I scared everyone with that last chapter break! Don't worry, guys, our Lt. Flynn is safe for like, *at least* another eight chapters or so!

After that, all bets are off.

A Tangled Web (3)

"I was supposed to have brunch with Nic and her family today." Flynn sighed, his previous anger gone. "Just a regular family brunch – my ex won't even be there, do you have any idea how long I've waited for something like that? Now because Taylor wants to make the Mayor happy, I'm gonna miss it." A trace of resentment found its way back into his voice.

Sharon's expression was sympathetic – and unsurprised. Lately, most of Andy's moods had been somehow connected to his efforts to make amends to his children. Addressing past mistakes was never easy. "You couldn't have known that we'd get called in," she offered.

"No, I know. It just… it makes me angry, you know?" He grimaced. "I used to pull this kind of thing all the time, letting her wait, missing school plays, birthdays – Nicole never says anything but I know she remembers that."

It was easy to feel for him. "I'm sorry."

"And it's not even – okay, if this were a real case, fine, but the only reason we're all here is because of some stupid meeting where the board of commissioners decided that the LAPD needs to be part of the Mayor's re-election campaign!"The lieutenant shook his head, disgusted. "I swear, I don't know how you play that game, Sharon. If I were in your place, I'd tell all those entitled assholes to go to hell."

Her lips curled ever so slightly. "Oh, I think they're all very well aware of your sentiments, even if you're not in my place," she assured him. "And I prefer a more… diplomatic route to telling one's superior officers to go to hell."

At her deceptively mild smile, Andy snorted. "That must be why Pope picked you for the job and not me."

Sharon hummed. "No… he picked me because I'm scarier."

That surprised another snort out of Flynn. "No argument there," he smirked. Then after a second he sighed, the light humor gone again. "I haven't even called Nic to tell her I won't make it."

She let a few seconds pass by in thoughtful silence, then bit her lips. "Go to your brunch."

Andy's expression sobered instantly. "What – no, Sharon, that's not why –"

"I know," she acknowledged. "But we're not getting anywhere here until we get the tox screen results back, until Buzz is done reconstructing a better picture or Dr. Morales gets us some dental records or we get a hit on prints… none of which require your presence," she pointed out. "Go to brunch with Nicole and her family. We'll call you if we need you."

He shook his head, uneasy. "Look, everyone's got plans –"

" –and if we can spare them later, I'll see what I can do about that, too," the Captain nodded. "For now, you're the one whose daughter and step-grandkids are waiting on him for brunch. So… go." Arching her eyebrows, she waved a hand in the direction of the door. "Go on. Give my best to them."

Flynn hesitated for another long moment, but in the end his shoulders relaxed, and he gave her a soft smile. "Sharon… thanks."

She smiled back. Then... "Well, I plan to make you write the after-action report on this case," she informed him, going around the desk to sit down, "so don't thank me yet."

As soon as Andy left, Sharon allowed herself a quiet moment, head leaning back against the chair. She thought that she'd done the right thing telling him to go… but the rest of them were still stuck there, and there really wasn't anything she could do to about that until they ID'ed the man in the morgue.

She pulled out her phone to call Rusty, as she'd promised. Their plans for the day had to be altered, of course – they'd probably not get to go grocery shopping until the evening at the very best, and they'd likely have to skip going to mall to get him new pants for school… which was a problem because school was tomorrow and his only other pair of appropriate uniform pants was in the hamper and… Well, they'd just have to run the washer again tonight, and of course not mention it to anyone at St. Joe's – or her mother – that they'd done laundry on a Sunday.

This last-minute scrambling to reconcile work and home and get everything done suddenly felt awfully familiar.

Raising her last two teenagers had entailed much of the same: the need to do several things at once, the worrying, the constant attempts to keep one step ahead of the game and on top of everything that was going on in their lives… With Rusty, there was more on top of that, too, because there were other dangers to him, and she'd already almost lost him once, and the security was gone now and oh… in a way, it had almost been easier when he was spending all his free time at the station.

Of course Sharon felt awful as soon as she thought that. His life wasn't lived for her convenience, and if she couldn't figure out a way to do her job and take care of him and keep him safe, that was definitely her failing, not his.

She let out a long sigh as she listened to the phone dial.

Rusty picked up on the second ring, and asked her if they'd caught their bad guy yet. Despite her somewhat restless thoughts, Sharon smiled.

"Hi," she said, leaning back against the chair as he returned her greeting. "And no… actually, there might not be a bad guy to catch, this time."

"Wow, I'm sure that's very disappointing." Her smile widened; he was clearly in a good mood that morning.

"Did you eat breakfast?"

"Yeah. We're out of bread, by the way," he informed her. "And bacon." (she rolled her eyes at the kind of 'breakfast' those ingredients hinted at.) "And like… everything else. Do you want me to go grocery shopping?"

Sharon winced. "That's alright, honey, we can go together, later tonight." The day she let him shop for groceries alone was the day they'd both start eating bread and bacon for every meal.

"You could give me a list," Rusty grumbled, reading her mind, and for a moment she was worried that their easy mood would darken. But instead he just gave in and asked if they were still on for lunch, and she counted off yet another plan that had been derailed by the six a.m. work call.

This one, at least, was maybe still salvageable. "If you don't mind coming to the station a little later, and if we go someplace nearby," she said thoughtfully, glancing at the murder room and trying to infer how long it would take to ID their dead guy, "…I think that should work out just fine."

"Yeah, okay," he agreed, then added a little worriedly: "But like, as long as we don't have to go to that sandwich place again."

'That sandwich place' was the nearest and most convenient food location, only a few minutes away from the police building. Their food was not at all objectionable, but there wasn't great variety as to what one could order, and it definitely got boring after a while. The first time that Rusty had been back at the station after the round-the-clock security had been lifted, he'd informed Sharon in no uncertain terms that he was never eating there again, if the alternative was starvation.

"No sandwiches," she promised with a smile. "We should have enough time to go to a nice sit-down place."

After all, the case was hardly a high-alert one. In fact, Sharon hoped that after the ID and the tox screen results came back, they could confidently establish that the man had no real grounds on which to make any threats to public safety, and that his death was definitely not a murder. And then – no matter what she'd told Lt. Flynn – she'd personally fax everyone's very costly overtime sheets to the Chief's home.

At the very least he could get an indigestion following his peaceful Sunday brunch.

Unfortunately, her optimism about a quick wrap-up may have been premature. By noon, there were still no hits on the prints, the guards that Provenza and Sykes had talked to had no further useful information to offer, and the photo that Buzz had reconstructed from the video footage was so far returning no matches in the DMV database.

"I suppose it's possible that he didn't have a driver's license…" Tao wore a doubtful expression, and the Captain shared his skepticism. The dead man had seemed older than sixteen, and Dr. Morales had put his age around early-to-mid-twenties. Her eyes narrowed as another idea occurred to her.

"Is there a way to compare the photo we have against high school graduates in the last… eight years?"

Tao grimaced. "Not an easy way, but yes. Usually I'd suggest sending his photo to local high schools – we have a listserv that includes most of them – but no one's going to see it on a Sunday afternoon… I'll check our photo databases and come up with a search algorithm."

Sharon thanked him. She felt bad making him do all the extra work, but, the sooner they ID'ed the man, the sooner they could all go home.

At his desk, Sanchez finished a phone call, then looked up. "Ma'am. That was Dr. Morales. The lab just sent back the preliminary tox screen results." He shook his head to preview the news. "Other than a slightly elevated blood alcohol level, none of the toxins they tested for showed up in our guy's bloodwork. That includes household and industrial poisons and a list of toxic agents commonly used in criminal acts..."

Sharon pursed her lips. That was not good news: in her experience, the harder it was to find anything, the more likely it was that there was something to be found.

Reluctantly, she began to re-evaluate the suicide angle. Sure, the man had jumped off the bridge on his own, that much was plain from all the video footage they had… but if he'd done it because he was under the influence of a toxin, and if coming into contact with that toxin hadn't been an accident… then she might have been wrong when she'd told Rusty that there was no bad guy to catch.

Julio's expression indicated that he was thinking along the same lines. "The tox screen feels like a dead end, Ma'am." He arched his eyebrows. "I don't like dead ends."

Sharon dipped her head thoughtfully. "Neither do I, Detective," she murmured, then turned to glance again at what little information they had up on the murder board. Perhaps it was time to erase Lt. Provenza's quotation marks from around the word 'victim'. "I suppose we'll have to wait for more information on who this man is before we can tell the lab what else to test for…"

Of course, none of that meant that their John Doe's threats were any more believable. Quite the opposite: if he'd been out of it enough to jump off a bridge without really meaning to, Sharon was disinclined to care about anything that had come out of his mouth in the minutes prior to that.

That still left them with a possible murder.

And an unidentified toxin.

And an unidentified dead body.

At least he hadn't been delivered to her office in a duct-taped cooler...

"Captain…" Buzz walked into the murder room holding a couple of papers, and handed her one of them. "Printouts of our dead guy's picture. This is the best-resolution image that we can get from the video footage."

Sharon glanced down at the photo. It showed a young white male, with wavy brown hair down to his shoulders and a crooked nose. He looked very thin and otherwise perfectly ordinary, which made their inability to ID him all the more frustrating. It wasn't that someone was deliberately trying to hide this man's identity… it was just one of those needle in a haystack cases…

"Uh… should I…" Holding the second copy of the photo, Buzz waved uncertainly to the murder board. He wasn't usually the one to put stuff up there, but Tao was busy at his computer and Sanchez was seated and everyone else was gone…

When the Captain motioned him to go ahead, he hesitated a moment, a little confused as to where to place the picture exactly. Finally he pinned it next to the two grainy ones, more or less under the word 'Victim'.

"I've also looked at all the footage we have, again. Still no evidence of anyone else in any of the frames. Just… him. He was alone up there, Ma'am."

"Yes, thank you, Buzz," nodded Sharon. "At this point, there's no reason to think that this man didn't jump off the bridge of his own volition," she mused out loud, crossing her arms. "The question is, did he do so intentionally, or was it a consequence of an unidentified toxin impairing his judgment…?"

"Uh…" Buzz looked at her a little warily, as though uncertain whether she was actually asking him and expecting an answer. "The…latter?" he guessed. "He did look pretty out of it in those videos."

Sharon hummed, thoughtful. "Unfortunately, until we ID him and find out more about his background, it's impossible to tell what he was like under normal circumstances."

"Could be that he was a wacko all the time," Sanchez translated for Buzz's benefit. "Although none of the shelters or psych wards in that area reported anyone missing," he told the Captain. "I checked earlier."

"That's because he wasn't homeless or in a mental institution." Tao looked up from his computer, eyebrows arched in an expression that plainly said that he had news. "Just got a hit on the photo search."

Julio crossed his arms. "That was fast," he noted, a note of almost suspicious admiration in his tone, and the lieutenant gave his usual modest shrug:

"The algorithm was quicker than I thought."

Sharon's lips curled. If she had to be called out on a questionable case at the crack of dawn on a Sunday, having the best people on the force on her team at least gave her one reason to smile.

"James Donnell." Twenty minutes later, having waited for Provenza and Sykes to return, as well, Mike was writing the name of their victim above the photo on the murder board. "Twenty-three, works in Animal Care for the Department of Animal Resources at USC, has been employed there for the past two years. Not married, no history of mental problems, no criminal record… not even a speeding ticket. Although that might be because he doesn't actually have a car registered in his name," he amended.

"Let me guess," said Provenza, "no known affiliations with any radical groups or gangs, no documented anarchist leanings… no previous suspected involvement in any sort of criminal endeavor." His eyebrows arched wryly.

"None of the above," Tao confirmed.

"That doesn't mean that he's not involved in something now," Amy pointed out, earning herself an eye-roll from the older lieutenant:

"Do you want to be here until tomorrow morning, Sykes?"

"If it means that a local train station doesn't get blown up," she replied in kind, although there was no more bite to her words than there had been to Provenza's protest, and he waved a dismissive hand:

"There's no indication that this guy even knew what a bomb looks like, let alone how to make one."

"I've also looked up his credit card statements," Tao provided. "No unusual purchases, nothing that stands out…"

"There you have it." Provenza leaned back in his chair. "I say we pass him on to Robbery-Homicide, with our compliments."

Five pairs of eyes moved to Sharon, who sighed quietly.

It was up to her, now, to decide how far to take the case. If she was comfortable calling it a suicide, she could send it back to the on-call officers and have them figure out emergency contacts and inform the family. That would let her division off the hook, but…

She glanced at the photo of the young man, then at the images of his damaged internal organs that Buzz had added to their documentation of the case.

If, as they all suspected, the 'suicide' had been a consequence of whatever toxin had poisoned Mr. James Donnell, she could still refer the case to Robbery-Homicide. It wasn't unlikely that he'd come into contact with the toxin accidentally, as Dr. Morales himself had suggested...

With another sigh, she turned her attention to the team again. "Alright. Based on the evidence so far, I don't believe we can safely rule out the possibility that Mr. Donnell was murdered… or the possibility that he may have indeed been involved in some sort of threat to the public safety," she added almost reluctantly, to Provenza's resigned groan.

"Shoulda gone with Flynn," he mused. Sharon gave him a sympathetic look.

"As of this moment, I'm inclined to treat this as a suspicious death. We'll look into how James Donnell died, and hopefully the rest of the answers will come from there."

She took a step closer to the murder board, mentally reviewing the information that they had so far.

"Julio." The man nodded, at the ready. "You and Amy go check out his work place at USC. If no one's there on a Sunday, find out the name of his supervisor and go question them about Mr. Donnell. Lt. Tao… can you please look further into his background? Interests, friends, online activity… see if there's anything that might tell us why anyone would want to hurt him."

While Mike rolled his chair back to his desk and pulled his keyboard closer, Sharon turned to Provenza.

"Lieutenant… as soon as Lt. Flynn gets back, which should be any minute…" She paused, realizing that she'd been about to order him to the dead man's residence, except if there was any evidence there, they'd need to document it on film. And she'd just allowed Buzz to go so he could make his play…

The day was getting more inconvenient by the minute. For everyone.

"Can someone please call Buzz, and let him know that we'll need him, after all?" she sighed. "Once he and Lt. Flynn are back," she qualified, turning back to Provenza, "you can go check out Mr. Donnell's residence. Be careful what you touch – something poisoned him, and it might not have been airborne according to Dr. Morales, but it could still be in his home."

"We'll make sure our gloves don't have any holes," the lieutenant reassured her with a wry smirk.

"Detectives, that goes for you, too." Sharon waited to see Sanchez nod, before glancing back at the murder board again.

His work and home covered, there was still one aspect to consider. "Since he's not married, who's James Donnell's next of kin?"

Sykes checked the basic background sheet that Tao had printed out for all of them. "Parents," she said. "Robert and Sylvia Donnell. They live in Arvin, Kern County... that's a few miles from Bakersfield."

A couple of hours' drive away. Too far for an in-person notification… usually. If they had to do it over the phone, Sharon would do it herself and spare anyone else the unpleasant experience. But depending on what they discovered in their investigation, it might be worth it to drive over in person… She decided to postpone the notification until they had further information.

The sound of familiar footsteps made her turn her head, and she saw Rusty appear in the doorway to the murder room.

As soon as their eyes met, he read the note of apology in her smile, and sighed. "Let me guess. Rain check on lunch?"

Sharon grimaced. "I'm afraid so. I'm sorry, Rusty," she said softly, "I know I said that we should have time, but the case is turning out more… complicated, than I'd anticipated." She looked a little too anxious about his reaction, which made him give her a funny look.

"That's okay, Sharon… pretty sure murder trumps brunch."

"Hm." Provenza turned to the rest of them, his tone low, wry. "We should put that on a T-shirt."

Complimentary 'Murder Trumps Brunch' T-shirts for everyone who reviews!

(sadly, not really - although I would if I could!)

Thank you for reading!