January 2014.
After her home empties, the last pair of patrol officers stepping outside with nods and open-ended offers of, "If you need anything, ma'am," Sharon sinks onto the couch. A now-unfamiliar quiet settles into every corner of the condo. The evening's events begin to gnaw at the fringes of her resolve. It had been so close to ending, right downstairs, this life that she'd taken on to protect.
For all of Rusty's bravado, he'd had no reference for the depths of what he managed to get himself into.
Then again, neither had Sharon. This truth circles her like a wasp. She hadn't known what to prepare for, this reality taking shape beyond her darkest expectations.
In a moment when she isn't quite sure what to do, not least because there's nothing to be done, she's roused by a pattern of light raps on her door. She braces herself to find Chief Taylor through the peephole, here to pass on more bad news. Perhaps the man from downstairs had killed again, or maybe each of their few leads had already run cold.
With these possibilities in mind, she's relieved to find Andy behind the knock. He grips a white paper bag in one hand and a thin stack of folders in the other. Sharon blinks at him a few times after pulling the door open, as if he's appeared at her condo out of thin air. The keys sticking up from the pocket of his jacket and his just-loosened tie say otherwise.
Still, his sense of timing is impeccable today.
"Andy," her lips curl into a grin, half-despite herself. "What are you doing here?"
"I was wrapping up a few things with SIS, down at the office. They've scraped together a file on the creep," his voice hones into a blade on the word, "that did this." He holds up the file. "Thought you might want to take a look."
"I would." She steps aside, allowing him past her, and spares the shortest of glances toward the uniforms down the hall before closing them on the other side of the door. She nods to the bag in his other hand. "And that?"
"Thought you might be hungry."
At the mention of food, her stomach grinds. Sharon's efforts to keep a straight face must fail, because he quickly adds, "I thought you might be hungry if I stopped at Pietro's."
He must have remembered the vague ramblings she'd dipped into after they'd stopped there a few months ago, on the way back to PAB from the scene of a shooting. The unexceptional 24-hour strip mall spot was probably kept afloat by the number of officers from Northeast who seem to depend upon it for the majority of their meals. Sharon couldn't help but wax nostalgic during their visit, recalling the number of late nights she'd spent there over her years in patrol, hunched over paperwork and trying to eat too-large sandwiches one handed while the kindly proprietor, the eponymous Pietro, fretted over her workload.
Comfort food that it is, Andy's mention of the deli manages to summon her appetite from somewhere beyond the laser-focused concern that has overwhelmed her evening. "Well," she says, "when you put it like that…"
He follows her into the kitchen. "I got you one of those twisted turkey whatevers—"
She smiles. "Turkey toaster?"
"Sure." He drops the bag onto the countertop and frowns toward it. "That explains why the kid at the counter was giving me a weird look."
As improbable as it would have been just minutes earlier, Sharon laughs at the scene he's sketched out. His face smooths into a lopsided and self-satisfied grin. "Anyway," he continues, "I got you a turkey whatever, whole wheat bread, spinach, tomato, onion, avocado instead of mayo, extra mustard, hot peppers, and," he finishes with a flourish that bends the list into a question, "double provolone?"
Her jaw drops. "How in the world did you remember all of that?"
He shrugs. "I pay attention."
He does. Sharon's beginning to catch onto the way Andy observes and catalogs information, tucking away even the smallest details for use later. She shouldn't be surprised — the skill is intertwined with his success as a detective. But she isn't used to being on the receiving end of this kind of attention.
It's odd; not unpleasant, but different. She wonders, from time to time, what kind of case he's piecing together on her in his head. And then, when she's feeling particularly reckless, she follows that trail into imagining how he might choose to act upon what he's found.
But now is not the time for that. "I should be the one buying you dinner," she says, thinking back to his timely phone call.
"Not necessary." Andy pauses in the process of unwrapping his own sandwich, reconsidering, meeting her eyes. "Though I wouldn't turn it down."
"Raincheck, then."
He goes back to unwrapping. "I'm just glad everything turned out okay."
Sharon pulls back a chair at the table. "Have a seat." As he relocates his sandwich and the files, she asks, "I have sparkling water, you want one?"
"Absolutely. Thanks."
Settled with their dinner at the table, Andy flips through and narrates the folder containing the barebones information SIS was able to collect. It's the frame of an investigation, one that they'll have to race to build out before the letter-writer disappears.
Sharon stares at the grainy stills that Lieutenant Cooper extracted from surveillance at the park. "This man has to be connected to Stroh."
"Yeah, but we'll be hard-pressed to find out how. He's too smart to pull one of his past clients for this."
The long history of the case rears back and smacks her in the face. She's been too focused on the direct threat posed by the letters, overlooking the sociopath at its center. Her temple pounds. She absently rubs at the pain, failing to ease it away.
"Hey, you okay?"
She offers him a small nod and drops her hand. "What would make a person to do something like this?"
He watches her poring over the list of connected homicides for a moment before asking, "Is that a rhetorical question?"
"No," she looks at him, sidelong. "Not if you have insight."
"Some guys, they go through too much," Andy squints toward the opposite wall, as if details from a long trail of investigations are written there. "It's more than just 'snapping'. It's like...a loss of humanity. That's when things get sad, even for someone like me."
"Someone like you?" She half-laughs, half-sighs. "You make yourself sound like…some kind of loach."
He shrugs. "I've seen some shit." He wads up his sandwich wrapper, pausing long enough to shoot her an apologetic look. "Sorry." She waves him off, and he continues with a smirk. "I have a reputation to uphold. So don't be compromising it."
"Sure thing, tough guy." Sharon voices the rib without thinking, without examining the familiarity in it. It might be too much, for them. Are they to the 'gentle teasing' part of their friendship? Sometimes, based on where they started, she wonders about lines: where they are, when she might step across one, all the ways they might break this thing between them.
And why, exactly, is she even worrying about all this, on a night like tonight?
Andy, for his part, just smiles that warm, surprised smile, so different from the suite of expressions he wears at work. It's the one that earned a place in her memory the first time she saw it, when she offered to accompany him to his daughter's wedding. He tamps it down with a swallow of water, though even this can't wash away the stubborn hint of it.
In the lull of their conversation, Sharon accepts that the second half of her sandwich is mocking her still-unsettled stomach. She folds the wrinkled, damp wrapper back around it, and sticks it in the refrigerator. She tries and fails to roll some of the tension from her neck. The attempt isn't helped by her notice of two folders left on the counter, marked with the telltale initials of the Criminal Intelligence Division.
She waves them in Andy's direction as she heads toward the living room, seeking out a base level of physical comfort. "What about these?"
"Ah, those are from the spooks."
"I see that."
Trailing her to the couch, Andy settles close to the armrest. The spot is precise: he's near enough to read the files she relocated to the coffee table, far enough to pretend they're not sitting next to each other.
"Haven't had a chance to read all the way through them yet." He turns one of the folders over in his hands, passing the other to her. "It felt like a shot in the dark to include CID, but Taylor insisted."
They sit in silence for a moment, bent over informant interviews and surveillance reports. Within a few pages, it's clear that none of the information will be of use in their hunt. Their subject is nondescript enough as to blend into almost any LA sidewalk, and he has no connections to the criminal networks at the heart of CID's mission.
Andy closes the cover of his folder and echoes her verdict. "I got nothing here, how about you?"
"Same."
After tossing his folder back onto the table, he sits with his elbows on his knees, like a basketball player strategizing during a timeout. "I still can't believe the lengths this guy went to, coming after Rusty."
"He managed to get far too close." The truth of this presses on Sharon's chest, in a way she hadn't allowed earlier. She releases a shaky sigh. "It feels like we're chasing a ghost."
"But we're not." Andy moves his palm to her shoulder, a reassuring gesture that his words reinforce. "This asshole has a face, he has fingerprints and a history. By making his move now, he's also gotten closer to us . And we're gonna find him." His fingers curl into a gentle squeeze. "When we do, you can have the first crack at him."
Sharon narrows her eyes at his insinuation. He clarifies, with a grin. "Metaphorically, of course." After a beat, as if compelled, he adds, "The rest of us can handle the literal part."
"Ugh, please don't." She sighs, sinking back into the cushions. He lets his hand drop as she goes. She can't fend off a stab of loss as the contact fades.
"I'll try to make sure everyone behaves." He takes a sip of from his water. "Mostly."
She can't hold back a soft laugh. "You're incorrigible."
"What can I say?" He shrugs. "I don't like to make promises I can't keep."
It's meant, with a quick smile, to be a joke, a continuation of his ribbing, part of his apparent mission to both reassure and lighten her mood. But there is an undeniable, appealing honesty to the statement.
It spurs Sharon into speaking a truth of her own, one that's been building a rigid tension down her spine for weeks. "I don't know if I can protect him."
Lending voice to the words makes them more real, a surrender to the outcome she's been fighting. She blinks against tears pricking at her eyes. "I should've admitted that weeks ago, rather than have him go out with SIS."
She twists her hands together in her lap, a distraction from both the flood of emotion and the careful way Andy watches her. She can't shake the idea that he's gathering another observation for his case.
He rubs at his jaw, turning his attention to the hills beyond her balcony. "None of us knew the lengths this guy would go to."
"Does that excuse it? Does that make it okay that I didn't pick the straightforward safest choice?" Her voice is glassy, calm water compared to the river rushing through her head. The words might as well be coming from someone else's mouth. She can't let it go, this guilt, this sinking into the realms of what-ifs and then-elses. Flighty thoughts not worth more than glances, now demanding deep inspection.
"Sharon, there isn't always a right answer, y'know?" His shoulders rise and fall in the span of the sentence, closed out by a slight shake of his head. "The way I see it, this drive to find his pen pal is the same force that made Rusty agree to testify against Stroh: independence, willfulness, and an interest in doing the right thing."
She hums an agreement. "And, yet, what I see most of all is how he keeps ending up in harm's way."
"Yeah, well, you're his mom, so…" Andy states this as an inarguable truth, instead of the thorny issue that others try to make it.
"Kind of."
"More than kind of." He watches her from the corner of his eye before gathering up his empty can and napkin. "No one is expecting you to make one hundred percent impartial decisions when it comes to this kid." He stands. "Uh, trash can?"
"Around the corner, to the left of the fridge." She watches him go and, once the thump of the lid against the bin sounds out, she counters. "Emma does."
"Emma?" He screws his face into a grimace that matches his the wide cast of his arms. "When has a lawyer ever made a solid decision on the human element of a case?"
Sensing the end of his visit is approaching, Sharon joins Andy in the kitchen. "I'd say she tried, but…"
"She didn't," he finishes, with a force that betrays his annoyance toward the situation.
Sharon can't argue the point. Emma had exacerbated the situation by threatening, multiple times, to send Rusty away. She made him feel like he needed to hide the letters if he wanted to stay with Sharon, at his school, near the few friends he'd made. If he'd felt comfortable in passing those letters to Sharon, they might have been able to find their source, before it came to this .
Andy clears his throat, capturing her attention. "Uh, I think I already know the answer to this, but just in case…"
She tilts her head as he trails off, inviting the rest of his point.
"Are you okay staying here, after everything today?"
His offer is thoughtful. It's also surprising enough that she can't deflect it offhand. Facing a question with several possible answers, Sharon goes with the most basic correction of logic. "That was downstairs."
"Yeah, okay." He drags the words out, making clear that she's talking around his point.
"I'll be fi—" She stops herself, deciding that half-truths don't fit in the vein of their conversation earlier. With a long nod, she reframes it. "I probably won't sleep much anyway."
Andy watches her for a long moment, and she can almost measure the concern building up between them. Before he says whatever's on his mind, though, his jaw shifts, just enough for her to notice. With that, the gauge is cleared. He gathers up the folders and squeezes her forearm, just for a second, before heading for the door.
But, over his shoulder, he says, "No one would blame you for taking some time tomorrow."
With a tight smile meant to reassure, she says, "I need to be there."
"I know. Still."
The message between the words: he wishes she could take a moment, that she could rest. She pulls the door open for him, nodding toward the files balanced in the crook of his arm. "There'll be time for that, after we wrap up this case."
This case. That's how she needs to think about it. Andy understands, and surely knows that he'd have the same priority. "There will be."
From across the threshold, Sharon approaches another of those lines, allowing exhaustion and the familiarity to push her forward. "And, most likely, there'll be time to fulfill that raincheck dinner, too. So think about where you want to go."
He smiles. "I will." With his signature lazy salute, he sets off toward the elevators.
Beyond the closed door, she hears him gabbing with her security detail at the end of the hall. The thought of what he might be telling the officers, no doubt leveraging his rank and ordering them to let absolutely no one approach her door, has her rolling her eyes. The thought of what they must think, with him showing up to her home after nine and staying for more than an hour, has her resting her forehead against the cool metal.
The realization that she wouldn't have traded his visit anyway...well, that'll just have to wait for another day.
They've solved nothing yet, but Sharon is looser than before he showed up. She's more certain of what happens next. And, even if the memory of Rusty nearly being killed on the third floor keeps her awake for the foreseeable future, at least guilt won't.
