'Whoa, whoa, what?'

'Nicky Tomasi,' Beckett said to him as they parked in the precinct garage, took the two boxes upstairs to the Homicide bullpen. 'I think you're right on the money about him, we need to dig deeper on him.'

'What brought on this sudden epiphany? You still drunk from the weekend or what?'

'No epiphany, just putting it together logically. I've dealt with child killers before, have you?'

'Not where the child is the killer, no.' Adam shook his head.

'They are just as dangerous, sometimes moreso, than an adult.'

'Why more?'

Beckett waited until the elevator doors opened on their bullpen and she gave Adam a little look. 'To a child, even a teenager, the world is very crystal clear. Things are either right or wrong, black or white, that's it. Even if they don't necessarily process it that way, that is how they see them. That also means that if we're dealing with someone who thinks the only response to a problem is murder, we are dealing with a budding sociopath. So.'

She set the boxes on her desk, turned her computer on. 'We are going to dig up everything we can on Nicky Tomasi, or rather you are, and I am going to go to Karpowski and convince her that one of her children's classmates is responsible for a cold-blooded murder.'

'Alrighty then.'

Adam went for the heavy duty sugar and popped the top on the box of strawberry blintzes, sat down with one at his desk whiel he reviewed the fiel and waited for his computer to boot. The moment it was up and running, he set about doing what he did best - scouring the cyber-world for any details related to the victim. In this day and age, it was impossible not to have any kind of digital trai; hell there were people who created entire websites dedicated to tracking their pregnancies.

He clicked and scanned, copied pasted and printed until he had a neat little dossier on Nicholas Cesare Tomasi. Resided in Hell's Kitchen in a three-floor walk-up one-hundred percent owned by his parents. His father was Cesare Tomasi, MD and PhD, head of neurology at George Washington Memorial on the east side of the city and his mother was Lucia Orvino Tomasi, deceased.

This made Adam sit up and frown. The mother was dead, but she wasn't exxactly forgotten - her maiden name had been Orvino, big-time wheels in the city infrastructure. Orvino Engineering was the city's subcontractor for all public works and it was a family owned firm unto the fifth generation. That's what Nicky had meant, he thought. With nimble fingers, he searched the information for Lucia's death and rubbed his mouth in sadness. The boy had been only eleven when his mother had driven her car into a telephone pole on the Long Island Expressway; reports she'd been drinking were dismissed and it was revealed she'd stopped taking the anti-depressents her physician had prescribed after the death of her father Nicholas Giuseppe Orvino.

'Orvino? That's big mafia money right there.'

Adam glanced back over his shoulder, saw Ryan standing there reading his screen. 'What do you mean, mafia money?'

'There was a popular rumour going around the annals of City Hall that the Orvinos were Puzo's inspiration for the Godfather, and that they made some seriously problematic noisemakers disappear for LaGuardia back in the day.' Ryan dragged over a chair, snagged a blintz from the box. 'What's Nicky Orvino got to do with your case?'

'One of the grandsons, also a Nicky, is now the prime suspect in our case.'

'Ooh, careful where you step on that one, boy. Family money and all that.'

'Except that the link, the mother, she died six years ago in a car crash on the LIE, dude.'

'Oh, that you should be fine,' Ryan shrugged. 'Unless you like sleeping with the fishes.'

'Shut up and go away, I've got stuff to do.'

Ryan only laughed and wandered away with his blintz while Adam looked at the screen once more and pondered. He picked up the small little white bear Lindsay called Dunno the Eisbar, for when the answer to a problem he was facing was 'dunno'. It had been the first thing she'd given to him that he'd put on his desk at work; it made Adam frown deeper in thought. How had Nicky's idea that his teacher had to go the hard way come to him? Was it simply born of rage and then his ego goaded him into it? Or was it simply part of his brain detached and devoid of emotion that had triggered such a response.

Or was it the family thing, he wondered further. There was clearly no love lost between Nicky and the pressures he was feeling from home to go into engineering. There had been pressure like that on Lindsay to be a homemaker and baby machine from her father, and her mother had just gone along with it, Adam thought in disgust. She'd gotten away, broken free. Was this Nicky's twisted version of the Great Escape?

Adam spent the next hour pulling it all together, everything he could find on Nicky Tomasi so that when Beckett gave him the subtle 'get your ass over her' signal, he was ready with a small dossier.

'What have you got?'

'Nicholas Cesare Tomasi,' he started, and gave the run-down on their boy. 'The woman we saw at the school and assumed was a parent was actually his aunt, his father's sister, who came to live with them after Nicky's mother died.'

'Tell me more about that accident,' Beckett said quietly, looking over the photographs from the newspaper articles - the Lexus had been completely totaled, the front end a twisted mess of tangled metal and glass.

'The way the police report goes down, Nicky and Lucia were in the car together on a rainy night when the vehicle skidded and she went face-first into that telephone pole. Lucia was killed on impact and...' Adam traield off as he fought to clear his throat. 'And Nicky was in the backseat with a concussion, some bruised ribs, and multiple contusions and lacerations.

'Survivor's guilt is a hard burden to bear, especially on the mother-son relationship like that.'

'Well, it gets worse. There was some noise going around that Lucia aimed for that telephone pole and meant to take out herself and her son so her family couldn't get their hands on him. That's family with a capital F.'

'How do you mean?' Beckett shook her still slightly-throbbing head.

'Lucia's maiden name is Orvino,' Adam explained and he saw her make the connection right away. 'Her pops was Nicholas Orvino, allegedly the man behind the curtain for Fiorello LaGuardia back in the day.'

'That's hearsay a lot of the time, just adds to the legend of LaGuardia, but if she was brought up to believe it and believed that her son was in danger it makes sense. What did the accident investigation reveal?'

'Considering that same night there was three other similar incidents without the same level of catastriophe on the LIE, the accident investigator chalked it up to bad luck and cleared any suspicion from the insurance company. The inheritance went through, and Nicky was in the care of his father and his aunt ever since.'

'Alright. Call Fuqua, tell her you want a warrant for any and all medical records for Nicky Tomasi starting from two years prior to the accident. A decision like that, if that's the decision Lucia made, does not happen overnight, it takes time, planning, patience, and its repercussions on an eleven year old boy would be very far-reaching.'

'You're thinking his brain broke after the accident and this is somehow tied to honouring his mother?'

'Bingo. Fuqua, warrants, now.'

'Yes ma'am.'

Adam headed back to his desk, scowled in the playful way of cops when he saw Esposito hovering by the bakery box. 'You get one,' he told his friend and Esposito glanced up, grinned.

'You shoulda gone to the Salamander, bro. My mami woulda hooked you up no question.'

'Yeah, but this way Body, is that the guy's name?'

'Yeah, Body Mathias he's one of Shane Weaver's best mates.'

'Right, right.' Adam scratched his cheek. 'Well, considering how hungover Beckett was this morning, I doubt she'd have lasted the ride up to the barrio.'

Esposito thought of how wrung out Meredeth was and could only laugh. 'Yeah, alright, you get a pass on that one today bro. But next time...'

'Piss off,' Adam laughed as Esposito snagged a blintz and wandered off to his own desk.