The following morning, Charlie could still feel Sawyer's hands on his shoulders as he sat behind the front desk. He hadn't been able to work out what had happened last night, despite thinking about it ever since Sawyer had stopped the car in front of his flat and ordered him to get out.

He'd eventually decided to just forget about it – it was nothing. And even if it was something, Sawyer was his superior officer. There was no way he'd even consider getting involved with him in any way at all.

Unless he talked in that growling whisper again.

Urgh, okay. So maybe he wasn't doing a very good job as 'forgetting'. He frowned and rubbed at the centre of his forehead, as he continued to read through the printouts of the computer files, and the schedules that they'd seized as evidence.

Sawyer seemed to be covering up for their 'GWHunter' and no one else from the web-cam chats seemed too out of the ordinary. They were all either one-time visitors or weren't behaving abnormally or threateningly. He set the logs aside for now, and took a sip from the glass of water in front of him.

Fine. The schedule. There was bound to be something there, right?

Charlie leaned back in his seat, closing his eyes for a few moments. He almost wished he was back at Manchester. Almost. He opened his eyes again and looked over the neat and orderly desk. Beside the phone, in the plastic pot of pens, there were a couple of vibrant highlighters. He had photocopied sheets of paper – he could try some colour coding. It might help.

He leaned forwards and grabbed a green pen, holding it tightly before getting to work.

He had pen marks in various colours scattered all over his hands by the time the automatic door slid open and frenzied movement revealed that Sawyer had just arrived – late again. Charlie didn't look up, and instead fought to hide a smile.

"DI Ford, sir? You've got a couple of messages." He couldn't look at Sawyer, so stayed focused on his notes. Sawyer lingered on the other side of the desk. Even without seeing him, Charlie sensed that he felt uncomfortable too. "One's from the chief – he says Locke's taken three weeks sick leave, so you've got to direct any enquiries straight to him."

Charlie dared a glance up after that, and he and Sawyer shared a secret smile. Warmth spread between them, slow and creeping, before Charlie coughed and focused again. "Also, Forensics called – said you've got to come down and see them. Now, preferably. Or ten minutes ago, to be honest. Said you were talking to the Chief. Might wanna go now, though, before they catch you out."

Sawyer nodded and walked off without a word and definitely without a simple 'thanks'. Charlie rolled his eyes and returned to his work.

Sawyer rushed downstairs to the forensics lab, with his heart still stammering from the meeting with Charlie. He'd frozen up during it, barely able to say a word. Instead, his stomach had just felt like it was glowing, and he'd barely been able to think after Charlie had offered him that secret smile.

He shook his head at his own behaviour as he descended the emotionless stairs to the lab. It would have been fine if he'd just wanted sex. That was easy – but this? This was damn difficult.

He wanted to do it all properly, for the first time in his life. He wanted to take Charlie out on a date and get him to move in with him and get married and have kids and grow old together and retire out to the country and do crossword puzzles – which Charlie would be terrible at, so Sawyer would get to feel smart.

But it was precisely because of all that that Sawyer wouldn't do this. He didn't believe in relationships; they were dirty things, even when they weren't between police officers.

He definitely was not going to give into temptation.

He wasn't.

Maybe, though, just for curiosity's sake, if he had some spare time – he might look up the department's policy on relationships between colleagues.

He reached the bottom of the stairs and swept into the chemical smelling environment of the lab. For a reason he'd never been able to pin down, this place always reminded him of a hospital. And, just for the record, Sawyer hated hospitals.

A man in a lab-coat sat nearby, with a loud and whirring machine on the desktop beside him. Seeing as he was the only intelligent life form that Sawyer could see, he moved over to him. "I'm on the Kwon case. I was told to come down here."

The man looked up, slightly harassed. His hair was greying and the wrinkles thrown over his face seemed to imply that he was nearing retirement age. "The fingerless chick? Yeah, we've just finished processing the evidence you sent down."

Sawyer nodded, even though he hadn't sent anything down here. Other people would've done that for him, and he hadn't even been working the case since the beginning. "What is it?"

"There was a powder found at the murder scene. We've tested a sample – it's sand. We thought, at first, that it might be some kind of drug, but… Apparently not!" The man – Sawyer really wished that they'd bothered to introduce themselves – bopped off his stool and walked to grab a file. Sawyer had it thrust into his arms before he could protest that he didn't want any more paper. "That's the full chemical breakdown of the sample and finance report. I've also added in the report about the blood we found under her fingernails."

"Just tell me about it."

"Alright. Type AB, no match in the database. But we did manage to find something out that might help." He grinned, and Sawyer stared blankly at him, just wanting to yell at him to hurry up. "It's related to her. Mother, father, sibling, child, something. Definitely related."

Sawyer frowned, but he nodded slowly. He hadn't known that there was any family in the country. "Anything else?"

"The footprint. Ecco brand shoes, size 10, man's shoe. That's all we've got so far – we're working on narrowing down the exact type."

Sawyer tried hard to pay attention, because this might actually be important. It might've been more interesting if the lab-rat talking did so in anything other than a monotone. "Is that it? Any fingerprints found?"

"No, sorry. There's a full report of everything in that file. If anything else comes up, we'll call you down."

Sawyer nodded, while trying to figure out roughly how long it'd take him to read the damn file. A couple of hours, if he was lucky and read it fast. "Yeah, sure," he muttered, before turning around to leave. It looked like he had a day of reading ahead of him.

"Sawyer!" Charlie called as the DI walked past the desk. He'd only been down at forensics for about five minutes, but he already looked fed up and liable to snap at whoever was brave enough to go near him. Charlie paused for a second, sighed heavily, then picked up the papers on his desk and walked after him. "Sawyer, wait."

Sawyer thoroughly ignored him and instead stormed up the corridor to his office. Wanker.

He arrived at the office just as Sawyer slammed the door shut – he came within half an inch of having to live with an extremely flat nose for the rest of his life. He took a step backwards and opened the door, while listing all the reasons why yelling at his boss would be a bad idea.

Surprisingly, there weren't as many as he'd thought there would be. He just about managed to keep himself controlled, especially as he saw Sawyer throwing a hefty file onto his desk. That'd explain it; the guy was having a tantrum because he didn't want to read a report.

"Sir? I was calling for you – didn't you hear me?" he asked, closing the door behind him. Now that he'd cleared up, the room seemed bland. The plant he'd left on Sawyer's desk was already dying.

Sawyer glanced up and shrugged. It looked like he was feeling even more anti-social than usual.

"Well, uh… I wanted to say – I've been looking over her schedule, right? The victim's? She's got a couple of hours with the camera pencilled in every night; apart from the weekends." He moved over to the desk and placed his papers down on top of the file that Sawyer had just put there.

He'd already managed to colour-code it nicely, his revision skills from high school kicking in persistently. The pink highlighter meant web-cam time. Then he'd started to use a different colour for each of the other appointments, and on thing had quickly become apparent: she had some one-off random clients, and three regulars.

He pointed to the first one, coded green. "'Dancing at H's'. If she's dancing, I figured that might be a strip-club or something? I'm going to look it up, see if there are any clubs called H, or beginning with H, or have an owner beginning with H or… I dunno. I'll ask Mr. Kwon first. Probably easier. And I'll ask to see if there are any addresses for the rest of them."

"The 'rest of them' is just two people."

"Yeah. Hugo and SL. I'm gonna go with 'Hugo' first – he had an emergency appointment on the night she disappeared."

Sawyer didn't look like he was really paying attention; his eyes had sort of glazed over. Feeling self-conscious, Charlie picked up the schedule again. "So… yeah. Just thought I'd let you know what I'm up to." He'd definitely learnt his lesson light night – the last time he hadn't told Sawyer absolutely everything, he'd been slammed against a wall. He wasn't going to make the same mistake today.

Sawyer seemed satisfied. "Yeah, okay. You make any progress at all, I want to know about it. Immediately. You got that?"

Charlie nodded and walked over to the door. "Yes, sir."

He'd managed to develop a headache by the time he went back to Sawyer's office an hour or so later. He'd spent that time with the phone glued to his ear, and had decided that he hated being the 'good cop'. He didn't have the patience for it.

He rapped briefly on the door with his knuckles and didn't wait for an answer – he just charged straight in.

Sawyer was merely staring out of the window anyway, with the file on his desk read about a quarter of the way through, sitting open on his desk. He jumped up and attempted to look busy when someone walked through the door; instantly, though, he relaxed when he saw it was just Charlie.

'Just Charlie'. Christ, that wasn't exactly flattering. He'd had to cope with being 'just Charlie' and never anything more all his life.

He plonked himself down in the chair in front of Sawyer's desk, and didn't bother saying hello. If Sawyer could be rude, then he could too. "H's is Henry's. It's a chain of club. They're mainly in England, but there's one in Scotland too. There's even a floating club – he has a boat that goes up the Thames and out to sea, every Friday.

"Anyway, they're ran by a guy called Ben Gale – Henry was his stage name when he used to do stand-up. Now, though, he runs a collection of 'adult entertainment parlours' – strip joins, basically. But, most importantly, Sun had a job on Saturday nights there, as one of the entertainers."

It had taken him a half-hour phone conversation with Jin just to work out that much. Sawyer'd better appreciate it. "Still, nice bit of trivia for you; Sun and Ben knew each other. That's how she got the job, according to Jin. He said they'd known each other since Ben was still doing stand-up. Years down the line, when Sun's having money troubles, he pulls a few strings and she just happens to end up working for him."

An impressed smile started on Sawyer's face, but Charlie wasn't anywhere near done yet.

"And, being so bloody perfect, I managed to get us an interview with Gale. Pretty difficult, but once I explained that if he didn't comply we'd have to arrest him, it became a little easier."

"Well, Ch—"

"Hey, hang on. Unlike you, dazing through windows, I've actually made productive use of the past hour." He smiled and only just held back from sticking his tongue out at Sawyer. "So. I couldn't figure out who the other guy on the schedule was, the 'SL'? Mr. Kwon seemed a little baffled by it too. I'm gonna keep looking into it.

"But, I had some progress with Hugo. When I was talking to Mr. Kwon, he said he didn't keep the addresses of her clients. But, he told me where he was supposed to have been picking Sun up afterwards, and I researched into it to see who lives in the area. No one called Hugo, but there's a 'Hurley Reyes', lives a little while up the road – he's a lottery winner, absolutely loaded. I talked to his wife on the phone; he's out of town, but he'll be back tomorrow."

Sawyer nodded slowly. "Anything else?"

"Nope, sir. That's it. How's the report?"

"Makes me want to dig my eyes out."

"Good read, then?" Charlie suggested, with a grin. Sawyer looked around for something to throw at him, so Charlie hastily put his hands up to show that he came in peace. "I should get back to the desk. The Gale interview's later this afternoon. Just wanted to keep you posted."

Actually, he'd just wanted a chance to chat to him again. Sawyer seemed to buy the excuse, though, as he nodded and looked back to his file. Charlie smiled uncertainly and left, knowing that he'd get to spend the afternoon with Sawyer when they interviewed Gale.