ACT II

“Happy Halloween,” Tom announced to open their morning meeting, “which means we can expect a marked increase in vandalism, theft, and assaults.”

“Can you ruin Christmas too?” a voice whispered from somewhere at the back of the room.

Lindsay glanced over at Jacobi, who gave her an amused smirk in return.

“Everybody who doesn’t have an active, priority case is in uniform and on the streets tonight. Everybody who does have an active case, you’re staying in, but you are on call,” Tom instructed, before holding up a file. “We do have one new case. It is a definite priority. The Potrero arsons have been reassigned to homicide.”

Lindsay looked up sharply. “Why?” she asked weakly, well aware there was only one possible reason.

“The fire last night was in a tenement on Humboldt. About forty minutes ago, a woman’s body was found in one of the rooms,” Tom stated the facts of the case with a practiced dispassion. “Probably one of the homeless who couldn’t get out.”

His account was loudly interrupted by Lindsay kicking the nearest desk, sending it scraping a few inches across the floor. Looking up, Lindsay discovered every eye in the room looking at her as if she was crazy.

“Lindsay?” Tom inquired carefully. “Something wrong?”

Lindsay shook her head, jaw clenching angrily. Tom watched her for a moment, waiting for her to be more forthcoming, though he knew it was too much to ask for, before returning to the task at hand.

“Fong, Cortez…” he started.

“Jacobi and I will take it,” Lindsay interrupted again.

Staring across the room at her, Tom weighed whether or not to just hand Lindsay the file and let her get whatever was going on with her out of her system without him.

“Okay, that’s it,” he said finally. “Everyone’s dismissed. Lindsay, Jacobi, upstairs in my office.”

Jacobi lifted his eyebrow to her in silent question, and Lindsay returned what she hoped was a reassuring look as they followed Tom up the stairs and into his office. Highly anticipating a long-winded tirade about how not to talk to him in front of the rest of the squad, Lindsay was rather surprised when Tom just studied her.

“What’s wrong Linz?”

She could tell the truth. If she disclosed what happened, there would be some serious hell to pay, none of it hers. Clifford and Bryan would get their asses handed to them for refusing evidence that might have solved their case before someone died. They might even lose their jobs. There was some sort of poetic justice in that.

“Nothin’,” Lindsay shook her head, aware that the room knew she was lying.

“Don’t you think you have your hands full right now?” Tom questioned carefully.

“I have a big lead on this case,” Lindsay informed him.

Tom’s eyes narrowed as he leaned forward on the edge of his desk. “What kind of lead?”

“You’re just going to have to trust me, Tom,” Lindsay responded, defensively. “I know what I’m doing.”

“You had a lead on this case and you didn’t give it to the investigating officers?” Tom demanded.

Lindsay looked away. She wasn’t going to go out of her way to get anyone into trouble, but, considering the interaction they’d had, she wasn’t going to lie to protect them either. Regardless, her refusal to answer was more than enough for Tom to reach the correct conclusion.

“They wouldn’t take the lead from you?” he heatedly asked, the anger less on her behalf than on behalf of the woman who died as a result of the petty decision.

“Tom, can we just move forward, please?” Lindsay argued. “Work with what we have. Nothing you do now will change what’s already happened.”

There was plenty he wasn’t being told. Tom knew that. Part of his duty was chastising subordinates for piss poor decisions, but if Lindsay wasn’t going to tell him the whole story, there wasn’t much he could do. Trying to talk it out of her would be a waste of all of their time. If there was one thing Lindsay didn’t do, it was crack under interrogation.

“Have you discussed this with your partner?” he tried instead. “Jacobi may be less inclined to be overloaded with both a serial killer and a serial arsonist.”

“He’s going to have to trust me too,” Lindsay replied, looking over at Jacobi beseechingly.

“If she thinks we need another case to keep from getting bored, who am I to question?” Jacobi offered.

Lindsay smiled at how unfailingly Jacobi always had her back, but Tom still looked less than inclined to say yes to either of them.

“Just assign us the case, Tom,” Lindsay insisted. “Trust me.”

“Fine,” Tom conceded, sighing heavily. “It’s yours. If you need any help…”

Lindsay grabbed the presented case file from Tom’s hand.

“We’ve got it,” she assured him. “Thanks.”

*****

Having a deep understanding of the nausea that had gone around the office, but knowing that hers was due solely to her shot nerves, Jill marched up to the door of Denise’s office as if she was in a funeral procession. And maybe she was. Death to her career.

Despite an irrational hope that Denise wouldn’t show up for her own scheduled appointment, Jill found her sitting in her office, already at work. Choking down the dread, she tried to look normal, giving up on the charade when she realized it was futile. Walking into a meeting with a fifty-fifty chance of coming out jobless wasn’t normal. Pretending that it was wouldn’t alter that fact.

Denise looked up at her before she had a chance to knock. Or run away screaming.

“Jill, come in,” she said, brusquely waving her forward.

Though there was no one around to witness the agonizing exchange that was about to take place, it was out of habit that Jill shut the door behind her in preparation for the impending rant. She sat down across from Denise’s desk, forcing herself to sit up straight and look Denise in the eye.

“How was your night?” Denise asked her.

Impossible to tell if she was being sincere or cutting, considering it was Denise, Jill thought it safe to assume she didn’t really care either way.

“Fine,” she answered in the simplest possible manner, knowing the more she said the more likely she was to shoot herself in the foot.

“Patterson, Lawrence, and Allen have all called to say they’ll be in today, so you can go,” Denise informed her with little dithering and even less emotion.

Thoroughly numb, Jill was at a loss. Anticipating it, and yet not anticipating it, she tried to think of something to say that didn’t end in the words “heartless bitch” or turn into groveling for her job.

“So will my final check be direct deposited or paper?” she asked in a daze.

Denise looked stunned, as if she’d just been slapped in the face. Jill wondered for a second if some of her not too subconscious anger had come to fruition, and she had, in fact, slapped her without realizing it.

“I’m not firing you,” Denise uttered.

“You’re not?” Jill asked in confusion

“Why would I fire someone who covered for the entire staff with me, Jill?” Denise posed, not trying in the least to hide the irritation. “Use your brain.”

“But you said I needed to go,” Jill recapped.

“You do,” Denise reiterated. “You’ve worked overtime ten days in a row, and almost sixty hours in the past three. Take a couple of days off.”

If she didn’t think Denise would take it as being mocked, Jill would have done what felt appropriate, tilted her head to the side and tried to clear her ears. Since she couldn’t, she just kept staring at Denise as if she were sprouting horns, or, more improbably, a halo.

“You know, just because I don’t keep any,” Denise stated quietly, “doesn’t mean I’m going to fire you for having friends.”

Not really sure how to respond to that without creating danger to her well-being, Jill decided her safest course of action was to simply not acknowledge it had been said.

“You should take some time off too,” she recommended instead.

“Then who will make all of these idiots do their jobs right?” Denise bounced right back, every bit as merciless as ever. “Could you give everyone’s work back to them before you take off?”

“Yeah, no problem,” Jill agreed, trying to determine if the majority of the conversation she’d just had was real or if it had taken place only in her head. Not that it mattered. Denise would deny any part that made her seem vulnerable if the subject ever came up again.

Without being told so, Jill knew that she was dismissed. Not bothering with the formality of saying goodbye, Denise simply returned to her work. Relatively confused, but grateful for the outcome nonetheless, Jill slowly got up and walked to the door, bothered by the lingering notion that there was something important left unsaid between them. Feeling a little like she was throwing her arms up in surrender before a trigger-happy firing squad, she turned back anyway.

“I’m sorry about what I said,” she asserted. Oddly enough, it seemed to be true.

Denise looked up at Jill in her doorway, surprised that she wasn’t gone yet, and even more surprised that she actually believed the apology. Unable to hold Jill’s gaze, she dropped her eyes back to the paperwork in front of her.

“Yeah, well, so am I,” she stated so quietly it was almost a whisper.

“I’ll see you in a few days.”

“Yep, I’ll see ya,” Denise responded, anxious to get Jill out of her office as quickly as possible.

Jill did her the service of going, trying to shake free of her mental confusion as she walked down the hall. She still wasn’t entirely sure what had just taken place. All she knew was that what she’d expected hadn’t happened, and what had happened, she never, in a million years, would have expected.

*****

Lindsay and Jacobi spent the majority of their morning talking to reluctant witnesses. After badgering what felt like nearly all of the residents of Potrero Hill, they’d found half a dozen people who claimed to have seen the blonde from Cindy’s photographs walking up and down 25^th Street throughout the day. That was their only lead. It might have felt a bit better if the majority of their witnesses weren’t the type of people for whom it was hard to take at their word, and if they hadn’t wasted so much time. At this point, the blonde could easily be back in her apartment, celebrating a hard day’s pacing with a frozen dinner and a wine cooler.

In the passenger seat, Jacobi thumbed through the 8x10s, trying to memorize the features of the obviously genius woman who let herself be photographed at several different crime scenes, her face clearly visible in the majority of them.

“So, what did they say to you?” he asked without looking up, the pictures sliding through his hands in a cadenced pattern.

“It doesn’t matter,” Lindsay answered.

“It does matter if it was something shitty and insulting,” Jacobi ceased in his movements to look up at her. Under the guise of keeping her eyes on the road, Lindsay avoided the concentrated gaze.

“It’s really not a big deal, Jacobi,” she murmured.

“It is to me,” Jacobi returned.

Unable to play off the declaration as if it meant nothing to her, Lindsay finally gave in and looked his way. Jacobi was a portrait in patience, just waiting for her to come clean in her own time. It was his way, and it was rare that it didn’t work on her.

“They wanted to know where I got my information,” she started slowly, “and since I couldn’t exactly tell them about Cindy they assumed my contacts were criminal… like my dad.”

The fact that Jacobi didn’t immediately say anything was not, unfortunately, a sign that he was really thinking things through before he went all raging fury on her.

“Who did?” he asked with a deliberate calm that usually indicated he was on that threshold of being too enraged to speak.

“That is really not important,” Lindsay said, hoping to pull him back from the ledge.

Jacobi wasn’t having it.

“If you don’t tell me, I’m just going to look through the case file and see who was originally on it.”

Knowing he would do exactly that, Lindsay shook her head, and wished she’d never said anything.

“Clifford or Bryan,” she disclosed. “I don’t know which was which. Only one of them did any talking, and, after a while, I stopped worrying about who was who, since they seemed to share only one brain between them.”

Though she refused to look, Lindsay could feel Jacobi’s eyes on her, trying to read her thoughts. And he would with perfect precision. He always did.

“They get to you?” he asked quietly.

“Well, it’s not like I can exactly dispute what they said,” Lindsay returned just as softly. “As far as I know, they’re right about him.”

“But they’re wrong about you.”

“That doesn’t make any difference. We’re judged by the company we keep,” Lindsay uttered, before glancing at Jacobi with a smile. “That’s why I make a habit of hanging out with you.”

Jacobi finally smiled, with a slight shake of his head, and palmed her shoulder long enough to be reassuring without being cloying before returning to the photos.

Slowing down as they crossed Potrero Street, Lindsay looked for somewhere to park. She was at once distracted by a scruffy man, with a wildly unkempt beard, leaning against the fence surrounding a vacant patch of land. Though she couldn’t quite place him, the man struck her as uncannily familiar. As she watched, a guy who looked as if he was probably born straight onto the streets approached and the man who looked familiar pulled something from his pocket and handed it to him.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jacobi murmured next to her. “It can’t possibly be this easy”.

Lindsay turned in Jacobi’s direction to see what she’d missed, and Jacobi pointed out the window at a blonde just up the street.

“That woman look familiar to you?”

One look from Cindy’s embezzled photograph to the woman standing on the sidewalk was all it took to confirm. Pulling to the side of the road, Lindsay double-parked, and she and Jacobi climbed out of her SUV. Hands resting on their service weapons just in case, they approached the blonde cautiously, though the woman’s extraordinarily focused inspection of the rundown theater in front of her made their stealthy approach completely unnecessary.

“Whatcha lookin’ at,” Lindsay asked her, in an admittedly sarcastic manner.

The woman turned to look at her, presumably amazed to see someone standing right next to her. Lindsay displayed her badge and the blonde’s eyes went so wide, Lindsay half-expected a confession to come tumbling out of her irises.

“Let’s take a ride into the station and have a conversation,” Jacobi proposed, closing his cuffs around the woman’s wrists before she seemed to comprehend what was happening.

Jacobi hauled the easily-arrestable blonde toward the car, and Lindsay turned to follow, her eyes drawn to the other side of the street as the man by the fence stirred. Jimmying a cane from where he had wedged it in the fence close by, he brought it down as a crutch beside him and started limping away. Though she still had no idea who he was, all at once Lindsay remembered where she’d seen him before.

“You ready?” Jacobi asked.

Lindsay turned to find him standing inside the open passenger door, the blonde already safely belted in the backseat of the car. Glancing across the street, she watched the man limp off down the sidewalk.

“Can you do me a favor?” she requested, walking over to Jacobi and pulling her keys from her pocket.

“Depends what you’re asking,” Jacobi responded.

 Lindsay grabbed his hand and pressed her keys into his palm.

“Take her back to the station?” she asked. “There’s something I need to take care of.”

Jacobi really wanted to tell her to get her ass back in the car. She could tell he did. But something on her face must have made him change his mind before any words reached his lips.

“How are you going to get back?”

“I’m a big girl with a big gun,” Lindsay reminded him, looking across the street again to make sure the man with the cane hadn’t yet disappeared. “I’ll be fine.”

Sighing, Jacobi closed the door and walked around to the driver’s side, looking at Lindsay over the hood.

“Don’t get yourself into trouble,” he ordered.

“Don’t plan on it,” Lindsay assured him.

With a shake of his head, as if he knew that he shouldn’t, Jacobi got into the driver’s seat and pulled away from the curb. As soon as he turned the corner, Lindsay jogged across the street in pursuit of the man with the cane. His disability working to her advantage, within a block Lindsay had caught up.

“Hey,” she called to him when she was within hearing distance.

He looked over his shoulder, and she would swear he started to limp faster.

“Hey,” Lindsay yelled again, running ahead to obstruct his path. “What are you, deaf?” she asked. “Or just scared of cops?”

“Shit!” he said, pulling to a halt, his greasy black bangs falling into his eyes. “What do you want?”

“I just want to talk to you,” Lindsay promised, though it didn’t seem to bring him any comfort.

“Yeah, what about?” he asked, looking around with a series of rapid head movements, a practiced technique undoubtedly fostered by rampant paranoia.

“I’ve seen you before,” Lindsay informed him.

He was shaking his head in denial before she even finished the sentence. “You’ve got me confused with someone else.”

“No,” Lindsay corrected. “I’ve seen you before. More than once. With my dad.”

Wrought with the tics of daily drug use, he couldn’t hold still, looking around continuously and shifting back and forth as much as his bum leg would allow, his cane tapping in an arrhythmic beat against the concrete.

“I don’t know you, lady,” he said, shaking his head, “and I don’t know your dad.”

“His name was Martin Boxer.”

Recognition flashed through the man’s eyes, giving him away even before he glanced anxiously around again. “Never heard of him,” he lied.

“We can have this conversation at the precinct if you’d rather,” Lindsay threatened.

The guy looked trapped. He was. After a moment’s hesitation, in which if he could have physically escaped he would have made the attempt, the man exhaled in frustration and cast Lindsay a nervous scowl.

“I knew your dad, okay,” he admitted hesitantly.

“How did you know him?” Lindsay demanded.

“We sort of worked together,” the man responded, glancing away.

It was exactly what Lindsay didn’t want to hear. In a way, she might have been better off letting the guy flee. There were some things it was better not to know.

“Bucci family?” she inquired.

The man’s already remarkable paranoia increased tenfold. His eyes darted around again, and he looked practically terrified by what-if scenarios.

“Listen, what do you want to know?” he hissed. “Being seen with you doesn’t exactly keep me alive. You know what I’m sayin’?”

Lindsay looked around. They were drawing attention from a couple of different directions, though there was no reason for them to necessarily make her for a cop. So maybe the guy wasn’t entirely paranoid. Though there were no immediate threats that she could see, there was information that she needed to extract from this guy before anyone decided to kill him.

“Come with me,” she said, taking him by the arm and tugging him down the street as fast as he could manage.

Lindsay turned them onto the first side street and when they passed the first small coffee shop, she swung open the door and pulled him inside. Other than the lone employee, who barely took the time to raise her head as they entered, the place was deserted. But the guy still looked as if he would rather be anywhere else on earth.

“Who are you?” Lindsay asked as she turned to face him.

“Nobody,” the guy tried, then seemed to realize from her expression that he’d be wise to keep talking. “I just worked for your father from time to time, you know, on an irregular basis.”

“What did you do for him exactly?” Lindsay questioned.

The man glanced over at the counter, but the worker was still very content to ignore them.

“If we have to talk about this, could we at least sit down?” the man asked.

Lindsay’s gaze fell to the cane, and, suffering a momentary bout of humanity, she motioned him to the nearest table. The pained grunt he made as he slid into the chair was genuine, and Lindsay almost felt bad for dragging him down the street.

“And can I get a coffee?”

The sympathy diminished. Aggravated, but wanting to keep him talking, Lindsay went to the counter, keeping a watch on him as she waited for the listless worker to actually do her job. She traded two dollars for the small cup, not terribly surprised when the worker forgot her change, and thumped the cup down in front of her high maintenance ward.

“Bitter,” he shuddered, taking a drink.

“Now tell me how you helped my father,” Lindsay demanded, sitting across from him.

He looked up at Lindsay and realized at once he’d pressed his luck as far as it would go.

“I was able to get in places he couldn’t,” he stated simply.

“Okay,” Lindsay nodded, molding her next words with ultimate care to make sure they provided sufficient intimidation. “You’re going to be a lot more cooperative or we’re going to move back out to the street and I’m going to pin my badge to my jacket.”

Lindsay saw the undisguised fear as a welcome sign that she would stop being jerked around.

“Fine,” the guy muttered irately and looked up at her, his guard dropping for a moment. “So, Marty… you said was. What happened?”

“He died a few months ago,” Lindsay granted him, unsure if he actually deserved to know.

The man nodded slowly, taking another drink with a shudder, and was all of a sudden considerably more human.

“Where I grew up, there were only two ways to be safe,” he began, playing with the paper cup. “You joined a gang or you became a cop. The people I knew were in gangs. I didn’t want that life.”

He glanced up, looking surprisingly sincere, and Lindsay nodded for him to continue.

“When I was thirteen, I was hit by a stray bullet,” he shook his head. “There was no way I could pass the physical to be a cop. So I started hanging around crime scenes, trying to help where I could. Nobody wanted my help.” He gave a small laugh. “Then, one day, I knew the guys who robbed a liquor store in my neighborhood, and killed the clerk. I told your dad. He didn’t want my help either at first. But I just kept coming around. I kept finding him what he needed.”

“You made yourself indispensable,” Lindsay said softly. It seemed an oddly familiar story.

The man shrugged. “He came around, let me help out. And, in return, he let me carry and promised he’d step up if I ever had to use it. Just having a piece that you can use if you have to makes all the difference some places.”

“So you weren’t a go-between between him and Dominic Bucci?” Lindsay asked the question she really wanted to know, terrified of what the answer might be.

The guy laughed uncomfortably, his eyes sliding to the disinterested employee.

“Lady, I’m no mobster.”

What she expected to hear, she wasn’t sure, but she didn’t feel like she’d gotten what she wanted. Fairly certain there was a lot he wasn’t telling her, Lindsay stood up anyway.

“I have to go,” she said. “I need your name. Tell me the truth. You do not want to lie to me.”

“Banks.”

“You got a first name?” Lindsay prodded.

“Leo.”

There wasn’t a lot of trust lost between them, but required elsewhere, Lindsay decided for the time being she would have to take him at his word.

*****

One of the greatest perks of Cindy’s job was that research looked like research whether she was trying to find a unique angle in the Potrero arson locales, so that she didn’t have to keep updating the same “Buildings torched on the Hill. No known Pattern. One dead.” article, or if she was searching for anyone in the bay area who had been envious to the point of making recent headlines.

Phone vibrating in her bag, Cindy got a hold of it, smiling at the caller ID before she flipped it open.

“Hey,” she answered.

“Hey,” Lindsay returned, sounding tired. She’d been sounding that way a lot lately. “I thought you’d want to know, we found the blonde.”

 “Already?” Cindy asked in amazement. “I knew it would probably be handed over to Homicide, but I didn’t think you’d get it.”

“Well, I had some inside information,” Lindsay said softly, and, despite everything, Cindy could hear a small smile in her voice. “I can’t believe I haven’t heard from you by now. It’s still your article right?”

“Yeah,” Cindy confirmed, glancing at the dueling windows on her computer screen with a sigh. “But I haven’t exactly been primo crime reporter today.”

“Why? Is something wrong?” Lindsay asked, smile fading into not-so-subtle worry.

Which made Cindy smile. Even if she didn’t want to give Lindsay further cause for concern. Sometimes it was hard to tell how much Lindsay cared. And sometimes it was impossible not to.

“No. I’m just busy,” Cindy semi-lied, anticipating Lindsay’s question about what she was busy doing, and trying to cut it off at the pass. “What’s that noise?”

“I’m on the train.”

“Is the SFPD going green?”

Lindsay laughed softly, and Cindy felt as if she’d scored a small victory. Making Lindsay laugh wasn’t all that easy these days.

“Jacobi took my car,” Lindsay responded.

There was something in her tone, something tenuous and guarded, which she undoubtedly would have preferred for Cindy to just ignore. But turning a blind eye, or ear, to Lindsay’s suffering wasn’t exactly in her nature.

“What’s going on Linz?” she gently queried, half expecting Lindsay not to answer, or to play whatever it was off.

Cindy could hear the sound of the train mixed with the faint rustle of Lindsay’s leather jacket, and envisioned Lindsay shifting around in her seat.

“I just…” Lindsay faltered. “I talked to this guy. I remembered seeing him with my dad.”

Cindy stared at her screen without seeing it, wholly attentive to the voice on the other end of the line. “Okay,” she whispered.

“He said that he helped my dad on his cases. You know, kind of like you do?” Lindsay lingered on the thought, taking a deep breath before she continued. “I thought he might work for the Bucci family.”

Cindy really wished that they were having this conversation in person, where she could do something to eliminate the unnatural fragility in Lindsay’s voice. But there was also some awe in the fact that Lindsay wasn’t trying to conceal it from her.

“You thought it would prove your dad was guilty of what they said he did?” Cindy deduced.

“I just want to know the truth,” Lindsay confessed so quietly that the screeching of the train as it slowed into a station nearly drowned her out.

“So did he?”

“He said that he didn’t.”

“You don’t believe him?”

“I don’t know what to believe. I just got a feeling he wasn’t telling me everything,” Lindsay sighed. “All that stuff yesterday, it brought everything back up, you know?”

Though Lindsay couldn’t see it, Cindy nodded, sorry once again that she’d asked Lindsay to play courier. She should have sent the photos anonymously, and if she had it to do over… Sadly, there were no do-overs. There was, however, atonement.

“The guy you talked to,” Cindy asked, “what’s his name?”

“He said it’s Leo Banks,” Lindsay responded. “Who knows if that’s true?”

Authentic or not, Cindy scribbled the name down on a scrap piece of paper on her desk, and drew a line under it, pen hovering in anticipation of more.

“Can you describe him?”

****

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