Author's Note: I've got the time off of school and work, so here's another bonus chapter!

"All you've got is conjecture and coincidence, Detective," the lawyer sneered, "No jury would ever convict my client."

The lawyer, a sharply dressed caribou, put an arm around his client. She was a middle-aged mountain lion, her eyes apparently red from crying. At the moment, however, she was stony-faced and glaring across the table in the interview room at the two detectives opposite her. The small room was made of cinder blocks and harshly illuminated by overhead fluorescent bulbs. The only pieces of furniture in the room were metal chairs and a metal table, all of which were bolted to the concrete floor. "Perhaps," Detective Black said evenly, "But then, perhaps not. We'll see when it goes to trial, won't we?"

"If you're done wasting my client's time, we'll be leaving now," the lawyer blustered, "Come on, Mrs. Leão-Baio."

The caribou and the mountain lion stood to leave, and the bunny and the wolf made no immediate move to stop them. When the lawyer had his hoof on the doorknob, Detective White spoke up. "You didn't mean to kill him, did you?"

The caribou grabbed Mrs. Leão-Baio by the paw. "You don't have to answer that. Come on."

The mountain lion had frozen in place. "It was an accident, right?" White continued, "It must have eaten you up inside, seeing your husband running off with someone young enough to be his daughter. But you still loved him, didn't you?"

"Come on, Helen," the caribou urged.

"He wasn't supposed to drink from that mug, right? Why wouldn't he use his favorite? Why would he give it to her? He never let you drink out of his favorite mug, did he? Maybe he just loved her more than he loved—"

The mountain lion tore her paw out of her lawyer's grasp and all but leaped across the table at the bunny. Even when her muzzle was mere inches away from Detective White's nose, the bunny didn't flinch. "He never loved her! Never! All she had to do was die and he'd move past it. It's her fault!" the mountain lion snarled.

"Helen, please!" the lawyer tried to interject.

"If... if she had just drank from the right mug... I wouldn't have... I wouldn't have killed him," the mountain lion sobbed as her entire body shook, her anger falling apart as her sorrow took over.

As Detective White snapped the cuffs onto the weeping mountain lion, Detective Black looked to the lawyer. The caribou's shoulders had collapsed as his client confessed to the murder, but he had forced himself back upright. "Conjecture, coincidence, and a confession," Black told him, sounding somewhat smug, "You might want to reconsider what a jury will do."

After the commercial break, Black and White came back for a brief coda in which the titular detectives discussed the twisted lengths to which some mammals would go for love, after which the scene faded to black and showed the credit for Executive Producer Rich Wolf, followed by the other credits. "When Grévy and LaMerk catch Roberto, can we interrogate him like that?" Nick asked, "I'll even let you be the bad cop."

Judy laughed and pushed the remains of her dinner around. She hadn't been particularly hungry for dinner after their lunch, but she had figured that they had to eat something. Her solution had been to pick up some fresh vegetables from the bodega around the corner from her apartment building and stir-fry them on her hotplate. One of the things that she had realized after moving to the city and becoming completely independent was that she couldn't survive off of frozen meals in the long term and she didn't have the cooking skills to prepare much else. Her options were limited when all she had to work with was a microwave, a mini fridge, and a hotplate, so while she thought she had more or less mastered stir-fries she was starting to get sick of them. Nick, for his part, hadn't objected to her selection for their dinner beyond telling her not to try stir frying grass. "You know that's not how interrogations work, Nick," she replied.

"Reality never lives up to our expectations, does it?" he asked in faux despair.

Although he clearly was not being serious, she considered what he had said. Her first day on the job as a police officer had gone nothing like how she had dreamed it would have gone, where she'd immediately be accepted as a valuable member of the force and win the respect of her colleagues. On the other paw, even in her wildest fantasies she had never imagined cracking a conspiracy that went to the very top of the city government and becoming a minor celebrity, or that her partner and best friend would be a fox. "That's not always a bad thing," she said.

Nick shrugged. As they had been the night before, they were sitting on her bed, watching the show on her laptop. "I should head out," he said, "If I show up to work in one of your shirts again, I think Clawhauser might explode."

"It's not just Clawhauser," Judy warned, "Francine told me that Wolford told her that you 'reeked of a vixen' when we got back today."

Judy had put the relevant phrase in finger quotes, which Nick laughed at. "Not the phrasing I would have chosen, but I'll take it as a compliment. They just can't believe someone this good-looking could possibly be single."

He hooked his thumbs towards himself and winked, but Judy just groaned. She threw one of her pillows at him lightly. "Get going, Slick."

Nick grabbed it out of the air and threw it back. "I can tell when I'm not wanted," he sniffed.

Judy just shook her head and put the pillow back in its rightful spot on her bed. "This was fun," she said smiling, "Maybe we can do this tomorrow, too. We've still got a couple episodes left."

"I could make some time," Nick agreed, "But tomorrow I'll make the dinner."

"You didn't like my stir fry?" she asked, playing up her disappointment a little.

"No, that's not it," Nick said, "It tasted fine. But you didn't enjoy it, did you? I'll bet you've been eating a lot of those same stir fries. Tomorrow I'll show you how to take them to the next level."

Judy had known Nick long enough to not be surprised by his perceptiveness; he had clearly noticed that she hadn't eaten much of her portion and correctly deduced why. "The next level, huh? I'll hold you to that."

Nick was on his way out her door at that point, but he paused in the doorway and smirked cheekily. "Nick Wilde never disappoints," he said, pulling the door shut behind himself.

"He does talk about himself in the third person though," she called through the door.

After he left, it was just about the time that she usually called it a night when she had work the next day, so she went through her usual bedtime preparations. When she crawled into bed, Judy realized that her blanket smelled faintly like Nick. It was comforting, somehow, and her last thought, as she drifted off to sleep, was to wish that she could have used him as a pillow again.

After the morning meeting, Judy's spirits were buoyed by the discovery that the new day had brought a few minor updates to the case. While Grévy and LaMerk hadn't managed to track down Roberto Escurel yet, they had identified a number of leads that they were working down. Jacques Lapin was still in his medically-induced coma, but the worst of the swelling in his brain had gone down and the doctors expected to be able to wake him up the following day if he continued to progress at his current rate. Additionally, the forensic technicians had apparently taken the obsolete file format of the video footage from Holly's apartment building as a challenge and had managed to convert the video into a format that would actually play on the police station's computers. Before she had the chance to dive deeper into any of the updates, however, the phone on Judy's desk in the cubicle she shared with Nick began to ring. "Hello, this is Officer Hopps speaking," she answered.

The telephones hadn't been updated in ages, and consequently most of the desk phones didn't have caller ID. As such, she was surprised when the voice on the other end of the line was Clawhauser's. "Judy! The mayor's here to see you!" he hissed into the phone.

"The mayor?" Judy asked.

"He's heading to your cube right now!" the cheetah warned, and then hung up.

Nick spun around, having apparently heard her half of the conversation. "What's that about the mayor?" he asked.

"That was Clawhauser," she replied, "Apparently the mayor is here to see me."

Nick frowned. "That's interesting timing," he said, "I wonder if the mayor has a source in the department."

Judy only had a moment to consider the implications before the mayor showed up outside the cubicle. Apparently, when Clawhauser had said that the mayor was on his way the cheetah hadn't been exaggerating. Mayor Escurel looked much the same as he had at the press conference of his that she had attended, although it looked like he was wearing a different tie. "I'd like to speak with you alone, Officer Hopps," the mayor said, ignoring Nick completely.

"There's nothing that you can say to me that you can't say in front of my partner," Judy replied.

"I think that I'm the judge of that," Escurel said archly.

"I'll just catch up on some paperwork," Nick said.

"Nick—"

"It'll be fine. Why don't the two of you grab a conference room?" he asked, then spun around in his chair to face his desk.

Judy reluctantly allowed Escurel to escort her to the nearest conference room, which was a bit too large for two relatively small mammals. The furnishings were plain and limited to a scuffed table and a few mismatched office chairs. "Are you going to ask me to leave your grandson out of this?" Judy demanded as soon as Escurel shut the door behind them.

"You insult me, Officer Hopps," the mayor replied, but he looked more bemused than anything else.

"You insulted my partner," she shot back.

Escurel inclined his head, conceding the point. "You can tell him whatever you like after this discussion. For now, though, I'll be blunt. I don't trust him."

This was a side of Escurel that Judy had never been able to see through his appearances on TV or the interviews he had given. He usually came off as being somewhat stiff and boring, but still avuncular. Now, however, he appeared coldly calculating, and Judy could imagine how he had managed to get on the city council in the first place.

"Because he's a fox?" Judy asked innocently.

"Because he's a former petty crook. Tell me, why does he deserve a second chance?"

"Nick passed a full background check," Judy said tightly, willing herself to remain calm and not allow the mayor to see her aggravation, "You're not being fair to him."

"Life isn't fair," the mayor responded, "And that's the point I'm getting at. My grandson has had his troubles, yes. We've tried getting him help, and he's tried overcoming those troubles. He's had second, third, and fourth chances he never would have had if he wasn't related to me. And if he's lapsed again, if he's the one who committed this terrible crime, then I will not stand in the way of his prosecution. But unless you know, beyond any shred of doubt, that he's the one who did it, I'm asking you to keep his name out of the press."

Judy remained silent, considering the mayor's request, which he apparently took as an invitation to continue. "If this gets out, there will be riots. Mammals will be calling for my head, and they probably aren't going to care much about due process. You've seen what happens when mammals lose faith in their government. You know, better than anyone, I think, what's at stake if you're wrong."

"You could have stepped down," Judy said, "None of this would matter if you had left office after Bellwether's arrest."

Escurel smiled slightly, as though she had made a joke. "I'm not stupid. I know that Bellwether only chose me as her assistant mayor because she thought she could control me. But I also know what this city needs, and I've got the chance now to make sure that the city gets it."

"And what does the city need?" Judy asked.

She was genuinely curious. The mayor had campaign slogans and promises, but they all seemed like little more than empty buzzwords. The mammal in front of her seemed like the real Escurel, not the image he projected in front of audiences. "Sameness."

"Sameness?" she echoed.

"It shouldn't matter that Holly Leaves is a popular actress. Every attempted murder should get the same attention. It shouldn't matter that your partner is a fox. He should be treated the same as every other officer."

"And it shouldn't matter that Roberto is your grandson?" Judy asked.

Escurel smiled, but his eyes remained hard. "Exactly. Think about what I've asked. I'm sure you'll make the right decision. Things could get very difficult for you—and your partner—otherwise."

"Is that a threat?"

"Of course not," Escurel said, "Just an observation about how the world works."