A/N: All previous disclaimers and spoiler warnings apply. Spoilers for all seasons of CSI:NY. A new chapter will appear next Tuesday or Wednesday.

Mac Taylor stood outside the metal door to Lessing's cell and fought the beginning of a headache. Not a migraine, thank God, but a bastard, nonetheless, and only discipline kept him from closing his eyes and kneading his throbbing temples with his fingertips. The head physician was beside him on one side, and on the other, a security guard shuffled from foot to foot, thumbs hooked into his scuffed, unpolished gunbelt.

"I don't know how this could've happened," the doctor was saying nervously, and he alternated between running his podgy, indelicate fingers through his thinning hair and riffling through the papers on his clipboard without looking at them. It was clear from his mottled complexion and woebegone expression that he thought his professional goose thoroughly cooked. After all, a confirmed mass murderer had almost slipped his tether on the good doctor's watch.

"Why don't you tell us what happened, Dr. Halsey," Stella suggested coolly.

The doctor reddened further, and his thick neck receded into the thick, white collar of his coat, a turtle seeking the comforting protection of his shell. "I already explained everything to the officers who were here earlier," he whined.

"Well, we need you to explain it again," Stella said, and Mac knew Dr. Halsey was treading on dangerous ground.

So did Dr. Halsey. His shoulders slumped, and he took refuge in the endlessly shifting forms on his clipboard. "At the two A.M. bedcheck, Mr. Lessing was present and accounted for. This was verified by the log sheet at the front desk," Halsey muttered to the pink form beneath his thumb. "At the three A.M. check, it was discovered that he was not in his bed. A thorough search of the hospital was conducted. Room by room, as per protocol," he added hastily, as if he thought they suspected him of lying. There was no sign of him, so we contacted the police."

Halsey spared him a furtive, bruised glance and then went on. "Five minutes after the first patrol unit arrived, Mr. Lessing was discovered wandering in front of the hospital by Mr. Greene." Halsey gestured to the security guard, who officiously hitched up his pants as if he were being called forth to battle.

Greene was only too eager to take up the tale. He lumbered forward with a bow-legged, John Wayne swagger. "That's right," he agreed, and nodded vigorously. "I was doin' my rounds like usual and found him staggerin' 'round by them fancy ashtrays made of rocks, you know?" A faint mist of spittle and the sharp, sweet scent of spearmint gum wafted from his mouth.

Mac did know. He'd noted the ashtrays on his way inside. There was nothing fancy about them. They were squat stubs of concrete jutting from the uneven asphalt, overlaid with cheap landscaping pebbles and filled with even cheaper sand and smashed cigarette butts. He forewent the analysis of medical architecture in favor of, "When was this?"

Greene made a great show of thinking. "Four-thirty. He was just lurchin' along, a regular space case, you know? Only he was butt-ass naked. And just between you and me, he ain't got the kind'a equipment to be carryin' that off. Know what I mean?"

"Thank you, Mr. Greene," Dr. Halsey said wearily, and Stella raised an eyebrow in mystified contemplation.

"Sure thing," Greene said, and gave a jaunty salute. He chewed his gum with gusto, and as Mac caught glimpses of the rubbery hunk between flashes of yellowing teeth, he was inexplicably reminded of a hunk of brain tissue.

Or like a hunk of Flack's intestine, supplied a helpful, gleeful voice, and Mac's hand was suddenly heavy with the slick loop of spurting artery that had coated his fingers with a young detective's life.

He blinked to dispel the unwanted image, but the phantom weight remained, and he surreptitiously wiped his palm on the starched crease of his pants.

"That will be all for now, Mr. Greene." Halsey let the precious clipboard drop to his side and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.

"Oh, sure, sure," Greene agreed chummily, but he lingered, took loping, circular footsteps that led him nowhere.

"Now, if you please, Mr. Greene. Before more 'space cadets' escape."

Greene visibly deflated. He favored Halsey with a mutinous glare and slouched away, hands stuffed into pockets of his pants. "Yeah, yeah," he muttered to no one in particular. Don't get your goddamned panties in a bunch. I'm on it."

"A sterling job of it you've done so far," the doctor retorted drily.

Greene muttered something that bore a suspicious resemblance to Go fuck yourself and trudged around the corner and out of sight.

Mac turned to Halsey, who was leaning against the wall with his hands clasped loosely in front of him. "Lessing was nude when you found him?"

"Yes. Which was strange, because when I checked on him myself at just after midnight, he was in his pajamas. An undershirt and flannel pants. Standard hospital issue, you understand.

"You checked on him yourself? Is that a standard practice, doctor?"

Dr. Halsey bristled. He straightened and adjusted his limp tie with a vicious jerk. "I make it a point to visit all high-risk offenders, yes."

"High-risk?" Stella, bright-eyed and alert, poised for attack. "According to the forensic psychiatrists who examined him, he was deemed a low risk for a repeat offense. Are you telling us that's not true?"

Dr. Halsey pressed himself to the wall as if he thought to escape Stella's unflinching scrutiny by blending with the bland, white plaster. "Well, no," he admitted. "In fact, he's proven quite docile. He's responding well to his treatment and has shown no sign of aggression. Most of the time, he lies on his bed and looks at pictures of his wife and daughter. There, you see?" He pointed to a square of vibrant color on the otherwise drab wall, thick fingertip pressed to the glass of the small observation window. "He's been asking me about setting up visitation with them at some point.

"Oh, yeah," Stella said savagely. "Never mind the six families who'll never see their husband or wife again. Her eyes were flashing, and her lean body was tensed with the urge to spring at the quailing, ineffectual man in front of her.

Halsey drew himself up, a whippet before a tiger. "I don't judge my patients, Miss Bonasera," he replied imperiously. "I merely treat them."

"That's Detective Bonasera to you," she snapped, and Mac could hear the barely-restrained, you asshole behind it.

"Stella," he soothed, and she reluctantly subsided.

Her anger wasn't just for the victims killed in that Sunday morning blast, but for Flack, who had spent the majority of the summer lying flat on his back and suckling morphine from a plastic teat. Flack had run interference for her during the IAB investigation of the Frankie Mala shooting, and Stella hadn't forgotten. As far as she was concerned, Don Flack was good people, and Stella Bonasera would go to the wall and over it for those she considered friends.

And if she can't go over it, she'll tunnel under it, and if all else fails, she'll go through it. She isn't afraid to get bloody when the situation calls for it. You weren't sure what to expect when she strode into your office ten years ago and announced that she was ready for a job in the lab, and that was that. You never considered yourself a vainglorious man, but you'd grown accustomed to a respect that bordered on shy deference. It was, Hey, Mac, what should I do? But not Stella. With her, it was, Unless you've got a better idea, buddy, this is what I'm going to do, and just you try to stop me. It was refreshing and unsettling all at once, her confidence, and over the years, you've come to count it among her greatest assets.

She's beautiful, too. You had Claire eleven years ago, and so the idea of you and Stella was never an option. Still isn't. Claire is gone, returned to the dust on a grey September morning, but you're still a mess, still holding yourself together by stubbornness and Marine know-how. Not by shoelaces; you needed those for Flack. You're more screwed up now than you were when you got off the plane from Chicago fifteen years ago, and Stella deserves better than that. She's already survived her brush with madness, thanks to the departed and largely unlamented Frankie Mala.

You'll never forget what you saw when Flack kicked in the door to her apartment. Overturned furniture in the hall and beyond that, Frankie Mala sprawled in a pool of blood on the bedroom carpet. And Stella, hidden from view at first by the bed. She was facedown, and the sundress she wore was bunched indiscreetly over her thighs. She looked small and fragile, a Barbie doll left by a careless child. It was so unlike the tough, no-nonsense Stella you knew that part of you refused to accept it even as your logical mind was processing the scene. Stella kicked ass and took names. She did not lie bonelessly on the floor, her cheek swollen, with the shadow of Frankie Mala's knuckles blooming on one cheek and a cut weeping blood beneath one eye.

Flack didn't touch her. He was too busy making sure the monster was dead and securing the scene, doing everything a good detective should, in other words. Whether he was motivated by a desire to keep the investigation above-board or by self-preservation, you can't say and don't care to guess. Maybe it was both. Whatever or whichever it was, it was a wise decision. If he'd tried to touch her, you'd have rounded on him with fangs bared. Stella was your partner, your responsibility, and you weren't surrendering her to anyone else.

Except that you did eventually. Flack went with her to the hospital while you stayed to process the scene, and they forged a bond over paper gowns and bad coffee. So it didn't surprise you when she pitched a tent at his bedside when the world upended and left a gaping hole in his gut. She looked out for her own, and she was there as often as Flack's young wife. Sometimes they bookended him, anchored him to the world with the gentle yet insistent grip of their hands. Rebecca Flack's trembled, but Stella's were steady as bedrock. She had made up her mind that she wasn't going to lose any more good people, and Stella was used to getting her way.

"One thing I don't understand, Dr. Halsey," she was saying. "If you've found Lessing, why are we here?"

"Because something has clearly happened to him," Halsey explained, and stroked his bedraggled tie. "Prior to his escape, Mr. Lessing was docile but alert. Thanks to a vigorous and consistently-applied regimen of medication, he was learning to differentiate between reality and his psychotic breaks. He was able to acknowledge that the act for which he was incarcerated was wrong, and not an act of patriotism."

From the corner of his eye, Mac saw Stella bite the inside of her cheek to smother a scathing retort.

"Now he's non-responsive, almost catatonic."

"Is it possible he suffered some sort of psychotic break?" Mac asked.

"Of course," Halsey conceded. "In fact, it's even likely given his history of mental disorder. But I want to be certain. Especially since he was covered in this when we found him." He held out his hands, palms up, as if in supplication. They were covered in a fine layer of dark brown dirt.

Mac set down his field kit, squatted beside it, and opened it. He pulled out a pair of latex gloves and pulled them on with an efficient, crisp snap. "I'm going to need a sample of that." He picked up a swab.

"Of course." Dr. Halsey brought his upturned palms together and tilted them downward.

Mac waited for Stella to snap a photo before he rolled the swab over the palm with practiced precision. He dropped the sample into the collection envelope that Stella offered him and sealed it.

"You say he was covered in it?"

Halsey nodded. "From head to toe. I was going to order a shower."

"Don't," Mac said sharply. Then, more quietly. "We'll need to process him for evidence."

"Of course." It had become the doctor's mantra in the face of the topsy-turvy world in which he suddenly and rudely found himself. Then he blinked, nonplussed. "Evidence of what?"

"I don't know yet. That's what we're here to find out."

"Of course," Halsey said again, and Mac wondered if the phrase would etch itself into the man's vocal cords, incubate in their wet, vibrating folds like a virus until the cold scalpel of a future medical examiner set it free to resonate throughout the morgue.

Cause of Death: Arteriosclerosis brought on by prolonged and acute stress.

Of course. Of course. Of courseofcourseofcourseofcourseofcoursecoursecourseof in an endless, mournful loop.

"May we go into the room now?"

"Of course," came the reply, and Mac was dimly amused to feel his own lips quirk in unconscious mimicry.

Dr. Halsey fumbled in the pocket of his coat and produced a set of keys. He paused in the act of fitting one of them into the lock and favored him and Stella with a speculative, uneasy gaze. "Would you like me to call and orderly just in case he comes out of it? It's unlikely, but it happens, and I can't predict what he'll do."

"That won't be necessary."

"Suit yourself." On your own head be it. Mac was suddenly reminded of Igor, the mad lab assistant of the even madder Dr. Frankenstein who shambled to and from in scraping subservience, all the while seeing the world with his own perverse, insane wisdom.

The door unlocked and swung open on soundless hinges. Mac went inside and wrinkled his nose at the smell, close body and long occupation. There was bleach, too, but it was overpowered by the more primal stink of a forgotten life. The door closed behind them with an ominous clang, and Stella gave an uneasy laugh.

On his cot, Lessing sat unblinking, hands lying limply on his pasty lap. He was hardly the imposing presence Mac had encountered in May, filled with virulent patriotism and dangerous mania. That Lessing had been possessed of a queer, sad charisma, one that with counseling might have been turned to a better purpose. This Lessing was lifeless in spite of the steady rise and fall of his thin chest. His eyes were distant and clouded, and saliva dangled from the corner of his lip in a glistening, silvery runner.

Mac crouched in front of Lessing and met that empty gaze with his own. "Mr. Lessing, I'm Detective Mac Taylor with the NYPD. We've met before. Do you remember?"

Nothing. Not a logy blink or grunt of acknowledgement.

"Do you remember what happened to you this evening? Where did you go? Were you alone? Mr. Lessing?"

Nothing.

Of course, said Dr. Halsey. Of course.

"There's no sign of forced entry," Stella called from her position beside the door. She opened her kit and reached for the fingerprint powder and lifting tape.

"There wouldn't be if this was an inside job," he murmured. He was still preoccupied by Lessing and his unsettling glass eyes. He reached into his kit for his penlight and shone the beam into Lessing's right eye.

"You thinking it was an escape gone wrong?"

He didn't answer her. He was too busy watching Lessing's eye in anticipation of a response.

The pupil contracted. Just like it should.

Of course, he told himself. Why shouldn't it? He switched off the penlight.

"Mac?" Stella prodded, and he jumped as though shaken from a dream.

"It's too early to tell, but it's a possibility. There's no sign of aneurysm or embolism and no external signs of head trauma that could account for his catatonic state."

Is that really what you were looking for? asked a leering voice inside his head. Is that all?

Of course it was. Of course.

"Dr. Halsey did say he'd probably suffered a psychotic break," Stella reminded him as she dusted the interior doorhandle. "And I gotta tell you, Mac; if it was an inside job, we're going to have a hell of a time proving it. There's nothing incriminating about an orderly's prints on a patient's cell, and I'm betting there's dozens."

"Hopefully, that won't be all we have to go on. Have the security tapes from the past twenty-four hours been collected yet?"

"Hawkes is on it, and Scagnetti is interviewing the orderlies who were on duty."

He opened his mouth to ask why it was Scagnetti and not Flack doing the questioning, then shut it again. Of course it wouldn't be Flack. Given that seven months ago, the man in front of him had blown a hole in the detective's gut and wagered the balance of his life on a dirty shoelace, his involvement would be a colossal conflict of interest.

Not to mention that Lessing isn't the only one who isn't the same. He tries to hide it, puts on his game face and blusters and swaggers his way through shifts, but Flack isn't who he was before the lights went out and he was buried in an avalanche of dust and rubble. The physical scars have faded-he's no longer white as chalk and leaning against the lab walls to catch his breath and smother the long-toothed beast who sank its teeth into his tender, mending guts, and he doesn't look too small and hollowed inside his suits. It's his eyes that give him away, his dull, wary eyes and the ruthless dampening of his ferocious joie de vivre. You might have thought it was sometimes foolhardy, but you admired and envied it all the same because looking at him, you could almost remember when catching the bad guys made you happy. Not just numbed to the emptiness where your better half used to live, but genuinely happy. Eight years on the job, and he wasn't jaded to the simple pleasure of justice.

But after the bombing, there were no more jokes, no more footchases where he bounded along the pavements and rutted asphalts like it was a competition. There was only stony, sallow silence and the exhausted plod of an old warhorse. He put in his hours, bolstered by cup after cup of gritty, acidic coffee you're pretty sure his doctor warned him not to drink, and shambled down the steps and home to his wife and his private, unspeakable pain. Sometimes, you'd watch him, and you'd have to swallow a cold, choking lump of guilt as you realized that you'd only saved part of him, the part that lived and breathed. The rest had been left behind in the debris of that collapsed building. Maybe he'd find it, and maybe he wouldn't. You didn't know. What you did know for certain was that you couldn't help him either way.

You couldn't blame him. Men changed irrevocably when confronted with their own mortality. Until that watershed moment, you get through life by telling yourself that death is for other people, not you. It's a comforting illusion that allows you to do incredibly stupid things and call it heroism. And then one day, it's ripped away, a security blanket torn from a stunned child's clutching fingers. A landmine detonates close enough to rupture your eardrums or singe the hair of your jarhead haircut, or a bullet passes through your buddy's brain and the sleeve of your uniform shirt, and the realization that death isn't just for everybody else fills your mouth with sour adrenaline and tugs your balls into the scant shelter of your belly. Once the illusion is broken, it can never be perfectly reassembled. There are always cracks in the looking glass.

You saw it yourself in Beirut, when the air smelled like dates and desert sand. Most of your platoon mates treated the assignment as a vacation even though the President said it was war. Oh, they conducted their weapons checks and cleaned their M-16s like good Marines, and nobody ever missed the call to duty, but underneath the façade of alert, well-trained soldiers was a group of young men still entranced by their own virility and still convinced that if death waited for no man, it would make an exception for them. You believed it, too. You can admit that in the safety of your own head.

And then the shooting started, sporadic, local skirmishes, mostly. Usually, there would be no fatalities to report. You were armed with machine guns, and the opposition was armed with sticks, rocks, and ancient rifles bartered from the Russians on the promise of future glory. What other outcome could there be? But occasionally, a stray round would find unprotected flesh, and the red blood on yellow sand broke the spell as harshly as the meaty slap of a bullet piercing flesh. Those not wounded would pick themselves up and look around, dazed, children who had suddenly found themselves in a dark and terrible wood with no fairy godmother and no kindly dwarves to protect them from the monsters who lurked behind the trees and beneath the bridges and bided their time for a chance to snatch them from the light and gobble their bones in the shadows. Where grown, military-hardened men had stood were little boys with eyes as wide as dinner plates.

You were miraculously untouched by the knowledge of mortality until the barracks bombing, and then that knowledge was seared into you like a blast pattern. You stumbled through the dust, smoke, and howling sand and found Pfc. Whitney dying in the golden dirt with his guts laid wide. You and mortality came to intimate terms then, and Whitney also put paid to any notions you might've had about being Superman. You couldn't save him, couldn't will him to survival with your cherished Marine bravado. You could only bear witness to his useless, bloody death.

You didn't realize you were hit until a medic noticed the blood on your shirt. You thought it was Whitney's last benediction, but then he cut the shirt away, and you saw the metal lodged just beneath the skin of your chest like a bullet. He pulled out the shrapnel with a pair of tweezers, and the pain came, hot and feverish and throbbing.

Have you stitched up in no time, the medic said matter-of-factly. Any other time, it would've been cheerful, but he was too stunned by the magnitude of loss to muster cheer.

If he hadn't been so pre-occupied, he probably would've noticed your growing horror. The cocoon was shattered, and there was no escaping the reality that you might've died in your bunk just like the other soldiers who had gone to bed dreaming of Farrah Fawcett and Christie Brinkley and woken up on the other side of the River Jordan with Amazing Grace sounding in their ears. The lifelong rebellion of Mac Taylor almost ended at twenty. The medic stitched up your wound and went to deal with the scores of serious casualties, and you went to the latrine and shivered beneath a free-standing shower, grateful for the water that dripped into your eyes and blurred the image of Whitney's guts quivering in the red dawn light.

You learned to live with the scar. You even succeeded in forgetting about it until Claire reawakened it with her brushing fingertips. Then you couldn't forget it because it remembered it was a part of you. You became aware again of the contrasting textures of unblemished skin and puckered, thickened scar tissue. She drew her lips and hands over it and made you shudder, and she asked you how you'd come by it.

You told her, of course; Claire was the one person in the world to whom you could or would talk about the past. And how convenient was that, considering that those confessions returned to you one bitter September morning in a fine mist of ash? What you couldn't endure so comfortably was the sour prescience of your own demise and the sneaking suspicion that you'd dodged it once already, that everything that had come after Beirut in 1983 was so much stolen time.

Stan Whitney was there to remind you, you see, in the darkness behind your closed eyelids. Before that morning in 1983, he'd been a Wisconsin farmboy, stocky as you please, with brown hair and eyes etched with permanent laugh lines. He'd smoked too much and talked incessantly of his girlfriend. One morning, he was collecting sand in a pouch to send home to her, and the next, he was holding his guts in with his hands and trying to tell you he couldn't breathe for all the blood in his mouth and throat.

He never came to you as he'd been in life. He was always as you remembered him in those last, terrible minutes, bloody and gutted and bleaching to white on the sand. You expected him in dreams, the pale phantasm of your conscience come to remind you that he mourned his lost life. But he also manifested himself while you were awake. You saw him in the corners of the scenes to which you were called as a uniform, and in the faces of the victims. Stan Whitney and his interrupted life greeted you from every face, whether they belonged to man, woman, or child. You still saw him after you became a CSI, though by then you could shut him out if you tried.

Claire could chase him away, but only just, and not always. Sometimes, when life was exceptionally sweet on your tongue, you'd look at her as she flipped through the pages of a book, and the familiar guilt would well in the pit of your stomach like acid. You'd think of the scenes you'd been called to that day and wonder if their life hadn't been the price of your continued good fortune. It was irrational, the work of survivor's guilt, but you couldn't shake the thought. Still can't, as a matter of fact. That niggling fear is what drives you long into the night on a case. If you're in some measure responsible for their deaths, then you can at least offer them justice in recompense.

You've seen that same knowledge of mortality in Flack's face. He looks older now, and not just by the seven months logged by the clock. It's the weight of hard-bitten wisdom, you suppose. You watch him and wonder if his wife has to soothe him back to sleep when the nightmares and flashbacks come for him in the middle of the night, or if he hides the night terrors from her the way you hid them from Claire, creeping into the bathroom and crouching in the shower until the nausea and the tremors pass.

You're not sure, and you don't ask, not now, with the wall of suspicion between you, thick and impenetrable as concrete. You suspect he tries, though, because Flack is all about swagger and image and not being a pussy. Least of all in the eyes of the woman he loves. You're willing to wager your salary that he slips from underneath the covers and washes the high, sickly sweetness of puke from his mouth in the bathroom sink.

You'd bet twice your salary that Rebecca Flack sees it anyway. You suspect she sleeps lightly even when she dreams, and his flights probably don't get very far. She never left his side for the eight days of his coma, and though you know it's physiologically impossible, you're not sure she even slept. She was a wan sentinel with a sniper's eyes, sometimes slumped and sometimes ramrod-straight in her chair, and always watchful.

You didn't see him much after he emerged from his coma. With him awake, it was harder for you to superimpose Pfc. Whitney's face onto his features, and with no means to exorcise your demons, you weren't sure why you were there. But you went for a few duty visits, and they were enough to convince you that Flack had held on for her. Her and the badge that was his birthright. He spoke constantly of the latter, and he was always watching her, reaching for her, petting her. Once, as you were walking towards his room with a few sports magazines you'd snagged from the pharmacy, you overheard him having a heated discussion with his therapist. He wanted to go home, he said. He had a wife to take care of, and he couldn't do that lying in some hospital bed that stank of sweat. The therapist pointed out that he couldn't do that anywhere until his abdominal wall healed. Flack spent another ten days in the hospital and likely sulked and stewed for every one of them.

You thought being home in his own bed would be good for him, but he grew more despondent. You never visited-it wasn't your place-but Danny and Stella did, and according to them, silence blanketed his apartment like a pall. Flack was morose and oddly contrite, and Rebecca withdrew completely when they showed up and hovered like a wraith in the corners of her own home.

And then one day, the pall lifted. He started to regain his vitality and the serrated edge of his tongue. His blue eyes flashed with wry humor and steely contempt, and he resumed the chase with gusto. He still grimaced or grunted when he turned the wrong way, but the burden of doubt had fallen from his shoulders, and he accepted that he was still a damn good cop.

But you fixed that, didn't you? Two months back in the saddle, and you ambush him in the street and treat him like a snot-nosed rookie without a dick in his pants. You all but accuse him of masterminding a heroin ring, never mind that you know he couldn't have because he'd spent that summer in a legal heroin haze. You demanded his memo book and asked him to be complicit in the sacrifice of one of his fellow detectives. When he protested, you didn't give a damn because you were in pursuit of justice, and that was the only thing that mattered.

Knowing what you know now-after you broke your own rules of non-involvement to clear Sheldon Hawkes-you can't imagine how galling he must've found your methods, your glib superiority. Six months before, you were pledging to see him through even though it wasn't your promise to make, and now you were questioning his integrity and his instinct as a police officer. You paraded Truby past his desk in cuffs as proof that you played no favorites, and in that moment, he hated you.

Hate mellowed to shutter-eyed contempt with time, but that's the best you can hope for. He's never going to trust you again. You knew that much when you let Jesse escape over a chainlink fence because the heart you keep hidden beneath your badge told you he was innocent. His anger bubbled over then, and even when you'd gotten the last word, his jaw twitched the way it does when he thinks a suspect is full of shit. He never said a word to you on the drive to his precinct, just stared out the windshield, and when he got out, he didn't tap the passenger side door in gratitude. He just slammed it and went inside without looking back.

You thought it was just the result of ruffled feathers, a collegial spat that would blow over, but not long after, you saw him on the street with his wife. They were browsing at a fruit and vegetable stand, sniffing and tapping their way through the produce. Flack had a tomato in one broad palm and was squeezing it gently. His other hand was rubbing Rebecca's bony shoulder with relaxed affection.

It's a tomato, babe, not a tit, she was saying. No need to cop a feel.

He laughed and kissed the top of her head. Hey, my Aunt Lucia told me this was the best way to test 'em.

Ah. Then I bow to her vastly superior knowledge.

You won't be sorry, Flack told her proudly. He placed the tomato into the basket she held on to the crook of one arm and was reaching for another when he spotted you. His face, which had been relaxed and suffused with pleasure, closed as efficiently as a slamming door. Hey, Mac, he said tonelessly, and Rebecca stiffened.

Anything good? you ventured.

Flack gave you a noncommittal shrug. Some good, some bad, just like everywhere else in the city. Behind his colorful array of crates, the vendor scowled.

If Flack was aloof, Rebecca was cold. There was no warmth in her face, only stony inscrutability, and she turned from you without a greeting. She picked up a tomato, tested the heft of it in her unsteady palm, and placed it inside the basket.

I think we've got what we need, don't you, love? she asked, and only on the last word was there any tenderness.

Yeah, I think so, Flack agreed, and rummaged in his back pocket for his wallet. He flipped it open, pulled out a few bills, and handed them to the vendor, who took them with a nod of thanks. Keep the change.

The vendor handed Rebecca a wrinkled, plastic bag filled with the tomatoes. She took it with a quiet Thank you and threaded her fingers through Flack's.

We gotta get goin, Mac, he said.

Mr. Taylor, Rebecca said by way of goodbye. Not Detective, but Mr., as though you were unworthy to carry the same rank as her husband. She looked over her shoulder as Flack pulled her into the crowd, and the mouth that had once offered you tremulous, tearstained thanks curved in a disdainful, mocking smirk. Hypocrite, her eyes said before she turned her attention to Flack, who was talking into her ear. Then the city swallowed them up and left you with only the haunting afterimage of that smirk, sharp and cutting as a whetted blade, and those hard eyes filled with terrible knowing.

You tried to broach the subject with him a few days later when he turned up in the lab breakroom to rummage in the refrigerator, but he dismissed your overture and offered no explanation. That bridge is burned, and there will be no rebuilding it.

Hypocrite. That charge has been bandied about so often of late that you're beginning to wonder if it's true. Rebecca Flack with her wordless charge, and then Hawkes with his soft-spoken dignity after your tirade in front of the lab techs. Before either of them, there was Danny, on whose face the word has been writ large more than once. He's had the stones to actually say it, to award it to you like a rancid prize. When you fired Aiden, he wore the unspoken word on his face like a scar, and sometimes, you think Stella has inherited from him. Her face is harder since Frankie Mala tempered it with his fists. In fact, it looks a lot like Rebecca's face, and that's not a comforting thought to consider, is it?

But if you're going to be honest with yourself like a good Marine should, that's not really what you're most afraid of. No. You're afraid of failing them like you failed Pfc. Whitney all those years ago on the sand in Beirut. They've all slipped through your fingers somehow. Claire, who sifted to earth in a cloud of weeping ash. Aiden, who believed that you'd catch D.J. Pratt before he hurt another woman. Danny, who was only saved from disgrace because his estranged brother wore a wire and paid for it with most of his brains. Stella, who had begun to believe in Prince Charming, only to find a dragon in her living room. Flack, who answered your summons one Sunday morning and almost never saw another, and who now flees from you as though you're a nightmare he doesn't want to remember. And Sheldon, who was nearly ensnared by the clever manipulation of the science you hold so dear. One by one, you promised to protect them, and one by one, you've let them down.

He saw Claire in his mind's eye even as he prepared the swab that would collect a dirt sample from Lessing. Her features had blurred since 9/11; one morning, he'd woken up and realized that while he could remember that her eyes were hazel, he no longer knew what they looked like. He'd tried to recreate them for hours on the canvas of his mind and couldn't, and he'd sat, panicked and sweating, on the edge of his bed with his sheets puddled around his waist to hide his shame. They never had come into focus, never during his waking hours, and he'd begun to count it as a small mercy.

Then Reed Conrad Garrett had appeared outside his apartment, and Claire Conrad Taylor had returned to brilliant focus. Not only could he recall her eyes, which her son had inherited, but he remembered her hair and the softness of her skin, and the way she smelled, cinnamon and roasted apples. Everything he had learned not to miss, in other words, and the feet of his impenetrable armor had turned to clay.

Not clay. Sand.

But now was not the time to be thinking of Reed Garrett or his lost mother. Of any of this, really. He steadied his hand and drew the swab over Lessing's forearm. He held it up to the light and studied it. Minute brown flecks dotted the surface, and he scowled. He looked at Lessing's forearm. Clean. He drew his gloved hand over the clammy flesh, and it came away covered in a fine layer of dirt. He took out his penlight and scanned Lessing from head to waist. The fine dirt blanketed him in a shroud from sole to crown.

"Stella."

Stella appeared over his shoulder. "What's up, Mac?"

He nodded at Lessing. "He's covered in dirt." He held up his hand for her inspection.

"Hunh." She repeated the experiment and peered at her hand. "It's weird, Mac. It's like it's embedded in his pores."

"The question is, why would Lessing break out of a psychiatric hospital just to roll in the dirt?"

"Another question is, what're we going to tell Flack?"

He thought of Flack then, cool and shuttered, and of his wife, with her leering mouth and unspoken accusations. Hypocrite.

"I'm not sure there's anything to tell him, Stella. For all we know, Lessing just suffered a psychotic break and wandered out. We'll know more when we analyze the security tapes, and this dirt-," He held up the evidence baggie. "-will tell us where he went."

Lessing blinked at him, and he tried one more time. "Mr. Lessing, do you know what happened to you?"

For an instant, he saw a familiar expression on Lessing's face(hypocrite), and then there was nothing. He picked up his kit, and he and Stella left the room. Outside the door, an orderly was waiting to lock the door behind them, and the turning of the key in the lock reminded him of a chuckle.