Note: This story contains spoilers for the Episode: 'The Heart of Saturday Night'

Chapter 2

It had been a very slow week for Worden, and for that matter, all of Giardello's shift. There hadn't been a single murder since he had joined, and the only dead bodies that he had seen had been two ODs.

Giardello had recovered enough from his shock to tell Worden that the general rule with any new detective was to work secondary the first couple of calls he got. Craig remembered his days from foot patrol that things rarely went that neatly - Tim Bayliss had been working Homicide for two days before he had caught the murder of Adena Watson. Considering how FUBAR that investigation had been practically from the beginning, it was remarkable that the man had managed to survive that first case, much less go on to become one of the best detectives in the unit - at least if the board was any indication.

None of the other detectives had exactly gone out of their way to be friendly to him since he had join the unit, but they hadn't been acting like he stunk either. He would've objected to being sent out on errands or administrative duty more than anybody else in the unit, particularly considering that Kellerman and Pembleton were essentially office bound, but it wasn't exactly like the unit was flowing over with anything productive to do.

That all changed that Saturday night. A lot of things did, actually.

"We have three dead bodies," Giardello announced at the top of the shift. "We have a carjacking in Druitt Hill, a dead body in East Baltimore, and a bar brawl victim at the Waterfront."

"That's the kind of publicity we don't need," Munch told them bitterly.

Worden couldn't blame them. For the last two years, the Waterfront had been sort of watering hole for every cop in Baltimore. This probably hadn't been the intention of Bayliss, Lewis and Munch, and no doubt it probably hadn't helped them get the clientele they had probably hoped for when they bought it, but it had managed to have a pretty solid rep for the last year. But there had been more than a few brawls ever since the place had opened, and now a murder had taken place there? No one would probably want to drink there ever again.

"Lewis, you and Munch take the carjacking," Giardello told him. "Bayliss, take Worden, see what you can find out in East Baltimore. Pembleton, you and Kellerman man the phones, help Howard maintain command here."

"Um, Lieutenant, who's going to be handling the murder at the Waterfront?" Howard asked.

"I will."

There was a moment of hesitation that even Worden seemed to understand. What the fuck was the shift commander doing going out on a case, especially one that didn't even come close to fitting the standards of a red ball. Worden knew that he should probably be paying more attending to the actual murder - the fact that a man had been killed at the Waterfront was probably the kind of thing Gaffney would've wanted details on - but he was about to go out on his first official homicide and he kind of figured that was a priority.

Besides, Bayliss was going to be there.

"I'll get us a Cavalier," he told him.

"All right," Bayliss was still looking at Pembleton, who, as he had managed to do for most of the time Worden had been here, maintained a completely blank expression. Was he upset that Worden was going out with his partner or that he was able to go out on the street at all? He didn't know how Pembleton, but he figured it had to be the latter.

"Does he do that a lot?"

"Does who do what?" Bayliss asked. "Try to frame your questions better.

"Does the Lieutenant investigate murders?" Worden asked.

"Not really," Bayliss told him. "And if we're so shorthanded that he's going out on this case, this shift is in more trouble then I thought."

He wasn't sure whether this was a dig or not. Bayliss hadn't expressed the same resentment towards him that Munch and Lewis had, but he hadn't exactly gone out of his way to welcome Craig with open arms either.

"This isn't the kind of job where we keep our opinions to ourselves," Bayliss said suddenly. "If you've got something to say, then say it."

"Honestly, I'm not sure what to think," Worden admitted. "You know the reputation that Homicide has in the department."

"That we're a bunch of troglodytes who need the patrolmen to find everything for us." Bayliss shook his head.

Worden didn't know how seriously to take Bayliss at this. "Well, that's what we think of the day shift, and I know for goddamn sure that they hate us just as much.'

"Come on. You guys are legends in the department. Everybody in the department wants to work here."

Bayliss gave a small smile. "I was like you once. I thought that the people in Homicide walked on fucking water. That there was no higher calling for anyone who wanted to be a cop. Now, half the time I stare at a dead body, I wonder if I made the right call."

Considering that Tim Bayliss was one of the most respected detectives in the department with one of the best closure rates, it was kind of appalling to hear this from him, even if that was part of the reason Worden was supposedly here. "What changed your mind?"

Bayliss didn't speak for a long minute. Worden was sure the next words out of his mouth were going to be Adena Watson. Instead, he just stared straight ahead, and told Worden: "This is it."

Mclellan Street. Worden knew that even though Bayliss was, by far, the most open of all the detectives working Homicide, he would be lucky if he got an answer by the end of the shift. Best to just focus on doing his damn job.

It was a dark alley in East Baltimore, which meant that it was pretty sure to be a crackhead's den. This one was not any more remarkable than a dozen others that Craig had frequented on foot patrol, but he had rarely encountered a murder victim in one.

"Tim. We've got to stop meeting like this."

Bayliss' face lit up a little for the first time since they had gotten into their Chevy. A dark-haired woman with brown eyes and a very attractive dimple wearing a black leather coat was waiting for them with a smile on her face.

"Dr. Cox, this is Detective Craig Worden. I don't believe the two of you have had the pleasure yet."

Juliana Cox. The new Chief Medical Examiner for the City of Baltimore. Worden knew enough that Chief M.E.'s usually came out to see fresh corpses slightly more often then shift commanders when to investigate them. Cox, however, was already proving herself to be something of an iconoclast in that department.

'Does Scheiner have something on you?' Worden found himself asking.

"Excuse me?" Cox asked.

"Knew the guy a bit when I was on foot patrol," he admitted. "Always seem to draw these late night calls. Said if he ever found a way to get out from under them, he'd jump at the chance. Looks like he finally found one."

Cox gave an amused smile. "He does hate going out in the wee hours, but this was all me. I'm more hands on."

"So what brings us all here?" Bayliss asked.

"Teenage girl, no ID, no wallet." Cox walked them to the body. "Strangled, beaten and tied up."

"Any sign of sexual assault?" Worden asked.

"I'll have to get your down to the morgue, but it looks that way. Whoever did this got up close and personal. Oh, and she definitely wasn't killed here. Someone definitely dumped her."

By now, Worden had gotten a good look at his first 'real' murder victim. She was pretty, but attractive in a way that looked like she was seriously damaged. "What's your guess on time of death?"

"Not that long. Six, eight hours ago at most."

Bayliss, in the meantime, had turned to the patrolman who had been on scene - Westby, it looked like. "Who called it in?" he asked.

Westby indicated two African-Americans not much older than their Jane Doe, Tom Spencer and Edgar Spritz. Worden had enough time on the Baltimore PD to know that they were on something. They tried to come up with a half-assed story of what they were doing there, but the fact that Edgar seemed more curious if there was a reward for the discovery of the victim pretty much gave the game away, even before Westby showed them the crack pipe that they had found on them.

Considering the location, there didn't seem to be any other witness besides Tom and Edgar. Bayliss told Westby to take them back to HQ after they finished the canvas. The veteran detective paid little attention to Worden for the next half hour, after it became clear there were none to be found.

As they walked back to the Chevy after exchanging notes, Bayliss spoke to him directly for the first time since. "So what do you think about Tom and Edgar?"

Worden gave it some thought. "I don't think that they killed her."

"And why's that?"

There were a lot of obvious reasons - no trace evidence had been found on either, they didn't seem the type who would be capable of doing this elaborate a murder, and then just wait around for it - but he chose the most obvious response: "They're too scared."

Bayliss remained stone-faced. "They could've killed her, and are scared of being caught." he pointed out. "Or maybe they're just scared of police. The only reason they came to this alley was to violate at least three or four various statutes of the Baltimore Penal code."

Worden considered this for a couple of seconds, then shook his head. "Addicts don't mind doing a night or two in lockup. With some of them its a point of pride. And fuck, killing a girl is worth bragging points in their world. They're afraid. And not of us."

Bayliss considered this. "They're definitely holding out," hem said. "So we're going to have to start squeezing them. After we find out who Jane Doe is."

By the time they got back to the squadroom, it was well past ten. Somehow he and Bayliss had made the most progress with their case, which pretty much said everything about how the night was going.

Natalie Silvio had been the victim of the carjacking. Bullet to the head, one to the heart. That was as far as Lewis and Munch had managed to get so far. They had put the car out on teletype, and they were checking the chop shops to see if anything turned up. More importantly, there had been a baby girl in the car. There was no sign of her.

As for Jack Widmer, the man who had died at the Waterfront (and there was a title for a Hank Williams song0, they had a roomful of suspects and witness, all of whom, quite naturally, had been too plastered to remember what they had been drinking before the first punch was thrown. This was the kind of scenario that called for half a shift, not the Lieutenant. Lewis and Munch certainly wanted to do so, but the sergeant was emphatic they work on their own case.

Bayliss, in the meantime, put Tom and Edgar in the fishbowl, and decided to try and shake their stories, such as they were. Craig's job was to start going through the missing persons reports of the last twenty four hours, and see if they could find a name to go with their Jane Doe. Because this was Baltimore, things didn't go well.

"Come on, come on." Craig was incredibly tempted to slap the machine on the side, but he knew given their equipment, it might very well break, and in a police department that was still using typewriters for its field reports, he'd get fit with the bill for the new one.

Kellerman looked at him. "I know. It's a piece of shit."

"I think my nephew uses a faster computer to play The Oregon Trail." Worden said wryly.

"What's that, some kind of educational game?"

"You could call it that. You take an 1840s family across the country in a covered wagon, you risk starving the death, dysentery, cholera, malaria, and if you make it all the way there, you ford the Columbia, and you probably drown." Worden told him. "You know, just the kind of thing your average eight year-old needs to learn about."

"Yeah. Doesn't really seem like it fits with the Baltimore market." Kellerman told him.

"I don't know. Occasionally, you get to go out hunt animals for food." Worden focused on typing again. "There's some use there."

"Nope." Kellerman argued. "Not unless you go hunting with a Glock."

Worden wanted to answer that, then he saw something. "To be continued," he mumbled, as he printed out a relevant report.

Bayliss was in the middle of shaking down Edgar when he rapped on the glass.

"Making any progress?" Worden asked.

"They clearly know something, but they're either playing brain dead or they really are." Bayliss looked at him. "You get an ID?"

"Maybe. Tom and Martha Rath, reported their sixteen-year old daughter Leila missing earlier tonight. Photo seems to be a match."

Bayliss looked at him. "And that's our first break." He turned to Pembleton. "Frank, can you keep an eye on Heckle and Jeckel till Worden an I make the notification?"

"S-sure thing," Pembleton agreed.

"I can work on them a little." Worden offered.

Bayliss shook his head. "You need to learn this part of the job eventually. Besides, they might be more forthcoming than these idiots."

"Is it asking too much to hope we're disturbing them for nothing?" Worden asked.

Bayliss handed him the report with the picture. "You don't really believe that, do you?"

Bayliss' instincts were proving to be as good as everyone said they were. The trip to the Raths was not one he hoped to repeat. When they got to the door, Martha, the mother couldn't seem to process the fact that they were Homicide cops. Tom Rath could, and he seemed to be more pissed that his wife didn't get the message that something had happened to their daughter then the fact that their daughter was very likely lying on a slab in the Baltimore County morgue.

The next ninety minutes were an ordeal of a different sort. According to procedure, they had to take next of kin down to the morgue to identify the body. The ride was ten excruciating minutes, mainly because Bayliss wanted to hear what they had to say before he told them anything. Martha kept saying if they were sure that this was Lila, that this had to be some kind of mistake, that their daughter would never do something to end up dying like this. Tom, on the other hand, kept lecturing his wife, telling her that the cops didn't make these kind of calls unless they were absolutely sure about these thing, and most gallingly, of course Lila could've done something that would have ended up with her dead.

The bickering continued right up until they had walked into the medical station. Bayliss asked both of them if their daughter had any identifying marks.

"She had a tattoo of a rose on her left ankle," Tom said.

"It-its like a bracelet," Martha still seemed to be trying to defend her daughter. "You know, that thing teenager's get.

"It's a tattoo!" Tom finally seemed to have run out of patience. "Bikers get tattoos! Sailors get tattoos! Whores get tattoos." His voice actually broke a little at this last as he seemed to realize what he was saying.

Dr. Cox pulled back the blanket on her left ankle. There was the rose. Martha broke completely and fell into her husband's arms, sobbing. Tom remained stoic, though Worden couldn't tell if it was for his wife, or whether he simply couldn't deal with the fact that his daughter was gone.

Bayliss then told him that he thought that they should interview the parents separately and see if they could get a clearer picture of what Lila Rath's life was like without them talking in stereo.

"You don't really think they'd lie to us about her?" Worden put forth. "Considering what each of them seem to think..."

"Normally, its a good idea to interview the victim's relatives separately," Bayliss pointed out. "You don't want them to get a chance to coordinate whatever stories they might tell."

Worden had a feeling that this was a rule the all-mighty Pembleton had established early in Bayliss and his relationship. He also figured Bayliss didn't much care working with anybody who wasn't him. "I'll take the father," he volunteered.

"Now Lila was sixteen," he began.

"She would've been sixteen today," Tom Rath managed to maintain a level of neutrality in his tone that would've been fitting for a cop, but was rather appalling for a man who'd just lost his daughter.

"How long had she been gone before you called the police?"

"Two days."

Worden blinked. "She's missing two days, and you don't think to call the police before then."

"This was par for the goddamn course. She'll come in four, five in the morning, miss dinner, miss school, and then she'll get on fucking high horse when we ask her where she was." Tom coughed. "Martha would buy her bullshit excuses, and she'd always tell me to let it go, she's a teenager."

"Do you know any of Martha's friends? Maybe someone who could give us a hint as to what happened to her."

"I know what happened to her. She spent her whole goddamn life looking for trouble, and now she finally found it!"

Given the nature of Lila Rath's death, Craig couldn't help but agree with him on that. "Can you think of anybody she might've known who could've been capable of doing this?"

"They're all fucking capable," Tom muttered. "Look, I can give you the names of some of the people who were in her grade as high school, but most of them, they only knew her well enough for her to borrow math notes from them."

After a bit of cajoling, Craig managed to get the names and phone numbers of some of the people that Lila had hung out with. Tom Rath, however, didn't think he'd get anywhere with them, considering his wife had asked some of her classmates and none of them had seen her since school. He questioned him for another few minutes before he figured he squeezed him dry.

"I knew this would happen to her," Tom said as Worden got up. "Oh, maybe she'd have gotten in a car with a drunk driver or OD on heroine, but we were always going to find her the same way. That's a horrible thing for a father to say about his daughter, but it's true."

After they sent the Raths back home, it was pretty clear that questioning the deceased's parents had gotten the two of them collectively nowhere. Bayliss thought that it was more important than ever that they find out what those two druggies knew. Worden decided not to push the fact that one of them could have been interrogating Tom and Edgar while the other had been talking to the parents, but he could see the logic in letting the witnesses stew a little.

He was still a little insulted that Bayliss' first move when he got back to the squad was to go to Pembleton. While he was telling them how Dad thought she had brought it on herself, and Mom wouldn't have been surprised if she just got lost going back from the prom, Craig was the first to notice that the fishbowl was empty.

"Where are they?" Worden demanded.

"W-who?" Craig wondered whether Pembleton was being coy or whether he genuinely was having some kind of after effect from his stroke.

"I l-let them go home." Pembleton told them. Before they could start to fully chew them out, he told them that they had seen someone hanging out in the alley, a guy named Gary Swern. "T-they're afraid of him. With good reason."

Indeed, Swern was twenty-five. His juvenile record was sealed, but he'd done a three year stint in Jessup for aggravated assault. He'd just gotten out of Jessup a month ago.

Pembleton had very thorough in the last two hours. In addition to questioning the witnesses, and getting a probable suspect out of them, he had also managed to track down his Aunt Eileen's, who had raised him since he was a child.

The man had been chained to his desk all night, and he'd managed to get more done then the two detectives actually investigating this murder. If it had been anyone else, Craig would've have been insulted.

Bayliss took the humble. "Thanks, Frank."

"Y-y-you're wel-welcome," Frank told him, as he and Craig left to try and track down Swern.

Roger Gaffney was not going to be happy that Pembleton wasn't nearly as slow as he had hoped he was.

"Look who we found." Bayliss had been considerate enough to let Craig walk the perp into the squadroom. Then again, Craig was a bit bigger than him. If Swern decided to fight - and given his rep, that was a reasonable assumption to make - maybe Bayliss wanted to make sure that Craig took the ass-whupping and not him.

"Mr. Gary Swern. Now ever since Mr. Swern was released from the good people at Jessup, he has been staying in his aunt's basement, where all the wonderful memories of his childhood have been. " Bayliss told him.

"And among those, we happened to find a sled." Worden told Kellerman and Pembleton who were paying the closest attention. "One of those nice old fashioned sleds. Guess what was missing from it."

"I'm all ears." Kellerman asked.

"A rope." Bayliss told them. "Just like the one our crack crime lad is analyzing now for Gary's DNA and blood. So, Detective Worden, if you would be so kind as to bring Gary into our humble interrogation room, I believe he has some questions that he needs to answer."

Bayliss walked up to the Box, held the door opened like a polite maitre'd, and let him walk Swern into the room, where he un-cuffed him, cuffed him to the table, while he got out the Miranda waiver. Unsure of what kind of technique his fellow detective would use, Craig decided to let him ask the first question.

"So. Why don't you tell us about why we're here?" Bayliss began.

Swern decided not to take the hints he'd been getting all the way there. "I don't know this girl."

Bayliss laughed. "Who said anything about a girl?"

"You said there was a girl." Swern was acting like he was an idiot.

"No, I said her name was Lila. She could be someone's mother, she could be someone's grandmother." He pointed at her. "You said she was a girl."

"Whatever, man."

"Fine. You don't want to take about Lila. Let's not talk about her." Bayliss paused. "Let's talk about Charlene Mills."

"Hey, hey. You can't get me for that. I did my time for her."

Bayliss said nothing, instead he looked at Craig. "That's right. You did. According to this," he looked at the file he had in front of him, "you wrapped a stocking around her neck until she passed out."

"I didn't kill her." Man, this guy deserved to go to the gas chamber.

"Not for lack of trying." Worden reminded him. "Charlene was in a coma for three days. She then spent the next six weeks in the hospital. Must have bugged the hell out of you that she was in any condition to testify at your trial."

"Lila Rath was sixteen. How old was Charlene? Fifteen? You sure like them young." Craig thought that he could see a little additional anger in Bayliss at this idea. "But then, maybe we're getting this wrong. Maybe Gary here got a raw deal."

"Definitely happens." Craig said slowly. "Maybe Charlene wanted to screw, and she liked it rough."

"Yeah, I'll bet that's what happened here." Bayliss told him. "She was a tease, she got under your skin, and then when all the smoke had cleared, Charlene decided to pin it all on you."

Gary actually considered this for a few moments. "Yeah, she wanted it. She wanted it bad."

"Same way Lila did."

"I'm telling you I don't know the girl."

This went on for another fifteen minutes. It might have worked better on someone who hadn't been around the block as frequently as Swern probably had been. But he'd been through the system enough to know better. For that matter, Worden was a little shocked that the smug prick hadn't asked for a lawyer already.

"All right, fine." Bayliss finally said. "You don't want to tell us anything fine. We don't need you to. We've got everything we need to put you back in Jessup for the rest of your life. I've got not one, but two witnesses who can put you in the alley where Lila Rath was found. We've got the rope from your sled found around the body of Lila Rath. We've got your previous victim who will jump at the chance to put you back in lockup. You don't want to try and get in front of this, fine. I'm just gonna call Danvers, and tell him that he's got yet another case that he can put in the win column. Come on, Craig. I'm gonna give you the privilege of calling the States Attorney yourself."

Bayliss walked towards the door. Worden got up as well. He had just put his hand on the knob when Swern broke.

"She wanted it."

Worden didn't turn around. Bayliss did. "Whoa, whoa. Before we go any further, I'm going to need you to read that piece of paper right there."

Swern picked up the paper, and looked at what was arguably the most familiar series of statements to anybody who'd grown up watching cop movies. No doubt this chump had seen more than his share going through the system. Craig was frankly a little shocked that a man who had gone through the system so many times was about to fall for it again.

After he finished signing and initialing the document, Bayliss sat down in the chair across from him. "She wanted it, didn't she?"

The stupid asshole actually had the balls to smile at them. "They always do."

The sun was rising when Bayliss started typing up the final report on Swern. Worden had offered but Bayliss had said that it was the primary's responsibility to make sure all the paperwork was typed up.

The rest of the shift had had something of a mixed day. The Silvio carjacking was probably going to be in red for a very long time, though they had managed to find the baby girl that had been in the back seat. And despite his doubts on their shift commander's ability to have to work a murder, he had found Jack Widmer's killer - a man who had gotten in the face of another drunk making unwanted advances to a woman, and who ended up hitting him with a beer bottle.

"What about notifying the Raths?" Worden asked Howard.

"I'll take care of that," Bayliss told him, his eyes never losing focus on the report in front of him. "Thank you, by the way."

"What, for acting as your secondary?"

"No, although you didn't screw it up that badly. No, thank you for going the whole night and never bringing up what happened at the Waterfront." Bayliss turned to him. "This is going to be a pain in the ass for months with Munch and Meldrick, and I didn't need any more distractions."

Craig was a little surprised at this. "Barroom brawls are good for business."

"Really? Cause we had a major brawl last year, and it took us three months before people started coming in droves again." Bayliss actually gave a sigh. "Now, we've got a genuine corpse. And even though they've got the killer, its not gonna be great for business that we actually had a goddamn homicide in our bar."

Now was not the time for Craig to say that the exact same thought had crossed his mind last night. He figured Bayliss was going to have his own headaches, and he was going to have his own problems.

A brawl in the bar owned by half of Giardello's shift that led to an actual dead man was probably just the kind of dirt that the Captain was looking for. The fact that none of this was their fault, and that none of it had anything to do with the kind of cops they were, wasn't going to make any real difference to his patron. Hell, he would probably get off just from the fact that the Lieutenant had solved the murder instead of trusting one of his own detectives.

Right now, however, Craig just wanted to go home and hit the mattress. He had a lot on his plate right now, not the least of which was he was still dealing with working his first real murder. He'd managed to contain the level of disgust the whole sordid affair had left him with - if his first week on the job had taught him anything, it was that you never showed how much a dead body unsettled you. He had a feeling, though, despite the exhaustion that permeated his bones, that he wasn't going to sleep that well.

He was right.