16. Chapter 16: Closer

(Nick's POV)

This was one of those times where he felt he was dying a slow death. He missed working a case without Bogo being overbearing and having a loose deadline, like when they were working on cold cases for Judy's promotion. He was no stranger to hard work by any means or even hard living with all the grifting and street hustling. But sitting pouring over document after file after photo evidence and all the statements made by people anywhere near the fire were draining. Judy still held onto her spark, throwing herself into the work deep enough to drown. Yes, the case was personal, but if it wasn't for her infinite energy, Nick knew he would've started losing hope far sooner.

She'd taken the loss of her home and others as a motivating force. Pulling all-nighters and thus roping Nick into it, trying to get the situation under control. It didn't help that the bullpen and the precinct were getting emptier day after day. Attack after attack. People were taking leave to be with their family or just staying home with enough fire extinguishers to replace the fire department. And no-one could blame them. Everyone likes to imagine how good they'll be in a crisis until it hits them close to home. Nick finished another coffee and threw it into the waste bin next to his desk, only for it to bounce off into the crowd of others that lied around his bin. Normally Bogo would lecture him about keeping his desk tidy, but it had devolved into strained yelling. Since he was falling asleep at his desk now, he acted as an alarm system and with how wound up Bogo was; it was probably doing him some good to vent as well.

They weren't the only ones that were sticking around at work. Especially after the lead detective got torched. People didn't want to leave out of fear, paranoia and probably a few other things. For Nick and Judy, while that was definitely a factor, was not the full story. Since the fire department had gone through the investigation, they'd found the cause of the fire and spent the day contacting everywhere that stocked it and use it so that every single stock count, employee and person who has stepped foot in the premises can get questioned. No stone unturned. Now they were trying to get every officer and precinct to get work on it, else it could take weeks. Luckily, the warrants were going through fairly quickly, but there was now nothing left to do until the next day, so now they were all being sent home to get ready for the big day.

Nick begrudgingly passed the night staff, sauntering in over to a still peppy Judy pouring over her notes. "Carrots, it's time to go." Nick said, leaning over her desks divider. "Captain's orders as much as I'd love to sleep at my desk again. Nothing to do till morning. We want to do a good job, right?"

Judy closed the folder she was working on and she lost all her energy, only swiping her phone off the desk and some of her work. "I still need to pass this onto the deputy chief to make sure there are a couple of schools that have the chemicals for demonstrations. We shouldn't ignore them, just in case."

If it were any other case and any other time, he wouldn't have hesitated to give her the workaholic speech about how it wasn't going anywhere and the station was full of capable people. This time though, it was every little helps and he might have done the same thing, so he gave a nod.

The journey back home on the train was quiet, with them both periodically dozing off, having to kick each other awake. This wasn't the evening for joking about work or discussing the cases. It was just a fight to stay awake long enough to get home. When they eventually staggered through the door, they both threw down their bags.

"We'll hopefully have this finished by tomorrow… no, it would be later today. They can't hide forever." Nick said, leaning on his bedroom door frame.

"We will, won't we?" Judy nodded confidently. "Night, Nick."

"Don't sleep in your uniform."

They were always up especially early at five am exactly. Not through Nick's preference. He'd happily wake up later since work would start at half-past six, but Judy still had her farmer conditioning. It was a sore spot between the two, but on a morning like this where they'd only got five hours' sleep and they were already exhausted, it was particularly irritating. So now he was sitting in the corner of a booth in a coffee shop, nursing a cup of coffee and trying to nap on the seating. Somehow Judy looked just fine pouring over her list of most likely suspects after doing a thorough amount of digging on the cruiser's laptop she'd brought in with her.

Nick, sitting in the corner, sat up straight, turning to Judy, having remembered an important detail. "Carrots." Nick groaned out. "None of the factories, depots or anywhere we'll be today open before nine."

She stopped for a moment, checking over her calender on her phone. "Oh. Sorry." Judy said before diving back into her work once again without even a beat in-between. Nick held his mouth open in stunned silence before slumping back in the booth. "There's still lots of work that needs to get done."

"Or sleep to get." Nick mumbled. "You know, there are other officers who are working on this. We aren't the only ones working on it, just the most tired."

"I'll wake you when we're ready." Judy said, rolling her eyes and continuing to scribble notes down in her notebook.

'As if it was up for debate.'

Getting some sleep was a great call, as even those couple of extra hours were enough to stop work from feeling depressing and hopeless. Judy was still doing alright, considering they were on maybe the hundredth interview today. They'd been at it for six hours and despite there being a few other officers here, it was slow going. Nick could almost say he was tired of probing for answers and talking overall. Bogo had given them Judy's lead of choice, the nylon plant. She felt there was the greatest concentration of potential suspects in the building, but was now facing issues with people not being at work that day but also needing to interview them. Some people were busy in areas where they would need PPE to get into and just a host of other barriers. Every corner of the city that had heard of chemicals was being pillaged and inspected, and it could still take them up to a week to do interviews. Then there was figuring out which people have cause, dig into their lives, etcetera. Something Judy had already been doing for this factory while he was napping.

She'd made him feel bad for sleeping. Which was a first.

The day at large had been a strain on his patience and resilience from the first interview of someone who clearly had no association with the case, but it was a formality, anyway. The red tape was bogging them down. Why question everyone? The lady watching to ensure quality control has no contact with the chemicals or a shady background. They needed to cut to the chase and start grilling the people who have even a shred of possibility, not everyone in the city. Judy, despite being the shining representation of lawfulness and procedure, was becoming impatient. She spent each interview tapping her foot, filling the silence between answers.

"Thank you for your time." Judy said, quickly crossing off another name that was entirely unrelated. They'd just interviewed the single father who spent his evenings volunteering at a soup kitchen in case he was an arsonist.

'Thank god it's lunch break.'

The pair of them head off to lunch at a cafe just across the docks into the rainforest district. It was a much chattier car ride than the last few days since, despite the tediousness and questionable need to question everyone who was associated with that factory, it still felt like progress.

"I felt bad for interviewing that last mammal. Had nothing to do with any of this, and we have to interrogate him." Judy vented animatedly while they waited at the lights. "And we only got three of the people on my suspect list."

"We still narrowed it down plenty and we can start sorting out the ones who have actual issues with predators and not the ones who only did when the Night-Howler crisis was going on." Nick placated her as they parked and made their way into the small cafe and over to a small table in the corner to continue talking about the case.

"I know. I know it's a good thing, but I wish we were moving faster." Judy complained.

"And break traffic laws, Carrots? You'd give yourself a ticket for that right after." Nick joked, feeling a little lighter than the last few days.

"And you wouldn't? Sounds like favouritism to me. Look at you. You've been sitting, making no jokes at work all week." Judy beamed across the table while still flitting from chatting to updating her notes at a slower pace now.

"Well, I had to give Bogo a break. He could have an aneurysm otherwise, and then who would shout at me for no reason?" Nick teased, drinking his coffee. Slow day or not, it did at least feel closer to completion and less claustrophobic. There was more room to breathe.

"So who's left then, Carrots? The others did a few of the interviews and they came up blank as well, so who's the top two?" Nick asked, picking chunks off a blueberry muffin idly.

"A Koala. Anthony Robinson aged forty-four and an avid anti-predator protestor with his own website called 'Predator Preying on Us?'. Advocates for segregation and works in shipping and blames the police for the attacks during the Night-Howler crisis." Judy rolls off, going through her earmarked notebooks. "Believes predators created the crisis to get more of them in the police, so they could quote 'rely on them more.'"

"A conspiracy nut then. What a peach. So who's numero uno?" Nick said, leaning forward, trying to commit it all to memory.

"You can write notes." Judy said, earning a shake of the head from Nick, holding his muffin in both hands. "Anyway, we have the strangest but also most probable one. So Fred Ramstein so is a ram, but most prominent is the brother of Night-Howler Doug, which would warrant suspicion, right?"

"Yeah, he has motive, probably hating the police and predators. But I'm guessing there's a catch." Nick queried.

"There sure is." Judy nodded enthusiastically before becoming more contemplative. "See, I did some digging because I had the same idea, but it doesn't add up at all. He massively advocated for peace during the crisis and actively denounced his brother and his actions when they convicted him. Then going back further was an advocate of the Mammal Inclusion Initaitive. Essentially, a really nice guy until a month ago when the tone switched on a dime and became just really vile and a river of hate."

Nick put down his muffin and gestured for Judy's notes, reading through them and photos taken from social media. "What changed?" Nick said accidentally out loud.

"That's the part I can't put together. I couldn't even find anything that would explain the change." Judy sighed, leaning back in the chair.

"So there is something missing from the story here. Does anyone know where he is?" Nick asked, taking his own rough notes. "Do we have anything else to go on other than his one-eighty change?"

"Nope. I did, however, put a warrant through. No-ones seen him at work for over a week now he just vanished." Judy said, crossing her arms proudly.

"That's why they pay you a detective's wage." Nick quipped, giving a quiet mock round of applause. "When will we get it, then?"

Judy got a call cutting off their conversation where she chattered away seriously. "Thank you, we'll get on it now. Can you tell the breaching team to wait? Thanks."

"That the bell?" Nick asked.

"Break times over. Back to class." Judy laughed, throwing down some money on the table, leaving Nick to catch up.

'Progress finally. But why does something still feel so off?'

Pulling in, they could see a much larger cruiser sat outside, prompting them to pick up the pace to make sure they weren't holding thing up too much. Fred lived in a top-floor apartment on a rougher side of town. The move out here was another recent change to add to the list of strange decisions. He'd lived in a spacious apartment out in central downtown, which wasn't exactly cheap and didn't have broken windows on the ground floor. There was more litter than pavement to be seen. Just past midday or not, Fred had pulled the curtains or blinds over, not giving them a chance to see what they were in for. Going into this situation blind was the last thing he wanted this to go. The feeling of uncertainty was being replaced with discomfort. Something about this place didn't feel right and now they'd be heading into what was seeming more and more like the arsonist's apartment with no intel. What if he'd trapped it? Nick wasn't really up for being in another house fire just because of a spiteful goodbye message from his least favourite person in the city.

Bounding up the stairs, Nick saw a rhino and a bear standing there with their vests also pulled on while the bear held a battering ram. The bear gave a short wave before gesturing them over to the other side of the door. With some shouted warnings and a last hand signal, the bear took his first swing at the door while Nick, Judy and the rhino readied tasers.

Tasers at the ready, the battering ram hit the door. Nothing. Nothing? It took another awkward ten minutes of the rhino and bear swapping occasionally while giving the door hell. Eventually, the door buckled in enough to be forced open into a pitch black room. Flicking on their torches, it revealed mounds of rubbish stacked up and attracting flies that filled the silence and covered up everyone's anxious breathing. The only lighting was the dim yellow light creeping in from the flickery hallway light, making it seem like a scene from a horror movie. The bear went to flick the light switch, only to get a dull click.

"Careful folks, looks like all we have are torches. We'll move up and you two cover from behind." The bear whispered gently, putting down the ram and inching in with his partner.

Empty.

After a clean sweep, they holstered their weapons and got to actually inspecting their surroundings. The other pair moved out to call for CSI and for someone to check if there were any bombs because "this shit doesn't feel right". The smell of chemicals grew exponentially as they moved into the trashed living room. To Nick, it was even worse with his sense of smell. It was like someone had doused the apartment in bleach and, even worse, smelled faintly like Judy's apartment. Missing piece or not, they could at least say they'd found their guy.

The entire apartment looked like a comical rendition of a conspiracy theorist's lair built to stop the government from reading his mind. They'd covered the walls in stapled up tin-foil in what seemed like an attempt to keep any communication out of the room. Fred had covered a wall with a paranoid spattering of print outs linked by red twine and decorated with thick red lines and circles.

Fred had marked the lead detective's house and portrait with a dripping red X in marker while marking all the other hospitalised officers with a single line.

'Sick bastard.' There was no doubt in his mind that they'd found the right person. The only thing left to do was a manhunt to get this guy behind bars, and fast.

The place was a wreck as well, with all the electronic devices barring a single old manilla fax machine sitting among the circuitry. Why he'd spared that compared to the shattered TV and decide to boil finely chopped circuit boards was another question. He'd even driven a knife through his mobile phone.

"What the hell is all this?" Nick said, breaking the silence, still slowly turning and observing his surroundings.

"They even boarded the windows up." Judy said incredulously while pulling the curtains out to reveal haphazardly mounted boards.

"Nothing here makes any sense." Nick grumbled, poking an empty can laying on the floor.

Judy shrugged her shoulders, looking just as perplexed, and then grabbed her radio. "Dispatch, the suspect is no-where to be seen and there's no intel to suggest their current location so far." Throughout, she continued to spin slowly, surveying the room before walking over to the damning wall of evidence. "We can confirm this is our guy. We just need to launch a manhunt and let the public know who we're looking for."

It was over. In the weirdest way possible it was over, there was enough evidence to make even the most experienced lawyer stumble over their words. Relief washed over him like stepping into a summer's rain. Calm. Nick could see it on Judy's face and the other officers that were a part of the breach. The tension had melted away from their heavy shoulders. He'd never been more than glad to close a case. Many people had got hurt and the lead detective was dead, but no-one else. Not anymore. This room alone was enough intrigue and mystery to keep him going for the next few months.

The fax machine cut off the silent celebrations with its loud whirring and beeping with its single green light poking through the dark. Nick walked guardedly over to the machine to see the slow birth of another concern as the paper inched its way out. Once it fell silent for hopefully the last time, Nick pulled out the paper and shone his torch on it.

"Hello Officers, I see you have found my home. Good luck on this last one. Act quickly lest you face the consequences." Judy walked over in the wake of Nick's silence and peered over to read the printout, losing her own smile this time. She then flipped over the document to see details printed out in the same format as all the others pinned to the wall. Nick read through it, trying to figure out where he knew the picture from. A three-storey building in Tundratown with white walls and wooden trim. Familiar enough. There were a bunch of them not too far from Tundratown's town centre. Trailing down the document, he saw the picture of each of the residents and he felt himself pale. A polar bear, a dingo, and an arctic fox. Quentin.

"Oh, no." Nick dropped the paper to let it float to the ground and his hand snapped to his radio as Judy pulled him out of the apartment. "Dispatch, we found the arsonist's next target. Building three, floor three, of the Sunrise Apartment Estates. Three targets with a couple of them being prior victims."

A woman's voice calmly called over the radio. "Roger, we'll dispatch the fire department and have directed some local units until we can pull some out of the interviews."

Judy pulled herself into the passenger seat and pulled out her phone while Nick rushed around the side and launched himself into the driver's seat and feverishly put on his seatbelt.

"Don't worry, I'm calling him now. It'll be fine." Judy said, putting on a calm tone that didn't match her expression.

'What a fucking mess.' Nick put the pedal right down on the floor and put the lights on. 'No more victims.'

(06/03/23)

Nothing much to say this week other than that this is a shorter chapter since it is kinda transitionary in my point of view, anyway. We reach the climax of the arsonist next chapter. Other than that, the only thing to address is that Sir Unknown I know what it looks like but just bear with me. If I pull it off right, then it won't be as simple as it seems. Trust me.

Anyway, have fun all. I like feedback as stressful as it can feel sometimes to make sure I'm still meeting expectations. Tough business this.

Till another day.