Chapter 16: Love of My Life
Love of my life,
You hurt me,
You've broken my heart,
Now you leave me
The lab was quiet. Danny concentrated fiercely on the job at hand. A suspect had gone through a plate glass window and then disappeared. There were probably prints and blood on the shattered glass. Danny had spent hours piecing together the glass so he could dust it for prints and blood spatter against an unidentified body in the morgue. It was painstaking, tedious, and potentially unnecessary work that may bring them no closer to resolving the case.
Still, Mac had given Danny the assignment, and that was all he needed to know at the moment. Besides, it kept him from thinking or feeling. If he thought anymore about anything outside of the job right now, he might just shatter into shards as thin and scattered as the ones he was sifting through so carefully.
He was pulling a double shift; Mac had approved it after he had seen how far Danny had got with his glass puzzle. If he had stopped at the end of his shift, Danny would have lost the "picture" of the glass he had built up in his head. Now, nearing the end of another eight hour shift, his arms and back ached from leaning over the table, and his eyes felt as if tiny pieces of glass had worked their way under his safety glasses. He was shaking, but he was finished.
Lindsay came into the lab and leaned over his hunched shoulder to look at the patterns outlined by the Luminol and fingerprint powder. Every detail had come up.
"Danny, that's incredible! I can't believe you got it all together. You can see every detail – it's like watching a movie of the guy going through the glass."
Danny went completely still as she leaned against his chair. He could feel her heat, smell her scent, feel her breath on his cheek. If he moved one way, she'd be in his arms. He closed his eyes and concentrated on controlling his breathing. Then, achingly slowly, he stood up, turning away from her, and moved to the other side of the table.
"I've finished the glass, but it needs to be photographed, and the paperwork needs to be logged.." his voice trailed off in exhaustion as he ran his hand through his hair.
Lindsay's heart ached when he withdrew so obviously, but she tried to forget her own feelings and focus on him. "You look awful. Book out, and I'll finish up."
He looked at her for the first time, she thought, in weeks, and his smile lit his face. "Thanks. I owe you one. See you at shift change."
It didn't take much, did it, to make her happy? One little smile and she was ready to melt, or at least to do his paperwork. Lindsay could not help the little rising of her heart. That was a touch of the old Danny back, at least!
She went to the computer in her office to post the results, and could not stop herself from glancing over at Danny's unnaturally tidy space. Since their – she didn't know what to call it – conversation, she supposed, Danny had hardly spent any time in here. He'd drift in, and drift out again if she didn't seem totally pre-occupied with whatever task she had at hand.
"So much for being there for me. If you could get any farther away from me, I'd have to call long-distance to give you my results," she muttered viciously, if unfairly.
She closed her eyes and indulged in a small daydream. She imagined Danny moving towards instead of away from her, then holding, her, as he had in the aftermath of the flash bomb. He had reached for her, held her as if she were the most precious thing in his life. And she, instead of pulling away, had responded with all the desperation she was capable of, holding on to him convulsively, her one stable point in an uncertain universe.
She had in pulled away the instant she had felt him shift from protection to something more urgent. She had done what she always did – returned to the job. It was the job which had always made sense, had always held her together. She didn't need a man to keep her steady. She could only rely on herself and the evidence.
But her arms ached every time she saw him. She wanted to put them around him and hold on until she could bring that light back into his eyes. She really couldn't have arrived in his life at a worse time: Aiden, Louie, and Lindsay herself had been that triple play which seemed destined to take Danny out of the game. How could she learn to live with that?
Lindsay took the letter from the Crime Scene Unit in Toronto out of her desk one more time. It was dated only a few weeks ago, but its dirty crumpled state proved that it had been read and read again. She looked down on it, hardly needing to look at it to remember the terse, official phrases, praising her experience and asking her to share her knowledge. She was being offered a chance to do something significant, unique: to make what had happened back in Montana stand for something, to make that time at least pay for something. So why wasn't she jumping at it?
What chance did she have here?