Disclaimer: I don't own the situations or characters portrayed herein. I'm just playing with them for a while.
Billy's Lost Weekend
It had been going to be a gorgeous fall day in DC. Beautiful. Sixty-seven degrees, not a cloud in the sky. She was going to go on a date after work with a nice Congressional aide by the name of Harper Radcliffe.
But she got the call at 3:37 AM, and it no longer mattered how lovely the day would have been.
Billy had been picked up by the Metropolitan Police in a skid row alley, his mind as muddled as if he had a secret drug habit and his clothes as torn as if he had fought his way out of a wolf pit.
If she didn't know Billy like the back of her hand, or if he'd been a sleazy slimeball like Patterson in payroll, she might think that this was just what happened when Jeannie went out of town. But she did know Billy, and a better, more upstanding character than his would be hard to find. Something had happened to him, probably in the line of duty, and it was up to her to keep his department running until they found out what it had been.
She gave Lee and Amanda a wink and a nod and an unspoken shove toward taking on the case for her, and she was glad when he picked up on it. He could speak her "language" of hints and subtext well after all these years, and in cases like this it paid off. Lee was the best agent she had and Amanda was the most tenacious, and although Scarecrow and Glinda's methods might be unorthodox they were sure to get results.
And she desperately needed results. They could not afford another Max Bateman. She could not afford to lose Billy, as a friend or as a mentor.
It was incredibly morbid to go through all the Jane Does in the Metro Police files.
Dead woman.
Dead woman.
Dead woman.
Dead woman.
Another.
And another.
A hundred.
Two hundred.
She hadn't gotten Ernie on this one. Innocent Ernie did not need his mind dirtied with all these horrific images.
Billy recognized Jane Doe #421's dress, and with that one fact, the case skyrocketed in importance and urgency.
She put away the files of all the forgotten women, her hands brushing the cases softly before she closed the cabinet door.
I'm sorry, she thought, as she did every time these files came out. I wish things had been different for you. Rest well, friends.
Her depressing little private ritual complete, she returned to her work and pretended not to notice when Billy and Lee rushed out after a mysterious phone call.
They came back tired and sweaty. Lee was scratched and bleeding. Billy was talking about something called the Kalahari list. What a desert had to do with anything, she didn't know. All she knew was that Lee had been bitten by a horrible dog, and Billy's contact — someone pretending to be someone else named Lanni Jeans — had been "shot".
Bits.
Pieces.
Snippets.
Snapshots.
A list.
The Kalahari list.
But what was it?
"Billy, you need to slow down," she said, even though she knew it was useless.
"I can't," Billy said, predictably.
"You need to," she pleaded, making eye contact with Lee and seeing that while he agreed with her he also knew it was hopeless.
"I can't!" Billy had walked over to the window and was now staring out of it. But when he turned around, the panic and desperation had been tempered and his voice was level again. "Listen, try to understand. Twenty-nine years ago I was a kid, right out of law school. I had a decision to make." She glanced at Lee and found to her surprise that he looked as if he understood it — and the reasoning behind it — perfectly. She decided to take it at face value, too. "To have a nice law practice in New York or to take a job as a counter-intelligence agent that paid little more than sweat. I don't know what kind of lawyer I might have been and I really don't care. Because I do know that I made a pretty damn good agent, and if there's someone out there trying to take that away from me, I'm going to fight like hell to make that decision stick."
She could understand that. She'd had to prove herself too. It might not be as hard for her as a white woman as it had been for Billy in the fifties at the University of Virginia, when Gregory Swanson had had to sue the UVA Law School to allow the first Black student into their program, but she understood the need to prove herself to a hostile outside world.
Lee, as ever, was the one who said the right thing in what could have come across as the worst way possible if Billy had been anyone else. "Gee Billy, I think you would have made a lousy lawyer."
She smiled, too. "The worst," she agreed, and Billy beamed.