A Tangled Web (14)

There was a chance that the boy was holding a grudge.

"Rusty…" Sharon sighed into the silence at their dinner table. "I told you, I'll read over the papers from Sister Anna tonight, and we can discuss you going on that class trip –"

"The last day for turning over the permission slips was today," he said angrily to his plate, "so like, I don't see how there's anything left to 'discuss' at this point."

She exhaled impatiently. "If you wanted the permission signed by today, you should've mentioned it to me earlier than seven a.m. this morning, five minutes before we had to leave the house…!"

Rusty just continued to glare at the table top.

Sharon shook her head, and took another bite of her pasta, finding it not particularly enjoyable at the moment.

"Look. We can talk about –"

"Why don't you just admit that you don't want me to go?" He looked up at her, resentment mixed with anxiety in his eyes. "It's like – it's like when you didn't let me go to Peter's house party!"

What…? "That…you told me that this Peter – whom I've never even met, by the way," she pointed out, "was home alone and planning on underage drinking and who knows what else at that party!"

"But I wasn't going to do anything! Why can't you just… why can't you just trust me, Sharon?"

"This isn't about trusting you," she said firmly. "I just don't want you in that sort of context."

"I can take care of myself!"

That was becoming a common refrain in their household, lately. Its counterpart, of course, being her endless reminders to him to be careful. Neither of them seemed able to fully convince the other..

"I am aware," Sharon acknowledged, "but that doesn't mean that you should go placing yourself in dangerous situations for no reason." His only response was more sulking, and she felt another pang of irritation. "Rusty, you're the one who said you didn't even want to go to that party," she reminded him. "And I don't understand why you're bringing that up now. It was almost a month ago, and it has no bearing on our current discussion."

"It has – it has a 'bearing', okay Sharon? It's... it's just another example to show that you don't trust me to do anything anymore!"

The frustration in his voice was almost palpable. Sharon sighed again.

"That's not true."

"It's true, okay?" There were tears of frustration in his eyes, too. "You don't think I can see it? You're – you're…. it's like, you constantly think I'm gonna get in trouble! That's why you don't want me to go anywhere! Like this trip, or Peter's party, or, or… or that chess tournament two weeks ago! That was in Irvine, Sharon, like, not even an hour away and you still didn't let me go by myself!"

The corners of her lips drew downward in a displeased expression. "Rusty…I wanted to go with you to that tournament so I could watch you play." She gave him a long look. "I was under the impression that you didn't mind."

He paused, mouth half-open, and hesitated.

"If you felt that my presence was a sign of anything other than my wish to support you and your team," she continued quietly, "you should have told me."

Rusty pressed his lips together and looked away.

Sharon didn't know what to make of that. He'd seemed fine with it – excited, even, when she'd said she'd come along. Now … she thought he was just lashing out, yes, but it was possible that he meant it...? He'd already told her he wanted to spend less time at the station. Maybe he wanted more distance altogether.

She thought they'd done well, that despite all the obstacles they'd settled into a good life together. Rusty himself had told her that he'd wanted to stay, when Emma had first threatened to move him, and then again when the letters had been revealed. But … that had been when his only alternatives were another foster home, a boarding school, strangers. Now, when he was close to the point where he could make his own choices, maybe he felt differently. Maybe half a year of living in a police state had been too much. Maybe he'd realized that living with a police captain wasn't what he wanted anymore.

She thought they'd come to a deeper understanding, but the last few weeks had been so fraught, that she wasn't even sure where they stood anymore.

But none of that had anything to do with why she hadn't signed the permission for his class trip that morning. He'd just sprung it on her out of the blue, with some breezy explanation ('this senior spring thing… I don't know, somewhere like, north…'), and suddenly her heart had picked up pace and... she'd just needed some time to think about it. It wasn't that she didn't want him to go, obviously, Rusty was wrong about that. It was that she…

… that…

… she…

…didn't want him to go.

Okay, so there was some truth to his accusations.

"I just want you to trust me again, Sharon," Rusty said quietly.

She didn't really understand what he meant by 'again', but on the whole trust thing, there he was wrong. It wasn't a lack of trust that was making her wary. Rather, she just wasn't ready to face the thought of him being out of her sight for three days, hours away from LA and surrounded by reckless teenagers whose idea of a good time these days was getting drunk on cheap alcohol and snorting cinnamon through their eyeballs or whatever.

What if something happened? What if someone wanted to hurt him?

Her fork actually rattled against the side of her plate at the memory of the last time she'd trusted his safety to somebody else, and to his own judgment.

But what could she say to him...?

Thursday had dawned overcast, unusually so for LA, but fitting for Sharon's mood. She and Rusty were still on uncertain ground after the previous night's argument, and she hadn't entirely given her consent on the class trip – partly because she was still uneasy, partly because she hadn't been able to get a straight answer out of him on whether he actually wanted to go. (She may have lost her patience a little in the end, because if he didn't even want to take the trip, then he'd just put both of them through hours of tension for no reason! To which Rusty had retorted that the only reason there was tension was because she couldn't sign off on a simple school trip without an in-depth investigation, and how was that his fault exactly? The exchange had not gone well for either of them.)

Things had cooled off a little by morning, at least. They had breakfast in relative good humors, though both of them quieter than usual. Rusty eating with one hand while flipping through his Algebra notes with the other.

"Good luck with your test today," she wished him as they entered the parking garage. "I'm sure you'll do great."

He shrugged and thanked her and warned her that he wasn't sure about plotting some function graphs, and Sharon encouraged him to do his best.

"I will," said Rusty as he stopped by the old Volvo and pulled out his keys.

"Are you coming by the station after school?" Thursdays were usually the days when he'd drop by and ask Buzz for homework help… but of course, he'd already done that Tuesday, in preparation for the test, so she wasn't sure.

"Uh…"

Apparently, neither was Rusty.

In the end they decided he'd figure it out after the test. He wished her good luck catching bad guys, and Sharon wished him a good day at school.

"Be careful," she reminded him when he opened the car door, and a flash of irritation crossed his face again.

"Yeah…" And he got into the car and slammed the door maybe a little louder than necessary.

Things were… complicated.

Work, as usual, was another source of complications, though at least these she knew how to handle. She spent the first hour or so at her desk, catching up on paperwork and dealing with several notices from other divisions on their less than stellar interactions with Major Crimes. Hollywood division in particular had little love for her team; each time there was a murder in their jurisdiction that got passed on to Major Crimes, Sharon was sure to find a litany of complaints on her desk in the following weeks. Her people were the best, but in her absence they did not play so well with others.

Which of course made the current case – for which they'd been recruited to help Robbery-Homicide – a thorny affair.

"The ex-husband's lawyer should be here soon," Lt. Tao said when she emerged from her office again around nine-thirty. Complaints all noted and recorded and recycled. "We called the DA's office and told them we'd made an arrest, they're sending someone over, too."

"If we're lucky, Ross and his partner will bother to show up by then…." muttered Flynn.

Provenza rolled his chair around to give him an incredulous look. "Lucky?"

"Right." Flynn amended, "I meant, if we're incredibly unlucky," and his partner gave him an approving nod.

Not playing well with others indeed.

"Maybe they're still washing 'fertilizer' out from their clothes, Sir," said Julio, and the rest of them snickered; Robbery-Homicide's detectives had run into a little trouble the previous day, trying to bring in the suspect, who had been hiding out on a farm.

"That's actually probably impossible," Tao mused, "given the amount that they were exposed to, and the length of time it stayed on their clothes, I don't think they'll ever be able to get the smell out."

Flynn snorted. "Who could tell the difference?"

"And that is why, gentlemen," Provenza concluded wisely, "I never drive my own car to arrest a suspect."

"Captain…"

Amy's low, serious voice alerted her that something was up. Sharon turned to see a familiar couple in the doorway to the murder room. The same people she'd met three days before, when she'd broken the news of their son's death to them, Mr. and Mrs. Donnell looked to have aged ten years. They both wore somber, nearly all-black clothes; the young man's mother held several folded papers in her hands.

The mirth in the room died down immediately, the others sobering up as well.

The first Algebra test after his return to school was not going so great.

Rusty's eyes darted to the clock above the teacher's desk, and he didn't know whether to feel relieved that he still had half an hour left to figure out more answers, or desperate because this was torture and he just wanted it to be over. It felt like they could've given him half a year, and he still wouldn't know how to find the oblique asymptote for the rational function f.

Ugh.

Part of him wouldn't have minded if he failed. Actually, for a brief period of time – and he wasn't proud of this, but it had happened – he'd considered failing the semester on purpose. Back in January he'd kind of distantly run the idea by Sharon that he stay home that semester, finish high school in the fall. She'd had none of that of course, and he'd been back in school the first week of February, to finish his senior year at St. Joseph's. And that was when he'd considered just… failing it.

It wasn't that he didn't want to do the work – well, okay, it's not like he loved spending so many afternoons trying to catch up on what he'd missed, but it was fine, he'd gotten used to it again. But graduating high school meant he'd be out in the world, it meant that he'd need to do something else, it meant the end of the deal he'd made with Sharon once, it meant … a lot of things. And Rusty didn't think he was ready for any of them.

So he'd considered, briefly, just… not doing it.

But Sharon would be disappointed if he suddenly flunked everything. And it wasn't as though he could make her pay tuition for an extra semester just because he didn't know what to do with himself… plus, there was no guarantee that she'd even do it. Well – yes, she'd probably do it. They had a deal that he could finish high school, and she'd put an awful lot of effort into making sure that happened … and not just her, either, Buzz was probably relearning five textbooks' worth of high school math just to help him, and Rusty couldn't pay them back by purposely doing badly.

But he needed more time. He wasn't ready for school to be over, because that meant that… other things would be over, and he didn't know what Sharon thought about all this, but she was so unhappy with him lately. She didn't trust him to do anything right anymore, and he hated that, and she hated that he hated that, but what was he supposed to do? If she was so worried that he'd do something wrong that she felt she couldn't take his eyes off him for one second, then probably it'd be easier for her if he weren't around, so she wouldn't have to worry so much.

Familiar anxiety churned in his stomach.

More and more, lately, he'd been thinking of reasons that Sharon would want him gone once he turned eighteen. Well first of all, the few foster homes he'd been in, those people had repeated to him five times a day that he'd be out the second he came of age, and they'd be better off for it. Sharon wasn't like that, obviously, Sharon loved him, which was… a whole different scary train of thought altogether, but she'd probably be better off with him gone, too.

And he had no idea how to convince her otherwise, so he was angry with her.

Angry and frustrated. Frustrated that she was being so unfair, that she couldn't just get it, that he couldn't figure out a way to be better. But somehow he was also angry at himself for being angry at Sharon, and that just made him more unhappy with her, and they fought more and ... it was already mid-March, in just over a month he'd turn eighteen, and then in two months he'd graduate, and then…?

With every passing day he felt more like he was on a train running full speed toward a cliff, and there was no way to stop it, or slow it down, or get off. And Rusty really, really wanted to get off, because he wasn't ready, he didn't have anything figured out and he didn't. want. to go.

His fingers clenched around the pencil, and the carbon tip poked a little hole through his answer sheet.

All those thoughts had consumed another five minutes of the test, and great, now he had even less time to work out more answers – although in the grand scheme of things, an oblique asymptote was really near the bottom of the very long list of problems he had no answers to.

With a sigh, the boy focused back on the sheet in front of him, and decided to see if finding the zeroes of the function would help with that asymptote…

"You're saying the funeral home won't bury their son without some stupid paper?" Andy was working his way to full-blown indignation.

"Don't look at me lieutenant, I wasn't the one who released the body and screwed up the release forms." Dr. Morales rolled his eyes as he filled out a new document. "When a case isn't closed yet, the form needs to specify that the body being released is no longer part of the active investigation… which whoever gave these people their son's body on this Tuesday morning neglected to do. There," he scribbled his signature at the bottom of the form, and held it out to the lieutenant, "now it's all legal."

"I can't believe they waited until the day of the burial to tell the parents that." Sykes cast a pitying glance toward the conference room, where the Captain was sitting with the bereaved couple. "What if we hadn't been here, or it had taken longer to get the form redone?"

"Hm, everyone ignores the fact that funeral homes are businesses," Morales said dryly, "so income, they care about. People? Not so much. They probably figured if the form didn't get fixed today, they'd get to charge those parents extra for rescheduling the whole thing." He arched his eyebrows at her horrified expression. "You'd be surprised how often that happens."

"Yeah, well not this time." Andy had double checked the form, to make sure the information was all in order. "I'll take this to the Captain."

Everyone in the conference room glanced over at him when he entered; he walked over to the end of the table and held out the paper to the parents.

"Dr. Morales just filled out the new form for you," he said quietly. "It should all be fine now. We're… sorry for the mistake."

The couple only browsed the form cursorily, clearly unable to pay much attention to it.

"My son didn't try to kill anyone." Mrs. Donnell looked about ready to fall over, but her voice as she spoke the words was filled with conviction. "I don't care what you think… Jimmy would never do something like that…"

Sharon and Andy exchanged a look.

"We understand," said Sharon in her soft voice. "We're…" But she hesitated, and the lieutenant knew why; she didn't want to give the parents any false hope. Yes, they were still sort of looking into James Donnell's death, but … everything was a long shot, at this point.

The young man's mother was looking for something in her purse; after a few seconds, she pulled out a stack of cards. "These are the… cards that Jimmy sent us." Mrs. Donnell held them out. "He always bought those… recycled ones… you can tell from the paper, its texture is different…" Tears began to fall down her cheeks. "I don't know why I brought them with me… here… "

She pressed several of them into Sharon's hands, and the Captain took them, although Andy could tell that she wasn't sure what she was supposed to do with them. The answer came soon enough from the heartbroken mother:

"Read them… you'll see, Jimmy was such a good boy… just… read them… please… he'd never hurt anyone…"

With a grimace of painful sympathy, Sharon opened one of the cards. Andy could see the words over her shoulder: a wedding anniversary card for the Donnells, from their son, in neat handwriting, and like they'd said it sounded… nice. Warm. He congratulated them and expressed his love and thanks, and another couple of sentences about how he was and how he missed them. Finishing that one, Sharon opened another, this time a Mother's Day card for Mrs. Donnell, and it was more of the same. Good wishes, quick updates on his life, promises to see her soon. So was the third card, a merry-looking one for Halloween, and then fourth, for Father's day…

Sharon paused after the last one, and went back to the Father's day card, her expression suddenly thoughtful. Over her shoulder, Andy read it again, too.

"Jimmy says here that he was going to get another job…?" the Captain prompted gently.

Mr. Donnell nodded. "He said… someone at the university had mentioned…something about giving him a research assistant position… he was such a smart boy, he won two national science awards in high school, did you know…?"

Sharon hummed a little pensively, and gave Andy a meaningful glance.

"You think that position he mentions in the card is important somehow?"

Sharon watched the door to the murder room, through which the couple had just walked out. "Maybe. That card was from over eight months ago, but he never switched jobs… although…" she frowned in concentration. "Danny did mention something in one of the interviews, he said some professor had told Donnell that he was smart… or something along those lines."

"Could be the same person," Flynn suggested.

"It's possible. One thing I don't understand," she murmured, "if he worked the night shift doing Animal Care, how did he even get to meet a senior researcher and be noticed for how smart he was?"

"That's a good question," Lt. Tao agreed from his desk. "He was probably only there a couple of hours a night, changing food and water and making sure the animal rooms were clean… I guess he could've had chance interactions with some of the researchers in the labs under his care…"

"Too bad his parents didn't know any details," said Andy.

Sharon nodded silently, her thoughts going around in circles again. Every new bit of information they found out about James Donnell seemed relevant, but somehow they still didn't quite fit together.

"Lieutenant," she glanced at Tao, "we already checked if any of the people with access to those missing supplies has a criminal record, or connections to any known radical environmental groups…?"

"We did, and no one does. The university also requires a background check before giving them access to certain classes of chemicals. Everyone's clean."

Right. It was a long shot, anyway. More and more, it looked as though this was just a misguided young man… Maybe Chief Taylor was right. Maybe she was looking too much into this. Could it be that she was more driven by her own anxieties than she realized? Was she trying to find, in this case, the resolution that she couldn't find for her own problems?

It was true that she'd been feeling fairly on edge lately. These past few days particularly so.

Was she doing more harm than good?

The sound of footsteps drew everyone's attention to the doorway again, just as DDA Hobbs walked in. She greeted the team, but seemed a little distracted, looking over her shoulder into the corridor.

"The two people who just left… were they the parents of your bridge kid?"

Sharon confirmed with a slight nod, prompting a mild grimace of sympathy from the blonde. Understandably – the couple had looked beyond heartbroken.

"What were they doing back here? Do you have anything new on the case?"

"The morgue misfiled the release forms for their son's body," said Tao. "Left out section A-twelve."

It took her a moment to place the reference, then the DDA's eyebrows arched. "You're kidding me."

He mirrored her expression. "Fortunately, we were able to get Dr. Morales to sign off on an updated version of the form, so they could go on with the funeral as scheduled…"

Hobbs grimaced again. "Those poor people."

Various expressions of agreement came from the rest of the team.

"You always end up feeling worst for the families," she shook her head. "And there's not a damn thing we can do for them."

"Except finding out the truth," Sharon said quietly. There was still doubt in her, but she was too stubborn to abandon things halfway. If she was wrong on this, then at least she'd be wrong all the way through. As the two Robbery-Homicide detectives also walked into the room, she lowered her voice and asked: "Andrea… how often does the DA's office request files from City archives…?"

Thank you all for reading - and as usual, huge thanks to everyone who takes the time to review. And to my guest reviewers, I never get to reply to you, but I very much appreciate your feedback :)!

Next chapter - Sharon goes to a spa, Rusty has a great day with zero sulking, and no one gets murdered at all! (right?)

No, actually we'll just get more mild angst, grumpy teenagers and a complete failure to communicate! Although, silver lining, there *will* be another scene between two characters that you all seem to enjoy seeing together ;) (hint: one of them is a lovable goof, and the other really loves blazers with pockets!).