Disclaimer: No infringement of copyright is intended. All characters originated with CSI:NY. Poetry not otherwise referenced is original.
A/N: As always thanks to readers and reviewers alike; I do love to hear what you like and don't like about the story and the characters.
Spoiler Alert: Spoilers for Seasons 2 & 3, up to and including "Silent Night".
Tell Me
Tell me a secret
Tell me a lie
Tell me you love me
Tell me why
Tell me what to do now
Tell me how to feel
Tell me what you're thinking
Tell me not to cry
Tell me how we got here
Tell me where we are
Tell me where we're going
Tell me you don't care
SMT2007
Chapter 15: Sharing the Burden
"Mac, do you have a minute?" Stella stood at the door, Flack behind. After a day off to compare notes and talk about what they knew, they had agreed to talk to Mac Monday morning and run everything by him. As Flack said, "Either he'll agree and we'll investigate, or he'll tell us why we shouldn't be worried."
"Come in, Stel. Flack. What's up?" Mac's eyebrows raised when Flack closed the door behind them.
"I went out on Friday to tell the Messers about Danny," he stated.
Mac nodded, "I talked to Danny Saturday in Montana. He'd talked to his parents by then. He said that it was good you had gone out there."
Stella watched the two men silently communicate. She wished they would just tell her why Mac hadn't been able to go to Staten Island.
"While I was there, an old informant caught up with me, 'Mouse' Mauser."
Mac wrinkled his nose, "Mouse? He's still around? Usually someone in his line of work doesn't survive into his twenties."
"He moved back to Staten Island for his health, I think," Flack said wryly. "Anyway, he strung me a line about another Sassone brother."
Mac's eyebrows raised again, and this time he sat forward at his desk. Stella could have been in the morgue for all the interest either man showed her. "We got Sonny and the younger one, what was his name? Tommy?""
Flack shook his head, "He says this one is older. Changed his name, and went into the FBI."
Mac sat back with a silent whistle, and swung his chair around to look blindly out the window. Flack and Stella glanced at each other, but said nothing for several minutes.
Finally, Flack cleared his throat and said, "Mac? Mouse may have seen me coming out of the Messers' apartment building."
Stella looked at him with narrowed eyes; he had not seen fit to mention that to her before now.
Mac swung back around, "Why do you think that?"
Flack shrugged, "I was being watched. Didn't think about it much until later; after all, I'd been expecting it. But Mouse showed up right on cue, and he couldn't have known my car; I didn't have that one when he used to snitch for me. Either he tagged me at the Messers …"
"Or someone else did, and sent him," Stella finished. Be damned to staying quiet; she ranked equal with both men.
"And Lindsay's brother, John Monroe, is FBI, and …"
"And Danny was in Montana, meeting the family, including John," Stella finished his sentence again.
"Too many coincidences add up to trouble, I'm thinking." Flack added.
Mac looked down at his hands for a minute then at Stella first and then Flack, "Remember Reed Garrett from the Kings and Shadows case?"
Stella said, "Claire's son. Student at Chelsea U, right?"
"Journalism student," Mac nodded. "He showed up at my place Friday night. Something had scared him into a major panic."
"He tell you what?" Flack asked.
Stella was having trouble swallowing; the thought that Reed had turned to Mac when he was in trouble touched her inexpressibly. Neither man noticed her reaction.
"Eventually, after spending the night and cooking a breakfast big enough for a frat house, most of which he polished off himself." It wasn't hard to catch the merest hint of pride in Mac's expression. "Anyway, he'd overheard a couple of conversations which worried him. I thought maybe he'd just made it bigger by worrying about it, you know. Plus, he's a journalism student; looking for connections and the bigger story is second nature."
"Yeah, but he seemed like a pretty smart kid, Mac. So, what did he hear?"
"Well, Messer and Sons has been getting a suspiciously high number of construction contracts at Chelsea: the last four major contracts have been picked up by them. Reed had noticed it, and went to investigate. He overheard a couple of the workers talking about techniques for beating out the competition. They were pretty graphic: everything from bribery to disappearance. It triggered questions in him. He's a student, a kid: he went to the Internet."
"And?" Stella questioned as Mac stopped.
"He googled Messer + mob – led him straight to Danny and Tanglewood."
Flack sat back, blowing out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding. "Yeah, it was all over the news when Sonny went away; Louie was still in a coma…"
"And Danny showed up in court every day," Stella completed the statement, but not the thought which followed, "On the other side of the room from his parents."
"So Reed found out about Danny. Did he come to warn you? To question you?"
Mac shook his head, "No, he had already figured out that Danny wasn't involved. But he pushed a little on the Sassone connection, and found out that Sonny's father had been connected to Gino Messer of Messer and Sons."
"Wait a minute!" Flack put his hand up, "The Sassones were connected to the Bonnano family; Messers to the Lucchese. What connection did Messer and Sassone have?"
"It was thirty, thirty-five years ago, maybe more. Sassone Sr. was involved with Gino Messer's sister-in-law."
"Maureen Messer." Now Flack was having trouble taking in a deep breath.
Mac nodded, his eyes hooded. "That was one conversation Reed overheard: the Messer-Sassone connection. There was another."
Flack had taken out his notebook and was scribbling down information as rapidly as he could. "What?"
"One of the workers was complaining about not getting paid for a job – Reed didn't hear what the job was. The guy he was talking to said, 'Don't worry, it'll come out right. The Councilwoman is in up to her eyeballs, and the Feds are in the game. We can't lose.'"
Stella looked puzzled a moment, "The Councilwoman? We have – what –
twenty-two women on council? O'Rourke, Addison, Chambers, Arroya, Nasril, Mercados, Messaline, …"
"And Garrett. Miranda Garrett. Reed's mother."
-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-
Hawkes searched through his pockets for the paper Lissa had handed him Saturday night. After they had finished dessert, they had decided to take in a late movie, then go out for coffee, and talk. There had never seemed a good time to go back to the conversation he had hoped to have with her about the list she had compiled for him of places that could use his help.
And now he had lost the paper.
He searched through his jacket pockets one more time. Dammit, this was impossible. He couldn't have lost it; Lissa would never let him live it down if she had to find all the information again. He was searching uselessly through his wallet again when the phone rang, and he answered it absent-mindedly.
"Hawkes."
"Shel? It's Lissa."
He jumped guiltily as her laughing voice sounded over the line. How did she do that?
"Hi, Lissa. How's it going?" He leaned against the kitchen table and tried to listen to her as he began an argument with himself about whether to ask her for the list again or not.
"Good. Thanks again for Saturday night. I'd forgotten how much fun hanging out with you was."
"I had fun too. We should do it again." Hawkes walked back into his bedroom to search through the clothes he had been wearing Saturday night.
"Definitely. I'll call you the next time I get a day off. Look, Shel, about that list – do you have there?"
"Umm, yeah, I think so," Hawkes said, surprised into lying.
"Good, 'cause I wanted to tell you something about the places, give you some background."
"Okay, just let me find it and you can tell me what you want." Frantically, Hawkes pulled out the pockets of the jeans he had pulled out of the dryer that morning, and nearly groaned out loud when he found the paper, folded up, washed, dried, and nearly illegible, in the back pocket.
"So, do any of those look interesting? You did look over the list, didn't you?"
Hawkes glanced over the stained paper with the words run together and across the page. "Umm, what about the Sisters' Centre for Wellness?" He rolled his eyes at the name, but it was the only one he could read clearly.
"Really?" Lissa sounded surprised but pleased. "That's not one I would have thought you'd be interested in. It's a great place, Shel – run by three women: a Jewish family practioner, a Muslim ob-gyn, and a Catholic counselor. They met at some international conference or something and decided to work together. Miriam Beniamin went to school with us; do you remember her?"
Hawkes thought back and could just about visualize a thin, intense woman with masses of bushy hair, glasses that were always slipping down her nose, and a penchant for sweatshirts and jeans. "Umm, yeah? Sure, sure, Miriam. I remember her."
Lissa's voice betrayed her doubts in his memory. "Yeah, well, she's amazing; such passion for what she does. She started the clinic and then Kathleen O'Conal came on board. About two years ago, Nasreen Suq joined them; she's from Montreal originally."
Hawkes was writing down notes frantically; he could tell he was losing ground with Lissa here with his weak responses. "Okay, so Dr. Beniamin, Dr. O'Conal, and Dr. Suq. Got it. Where is the clinic?"
Lissa sounded suspicious, "I wrote it down on the paper, Shel."
Hawkes laughed; convincingly he hoped, "Doctor's handwriting, Lissa! I can't read the numbers."
Lissa sighed and said, "Give me a minute." He could hear her rummaging around in the big old desk he had helped her salvage from a burned out office building a hundred years ago. "Okay, here it is." She read out the number and street slowly.
"Hey," Hawkes said, eyes narrowing as he wrote it down. "I was on that street, just a few days go. I didn't see a clinic in that block."
"I'm not surprised; they keep a pretty low profile," Lissa said soberly. "They've had some trouble with the neighbourhood. They provide services free for women; not everyone is comfortable with the types of services they provide."
"Abortions?" Hawkes surmised.
"Even to Muslims and Catholics. Birth control information for teenagers of any faith. They also do a lot of work with HIV status women and children. It can still be very difficult for women to get good information about the risks they run. They believe that having sex only with their partner will protect them. No one asks how many women their partner is having sex with."
"I know. Young heterosexual women in committed partnerships is one of the fastest growing HIV demographics."
Lissa sighed, "This group does good work, Shel. But they aren't popular around the neighbourhood. Not among the leaders, anyway, who are mostly men. Not until someone needs them, that is."
Hawkes thought back to the group of men standing outside the non-descript building with the glass doors. He bet that was the clinic.
"Where's the funding from?" he asked, doodling on the ruined paper. He'd transferred the important information into the notebook he carried to scenes.
"I don't know for sure. There are organizations, private donors, some international groups, I think. Are you serious about this, Shel? I just put it down because – well, because it's the kind of thing I'd like to get into."
Hawkes could hear her uncertainty over the phone lines, and his eyes opened in surprise. "I thought you were committed to your hospital work, Lissa? You put so much work into getting on there."
He could hear her sigh, "I know. And I do still feel committed, Shel. It's just that here, we see them come in, we patch them up, we send them back out. It's more like triage than medicine. I'd just like to follow a child from birth to adolescence, you know? A little bit of being a fixture in someone's life."
"Yeah, I understand." And he did understand. It was what he had run from up until now. Was he ready to commit even to a clinic, he wondered?
"Look, Shel, maybe that was a dumb idea. They may not want you anyway."
"What do you mean? Because it is a women's centre?"
"More because a lot of the patients are traditional women who may be more comfortable with a woman doctor. That was the original idea, after all."
"Yeah, I can see that. You're right; it probably isn't the best place for me."
"You should look at some of the other places I put down there. The Coalition, for example; they do great work with people living with HIV. There's another one, Outreach, that works with kids trying to get out of gangs. You'd do well with either of those groups." Lissa continued to mention snippets of names and organizations, and Hawkes tried frantically to get down enough to try and make sense of it all later.
Finally, she said, "Look, I have to go, Shel. Sorry that I wasn't more help. I guess I'm feeling a little unsettled myself these days. I seem to have projected my ideas onto you. If you need anything more, give me a call, okay?"
She hung up before Hawkes could offer dinner or another meeting. With a sigh, he put the phone down beside him, and scrubbed his hands over his face. She had seemed a little hurt, and he wasn't sure exactly why. Somehow, he had let her down, though.
His cell phone rang at that moment, and he frowned as he read the text message from Stella, asking him to meet her at an address in the Bronx. His eyes flickered from the text to the page he had been filling with information as Lissa doled it out.
The Sister's Centre for Wellness.