't learn much from staring at the projector."
"Sorry," he said, nervously loosening his tie. "Just . . . thinking." Was Alex standing a bit closer to Simmons than she had been a minute ago?
"Ok," Simmons said, pointing back to the projected page. "As I was saying, the first character is fairly easy to interpret: a capital 'r.' After that, things get mushy. The guesses you guys gave me had a 'w' and a 'u' in this next position, but if you'll notice," he said, using a pen to point to the letter in question, "there are one . . . two . . . three dips of the pen. Too many for a 'u' or a 'w.' I'm pretty sure what it actually is is a double 'w'."
"Is that a new letter I haven't heard of?" Eames said, raising her eyebrows.
"I'm sure your English capabilities are more than adequate, Alex," Simmons said with a teasing smile. "It's not a letter. It's actually two letters, run-together. Two 'w's."
"So the first three letters are 'Rww'?" said Goren.
"Yes. And the next character is, indeed, a slash."
"What's the rest?" prompted Eames.
Tracing each letter as he went, Simmons dictated, "R-w-w-slash-l-d-k-c-two."
"Rww/ldk:c2," Goren repeated, jotting it down on a notepad. "Still completely opaque."
"Agreed," Eames said with a nod.
Simmons shrugged. "Hey, the decoding is your job. I just read the writing. I do wish you luck, though."
"Thanks," she said with a self-effacing smile. "We can use all the help we can get."
"Oh, I doubt that," he replied, shaking each of their hands as they left his office. "Give me a call if you have any more handwriting work."
"Uh, yeah," Goren said with a distracted nod, putting his hand on the small of his partner's back and propelling her out the door.
Alex let him push her through the door, then pulled away. "Do you mind?"
"Sorry," he said with a shrug. "It looked like you'd have been happy to stay there all day if I didn't get you moving."
"What do you mean by that?" she said, striding ahead of him and unlocking the car.
"Nothing."
"Bobby," she said, giving him a baleful look, "are you trying to get me to punch you?"
He blinked. "Uh . . . no?"
"Then why, for the love of god, are you - only a few hours after denying any such opinion, mind you - insinuating that I'm spending the investigation flirting my way through the men of New York?" She jerked open the car door and slid into the driver's seat. "Don't sulk. Get in."
"I'm not sulking," he protested. "I'm trying to figure out what I said that makes you think that."
"You're being ridiculous," she said with a sigh. "But I'm sick of fighting about it. So fine, I'm a flake who's only on Major Case so I can get dates with criminals. That make you feel better?"
"No."
Tired of being angry, she purposely tamped down her emotions and tried to keep her statements on the logical level that Goren functioned so well on. "Ok, look," she said quietly, sounding only a little strained, "we obviously have a problem here. As far as I can tell, that problem has two possible causes: first, your opinion of my skills is genuinely that low, in which case logic would dictate that we shouldn't be partnered anymore."
"Wait, Alex, I . . ."
"Or," she pressed on, "you have some kind of personal problem with me that you can't keep under wraps. If that's the case, unless we can work it out, it's also not a good idea for us to be partners. We have to be able to trust each other, remember?"
"I trust you."
"Yeah, well, right now I can't trust you."
Stunned into silence, Goren sat back in his seat. He had never considered that she might feel she couldn't trust him. He was well aware of his many social faults, but he'd never thought untrustworthiness was one of them.
"You going to say anything?" Alex prompted after a few minutes of heavy silence.
"I . . . don't know."
"You don't know?" she ground out, momentarily forgetting about conquering her emotions. "Bobby, that's not an acceptable answer."
"What do you want from me?" he asked as she swung the car into their parking lot. "I don't know what to say."
"You could try telling me which the cause is."
"I don't have a cause. I don't think you're a flake. I don't have anything that needs to be worked out."
"Goren," she said unwaveringly. "This has been going on for days, and it's not getting better. If you're not willing - or not able - to talk to me about it, then as much as I don't want to, I'm going to have to resolve it by myself."
"What do you mean by . . . 'resolve'?" he asked. "That sounds ominous."
"It's not. It's just truthful." She looked at him for another second, waiting, and then let out the breath she'd been holding. "That's what I figured. I'll see you upstairs."
By the time Goren had processed that, she was gone.
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Alex managed to retain her self-control until she got into the only one-stalled ladies room in the building, but only barely. The trembling started just as she locked the door behind her; the struggle to hold back tears began only seconds later.
She stared down at her shaking hands, disgusted with herself. She'd made such a good show of confidence in the car; why was her mind suddenly vapor-locked now? She knew she'd made the right decision. What she'd told Bobby was true - if they couldn't trust each other, it literally wasn't safe to be partners.
But what was she going to do now? Was she going to go knock on Deakins's door? Walk in there and tell him that she was giving up, couldn't deal with the squad's most brilliant detective any longer? Deakins would want to know why, and any way she phrased it, it was Bobby who would come out looking bad. She would be seen as having done the best job she could in an impossible situation, and he would be blamed for driving away yet another partner.
Wait, why was she worrying about him? She should be concerned with getting herself out of this situation with a minimum of damage, professional and personal. To hell with Bobby Goren and his not-so-subtle jibes about her work ethic. She needed to be concerned with Alexandra Eames, because right now she felt . . . insubstantial.
Hell, she was really, truly hurt by her partner's behavior. Bobby didn't play games with her. He had no reason to dig at her, to try to make her look like a useless cop. And yet . . . that's what his actions had told her that he thought over the past few days.
Was she unfit for police work? Did she do her job as well as she could have? Was there something more, some technique, some attitude, that good cops had that she'd missed?
"Alex!"
She stiffened at the sound of someone banging on the door. How had he hunted her down so quickly? She sure as hell wasn't coming out of the bathroom and facing him as she was now, shaky and teary-eyed. "I'm fine!" she called back after taking a few deep breaths.
"Come out of there," he replied with another knock.
"Please just leave me alone for a few minutes, ok? I . . . don't feel well."
Goren switched to rattling the doorknob. "What's wrong? You're sick? Unlock the door!"
"I'm fine. Just . . . go away!" Her breath hitched on the last word and she shut her mouth, taking slow breaths through her nose and trying to suppress the spasmodic breathing the tears were causing.
"Alex, I'm not leaving. I'm sitting down outside this door until you either come out or let me in."
Torn between aggravation and embarrassment, she didn't respond. Sitting down on the floor, she just cradled her head in her hands and kept trying to control her gasping breaths.
"I can pick this lock if I need to," Goren reminded her through the door.
"Don't," she said dully. Arguing with him about it was pointless; if he wanted to get in badly enough, there was nothing she could do to stop him.
"Tell me what's wrong and I won't," he wheedled. "Alex, come on."
He wanted to know what was wrong? she thought, holding back a bitter laugh. Of course he didn't know what was wrong; that was the reason she'd ended up here in the first place! "Nothing's wrong," she finally replied.
"I don't believe you."
"I don't care if you believe me."
"Well, I care."
She couldn't hold back the laugh now. "It's a little late for that. Bobby, I'm trying to be professional about this. Please go away so I can keep it that way."
Defeated, Goren lowered his hand from the knob and turned away. "Ok, I'm going. Please come out soon." He walked away as slowly as possible, straining to hear the click of the door lock as she emerged, but by the time he reached the stairs, there had been no sound.