A/N: Thanks so much everyone for reading this story, and special thanks to those of you who take the time to review. Your comments are really helpful! Especially as I'm still quite new to this fandom (it was pretty much love at first sight... went through the episodes in an embarrassingly short amount of time), and I'm still learning the ropes.
I edited the ending of last chapter slightly. It's minor, and doesn't require re-reading to follow this chapter. But if you ever do go back for some reason and it looks different, that's why!
No Such Thing as a Perfect Family (3)
Monday mornings were usually a mess. Servers were backlogged. Printers were jammed. People who had taken the weekend off were slow to get back into the rhythm of things. People who hadn't been able to take the weekend off were grumpy. Suspects, witnesses and lawyers alike were overexcited.
In short, chaos.
And the Major Crimes division was not spared.
"Lieutenant." Captain Raydor sighed in exasperation. "Why is my report not printing?" It was barely nine a.m., the weekend had been nothing short of infernal and dealing with hardware issues was not making her any happier.
Provenza peered at his state-of-the-art, all-too-profitable printer. "Ah. It's because something's coming through on the fax." He waited a moment, and sure enough a piece of paper rolled out. "See? Now it'll print. Oh, and this has your name on it..." He handed her the fax.
The Captain glanced over it and involuntarily rolled her eyes.
"I see the heading of the DA's office," Provenza commented. "The delightful Ms. Rios making sure we start the week right?"
She didn't even dignify the question with an answer. "Detective Sanchez, any luck with the mailroom boy?" She turned to the whiteboard to search for the name, which Amy Sykes had hastily written down the previous night. "…Pat Dawson?"
Provenza and Flynn exchanged an amused glance, prompting her to purse her lips in a faint expression of displeasure. Normally she would have wondered what they were up to, or been entertained by their antics, but today she was feeling unusually short-tempered.
Sanchez cleared his throat, looking a little uncomfortable. There was a small band-aid right below his hairline, and a bruise forming on his collarbone. "Yes Ma'am. And no luck."
"Perhaps you should remind Mr. Dawson that assaulting a police officer is an imprisonable offense. As is obstructing a murder investigation."
He nodded.
"She wants Rusty to get a full physical?" Sharon was startled by Provenza's voice right over her shoulder; he was craning his neck to better read the fax in her hand.
Flynn frowned in confusion. "Do trials require that these days?"
The older man gave the Captain a wry glance. "What's she hoping, that there's yellow fever in your apartment?"
She shook her head. The request may have come out of the blue, but this wasn't a battle worth fighting. If the DA's office wanted it, she'd just get Rusty to a doctor and deal with it; after all physicals weren't the end of the world, and he was in perfect health.
In truth, she didn't even want to think about what Emma Rios' latest scheme may be. The woman had made it clear the previous day that she was not backing down – but the measures for Rusty's protection were in place, the boy was still in her custody, DCFS had not objected yet and Sharon should have been feeling cautiously optimistic.
Should have, but wasn't.
She pushed the anxiety away and focused back on the case at hand. The murder that they had so inopportunely caught on a Sunday morning, when the only case she wanted to work on was the one contained in those damn letters.
Dear Rusty…
She exhaled sharply. "Lieutenant Tao." The man looked up from his desk, slightly startled at her snappy tone, and Sharon forced herself to modulate her voice: "Any luck on Starling's financial records?"
The lieutenant gave a lopsided nod. "Maybe." As the rest of the team walked over, he pulled up a list on his computer. "Everything in their records checks out except," several rows on the list became highlighted in red, "these income statements and yearly balances."
The Captain frowned at the incomprehensible file names and tags. "Is our victim linked to any of them?"
"Uh, that's the weird thing – he's linked to all of them." Tao gave her a slightly confused shrug. "These are all his statements and forms, at least for the past year."
"And they're all fishy?" Flynn looked incredulous, but Provenza just scoffed:
"What do you know, a financial director stealing money. Call the newspapers!"
Sharon's eyes flickered to him again, impatiently.
"I don't know that 'fishy' is the right word," Tao hedged. "I'm not exactly a forensic accountant, but it doesn't seem like these were falsified to conceal any significant amounts of extra income."
Provenza looked over his shoulder at the screen. "Why else would someone put in fake numbers on their forms?"
"It looks like they're just… wrong. Like someone wasn't paying a lot of attention when they filed them."
"Wrong..." Sharon repeated Lt. Tao's word, eyes narrowing in suspicion. "I could buy one or two misfiled forms, but all of them for a whole year is too much to be a coincidence. Especially if they're the only irregular records for the entire company. Did our victim file his own statements and balances?"
"The company has a tax accountant on the pay roll," Sanchez offered, "but we don't know if he does everyone's forms."
She nodded. "Find out. If our victim did file his own forms, look into why he couldn't get the numbers right despite being a very successful analyst. If he didn't file them…" her eyebrows arched, "we'll have to ask the tax accountant why he seems to have done such a sloppy job on these particular statements…"
She was only marginally aware of the rest of the team proceeding to their respective tasks.
Dear Rusty…
…so many young boys… end up dead…
…if you feel afraid…
…we must all make our peace…
…an old friend.
"Captain?"
Her head automatically turned in the direction of the call, but it took her brain a moment to catch up.
"Detective…?" her voice came out hoarser than she intended.
Sanchez was looking a little uncertain. "If you don't mind, I'd like to finish up with Pat Dawson…?"
She nodded silently.
"You sure you don't need some back-up in there?" Flynn chimed in from his desk, and he and Provenza exchanged a grin, missing their captain's warning glance.
"I think I'm good Sir, thanks," Sanchez deadpanned.
"I'm just saying, in case there's another rolled-up magazine lying around that Mister Dawson can use against you …"
"It was a heavy-duty stapler," sighed Julio, prompting another guffaw from both…
"Lieutenants." Sharon's sharp reprimand caused their chuckles to die off, and she pressed her lips together to contain her unreasonable irritation. She exhaled and effortfully toned down: "Please let me know when you bring in the Starling's tax accountant. I'll be in my office."
The three of them watched her walk away with slow, measured steps, until the office door shut behind her. Provenza opened his mouth to make a comment, then thought better about it and abstained.
"Is the Captain mad about something?" Sykes asked with her usual blitheness, having walked in just in time to witness the last part of that scene.
Flynn gave her an exasperated sideways glance. Sanchez sighed.
Provenza rolled his eyes. "Come on, Sykes. We've got a tax accountant to pick up." He grabbed the jacket from the back of his chair. "Sanchez, go interview your ferocious attacker before anyone else finds out that it's a five-foot-two girl."
Then he met Flynn's eyes, and they both glanced toward the Captain's office. Flynn's shoulders twitched in a small shrug as if to say, 'nothing to do but wait it out', and Provenza replied with a disgruntled sort of sigh.
He hated feeling sympathetic. Things were so much easier when he could comfortably just hate the woman.
It wasn't until after the office door clicked shut behind her that Sharon realized she had left her coffee cup in the murder room. Maybe it was for the better – caffeine may have helped her feel more alert after the sleepless weekend nights, but she was already feeling sufficient jittery without the extra stimulation. Even so, she idly pulled open one of the desk drawers half-hoping to find another chocolate bar hiding at the bottom. No luck.
She winced on remembering how she'd snapped at Flynn and Provenza. Not that the two didn't occasionally deserve an earful, but this time her own irritation had colored her reactions, and she felt bad. It had taken a while to finally earn their respect – especially Lt. Provenza's, and she didn't want something like this to set things back to when he could barely address her without a sardonic grimace.
She really hoped it wouldn't. There was enough on her plate already.
A cold shiver ran down her spine as she reached for her bag. Inside were the crumpled copies of the letters; she had fallen asleep to them every night since Friday, trying to find a clue, something in the words that would tell them where to go next. But if a clue was in there, she couldn't find it. If the lab's examination of the original copies also revealed nothing, as it had with the first letter, they would be completely in the dark and at the mercy of the author.
Sharon's anxiety gave way to anger. She did not like anyone else calling the shots on her home turf. And with the letters turning her own life upside down, that's exactly what the author was accomplishing.
She wasn't planning to take it lying down.
Her hands straightened the creases in the papers.
Dear Rusty…
I read that a good family is the center of a good life. A child without a family is a stray sheep, and it's always the strays that get eaten by wolves.
Her anger only increased. They were all like this, the letters. Bland, hardly individual, only the flavor of a personality behind them, never enough to draw any strong conclusions. This was a hiding predator stalking from the shadows, tantalizing them with veiled threats that they could not trace back to him.
A coward.
Only a coward would do something like this to intimidate a sixteen year old boy. Or… a madman. There were so many of them out there. Why did one have to pick Rusty?
…because our fate is not always in our own hands.
Sincerely,
She pushed the letters away with an abrupt move.
There was a faint knock on the door, and without thinking she said "Come in." Only when Lt. Flynn had already stepped inside, his eyes immediately zeroing in on the xeroxed pages, did she realize she should have put them away first.
"Yes, Lieutenant." She calmly gathered the papers, folded them and placed them back inside the bag. "Any news on the case?"
"Not yet. Provenza and Sykes are bringing in the Starlings' tax accountant." He took another step. "You left these on my desk. Thought you might need them..." His hands held out her coffee mug, and the fax from the DA's office.
Sharon thanked him with a slight smile. "That's very kind of you, Lieutenant, thank you. Please get me when Lt. Provenza returns with our suspect…"
An obvious dismissal if ever there was one, but Flynn shifted a little and didn't leave. She fixed him with a questioning glance.
"Anything else…?"
He cleared his throat. "If there's anything you need on this other…business." His eyes involuntarily drifted to the spot on her desk where the letters had been.
"Thank you, Lieutenant," she said neutrally, "but the best to do right now is focus on solving our current case." A hypocrisy, since she had so clearly been doing otherwise, but he was unlikely to point out the double standard.
However Flynn didn't back down as expected. "And we're doing that," he acknowledged, "but if there's anything we can do to find the bastard who wrote those letters…"
There was nothing Sharon wanted more than to open the case to her own team and put everything else on hold until they figured it out. But she was already virtually abusing the resources of the LAPD, with the security duty at St. Joseph's and the expedited lab tests and all the strings she was trying to pull to keep Rusty. Making the letters an official Major Crimes case would have been one step too far.
"Thank you," she repeated in a softer tone, after a moment of silence. "I appreciate that, Lieutenant. But… the letters to Rusty aren't a major crime, and I can't ask any of you to spend your working hours on it, not to – "
"You're not asking," he clarified. "We all want to get this son of a bitch as much as you do. And trust me," he gave her a serious look, "they're a major crime as far as anyone here is concerned. We look after our own."
And even though that solved nothing, not really, somehow Sharon's spirits suddenly lifted a little.
Across town, the same could not be said about Rusty.
He was having a tough day. Being picked up at school by a squad car had earned him plenty of ribbing when it had first started a couple of months before, but the other students seemed to have gotten used to it eventually. Having two policemen patrol the premises, however, was a whole new level of awful. He was once again a subject of conversation for the whole school. Every time he caught a pointed gaze and a whisper directed his way, he wished for nothing more than a giant hole to open up and swallow him.
That wasn't the worst of it though.
His gaze involuntarily drifted to the other side of the classroom, where Kris kept glancing back worriedly. She had tried to talk to him throughout the weekend and he'd ignored her calls and texts, but there was no way to avoid her at school. He'd spent the two brief recesses so far running from her, but she obviously wasn't getting the message.
He gave her a dark glare and turned his eyes back to the notebook.
Unfortunately, she really hadn't been getting the message, because at the end of class she actually sprinted up from her seat and ran after him until there was just no point in even trying to avoid her anymore.
"What do you want, Kris?"
It irritated him that she looked so damn worried about him. She had no idea what was going on. Why did he ever have to make friends with her in the first place?
"Rusty – I'm sorry. I did what I thought was right. I was– I was scared for you. Those letters– "
"It's fine. It doesn't matter anymore. It's not like you can take it back. So… there, apology accepted, okay?" His hands held the backpack against his chest, a barrier between the two of them. "Now just… please? Stop… following me."
Kris looked disappointed, and somehow he felt bad. He'd felt bad from her from the start. She didn't know what she was dealing with.
No one really did, when it came to him.
He shifted uncomfortably. "Look…Kris… it's really fine, okay? I'm not like, mad at you or anything. I mean I was but…" He shrugged. What was the point in staying mad at her? She was just trying to do what she thought was best. She didn't understand. In her world, adults still always fixed everything.
In his, the exact opposite was true.
Or had been true. Until recently. Until Sharon.
He'd always known it was a temporary situation, but back then all he'd wanted was a roof over his head, food and the knowledge that no one would come through his locked door at night. Sharon had promised him all that, and he hadn't believed her but there hadn't really been a lot of options. So he'd taken her promise in exchange for his good behavior, then sat back and waited for her to go back on her word.
And then she'd given him all that she'd promised, and Rusty hadn't known what to make of it.
And then she'd given him more.
And now… now he'd started to expect things, and believe in things, and he should've really known better because of course the second he'd started to think that way had been the same second that everything had gone downhill. He'd learned that lesson a long time ago, and then over and over and over. Real life didn't cut you breaks. Real life was a bitch.
"Are you sure…?"
Kris' voice brought him out of his thoughts. "Yeah, I'm sure. It's fine…" He sighed. "Don't worry about it. Whatever…"
His eyes looked past her face, to the front door far at the end of the hallway. A cross was mounted above it, which he had frankly been a little afraid of in his first weeks, not least of all because it didn't look all that well-secured to the wall. When he'd mentioned that to Sharon she'd just laughed, and he'd been annoyed at her, but the next day he'd walked through the doors no longer worried about the thing dropping on his head.
Then he stopped worrying about helping himself to the contents of the fridge whenever he wanted a snack. Then about taking the occasional nap on the couch. About arranging the clothes in his closet. Or referring to the closet as his.
The longer he'd waited for Sharon to go back on her word, the more she'd seemed determined to foil him. Even on the occasions when he'd broken his own part of the deal, regarding good behavior. For a grown-up, she was stubborn. And for a long time he kept waiting and she kept at it…
Until one night he'd gone to bed without worrying where he'll sleep the next day.
After that he'd done it every night. And Sharon still stuck by her promises.
Then Emma Rios had decided to destroy his life.
"Is Ms. Rios going to take you away?" Kris was creepy like that sometimes. Reading his mind.
He felt a knot in his throat, and only managed a shrug. "I have no idea. Maybe." She really didn't have the right to look that sad. This was his sad moment, not hers. "I mean she's obviously trying of course, because why not ruin my life…but…"
"Can't your foster mom do something? To keep you?"
He tried for a glare, but only managed a miserable look. "I don't know, okay? It's not like they're bothering to share anything with me at this point." He grimaced. "Payback for the letters, I guess."
That wasn't entirely true. Sharon had said that no one was taking him away. But every night he could hear her fussing and pacing until early morning… and Emma had come to their house, and then she'd brought those people to the station on Sunday and… and Sharon was trying to be nice, sure, but people said a lot of nice things when they were trying to get rid of you.
And even if she did want him to stay, Emma obviously had the better position because Sharon always had to agree to everything the woman requested, even if she was horrible to him and everyone hated her.
All he wanted was a break. Even if real life didn't give breaks. He really, really, really wanted and needed a break. If he never got anything else ever in his life, he wanted this now. Maybe he didn't deserve it, but he wanted it so bad. Just… a small break. For once. Please.
"Can't you ask her? Sharon? If you can stay?"
"Yeah, of course I asked her, Kris…" he glowered – why was everything so simple for the girl? "But she's just being all… nice and saying what I want to hear. I don't know what she really thinks. I don't know what's going on at all!"
"I don't think she'd say you can stay if she didn't mean it," Kris offered softly.
"People make promises they can't keep all the time," he retorted – then cut himself off.
Not Sharon.
He'd waited so long, and she'd never gone back on her word. She'd only done more than what she'd said, never less.
All Rusty wanted was to believe that he wouldn't lose everything again. To believe that he could get his break. To believe that something good could happen.
Maybe Kris was right. Maybe this was that simple. Maybe, just maybe, sometimes, one adult in a billion could really fix everything.
He scrambled to pull out his phone, so frantically that he nearly sent it flying across the hallway.
"Rusty…? You know we're not allowed to use cells during school hours…" Kris was giving him a confused look. "What's going on?"
"I know, I just really need to do this, it's important." His fingers were almost shaking as he typed a text.
Are you at a crime scene?
His phone buzzed less than a minute later.
No. Are you OK? No phone at school!
Rusty swallowed hard.
Will E. send me away?
This time, the pause was just slightly longer.
No. It'll be OK.
So far so good. He typed the next words carefully, letter by slow letter, and even glanced quickly up at the cross as he pressed 'send'.
Promise me she won't?
But even though he waited until the bell rang to signal the next class, and checked his phone so often that it ended up being taken away from him until the end of the day, no other reply ever came.
A/N: Thank you for reading! And thanks again to everyone who reviewed the last chapter, and everyone following and adding this story to their favorites. I love hearing from you.