Sorry for the long delay, for anyone who's following. Moving's a bitch, adjusting even more so.

Hill of Our Home

Chapter Three

"I think that was the moment what I was doing became real to me," Beckett said into her glass. Once again, it had been refilled. "On the news, you see pictures of people who've been murdered, every other channel has a different cop show with dead bodies and rape victims, but it's different, you know, when you're there." She turned a peanut vertically and set it up against the bar, as if it was listening to her. "I can't even describe it; it's like entering an alternate universe where all the light just sort of got sucked out of it."

She dropped the peanut.

"I still hadn't seen a dead body at that point, but the woman we found was almost so much worse." She wet her lips, staring very intently at the peanut. Just beyond it, she saw Flannigan adjust on the stool he'd dragged behind the bar. "She was twenty-three. Really pretty. Had this long, black hair." Once again, she grabbed the peanut. "That night, someone broke into her apartment. His name was, uh..." she thought, tapping the nut lightly against the table. "Gault. Mark Gault.

"Gault, he was posing as a cop. One of us. And she let him in." Her nails sliced through the shell. "And he forced her to her bed, and he tied her up with the cord from her lamp, and he raped her."

There was a long, ringing sort of silence, and she stared at the seat she'd occupied a decade ago.

"We must've gotten there just a few minutes too late," she continued. "She was still on the bed." And, just as clearly as if she was standing there, she saw Royce as he helped her up, and she watched as he cut the cord with his knife. She could almost feel her fingers, tight on her gun, as she stood there, paralyzed. "We stayed with her until the detectives from the Sixteenth arrived," she said, "and then we went right back out on patrol." She smiled bitterly at the punctures in the shell. "Caught a couple kids vandalizing a meter."

She fingered the rim of her glass, wanting to lift it, but didn't. "I didn't sleep that night, or the next night either. I just laid there, thinking about my mom, thinking about that woman—Alicia Mathison was her name. I couldn't seem to escape the injustice of it all, and I was struck by how little I could do about it."

She swallowed, eyebrows creasing. "I got obsessed. I kept up with the Mathison case through the Sixteenth, went to her trial after Gault was caught—and that was years later. I couldn't help her, and I couldn't seem to help my mom either." She ran her tongue against her teeth. "For a couple weeks, I didn't really sleep. I kept telling myself one day I'd be able to reopen my mom's case, and I'd catch the guy, and he'd get the needle or get hit by a bus on his way to the courtroom, but the more I told myself, the more I didn't believe it. It'd been two years, you know, with nothing. Not a word. I didn't know if I'd ever make detective, was starting to think that even if I did, when I reopened her case there'd be nothing there to find. That I'd just be chasing empty leads forever. And the more I thought that, the more I started to believe it."

She paused, then smiled grimly at her peanut, and at the little sickle marks her nails had made in it. "And then I did something stupid." She looked up at Flannigan. "I went down to One PP."

She half-expected a floodlight to pop on, exposing her to a SWAT team with assault rifles trained on her chest. She imagined them cuffing her, stripping her of her badge and her gun, throwing her out of One PP and the police department. She saw herself clearing off her desk and taking back her little mug from Canal Street, watching as Royce and the rest of the precinct went on with their day without her.

But nothing happened, and she was still just standing there, one palm pressed to the side of the door.

Pulling herself together, she unclipped her flashlight from her belt and shined it into the darkness as she stepped into archives.

It was cool down here, but in the heavy sort of way that came from being underground, not air conditioned, and it smelled like old paper. As she walked down the first aisle, sweeping her beam over years and names, she was reminded, oddly, of a used bookstore and the musty, almost sweet smell of old books that hadn't been touched for years.

She came to the end of the aisle. These were all records from the 70s.

Exhaling, she skipped a couple rows and went down the next.

Today was her day off after a late shift the night before. Royce had taken her back to Flannigan's last night, and she hadn't managed to fall asleep until almost five in the morning. When she'd woken at eleven, she'd wanted nothing more than to stay in bed, crack open the novel on her end table, and have a couple cups of coffee to combat the ache behind her eyes.

But, instead, she'd slipped into her uniform, clipped on her heavy utility belt, gun, knife, and taser, and she'd left for One PP to gamble on a lie. When she'd arrived, the building had been buzzing with employees and officers returning from lunch, and the sergeant behind the desk had hardly glanced at her badge before allowing her down to archives.

She'd told him she was here to pick something up for Royce.

Here. Late 90s.

She cut her pace in half, a half-desperate sort of fear roaring through her gut and up her chest as she came to 1999.

And there it was, Bai – Bon.

Her heart pulled painfully, and she stared at the box, feeling almost sick. Then, with no small amount of trepidation, she slipped it from the metal shelving, flashlight gripped between her teeth, and sank to the floor where she stood.

The lid of the box hit the floor with a hollow thwak, and then she found the file, with her mother's name written in neat script along the top tab, and she felt the box slide from her lap to concrete as she stared half-blindly at the manilla envelope.

She was here; she'd done it.

She didn't know what the hell she was going to do, but she was here.

And then she opened the file.

Her blood drained from her face.

She was looking at the top sheet of a pathology report, which was part of a larger packet of information held together by a paperclip. It seemed to her that the report was most of what the file contained, and a bit of flipping confirmed that. Most of what she saw seemed to be paperwork from the initial response, CSU reports, even the statement she and her father had given to the detective.

She wasn't sure what she had been expecting. A journal chronicling the detective's moves? His theories as he'd doggedly tracked leads to impregnable walls of solid concrete? Mug shots of the man who'd just slipped away, that last shred of incriminating evidence just out of reach?

Whatever it was, it wasn't what she was seeing.

Exhaling through the flashlight, she laid the file in her lap, then extracted the ME report, slowly working the paperclip free. Something came loose when she pulled it off, and several large pictures fell from the thin stack of paper and onto her lap.

The flashlight slid from her mouth, and she swore as it cracked into her wrist, but the pain hardly registered as the images that had so briefly flashed through her sight burned into her eyes.

She sat in the dark for a beat, then retrieved the flashlight from the floor, picked up the pictures that had fallen to her lap, and looked at them.

Her mouth went paper dry.

She remembered. Just a week before these pictures were taken, her mother had been complaining about her greying roots. Gone were the days she could look into the mirror and run a brush through her hair without finding a new strand of silver. "Katie," she'd said, fingering her daughter's hair, which only two days before had been cropped short and dyed black, with little stripes of electric blue highlights—a New Year's decision aided by no small amount of vodka. "What is this?"

"Don't start," she'd replied shortly, brushing her mother's hand off her.

Her eyes stung, and she felt a band squeeze tight around her heart.

Her mother's hair was bunched haphazardly behind her in this picture, a mess over her head, and her face was frozen in an expression of neutrality—so different from her bulldog glare, or that almost impish sort of smile she wore when she thought she'd won something.

Beckett touched her mom's face, which was far too white, sucking in a strangled breath as she saw the bruising along her collarbone.

She'd seen her mother like this once before, that night when she'd insisted on seeing her. Through the glass partition, she'd watched as the ME rolled out the gurney covered by a blue sheet, and she'd watched him lift the sheet, and then she'd stared at her mother's face.

She was standing there with the detective, who she had come with alone, not telling her father where she was going. She'd held it together just long enough to ask him to leave, and then she'd crumpled against the wall, fingers running through her short, coarse hair as she cried.

Beckett slowly flipped the picture, then touched the next.

Viewing her mother from so far away had obscured the details, smoothed away the violence that had wrenched her from the world, but the ME photographs were cold and impersonal, sharp in their honesty. Here, Johanna Beckett wasn't her mother, wasn't anyone's husband; she was something less than human, an object on a table.

Swallowing, she flipped the page again, and her stomach lurched as her eyes lit on a stab wound and a ruler lying along its length.

It was clean and bloodless, bruised the purples and reds of death. It hardly even looked like a knife thrust, like anything at all without the blood, and she traced the line, feeling the paper glide under her nail as she stared at it.

Slowly, she crept through the pages, skipping some, staring long and hard at others. Hours seemed to pass, and then she found a new set of pictures, and the world froze over even as the temperature in the room went up several hundred degrees.

"Oh, Mom," she whispered, stomach dropping out.

Her mother had died in work attire, in that plaid skirt she seemed to wear every other Tuesday, even though this had been a Saturday, and her beige trench was crumpled under her. Blood had soaked her blouse, turning the blue a deep, angry crimson. She was slumped against a pipe, hands stained red like she'd attempted to staunch the flow.

Beckett ripped violently at her collar. It was at least ten thousand degrees in here, and she couldn't breathe. Christ, she couldn't breathe.

The buttons finally came loose.

Christ, it was hot.

She stared down at her mother's face, drawing strangled, shallow breaths.

She still had her jewelry.

She wanted so desperately to flip the page, to shut the file, to return the box and escape from the basement, but she didn't move, her resolve hardening even as her stomach churned. Her mother had died alone in that alley, fingers soaked with her blood, but she sure as hell wasn't going to stay down here forever, amongst stacks of cold cases and homicides, while whoever had done it to her was still walking free somewhere.

Unable to bear looking at the photographs anymore, she flipped to the police reports and began to read, starting at page one.

Not that there was much.

The lead detective in the case—indeed, the only detective in the case—was John Raglan. He had interview notes from both Beckett and her father, but he'd only written a few words down from a couple of her mother's colleagues, and his ultimate conclusion was that her mother had been killed in a random act of gang violence.

Beckett didn't know what case files usually contained, but even to her, an untrained a patrol cop, the investigative portion of the file seemed light.

A new feeling seemed to be eclipsing the grief knotting and twisting her insides: anger.

She directed her flashlight over the banker's box, and she dug out a couple files at random.

James Benny, or what was left of him, had been found in Central Park, a couple shots from a .45 having removed half his face. Beckett skipped the pathology report, instead going to the police reports.

Det. Glover had included copies of his notes and stapled them to the back of the reports. Benny had had four kids and was working as an intern at Bellevue at the time of his death, and Glover had apparently interviewed half the hospital staff, the family, and scattered acquaintances a few times each before the case had finally gone cold and ended up down here.

She looked at another file.

Patricia Bailey had been robbed of several tens of thousands worth of diamonds, one of which turned up a few months later at a pawn shop on Forty-Seventh and Fifth.

Not what she was looking for.

She switched files again.

Pat Barker had also been robbed.

George Bishop was carjacked by a ring of car thieves. Two of the thieves were caught, but the car was scrap metal by the time they got to it.

John Gillnitz was found dead in his office of a suspected heart attack.

Interest caught, Beckett looked further.

An autopsy revealed high levels of strychnine in his system, which he'd apparently ingested with coffee and half a bagel shortly before his death.

Det. Pruett had also included copies of his notes, and had spent a long time investigating the victim's wife for evidence of foul play. He had interview notes with half the office staff, the victim's siblings, neighbors, and friends. About two weeks after Gillnitz's collapse, Pruett finally arrested not the wife, but the victim's mistress, who had apparently come to visit him in his office and left after dropping a couple tablets of the poison in with his coffee.

Beckett dug for another file.

Robbery. Rape. Robbery.

Homicide.

She extracted the file.

Vivian Bonneli had died from blunt force trauma to the head in her apartment in Little Italy. A friend found her three days later. Det. Dusak was the investigating officer.

Unlike Glover and Pruett, Dusak had not included his notes in the file, but copies of warrants issued, a few interview tapes, and the killer's rap sheet were present.

Beckett closed the file, glancing down at her mother's case, which was still lying open on her lap.

She had only been interviewed once, that night, right after she'd left that little viewing room in the morgue. As a person who wasn't of interest, she'd never thought this odd. But Raglan hadn't appeared to have even interviewed her father more than once—and one didn't need to be a homicide detective to know that spouses are always primary suspects.

Beckett flipped back the pages until she was at the CSU photos again, and she held the picture of her mother in the alley up, shining her flashlight on it.

And what had she been doing in an alley in the Lower West Side? Her parents had lived uptown, and she was supposed to be meeting them on her way back from her office in Midtown. It wouldn't be like her mom to head into an alley anyway, let alone one so out of the way.

She stared at the photo, willing it to give her an answer.

Maybe—

"What the hell are you doing down here?"

She jumped, and her flashlight bounced away across the concrete as she scrambled to her feet. The lights flicked on, and her vision went white.

"What?" she said automatically, blinking as the shapes of the shelves and the man looking at her came into view.

He was black, tall, wearing a suit. And he was regarding her with an expression that made her sweat.

"I said, what the hell are you doing down here?" his eyes bored into her before taking in the banker's box and her mother's file, which was now scattered all over the floor. Beckett was still gripping the photograph.

"I, sir—" her thoughts raced for an answer, an explanation, anything, but she had nothing. Her face felt hot. "Sir, this is...my mother," she said weakly.

He glanced down again, and her eyes followed his. The ME and CSU photographs were spread around where she stood. Her mother's face, her bloody clothes, the knife wounds. Everywhere she looked, there she was.

"Sir, there are—" she started to say, and he looked back up at her, expression unreadable. "I found..." her voice trailed off, "things."

"Things?" he repeated, eyebrows arching.

She swallowed. Her mouth was dry as hell. "Things that don't make sense. That weren't investigated."

He seemed to stare at her for an eon. "Who are you?" he asked finally.

"Beckett—Kate Beckett."

"You're an officer?"

"Yes, sir, with the Seventeenth."

"Badge number?"

"Four one three one nine," she rattled off the numbers. Her heart was beating so hard she was sure he could hear it.

He seemed to be taking in her uniform. "You're a patrol officer?"

"Yes, sir."

"Badge?"

"Badge?" she repeated, temporarily forgetting what that was. Then reality slammed into her, and she hurriedly yanked it from a pocket and walked over to show it to him.

He took it, studied it, then eventually handed it back to her, glancing at the picture she was still gripping in one hand.

"You're not allowed to be down here," he said.

"I know," she averted her gaze and shifted the photograph closer to her chest. She wanted so desperately to explain, to tell him what she may've found. For one wild moment, she saw herself reopening the case as the lead investigator, chewing Raglan out, hauling in some tattooed guy with a knife and extracting his confession.

But she said nothing.

"Put it back and go," he said, and her heart tightened.

"Yes, sir," she replied quietly.

"Don't let me catch you down here again."

"Yes, sir," she said again.

He paused, and she waited as he glanced around the pictures on the floor. She did too, thinking miserably about having to leave her mother here with Patricia Bailey and John Gillnitz. She didn't know what she'd accomplished, coming down here.

Reflexively, she squeezed the picture against her chest.

"I'm sorry."

She looked up, eyes stinging. The man in the suit, whoever he was, was regarding her with a softened expression.

"For what?" she asked haltingly.

"For your mother."

Her gut lurched, and she couldn't seem to say anything.

He turned, and then he was walking away. "Remember, Beckett," he said as he made his way to the end of the aisle. "Don't come back here. I don't want to have to write you up."

She stood there, rigid, heart thumping hard in her throat as she watched him turn the corner and disappear from sight.

And then she was alone again.