[fic] Their Mouths Always Lie 2/9
Jun. 8th, 2012 01:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keire_keCHAPTER TWO – dance of death
It wasn’t something that happened every morning. It wasn’t even something that happened on most mornings.
Every now and then, however, Erik would dream that he was falling. The wind howled in his ears and he was falling from an unimaginable height, with the clear blue sky and white clouds mocking him from on high. He would wake as he hit the ground; it was sand or concrete, water, or ice. It made no difference. He didn’t scream or sit up suddenly in bed, gasping for breath and searching wildly for something to remind him he was real, this was real; that he was no longer dreaming. The dream just ended, leaving him wide-awake and empty.
This happened now. He woke abruptly and stared at the empty ceiling. It was four in the morning. He didn’t need a clock to tell him that, just as he didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell him that the space between his ears didn’t fit the narrow strokes of normal, or that he wouldn’t sleep again tonight. He threw the comforter off and got up.
In the moonlight the apartment seemed desolate and empty, as opposed to the daylight hours, when it was just empty. It was a studio flat, painted a uniform white, with dark wooden flooring and nothing at all to show that a person was living there on a permanent basis. Erik’s clothes hung in the walk-in closet, invisible from sight, and the few books he owned and a handful he borrowed from the library were piled on the floor by the bed. Erik’s sole concession to bodily needs was a luxurious mattress in the middle of the floor and a cheap lamp. The kitchen, separated from the rest of the room by a low partition wall, was also white and gleaming.
Military habits died hard. Erik ate quickly; he cooked only the simplest of foods, and scrubbed the dishes clean as soon as he finished eating. As a result his kitchen looked like the moon of the 1950s: full of promise, but free of human touch.
He had a cold shower. Hot water would make him sleepy and long experience with nightmares taught him that going to sleep again would only result in picking up where he left off. It was best to hang on to whatever rest he had and let the day tire the dreams out of him for the following night.
He didn’t bother dressing again afterward. It was still too early to eat, still too early to even think, so when he walked out of the bathroom naked, dripping water, and paused in front of the window, he wasn’t surprised when it took him half an hour to move again.
A full moon was hovering low over the city, staring into Erik’s window with open curiosity, and he returned her questioning gaze, though he held no answers.
His gun was on the floor beside the bed. He remembered leaving it there; he didn’t sleep with it under his pillow (largely because he didn’t sleep on a pillow), but it was always beside his bed. It was eerie how well it fit his hand. It was a generic semi-automatic pistol, thousands of them were available for anyone with a half-clean record across the country, and this one fit his palm like it was molded to it.
Like he was born clutching it in his hand.
Erik closed his eyes and felt his fingers dissemble the gun piece by piece, then put it together again. He slid the clip home and weighed the whole thing, held it up so that the moon could see.
An object becomes a weapon when wielded and no sooner.
He stared the moon down as he put the muzzle to his temple. He didn’t move for a long while.
*****
“Lehnsherr!” Moira advanced through the bullpen much like an eighteen-wheeler advanced through the freeway – the same basic rules applied, but when push came to shove the lesser cars would end up on the bottom of the heap, and they knew it. Seasoned policemen dove out of her way, just in case she chose to turn Wagner-themed fury upon them. Charles watched her progress with much interest. It was so… inevitable. “What in the name of god were you thinking?”
Erik straightened in his chair standing to attention while sitting down. He affected the most unconvincing innocent expression Charles had seen since he arrested a street vendor of sausages of unfortunately unquestionable origin, and said, “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“My office, now! You too, Xavier.” This spelled trouble. Moira never referred to Charles by his last name, not unless she was livid, and that happened very rarely, as her nature was far too melancholic to allow for rage. He and Erik rose and followed her to the office, chased by the slamming of doors which rattled the whole building.
Safely hidden away from the bullpen and its prying eyes, Moira took to her throne of police chief and glowered. That she could do perfectly.
“Let me refresh your memory,” she said, and swiveled the monitor so that it was facing them. On the screen, proudly displayed on YouTube, was a grainy video of Marvin’s police-assisted swan dive.
Erik barely blinked. “Is there a problem?”
“Yes, there is a problem. You have jumped off a roof with a civilian. You have pushed a civilian off a roof.” Moira exhaled. “Mr. Lehnsherr, I will be blunt. If you can’t see the problem, then your employment is terminated, effective immediately.”
Erik took a moment to compose his reply. “He was in no danger.”
“He was in any number of dangers, up to and including a heart attack.”
Charles very nearly reminded her that Marvin was in perfect health and that the chances of a heart attack, considering his dietary habits, were negligible.
“He walked away. He walked away better off than he walked in.” Erik crossed his legs, but the rest of him remained unmoving.
Moira, by virtue of being a lady, escaped the much favored slapping of palm across her face. Instead she rested her wrists on the armrests of her chair and exhaled, until she was very nearly calm. When she spoke, well. Charles remembered she worked as a nanny in high school. She knew how to talk to obstinate toddlers. “That’s not the point and the press is not going to care. They will take the adrenaline high and blow it up until they have a story, and the story will be ‘unhinged officer attempts murder of prominent citizen, more inside!’”
“It’s a good thing I’m not an officer, then.” Erik didn’t smirk – he had an excellent poker face – but the tone of his voice indicated the smirk was a possibility, and would remain so for the foreseeable future. Fortunately, he saw Moira’s expression, and drew appropriate conclusions. “I thought I would help Marvin. I made a mistake. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
Moira sighed. “You have no idea how much I wish it was that simple.”
Charles froze as Moira – studiously ignoring him – continued to talk to Erik.
“I can’t exactly do anything to you, Lehnsherr. You’re not an officer. Your arrangement is an unofficial one, so nothing I do to you will stick to any file. This means that most of the disciplinary actions at my disposal are pointless. What I can do, however, is suspend Charles on your behalf.”
Charles didn’t think he imagined the spike of anger which coursed through Erik at that moment. “Why?” Erik asked, furrowing his brows.
“Because you will fall in line if you want to work here.” Moira stared them both down without a twitch of unease, if one could overlook the rigid set of her thumbs. She always locked her thumbs when something upset her. “I’m sorry, Charles, but he was under your supervision and yours was the only badge on the roof. You’re suspended until the end of the week and you will take Erik to see the psychiatrist. For emotional support.”
“What has Wesley ever done to you, that you would punish him so?” Charles asked, fluttering his eyelashes.
Moira grimaced, but it was more from the effort of holding in the laughter, then annoyance. “Don’t make me laugh, please. I’m trying to be stern.” She bit her lip and her features settled. “Charles, I need you to make a statement that there was something there which looked like it might explode. However, if Marvin decides to take action…”
“He won’t,” Charles said. He was more than a little surprised his voice had an echo. He turned and found Erik was staring at him with a challenge written plainly across his features. The surprise melted into a warm gush of kinship, and that in turn morphed right back into surprise, because genuine kinship of the sort was new.
Evidently, it was new to Moira as well. She looked between the two of them, nonplussed. “Well, I know Charles dabbles in telepathy, but this is new.”
“If he was going to do anything he would have started by storming in here and demanding that you arrest me,” Erik said with a shrug.
“I’m not so sure his uncle will be this forgiving.”
“Tell him I was trying to save his life, while Charles defused the bomb.” This time Erik fluttered his eyelashes and cocked his head, drawling the syllables through his teeth like a naughty, unrepentant schoolboy faced with the principal he knew he had under his spell.
This time Moira didn’t manage to hold the laughter in. “I will. I’m afraid the suspension stands. Be here on Monday morning,” she told Charles.
Well, that wasn’t much of a punishment. “It’s Thursday.”
“Thank god it is,” Moira said. “Lehnsherr, since you are without a badge and without training, you are going to be processing the detained. Do not leave the station. Do not touch your gun. The officer on duty will instruct you, but the job is self-explanatory. The forms are on the desk and pens are freely available.”
Charles’ poker face was mediocre at the best of times. It stood to reason that it would fail him now. He couldn’t hold in the giggles at the sight of Erik’s – admittedly impressive – stone face.
“Dismissed.” Moira turned her computer back towards her and Charles barely managed to hold in the laughter until he got back into the bullpen. He let it out in the narrow gap between the silence of the office and before the noise of the police station at work swallowed him back up. Erik laughed along with him, presumably for the same reasons.
“I’m sorry,” Erik said after they’d both calmed down. “I didn’t think you’d get in trouble for it.”
“Don’t worry about it. I can live with a brief suspension. It’s no trouble.”
“It’ll go on your permanent record.”
Charles wished he could say he cared about the advancement of his career. He wished the job was important enough to him that the slap on the wrist would sting. He almost wished he could be angry at Erik for being the cause of it, alas, he had enough articles to keep him occupied for the duration and sitting at home, in relative silence, will never be a burden. If he could hole himself up in his bedroom, if he could pour over the papers and experiments for the rest of his life, then he would die a happy man.
“I’m– Don’t let it trouble you, my friend. I won’t.” The smile he shot Erik was sincere. He trusted Erik would realize as much. “Enjoy your week and I will see you first thing on Monday.”
Erik grimaced. “If the station is still standing by then.” He flexed his fingers, curling them around an imaginary gun, and now Charles was worried, too.
“One can only hope!” he said, with a small shrug.
He was just finishing shoving his files into the backpack when he saw Marvin, standing by Angel’s desk with an armful of Starbucks coffee and a sheepish grin. He looked great, for a lack of a better word.
“Marvin,” Charles said. “Pleasure to see you. Everything alright?”
“Yes, thank you. I, uh. Coffee? I have mochas, cappuccinos and ten black, five white.”
“Mocha, please.”
Marvin began shuffling the trays until he came to the one which held four cups with an M on the side and held one out. Charles took it and raised it in thanks. Marvin was buzzing with energy, glowing with it, and he had Erik to thank for the jolt. Amazing.
“Officer Lehnsherr?” Marvin asked meanwhile, turning to Erik.
“I wasn’t aware I deserve a coffee.”
Marvin rolled his shoulders inside his expensive suit and sighed, then smiled immediately after. “Ah, you know what the bible says: forgive and forget.”
“Torah says eye for an eye.” Erik helped himself to a cup of black coffee and nodded. “Good to see you are doing well.”
“Well,” Marvin said, beaming. “I’m off to work. Have a good day!”
They watched him go with a new bounce to his step.
“He would have bounced off the pavement even without the landing pad,” Erik observed once they stepped away from the heap of coffee onto which the policemen were descending like hungry vultures.
Charles felt the atmosphere warranted smacking his shoulder. “Stop that, you’re horrible.”
“Just truthful. How was that a bad thing?”
“Marvin needed it, true.”
“Why didn’t you ever push him?” Erik set the cup aside, popped the lid open and emptied seven sugar packets into the coffee. There was nothing long enough to stir the grande cup with, so he put the cap back on and swirled the drink around and around. “You can’t seriously tell me you’ve never considered the possibility.”
“I have.” Many times. Every time. Marvin never wanted to die, though he often wanted to jump. All he wanted was to feel alive. Somehow the two got twisted in his head and he no longer knew which desire meant what. By the time Charles became a regular visitor, Marvin could only feel alive balancing on the narrow ledge, foolish, when he took great pleasure in his everyday life. He was strange creature, Marvin, prone to depression and influence of others. He needed to take the leap and see for himself that falling was not all it’s cracked up to be, but for the idea to take hold he would have needed to take the final step, a grand feat for someone who had trouble getting up on a chair.
“Charles?”
“Sorry. I… I don’t know. I am a detective. It’s not my job to solve people’s psychological problems.”
“Shame,” Erik merely said. He looked at the corridor, where a stationary desk saw the beginning of a queue. There were only five people so far, but it was still early. Three of the perps wore school uniforms. Interesting beginning to a school day, Charles thought. “I wonder how many I could get to jump out the window just by taking down their details,” Erik was grinning at the line, and already the kids looked uncomfortable. One of them was clutching his cell-phone, no doubt to alert the authorities that a stranger was staring at him with a most predatory grin.
“Don’t!” Charles told him, laughing, as he shouldered his backpack. “I’ll see you Monday.”
*****
If there was one constant in Erik’s life, it was trouble. He could go on a walk to the park, have a hot-dog from the vendor at the corner, get attacked by three different bullies and end up completely soaked by freezing rain in the middle of August. “It is a gift,” his mother had often said, cleaning up his cuts with a soft smile on her face. “It will make you strong.”
It had. Erik became mean and, when he was old enough, he became deadly as well. Moral superiority was nice and well, he reasoned, but supporting the argument with a right hook got him immediate results.
So, when he returned from his first coffee break on a cold Tuesday morning to find the precinct in an uproar and a half-mad thug holding Charles by the neck with one hand, while the other held a gun to his unblinking eye, Erik had, quite casually, pulled out his own gun and put a bullet through the man’s temple.
Unfortunately, the shot was lined up that the man standing behind the thug got a bullet through the shoulder, but since he looked like a very nervous accomplice, Erik really didn’t bother thinking this through.
“Really, Erik,” Charles said with just a hint of reproach, when the unfortunate assailant slid to the floor and his companion did likewise, only with far greater volume. “Was this necessary?”
“Was it not loaded? Do excuse me. It looked very serious.” Erik thumbed the safety of his gun back on and looked around, to find everyone studiously avoiding his gaze. This might have been Westchester, but they were policemen, not soldiers. He had no business expecting them to handle a shooting casually.
… which, consequently, might have meant this was a mistake.
“It was loaded. I do believe it was very serious,” Charles said. The right half of his face was speckled bright red.
Erik tucked his gun back into his pants. “Did you have a plan?”
“I did plan on getting out of it, if that’s what you mean.”
“May I ask how?”
Charles shrugged. “Improvisation.”
Erik made no comment, though he very carefully took note of how they were standing in the middle of a quite crowded bullpen, not one officer had a gun out. They were not soldiers, he reminded himself one more time.
“Excuse me for a moment,” Charles said. He knelt by the injured man, who would have crawled away on his shoulder blades, if he could, were it not for the bullet right beneath his collarbone. As it were he whimpered when Charles leaned over him and pressed two fingers to his neck. “Would someone please call an ambulance?”
The man whimpered pathetically when Charles was handed a first aid kit and balled a roll of bandage against the wound. “Now, stop struggling,” he said lightly. “You don’t want to make it worse.”
Someone did call the ambulance, the Angel girl, if Erik was not mistaken, and the response was remarkably prompt. Within five minutes the paramedic – Sean Cassidy, Erik learned – was loading the unfortunate accomplice onto a gurney.
Charles stood, meanwhile, and began tidying up the papers which the fatality disturbed on the way to the floor. “Darwin, if you would, please accompany Mr. Vossa to the hospital. We will need a statement from him. Possibly a confession.”
One of the younger officers nodded, and followed the procession downstairs, while the rest of the station returned to their usual tasks, only now and then sending wary looks in their direction. Soldiers they might not have been, Erik thought wryly, but it was far from the first shooting any of them has seen. Not in this town. The only exception seemed to be the kid who followed Darwin like an errant puppy stood rooted to the spot, gaping at Charles.
“Um. Detective?”
Charles turned to him with a file in his hand. He was kneeling by the corpse, inspecting his jacket and the stains on it. “Yes?”
“You have blood on your face. All over your face,” the kid said.
“Oh,” Charles said. “Excuse me.”
Erik followed him into the bathroom. No one batted an eye, and if they did, fuck them, really.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that, in the future.” Charles had hung his jacket on the hook and was bent low over the sink, scrubbing at his face with no sense of urgency whatsoever. This was hardly the way a man reacts to having someone else’s head splattered over their face.
This was why he felt no guilt whatsoever when the worse part of his being made his body cross its arms, quirk his brows and quip, “Save your life, you mean?”
“You shot the man in the middle of a precinct. That doesn’t make us look good.”
“The man was holding a gun to your head.”
“Thank you,” Charles said. Water was dripping down his face in a parody of a crying fit, which any reasonable person would be having right about now. Charles, instead, reached for a paper towel.
Erik carefully didn’t say that the rest of the force didn’t lift a finger in his defense. Not the he doubted Charles’ ability to get out of it, but… “An old friend, I presume?”
“I sent him to jail multiple times. I believe much of his social and family life deteriorated as a result.”
“And I suppose that killing you is a surefire way to resurrect it.”
“In his head, certainly.” Charles nodded and threw the soggy towels into the bin. “He wasn’t very stable emotionally at the best of times and his career as a criminal mastermind was borne out of enthusiasm rather than genuine forethought.”
“The obvious is just another fact to you, isn’t it?”
Charles turned his head. “I’m sorry?” There was a red spatter on his neck, which would stain his collar the moment he straightened his head, or the drop succumbed to gravity and followed the line of his spine. Erik didn’t lick his lips solely because he remembered it was human blood and even then it was close.
“Just an observation,” he said instead and reached to wipe the red spatter off with his fingertips. “You had some blood on your neck,” he answered the unspoken question.
“Oh, thank you.” Charles looked at him with something… something in his gaze. Something not suited for the police station restroom.
“I’ve some emails to go through,” Erik said and left.
Charles joined him in the bullpen a few minutes later, when Erik was reading an email from Marvin, who had taken to informing the police – informing Erik – of what he was up to that particular week. It mystified Erik, to a degree, but he seemed to have made a friend who wasn’t a psychic detective.
“Detective Xavier,” Angel called all of sudden. For once she wasn’t wearing her usual flirtatious smile. “There’s been a murder.”
Erik watched Charles’ face shift. It was fascinating to watch – first to appear was sorrow, all the more curious for Charles’ long practice in the business, then the calm acceptance of the death. Then he processed the tone in which the information was delivered and his interest was piqued, the excitement flared into a flame bright enough to provide light to cities.
“Where?” Charles merely said, getting off his chair and pulling his jacket off the backrest in one fluid motion.
“Hundred and eight Sunnyside Avenue. Apartment four.”
“On my way.” Charles dove for the car and took off with a squeal of tires. It took three intersections, traversed with blatant disregard for traffic lights, usually reserved for ambulances and the fire department, before he remembered about the blinking light affixed to the car’s roof. Erik breathed a little easier when the siren cleared the way for them.
They drove to Sunnyside Avenue, which was the quintessential High Westchester. Even the sidewalks were posh, as if the district tried to forget which city it resided in, or, more likely, tried to make up for the pit the rest of it was. The trees never dared to venture a branch out of place, the doorknobs gleamed and the homeless drove Rolls Royce. Erik had killed a man in a similar neighborhood somewhere in Mexico.
Hundred and eight was halfway down the avenue, and when they got there Erik discovered another thing about his partner: Charles drove like a madman, but he parked like an old lady. Erik got out of the car midway and waited on the curb, while Charles performed the fourth backing up and edged into the available space, perfectly parallel to the curb. Only then did he get out of the car (not that Erik didn’t provide slow, sarcastic applause, just because he could) and went for the door. He flashed his badge at the doorman, then cast a quick look around the garden, while the forensic team and the grunts arrived. Charles didn’t even turn in their direction before he started issuing orders.
“Alex, I want the who area taped over. No one gets in. No press,” he told Darwin’s lapdog, before turning to the doorman. “Mr. Moseby, I will also require your notes on who’s been coming and going for the past week, and all the security video data you have.” All of this arrived in a measured, clipped voice, threaded through with very British curls around the words. No wonder the man required a moment to figure it out.
“Sir, our tenants…” he began, but Charles was already talking, “Will appreciate my keeping the press out of their hair, yes?”
The doorman flushed, but nodded. “We don’t have much data, mind, only a few of the cameras record. Most transmit live feed to the monitors.”
“I also want a list of people who have access to both the files and the monitors.”
The doorman was a professional, but evidently not so well paid that he would choose to obstruct a police investigation. He gave in without much internal struggle. “Right away, detective.”
“Excellent,” Charles said. “Who found the body?”
“Mrs. Liehdermann, the housekeeper.”
“Why did you wait before calling us?”
The doorman started. Charles had been studying the list by doorbell, not sparing him a glance. “I– I had to make sure there was a body in the first place. I went upstairs. The kids who live here play pranks, and Halloween is around the corner. I wasn’t sure if he was really dead, at first, see…”
“That’s alright. Officer Summers will take your statement now, unless you’d like a moment to compose yourself?”
“I’m fine,” the doorman said.
Charles nodded. “In that case, Alex, statement. We are going to look at the victim.”
They took the elevator, whose plainness was cleverly disguised between the opulent pillars in the lobby.
“I see they spared some expense.” Erik considered the ceiling of the elevator. It was made of cheap plaster and it hadn’t been touched in years.
“It’s likely no one uses it – it’s not a very tall building.” Charles told him, or rather the corner of the elevator, into which he had chosen to stick his nose.
“Did you find anything interesting?”
“Dirt.”
“Interesting dirt?”
“Boring dirt, I’m afraid.”
“Color me shocked.”
Charles smiled as got back to his feet. “My friend, you are headed for a profound disappointment in the job, if you don’t learn to appreciate dirt.”
Up on the fourth floor (two apartments per floor, but each had two stories) the elevator masqueraded as a wall. A fairly decent impression it was, too – Erik was willing to bet casual, lazy guests would take the stairs and curse the architects more often than not.
Charles made a beeline for the door number four, where a purple flower waited, tacked to the door; a single stalk, five blooms. It was still fresh.
Charles examined the flower in complete silence, barely daring to breathe, presumably for fear of disturbing the fragile petals. He pulled a rubber glove from his pocket and removed the pin with the reverence a man would apply to a holy relic. Erik could swear he saw giddiness in his blue eyes, though his face remained impassive.
A plastic bag appeared from the backpack, as if by magic, and Charles dropped both the flower and the tack inside.
“It’s foxglove,” he said as he turned the knob. “Do you have gloves?”
Erik did. He had, after all, read the manual.
The apartment was sparsely furnished, decorated with even less. A lone, sprawling pistachio-green couch dominated the otherwise beige space; a solitary green king among its swamp. It looked, altogether, like Erik’s kind of place, if he put any effort at all into interior design.
Slightly less up his alley was the tacky trail of flower petals on the floor, leading down the stairs and into the bedroom. The body was artfully arranged on the bed, as if sleeping in a fetal position, completely naked, surrounded by the same flower petals.
“Well,” Erik said dryly. “I’ve watched enough CSI to know this is the work of a serial killer.”
Charles threw him an amused look. “It is far too early to tell.”
“You think it’s a serial killer.”
“True.”
“Then why am I not allowed?”
“Because we are on duty and every word can and will be used against us.”
“I thought those only applied to suspects.”
“Conjecture is a dangerous game and saying the words aloud influences the mind.” But Charles already stopped seeing him. Erik would feel bitter about losing the competition for attention to a dead guy, but it took him all of ten seconds to realize that watching Charles while he worked was no less fascinating than conversing with him.
Charles danced around the victim. He circled the bed first, measuring his steps so that they were perfectly even and didn’t fall on any of the petals. His palm extended over the sheets, searching for stray bits of warmth. Erik was sure he didn’t imagine Charles’ wetting his lips, because though he was an intelligent man, his imagination was limited to a blueprint with silhouettes standing in for people; he wasn’t capable of imaging a pink tongue wetting red lips in anticipation of a Totentanz in the bed of roses.
Erik had heard the term “soul of a poet” and he was certain he didn’t have it. If he had, he might have thought then that he was watching Death himself, circling his bounty, as he watched Charles bow before the corpse and trail a finger along his arm.
“Do you know what his name was?” Charles asked in a hushed tone, like he feared to wake up the sleeper, like he feared he would be roused by a careless word putting an end to this macabre dance.
There was very little chance of that happening; Erik could smell the blood from where he stood, even if he couldn’t see it. The body was unnaturally pale, as though carved from alabaster, the skin nearly snow-white against the rosy petals.
“Sebastian Tojo.” Erik flipped through the wallet, carelessly abandoned on a dresser, next to a handful of photos, which depicted their corpse with a small circle of friends. “What killed him?”
“Blood loss.” Charles kneeled beside the bed, so that he was level with the victim’s eyes. “His sister will be devastated to hear of his death.”
“Unless she did it, to get his money.”
“Doubtful.”
There were footsteps in the hall right outside the bedroom. Charles didn’t look up, but Erik watched the newcomers’ reflection in the windowpane. Summers stopped by the door. He was followed by McCoy, who was pushing a gurney, and finally Emma Frost, the voluptuous coroner in an impeccable white pants suit. Erik would be the first to admit he didn’t keep abreast of the current fashions in lab wear, but a cut low enough to proudly display the make and model of the bra seemed to be pushing it.
“Mr. Xavier,” Frost said, giving Erik a look no warmer than her name. “Are you determined to do my job for me every single time?”
“I wouldn’t dare, Miss Frost.”
“How much more time do you need? I have patients waiting.”
“I need Hank to take pictures. Then he’s all yours.”
“Yessir,” McCoy said, wielding the camera like it was a shield. It became one, when he turned to Erik, and tiptoed around him.
With the career change it might be wise to rethink his demeanor, Erik reflected. Then, because fuck demeanor, he grinned and snapped his teeth. Hank skidded to the bed and hid behind Charles and his camera.
“From up above too, if you can,” Charles said, paying little to no attention to the problems of the living.
“Okay. Alex, can you fetch me a chair? Something high?” Hank started snapping pictures at a cinematic rate, pausing for nothing whatsoever including breathing.
“What, being freakishly tall not doing it for you any longer?” Summers said, already out the door and fetching.
“It’s a tall bed,” McCoy mumbled to the camera when he got his chair.
“Whatever.” Summers took stock of the bed, now that he was in the vicinity to properly appreciate it, and whistled. “Wow, this looks like something from CSI. All the colors.”
Charles threw him an amused look. “It does, doesn’t it?” He turned away from the bed and its, admittedly, pretty color scheme, to study the floor and the scattering of petals which led to the windowsill.
“How do you suppose the killer got in?” Summers asked meanwhile. “The window?”
“Main door,” Erik said automatically. He wasn’t surprised that Charles had spoken in unison with him, Summers, on the other hand, jumped. He alternated between staring at them both with a growing look of “oh god, there’s two of them!” until finally curiosity has won and he had to ask the obvious question.
“How do you know?”
“This amount of effort indicates preparation within the flat. The killer was here for quite some time, which in turn indicates he had plenty of time to familiarize himself with the interior, doing which would be far more practical if he had a spare key. People pay far less attention to who walks through the front door than who walks in through the fire escape,” Charles told him, disturbing the fine line of dust on the window frame with a gloved finger. Erik had to wonder if and where he allocated time for breathing when he planned an explanation: the words arrived in a daisy-chain with no space in-between. It was likely Charles simply paused bodily functions to say things, then breathed out. The glass turned opaque with warm mist where it was closest to his red lips.
Any moment now he should stop staring and start being a professional sort-of detective, Erik thought ruefully, and now would be the perfect time, because Alex turned to him next, waiting with an expectant expression. Luckily, the answer was obvious.
“That’s what I would do,” Erik said with a shrug.
Charles nodded and smiled. “Sensible choice. This makes our job very difficult, ladies and gentleman, as we have a sensible, meticulous killer on our hands.”
“And to think, Christmas isn’t for another three months. Someone must have been a very good boy.” Frost nudged a flower petal with the tip of her milky white stiletto heel and considered her nails. “Have you been sneaking out to help old ladies across the street?”
“Around here?” Charles straightened and fixed Frost with an incredulous look. “Goodness, no. I would get mugged and end up with my throat slit in a back alley. The old ladies are vicious.”
Hank took a step back from his perch on the chair, but instead of falling to the carpeted floor and cracking his skull open he landed on lightly bended knees, with grace ballet dancers starved themselves for. The kid – and he was a kid, around ten years younger than Erik – hid his fitness behind glasses he didn’t need and a labcoat, probably to avoid Charles’ fate of being sent out onto the streets of Westchester with nothing but a gun and a badge for protection.
Given what the kid did to Summers every time they were in the gym together, he was more than suited to keep himself on top of any given fight, but only a moron took to the streets unless he had to, and McCoy had an IQ which, in the lab, was measured in Kelvins as opposed to everyone else’s Fahrenheits. Unfortunately, the outdoors required different kind of smarts and even Hank knew he wasn’t cut out for it. Hence his devotion to Charles and Charles’ campaign to keep MacTaggart sidetracked long enough to hire other people, before she had to resort to offering another grad student a bowl of soup per week to run labs, and put McCoy in harm’s way. It was hard to dislike McCoy, Erik allowed. He was too fluffy and reminiscent of an overgrown teddy bear for that. Even Erik got roped into the “Save Our Hank” campaign as a result, though that had less to do with Hank himself and more with Charles’ hopeful blue eyes, raised in supplication.
“I’m done here,” Hank told Frost, who snapped a pair of latex gloves onto her manicured hands and bent over the cold body. Out of the designer bag she took a thermometer and with practiced ease stabbed the victim’s liver.
“Off-hand, he bled to death,” she said. “There we go.” She turned over the victim’s wrists, revealing two gouges on each. Erik had been staring at the bed at the time, so if his gaze slid from the pale skin of the corpse to Frost’s equally pale cleavage, framed by creamy satin, he could feign innocence. Had he met Frost under different circumstances, Erik would have assumed she had little to no interest in anything except fashion and the many shades of the color white. She wore expensive clothes and her hair was woven into a precarious bun on the back of her head, with every last hair controlled by an appropriate substance. If they had met under different circumstances, Erik would have trouble imagining her tugging apart the edges of a wound with her elegant fingernails. “Oh, marvelous job, a plastic surgeon couldn’t have done a cleaner cut.”
“He was drugged first,” Charles said absently. He was on his knees and elbows again, half-hidden underneath the bed, though not so well hidden that, when he looked over his shoulder, Erik couldn’t see his eyes. “He slept through his own murder. Hank, there’s blood seeping through the mattress, see if you can get anything out of here.”
Frost released the victim’s wrists and made quick examination of his skin around the elbows and inner thighs. “There are no obvious needle marks, no sign of strangulation, no suspicious bruising. Given the blood loss and the temperature of the liver, I’d estimate he’s been dead seven to ten hours.”
“How many bodies do you have waiting?”
“Today?” Frost arched an eyebrow at Charles, pursing her lips in a cool smirk. “My dear, you know perfectly well I am up to my blonde coif in corpses.”
“Any chance we could push this one ahead of the queue?” Charles fluttered his eyelashes and smiled, sitting back on his haunches. “This will get out, sooner or later, and Moira will be pushing to close it quickly.”
“Who am I to spoil your early Christmas gift?” Frost smiled in a way that, Erik was sure, invited the little boy into getting into her sled. There was a cruel edge to it, a coldness which belied the sexual elegance of the rest of her, but even so, it was friendly. Emma Frost, the Snow Queen extraordinaire, would go the extra mile to spoil her favorite courtier. “Gentlemen, my body, please. Post-haste, if you will, Charles is waiting.”
With a little effort Summers and McCoy transferred the body of Sebastian Tojo to the gurney and zipped the bag closed. Both of them avoided standing too close to Frost, Erik noted, despite the fact that neither could resist using the height advantage to peek into her bra. The two of them then wheeled the gurney out the door and, presumably, down into the van.
“Thoughts?” Erik asked when Frost’s clicking heels stepped onto the tiles in the hallway and the two of them were alone, considering the indentation of the body on the bed, preserved in dried blood.
Charles wasn’t looking at him, but the corner of his mouth was curving towards his eye, as if he had a particularly amusing thought. “Well, Erik, I must say that if you are asking me if I have any suspects, you are the first on the list,” he said, carelessly showing his unprotected back.
Erik folded his arms across his chest. “Care to elaborate on that?”
“Mr. Tojo was murdered by a man he barely knew, if at all. The killer was, however, meticulously prepared for the murder. He walked in when Mr. Tojo was sleeping, possibly after he had been drugged. The incisions were made with a sharp implement, but I would wager it was more a knife than it was a scalpel. Emma will confirm the nature of the cut. The force and intent behind it indicates a seasoned soldier, not a surgeon.
“This is far from a first kill, I’m sure of that, but it is the first of its kind. It might be that I have simply been unaware of such killings, I grant you, but either way, they haven’t happened in Westchester. This is all for show, obviously, so he wouldn’t have bothered hiding it. Thus, I suspect the killer is new in town. So, who do we know of that has extensive military background and no history in this city?”
“Should I expect an arrest?”
“Of course not. There’s not a shred of evidence tying you to the scene, not a shred of evidence, in fact, that even hints at you.” Charles was smiling at him, open and flirtatious.
With the exception of everything he just said, Erik thought and shook his head. “I could step down from the investigation,” he said with as much seriousness as he could muster.
“Don’t be absurd.” Charles stepped away from the bed as it personally insulted him. “I meant it in a purely hypothetical fashion.”
“You are levying a serious implication against me; aren’t you concerned my judgment might be impaired?” Erik grinned, as he rarely got the chance to, and took the few steps separating him from Charles, until they were standing close enough to touch. They were flirting, he wondered, with a dead body between them.
“Please. The technicalities are one thing; the style is something quite different. This,” Charles waved his arm to encompass the bed, the room and the petals throughout, “is not like you, my friend.”
“Oh, so now I lack style. I could learn, you know. There is an art to it, when you think about it – a body must be a curious medium to sculpt. Not quite my type, this particular man, but I could make the effort.”
Charles’ red mouth stretched in a languid smile. “I love a challenge.”
“Working with a serial killer to solve a murder is merely a challenge now?”
“I was born in Westchester, Erik. Working with a serial killer to solve a murder is merely Tuesday. Or, as my month has been going, every working day and the occasional beer.” All of which included Charles at some point laying his throat bare for Erik’s perusal. If Erik was the least bit interested in hurting him, he had more opportunity than he’d had home-made meals in the last ten years.
Erik wasn’t yet sure what to make of that. People had pegged him as a killer the moment they knew about the Green Berets; his attitude earned him plenty of respect, but very little trust. “I have no alibi for last night,” he said, just in case.
“You were home, reading, not having dinner.” Charles looked at him and bit his lip. On anyone else it would be gesture of nervousness. On Charles, it was a mark of an endearing smile. “Which isn’t much of an alibi, I’ll grant you. However, you also have no motive, as I don’t believe you’ve ever met Mr. Tojo before.”
“I’ve never met many men I have killed, Charles.”
“How many of them have you laid out on a bed of roses, however?”
“I have staged a suicide or two, but your point is well made.”
Charles laughed, turned his back on Erik, relaxed and unconcerned, and moved out the bedroom to inspect the kitchen, leaving Erik to contemplate the bloodied bed. The victim has been positioned so that his head rested on one wrist, the other extended, a mockery of the recovery position. The bloodstains corresponded directly with the placement of the wrists – whatever drugs the victim had running through his veins were potent enough to induce a deep sleep. The man didn’t know he was going to die; the killer didn’t want him to suffer.
He was a killer, then, who didn’t delight in killing.
Charles was right to suspect him, Erik thought. Unbidden, his mouth curved into a wide grin, framing a silent laugh that seemed to echo throughout the empty room, reddened with blood and roses. Charles was right to suspect him and still he’d shown him his back, aware of the gun Erik carried, aware of the hundred ways he could kill him with his bare hands and the furniture.
Idiot, Erik thought fondly.
*****
Charles took a glance at all the photos, tapping his finger on the arrow key every few seconds, once the room’s edges aligned with those which were already burned in his mind. He flipped through the photos until the room became a blueprint on which a crime has been committed. The bed, the petals, the blood, the body; the pictures were snapshots of a frozen moment, but in each one there was a hint.
The fundamental law of physics: in this universe, the motion of each particle carried in it the information of where it had been previously. Every body had a history hardwired into its very being. If one could tap into the universal reserve, then the explosion of infinity could be wound up back to the singularity which begot it.
In Charles’ head, this was the world: snapshots in time, meticulously catalogued, with bright vines of intent connecting the past to the present, to the future. It made him a brilliant CSI, when he first started work in law enforcement. It made him a better detective.
When he closed his eyes the crime scene was before him, stripped bare of the milling police personnel, stripped bare of his own presence, of Erik, of anything which wasn’t there when the important events happened. The confined space stretched across miles, to make space for each detail, so that it was displayed as the single most important object, until it faded into obscurity at his command.
“I think,” Charles started, even though he didn’t think, in a manner of speaking, so much as he saw, as clearly as he saw the lines crisscrossing his palms, “Our killer is a tall man. Not necessarily large, but strong. There is a sense of effortlessness in the scene. He takes pride in it, makes an effort to display his success, taunts us even, but there is no passion there. It is all planned. It is all dry. There is a definite sense of accomplishment, yet it is not in the act of killing, but the accomplishment itself.” He opened his eyes to find Erik studying him over their shared desk space. “This display is a show. He has killed before. This is not an experiment. This is a show staged specifically for us.”
Erik raised his gaze from the few key photos they had printed. “We are talking about a man who kills with such amount of forethought that he brings in heaps of flower petals. It is more or less obvious he’s doing it for show.”
Charles blinked. Suddenly Erik’s gaze was hard to withstand. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say it’s not apparent. Sometimes I just… like to hear what I see. I’ll be quiet.”
Erik was already shaking his head by the time Charles was halfway done. “Talk. I don’t need silence to concentrate. I’ll let you know if anything catches my attention.” He went back to staring at the photos, leaving Charles to stare at him, in something which was indescribable. There was surprise there, and gratitude, and fear, because he would wreck this, he was certain, he would keep talking and this would collapse before his very eyes.
“I’m not saying there isn’t a chance of error,” he said eventually. “I make mistakes, now and then.”
“Interesting. I’ll be sure to make a note when you do.” Erik closed the file and stretched. The slim-fitting turtleneck didn’t ride up high enough to reveal skin, but it was close. It didn’t reveal anything Charles’ hadn’t already known about, like the taut abdominal muscles and a lean body, coiled like a serpent ready to strike. “The crime scene is getting us nowhere; anything left will be small enough for even you to overlook. What do we do next, look through the personal file?”
“Yes. Then we should interview the family and friends. We’ll see if he had any enemies, anyone with a motive.”
“He was a rich man. They typically have enemies.” Erik was already typing, no doubt searching for the file and formal associations of Mr. Tojo. The laptop taken from the scene gave him access to the victim’s Facebook account, which in turn should yield a list of a hundred names: a hundred possible suspects.
“Mr. Tojo was generous.” Charles flipped through his mental catalogue of the crime scene and the apartment and found it dotted with small gifts, things made by hand or bought with the intent to brighten someone’s day. The few photos on display were of parties, of people enjoying each other’s company. “I doubt he was in anyone’s bad books.”
“He has been murdered,” Erik noted with a small smirk and no teeth whatsoever. “I figure he was generous enough to lend money, but not enough not to incautiously hint he might like it returned. Maybe his jealous girlfriend found him lending money to his ex.”
“Ah, but then we would have twelve haphazard stab wounds, not four surgical cuts on his wrists. Passion tends to be obvious in a murder.”
“Enthusiasm is not passion, Charles.” Erik watched him. He did that often. He would pause whatever he was doing and just watch, until Charles was certain the room could fall away in a quantum explosion, leaving behind nothing, and Erik would still only have eyes for him. It was a heady feeling. It wormed underneath his collar, caressing his skin every time he moved. Erik watched him with the same rapt attention he bestowed on the results of crimes and their perpetrators, and Charles felt naked under his gaze. It was funny, really. He could shed his sweaters and slacks; he could leave his underwear pooled on the clothes and walk down the busiest street, yet he would never feel as naked as he did when Erik was giving him his full attention.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” he stammered.
“The so-called crimes of passion are enthusiasm gone wrong. True passion is not fiery; it’s more like ice. It’s like a vacuum into which everything else in the world pours.”
He blinked and suddenly the room had fallen away, because Erik was elsewhere. His gaze was focused on the distance, unhindered by walls and the chaos of the bullpen, reviewing a story only he was aware of.
“Passion is fire by definition,” Charles said cautiously, feeling like he was on foreign soil. Dictionaries were a familiar ground; a thesaurus was more of a Canada. The same in theory, slipping his grasp in practice. No wonder it made sense to Erik, who had traversed continents and slid into a new profession like it was a new outfit.
“Is it?” Erik went back to looking at him, though his eyes remained distant. “Have you ever felt it, then?”
Charles blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“What’s the police protocol for wanting things?”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.” Charles picked up a file from the desk and thumbed through the pages. “I have plenty of things I feel strongly about.”
“Like broccoli.”
“I have no particular feeling regarding broccoli.” He didn’t avoid dishes containing the plant, if there were other things in it that he enjoyed, but there was something about the texture that made him swallow the pieces without chewing and quickly douse the aftertaste with wine.
“You eat it funny,” Erik said, then indicated the photos Charles was flipping through. “Any progress?”
“The scene? Relatively little. I doubt I’ll be able to get much further without more data. I did get a preliminary tox report, which tells us no more than the killer had access to morphine. That’s all. How about you?”
“He wasn’t exactly friendless. Not a whole lot of family though.” Erik hit print and the machine spit out a dozen pages, each with a brief dossier. He gathered them into a single stack and flipped through it, until one caught his eye. “I’d start with the cousin. He should be able to point us further.”
Charles nodded. The photo was of an attractive Asian man in his late thirties, with hair dyed a lighter brown. “Cousin it is. Do you want to drive?”
Erik was already shimming into his soft leather jacket. “I don’t really care.”
An unusual answer from a person who had been at the mercy of his driving skills previously. Charles grinned. “Flip you for it?”
It wasn’t something that happened every morning. It wasn’t even something that happened on most mornings.
Every now and then, however, Erik would dream that he was falling. The wind howled in his ears and he was falling from an unimaginable height, with the clear blue sky and white clouds mocking him from on high. He would wake as he hit the ground; it was sand or concrete, water, or ice. It made no difference. He didn’t scream or sit up suddenly in bed, gasping for breath and searching wildly for something to remind him he was real, this was real; that he was no longer dreaming. The dream just ended, leaving him wide-awake and empty.
This happened now. He woke abruptly and stared at the empty ceiling. It was four in the morning. He didn’t need a clock to tell him that, just as he didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell him that the space between his ears didn’t fit the narrow strokes of normal, or that he wouldn’t sleep again tonight. He threw the comforter off and got up.
In the moonlight the apartment seemed desolate and empty, as opposed to the daylight hours, when it was just empty. It was a studio flat, painted a uniform white, with dark wooden flooring and nothing at all to show that a person was living there on a permanent basis. Erik’s clothes hung in the walk-in closet, invisible from sight, and the few books he owned and a handful he borrowed from the library were piled on the floor by the bed. Erik’s sole concession to bodily needs was a luxurious mattress in the middle of the floor and a cheap lamp. The kitchen, separated from the rest of the room by a low partition wall, was also white and gleaming.
Military habits died hard. Erik ate quickly; he cooked only the simplest of foods, and scrubbed the dishes clean as soon as he finished eating. As a result his kitchen looked like the moon of the 1950s: full of promise, but free of human touch.
He had a cold shower. Hot water would make him sleepy and long experience with nightmares taught him that going to sleep again would only result in picking up where he left off. It was best to hang on to whatever rest he had and let the day tire the dreams out of him for the following night.
He didn’t bother dressing again afterward. It was still too early to eat, still too early to even think, so when he walked out of the bathroom naked, dripping water, and paused in front of the window, he wasn’t surprised when it took him half an hour to move again.
A full moon was hovering low over the city, staring into Erik’s window with open curiosity, and he returned her questioning gaze, though he held no answers.
His gun was on the floor beside the bed. He remembered leaving it there; he didn’t sleep with it under his pillow (largely because he didn’t sleep on a pillow), but it was always beside his bed. It was eerie how well it fit his hand. It was a generic semi-automatic pistol, thousands of them were available for anyone with a half-clean record across the country, and this one fit his palm like it was molded to it.
Like he was born clutching it in his hand.
Erik closed his eyes and felt his fingers dissemble the gun piece by piece, then put it together again. He slid the clip home and weighed the whole thing, held it up so that the moon could see.
An object becomes a weapon when wielded and no sooner.
He stared the moon down as he put the muzzle to his temple. He didn’t move for a long while.
*****
“Lehnsherr!” Moira advanced through the bullpen much like an eighteen-wheeler advanced through the freeway – the same basic rules applied, but when push came to shove the lesser cars would end up on the bottom of the heap, and they knew it. Seasoned policemen dove out of her way, just in case she chose to turn Wagner-themed fury upon them. Charles watched her progress with much interest. It was so… inevitable. “What in the name of god were you thinking?”
Erik straightened in his chair standing to attention while sitting down. He affected the most unconvincing innocent expression Charles had seen since he arrested a street vendor of sausages of unfortunately unquestionable origin, and said, “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“My office, now! You too, Xavier.” This spelled trouble. Moira never referred to Charles by his last name, not unless she was livid, and that happened very rarely, as her nature was far too melancholic to allow for rage. He and Erik rose and followed her to the office, chased by the slamming of doors which rattled the whole building.
Safely hidden away from the bullpen and its prying eyes, Moira took to her throne of police chief and glowered. That she could do perfectly.
“Let me refresh your memory,” she said, and swiveled the monitor so that it was facing them. On the screen, proudly displayed on YouTube, was a grainy video of Marvin’s police-assisted swan dive.
Erik barely blinked. “Is there a problem?”
“Yes, there is a problem. You have jumped off a roof with a civilian. You have pushed a civilian off a roof.” Moira exhaled. “Mr. Lehnsherr, I will be blunt. If you can’t see the problem, then your employment is terminated, effective immediately.”
Erik took a moment to compose his reply. “He was in no danger.”
“He was in any number of dangers, up to and including a heart attack.”
Charles very nearly reminded her that Marvin was in perfect health and that the chances of a heart attack, considering his dietary habits, were negligible.
“He walked away. He walked away better off than he walked in.” Erik crossed his legs, but the rest of him remained unmoving.
Moira, by virtue of being a lady, escaped the much favored slapping of palm across her face. Instead she rested her wrists on the armrests of her chair and exhaled, until she was very nearly calm. When she spoke, well. Charles remembered she worked as a nanny in high school. She knew how to talk to obstinate toddlers. “That’s not the point and the press is not going to care. They will take the adrenaline high and blow it up until they have a story, and the story will be ‘unhinged officer attempts murder of prominent citizen, more inside!’”
“It’s a good thing I’m not an officer, then.” Erik didn’t smirk – he had an excellent poker face – but the tone of his voice indicated the smirk was a possibility, and would remain so for the foreseeable future. Fortunately, he saw Moira’s expression, and drew appropriate conclusions. “I thought I would help Marvin. I made a mistake. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
Moira sighed. “You have no idea how much I wish it was that simple.”
Charles froze as Moira – studiously ignoring him – continued to talk to Erik.
“I can’t exactly do anything to you, Lehnsherr. You’re not an officer. Your arrangement is an unofficial one, so nothing I do to you will stick to any file. This means that most of the disciplinary actions at my disposal are pointless. What I can do, however, is suspend Charles on your behalf.”
Charles didn’t think he imagined the spike of anger which coursed through Erik at that moment. “Why?” Erik asked, furrowing his brows.
“Because you will fall in line if you want to work here.” Moira stared them both down without a twitch of unease, if one could overlook the rigid set of her thumbs. She always locked her thumbs when something upset her. “I’m sorry, Charles, but he was under your supervision and yours was the only badge on the roof. You’re suspended until the end of the week and you will take Erik to see the psychiatrist. For emotional support.”
“What has Wesley ever done to you, that you would punish him so?” Charles asked, fluttering his eyelashes.
Moira grimaced, but it was more from the effort of holding in the laughter, then annoyance. “Don’t make me laugh, please. I’m trying to be stern.” She bit her lip and her features settled. “Charles, I need you to make a statement that there was something there which looked like it might explode. However, if Marvin decides to take action…”
“He won’t,” Charles said. He was more than a little surprised his voice had an echo. He turned and found Erik was staring at him with a challenge written plainly across his features. The surprise melted into a warm gush of kinship, and that in turn morphed right back into surprise, because genuine kinship of the sort was new.
Evidently, it was new to Moira as well. She looked between the two of them, nonplussed. “Well, I know Charles dabbles in telepathy, but this is new.”
“If he was going to do anything he would have started by storming in here and demanding that you arrest me,” Erik said with a shrug.
“I’m not so sure his uncle will be this forgiving.”
“Tell him I was trying to save his life, while Charles defused the bomb.” This time Erik fluttered his eyelashes and cocked his head, drawling the syllables through his teeth like a naughty, unrepentant schoolboy faced with the principal he knew he had under his spell.
This time Moira didn’t manage to hold the laughter in. “I will. I’m afraid the suspension stands. Be here on Monday morning,” she told Charles.
Well, that wasn’t much of a punishment. “It’s Thursday.”
“Thank god it is,” Moira said. “Lehnsherr, since you are without a badge and without training, you are going to be processing the detained. Do not leave the station. Do not touch your gun. The officer on duty will instruct you, but the job is self-explanatory. The forms are on the desk and pens are freely available.”
Charles’ poker face was mediocre at the best of times. It stood to reason that it would fail him now. He couldn’t hold in the giggles at the sight of Erik’s – admittedly impressive – stone face.
“Dismissed.” Moira turned her computer back towards her and Charles barely managed to hold in the laughter until he got back into the bullpen. He let it out in the narrow gap between the silence of the office and before the noise of the police station at work swallowed him back up. Erik laughed along with him, presumably for the same reasons.
“I’m sorry,” Erik said after they’d both calmed down. “I didn’t think you’d get in trouble for it.”
“Don’t worry about it. I can live with a brief suspension. It’s no trouble.”
“It’ll go on your permanent record.”
Charles wished he could say he cared about the advancement of his career. He wished the job was important enough to him that the slap on the wrist would sting. He almost wished he could be angry at Erik for being the cause of it, alas, he had enough articles to keep him occupied for the duration and sitting at home, in relative silence, will never be a burden. If he could hole himself up in his bedroom, if he could pour over the papers and experiments for the rest of his life, then he would die a happy man.
“I’m– Don’t let it trouble you, my friend. I won’t.” The smile he shot Erik was sincere. He trusted Erik would realize as much. “Enjoy your week and I will see you first thing on Monday.”
Erik grimaced. “If the station is still standing by then.” He flexed his fingers, curling them around an imaginary gun, and now Charles was worried, too.
“One can only hope!” he said, with a small shrug.
He was just finishing shoving his files into the backpack when he saw Marvin, standing by Angel’s desk with an armful of Starbucks coffee and a sheepish grin. He looked great, for a lack of a better word.
“Marvin,” Charles said. “Pleasure to see you. Everything alright?”
“Yes, thank you. I, uh. Coffee? I have mochas, cappuccinos and ten black, five white.”
“Mocha, please.”
Marvin began shuffling the trays until he came to the one which held four cups with an M on the side and held one out. Charles took it and raised it in thanks. Marvin was buzzing with energy, glowing with it, and he had Erik to thank for the jolt. Amazing.
“Officer Lehnsherr?” Marvin asked meanwhile, turning to Erik.
“I wasn’t aware I deserve a coffee.”
Marvin rolled his shoulders inside his expensive suit and sighed, then smiled immediately after. “Ah, you know what the bible says: forgive and forget.”
“Torah says eye for an eye.” Erik helped himself to a cup of black coffee and nodded. “Good to see you are doing well.”
“Well,” Marvin said, beaming. “I’m off to work. Have a good day!”
They watched him go with a new bounce to his step.
“He would have bounced off the pavement even without the landing pad,” Erik observed once they stepped away from the heap of coffee onto which the policemen were descending like hungry vultures.
Charles felt the atmosphere warranted smacking his shoulder. “Stop that, you’re horrible.”
“Just truthful. How was that a bad thing?”
“Marvin needed it, true.”
“Why didn’t you ever push him?” Erik set the cup aside, popped the lid open and emptied seven sugar packets into the coffee. There was nothing long enough to stir the grande cup with, so he put the cap back on and swirled the drink around and around. “You can’t seriously tell me you’ve never considered the possibility.”
“I have.” Many times. Every time. Marvin never wanted to die, though he often wanted to jump. All he wanted was to feel alive. Somehow the two got twisted in his head and he no longer knew which desire meant what. By the time Charles became a regular visitor, Marvin could only feel alive balancing on the narrow ledge, foolish, when he took great pleasure in his everyday life. He was strange creature, Marvin, prone to depression and influence of others. He needed to take the leap and see for himself that falling was not all it’s cracked up to be, but for the idea to take hold he would have needed to take the final step, a grand feat for someone who had trouble getting up on a chair.
“Charles?”
“Sorry. I… I don’t know. I am a detective. It’s not my job to solve people’s psychological problems.”
“Shame,” Erik merely said. He looked at the corridor, where a stationary desk saw the beginning of a queue. There were only five people so far, but it was still early. Three of the perps wore school uniforms. Interesting beginning to a school day, Charles thought. “I wonder how many I could get to jump out the window just by taking down their details,” Erik was grinning at the line, and already the kids looked uncomfortable. One of them was clutching his cell-phone, no doubt to alert the authorities that a stranger was staring at him with a most predatory grin.
“Don’t!” Charles told him, laughing, as he shouldered his backpack. “I’ll see you Monday.”
*****
If there was one constant in Erik’s life, it was trouble. He could go on a walk to the park, have a hot-dog from the vendor at the corner, get attacked by three different bullies and end up completely soaked by freezing rain in the middle of August. “It is a gift,” his mother had often said, cleaning up his cuts with a soft smile on her face. “It will make you strong.”
It had. Erik became mean and, when he was old enough, he became deadly as well. Moral superiority was nice and well, he reasoned, but supporting the argument with a right hook got him immediate results.
So, when he returned from his first coffee break on a cold Tuesday morning to find the precinct in an uproar and a half-mad thug holding Charles by the neck with one hand, while the other held a gun to his unblinking eye, Erik had, quite casually, pulled out his own gun and put a bullet through the man’s temple.
Unfortunately, the shot was lined up that the man standing behind the thug got a bullet through the shoulder, but since he looked like a very nervous accomplice, Erik really didn’t bother thinking this through.
“Really, Erik,” Charles said with just a hint of reproach, when the unfortunate assailant slid to the floor and his companion did likewise, only with far greater volume. “Was this necessary?”
“Was it not loaded? Do excuse me. It looked very serious.” Erik thumbed the safety of his gun back on and looked around, to find everyone studiously avoiding his gaze. This might have been Westchester, but they were policemen, not soldiers. He had no business expecting them to handle a shooting casually.
… which, consequently, might have meant this was a mistake.
“It was loaded. I do believe it was very serious,” Charles said. The right half of his face was speckled bright red.
Erik tucked his gun back into his pants. “Did you have a plan?”
“I did plan on getting out of it, if that’s what you mean.”
“May I ask how?”
Charles shrugged. “Improvisation.”
Erik made no comment, though he very carefully took note of how they were standing in the middle of a quite crowded bullpen, not one officer had a gun out. They were not soldiers, he reminded himself one more time.
“Excuse me for a moment,” Charles said. He knelt by the injured man, who would have crawled away on his shoulder blades, if he could, were it not for the bullet right beneath his collarbone. As it were he whimpered when Charles leaned over him and pressed two fingers to his neck. “Would someone please call an ambulance?”
The man whimpered pathetically when Charles was handed a first aid kit and balled a roll of bandage against the wound. “Now, stop struggling,” he said lightly. “You don’t want to make it worse.”
Someone did call the ambulance, the Angel girl, if Erik was not mistaken, and the response was remarkably prompt. Within five minutes the paramedic – Sean Cassidy, Erik learned – was loading the unfortunate accomplice onto a gurney.
Charles stood, meanwhile, and began tidying up the papers which the fatality disturbed on the way to the floor. “Darwin, if you would, please accompany Mr. Vossa to the hospital. We will need a statement from him. Possibly a confession.”
One of the younger officers nodded, and followed the procession downstairs, while the rest of the station returned to their usual tasks, only now and then sending wary looks in their direction. Soldiers they might not have been, Erik thought wryly, but it was far from the first shooting any of them has seen. Not in this town. The only exception seemed to be the kid who followed Darwin like an errant puppy stood rooted to the spot, gaping at Charles.
“Um. Detective?”
Charles turned to him with a file in his hand. He was kneeling by the corpse, inspecting his jacket and the stains on it. “Yes?”
“You have blood on your face. All over your face,” the kid said.
“Oh,” Charles said. “Excuse me.”
Erik followed him into the bathroom. No one batted an eye, and if they did, fuck them, really.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that, in the future.” Charles had hung his jacket on the hook and was bent low over the sink, scrubbing at his face with no sense of urgency whatsoever. This was hardly the way a man reacts to having someone else’s head splattered over their face.
This was why he felt no guilt whatsoever when the worse part of his being made his body cross its arms, quirk his brows and quip, “Save your life, you mean?”
“You shot the man in the middle of a precinct. That doesn’t make us look good.”
“The man was holding a gun to your head.”
“Thank you,” Charles said. Water was dripping down his face in a parody of a crying fit, which any reasonable person would be having right about now. Charles, instead, reached for a paper towel.
Erik carefully didn’t say that the rest of the force didn’t lift a finger in his defense. Not the he doubted Charles’ ability to get out of it, but… “An old friend, I presume?”
“I sent him to jail multiple times. I believe much of his social and family life deteriorated as a result.”
“And I suppose that killing you is a surefire way to resurrect it.”
“In his head, certainly.” Charles nodded and threw the soggy towels into the bin. “He wasn’t very stable emotionally at the best of times and his career as a criminal mastermind was borne out of enthusiasm rather than genuine forethought.”
“The obvious is just another fact to you, isn’t it?”
Charles turned his head. “I’m sorry?” There was a red spatter on his neck, which would stain his collar the moment he straightened his head, or the drop succumbed to gravity and followed the line of his spine. Erik didn’t lick his lips solely because he remembered it was human blood and even then it was close.
“Just an observation,” he said instead and reached to wipe the red spatter off with his fingertips. “You had some blood on your neck,” he answered the unspoken question.
“Oh, thank you.” Charles looked at him with something… something in his gaze. Something not suited for the police station restroom.
“I’ve some emails to go through,” Erik said and left.
Charles joined him in the bullpen a few minutes later, when Erik was reading an email from Marvin, who had taken to informing the police – informing Erik – of what he was up to that particular week. It mystified Erik, to a degree, but he seemed to have made a friend who wasn’t a psychic detective.
“Detective Xavier,” Angel called all of sudden. For once she wasn’t wearing her usual flirtatious smile. “There’s been a murder.”
Erik watched Charles’ face shift. It was fascinating to watch – first to appear was sorrow, all the more curious for Charles’ long practice in the business, then the calm acceptance of the death. Then he processed the tone in which the information was delivered and his interest was piqued, the excitement flared into a flame bright enough to provide light to cities.
“Where?” Charles merely said, getting off his chair and pulling his jacket off the backrest in one fluid motion.
“Hundred and eight Sunnyside Avenue. Apartment four.”
“On my way.” Charles dove for the car and took off with a squeal of tires. It took three intersections, traversed with blatant disregard for traffic lights, usually reserved for ambulances and the fire department, before he remembered about the blinking light affixed to the car’s roof. Erik breathed a little easier when the siren cleared the way for them.
They drove to Sunnyside Avenue, which was the quintessential High Westchester. Even the sidewalks were posh, as if the district tried to forget which city it resided in, or, more likely, tried to make up for the pit the rest of it was. The trees never dared to venture a branch out of place, the doorknobs gleamed and the homeless drove Rolls Royce. Erik had killed a man in a similar neighborhood somewhere in Mexico.
Hundred and eight was halfway down the avenue, and when they got there Erik discovered another thing about his partner: Charles drove like a madman, but he parked like an old lady. Erik got out of the car midway and waited on the curb, while Charles performed the fourth backing up and edged into the available space, perfectly parallel to the curb. Only then did he get out of the car (not that Erik didn’t provide slow, sarcastic applause, just because he could) and went for the door. He flashed his badge at the doorman, then cast a quick look around the garden, while the forensic team and the grunts arrived. Charles didn’t even turn in their direction before he started issuing orders.
“Alex, I want the who area taped over. No one gets in. No press,” he told Darwin’s lapdog, before turning to the doorman. “Mr. Moseby, I will also require your notes on who’s been coming and going for the past week, and all the security video data you have.” All of this arrived in a measured, clipped voice, threaded through with very British curls around the words. No wonder the man required a moment to figure it out.
“Sir, our tenants…” he began, but Charles was already talking, “Will appreciate my keeping the press out of their hair, yes?”
The doorman flushed, but nodded. “We don’t have much data, mind, only a few of the cameras record. Most transmit live feed to the monitors.”
“I also want a list of people who have access to both the files and the monitors.”
The doorman was a professional, but evidently not so well paid that he would choose to obstruct a police investigation. He gave in without much internal struggle. “Right away, detective.”
“Excellent,” Charles said. “Who found the body?”
“Mrs. Liehdermann, the housekeeper.”
“Why did you wait before calling us?”
The doorman started. Charles had been studying the list by doorbell, not sparing him a glance. “I– I had to make sure there was a body in the first place. I went upstairs. The kids who live here play pranks, and Halloween is around the corner. I wasn’t sure if he was really dead, at first, see…”
“That’s alright. Officer Summers will take your statement now, unless you’d like a moment to compose yourself?”
“I’m fine,” the doorman said.
Charles nodded. “In that case, Alex, statement. We are going to look at the victim.”
They took the elevator, whose plainness was cleverly disguised between the opulent pillars in the lobby.
“I see they spared some expense.” Erik considered the ceiling of the elevator. It was made of cheap plaster and it hadn’t been touched in years.
“It’s likely no one uses it – it’s not a very tall building.” Charles told him, or rather the corner of the elevator, into which he had chosen to stick his nose.
“Did you find anything interesting?”
“Dirt.”
“Interesting dirt?”
“Boring dirt, I’m afraid.”
“Color me shocked.”
Charles smiled as got back to his feet. “My friend, you are headed for a profound disappointment in the job, if you don’t learn to appreciate dirt.”
Up on the fourth floor (two apartments per floor, but each had two stories) the elevator masqueraded as a wall. A fairly decent impression it was, too – Erik was willing to bet casual, lazy guests would take the stairs and curse the architects more often than not.
Charles made a beeline for the door number four, where a purple flower waited, tacked to the door; a single stalk, five blooms. It was still fresh.
Charles examined the flower in complete silence, barely daring to breathe, presumably for fear of disturbing the fragile petals. He pulled a rubber glove from his pocket and removed the pin with the reverence a man would apply to a holy relic. Erik could swear he saw giddiness in his blue eyes, though his face remained impassive.
A plastic bag appeared from the backpack, as if by magic, and Charles dropped both the flower and the tack inside.
“It’s foxglove,” he said as he turned the knob. “Do you have gloves?”
Erik did. He had, after all, read the manual.
The apartment was sparsely furnished, decorated with even less. A lone, sprawling pistachio-green couch dominated the otherwise beige space; a solitary green king among its swamp. It looked, altogether, like Erik’s kind of place, if he put any effort at all into interior design.
Slightly less up his alley was the tacky trail of flower petals on the floor, leading down the stairs and into the bedroom. The body was artfully arranged on the bed, as if sleeping in a fetal position, completely naked, surrounded by the same flower petals.
“Well,” Erik said dryly. “I’ve watched enough CSI to know this is the work of a serial killer.”
Charles threw him an amused look. “It is far too early to tell.”
“You think it’s a serial killer.”
“True.”
“Then why am I not allowed?”
“Because we are on duty and every word can and will be used against us.”
“I thought those only applied to suspects.”
“Conjecture is a dangerous game and saying the words aloud influences the mind.” But Charles already stopped seeing him. Erik would feel bitter about losing the competition for attention to a dead guy, but it took him all of ten seconds to realize that watching Charles while he worked was no less fascinating than conversing with him.
Charles danced around the victim. He circled the bed first, measuring his steps so that they were perfectly even and didn’t fall on any of the petals. His palm extended over the sheets, searching for stray bits of warmth. Erik was sure he didn’t imagine Charles’ wetting his lips, because though he was an intelligent man, his imagination was limited to a blueprint with silhouettes standing in for people; he wasn’t capable of imaging a pink tongue wetting red lips in anticipation of a Totentanz in the bed of roses.
Erik had heard the term “soul of a poet” and he was certain he didn’t have it. If he had, he might have thought then that he was watching Death himself, circling his bounty, as he watched Charles bow before the corpse and trail a finger along his arm.
“Do you know what his name was?” Charles asked in a hushed tone, like he feared to wake up the sleeper, like he feared he would be roused by a careless word putting an end to this macabre dance.
There was very little chance of that happening; Erik could smell the blood from where he stood, even if he couldn’t see it. The body was unnaturally pale, as though carved from alabaster, the skin nearly snow-white against the rosy petals.
“Sebastian Tojo.” Erik flipped through the wallet, carelessly abandoned on a dresser, next to a handful of photos, which depicted their corpse with a small circle of friends. “What killed him?”
“Blood loss.” Charles kneeled beside the bed, so that he was level with the victim’s eyes. “His sister will be devastated to hear of his death.”
“Unless she did it, to get his money.”
“Doubtful.”
There were footsteps in the hall right outside the bedroom. Charles didn’t look up, but Erik watched the newcomers’ reflection in the windowpane. Summers stopped by the door. He was followed by McCoy, who was pushing a gurney, and finally Emma Frost, the voluptuous coroner in an impeccable white pants suit. Erik would be the first to admit he didn’t keep abreast of the current fashions in lab wear, but a cut low enough to proudly display the make and model of the bra seemed to be pushing it.
“Mr. Xavier,” Frost said, giving Erik a look no warmer than her name. “Are you determined to do my job for me every single time?”
“I wouldn’t dare, Miss Frost.”
“How much more time do you need? I have patients waiting.”
“I need Hank to take pictures. Then he’s all yours.”
“Yessir,” McCoy said, wielding the camera like it was a shield. It became one, when he turned to Erik, and tiptoed around him.
With the career change it might be wise to rethink his demeanor, Erik reflected. Then, because fuck demeanor, he grinned and snapped his teeth. Hank skidded to the bed and hid behind Charles and his camera.
“From up above too, if you can,” Charles said, paying little to no attention to the problems of the living.
“Okay. Alex, can you fetch me a chair? Something high?” Hank started snapping pictures at a cinematic rate, pausing for nothing whatsoever including breathing.
“What, being freakishly tall not doing it for you any longer?” Summers said, already out the door and fetching.
“It’s a tall bed,” McCoy mumbled to the camera when he got his chair.
“Whatever.” Summers took stock of the bed, now that he was in the vicinity to properly appreciate it, and whistled. “Wow, this looks like something from CSI. All the colors.”
Charles threw him an amused look. “It does, doesn’t it?” He turned away from the bed and its, admittedly, pretty color scheme, to study the floor and the scattering of petals which led to the windowsill.
“How do you suppose the killer got in?” Summers asked meanwhile. “The window?”
“Main door,” Erik said automatically. He wasn’t surprised that Charles had spoken in unison with him, Summers, on the other hand, jumped. He alternated between staring at them both with a growing look of “oh god, there’s two of them!” until finally curiosity has won and he had to ask the obvious question.
“How do you know?”
“This amount of effort indicates preparation within the flat. The killer was here for quite some time, which in turn indicates he had plenty of time to familiarize himself with the interior, doing which would be far more practical if he had a spare key. People pay far less attention to who walks through the front door than who walks in through the fire escape,” Charles told him, disturbing the fine line of dust on the window frame with a gloved finger. Erik had to wonder if and where he allocated time for breathing when he planned an explanation: the words arrived in a daisy-chain with no space in-between. It was likely Charles simply paused bodily functions to say things, then breathed out. The glass turned opaque with warm mist where it was closest to his red lips.
Any moment now he should stop staring and start being a professional sort-of detective, Erik thought ruefully, and now would be the perfect time, because Alex turned to him next, waiting with an expectant expression. Luckily, the answer was obvious.
“That’s what I would do,” Erik said with a shrug.
Charles nodded and smiled. “Sensible choice. This makes our job very difficult, ladies and gentleman, as we have a sensible, meticulous killer on our hands.”
“And to think, Christmas isn’t for another three months. Someone must have been a very good boy.” Frost nudged a flower petal with the tip of her milky white stiletto heel and considered her nails. “Have you been sneaking out to help old ladies across the street?”
“Around here?” Charles straightened and fixed Frost with an incredulous look. “Goodness, no. I would get mugged and end up with my throat slit in a back alley. The old ladies are vicious.”
Hank took a step back from his perch on the chair, but instead of falling to the carpeted floor and cracking his skull open he landed on lightly bended knees, with grace ballet dancers starved themselves for. The kid – and he was a kid, around ten years younger than Erik – hid his fitness behind glasses he didn’t need and a labcoat, probably to avoid Charles’ fate of being sent out onto the streets of Westchester with nothing but a gun and a badge for protection.
Given what the kid did to Summers every time they were in the gym together, he was more than suited to keep himself on top of any given fight, but only a moron took to the streets unless he had to, and McCoy had an IQ which, in the lab, was measured in Kelvins as opposed to everyone else’s Fahrenheits. Unfortunately, the outdoors required different kind of smarts and even Hank knew he wasn’t cut out for it. Hence his devotion to Charles and Charles’ campaign to keep MacTaggart sidetracked long enough to hire other people, before she had to resort to offering another grad student a bowl of soup per week to run labs, and put McCoy in harm’s way. It was hard to dislike McCoy, Erik allowed. He was too fluffy and reminiscent of an overgrown teddy bear for that. Even Erik got roped into the “Save Our Hank” campaign as a result, though that had less to do with Hank himself and more with Charles’ hopeful blue eyes, raised in supplication.
“I’m done here,” Hank told Frost, who snapped a pair of latex gloves onto her manicured hands and bent over the cold body. Out of the designer bag she took a thermometer and with practiced ease stabbed the victim’s liver.
“Off-hand, he bled to death,” she said. “There we go.” She turned over the victim’s wrists, revealing two gouges on each. Erik had been staring at the bed at the time, so if his gaze slid from the pale skin of the corpse to Frost’s equally pale cleavage, framed by creamy satin, he could feign innocence. Had he met Frost under different circumstances, Erik would have assumed she had little to no interest in anything except fashion and the many shades of the color white. She wore expensive clothes and her hair was woven into a precarious bun on the back of her head, with every last hair controlled by an appropriate substance. If they had met under different circumstances, Erik would have trouble imagining her tugging apart the edges of a wound with her elegant fingernails. “Oh, marvelous job, a plastic surgeon couldn’t have done a cleaner cut.”
“He was drugged first,” Charles said absently. He was on his knees and elbows again, half-hidden underneath the bed, though not so well hidden that, when he looked over his shoulder, Erik couldn’t see his eyes. “He slept through his own murder. Hank, there’s blood seeping through the mattress, see if you can get anything out of here.”
Frost released the victim’s wrists and made quick examination of his skin around the elbows and inner thighs. “There are no obvious needle marks, no sign of strangulation, no suspicious bruising. Given the blood loss and the temperature of the liver, I’d estimate he’s been dead seven to ten hours.”
“How many bodies do you have waiting?”
“Today?” Frost arched an eyebrow at Charles, pursing her lips in a cool smirk. “My dear, you know perfectly well I am up to my blonde coif in corpses.”
“Any chance we could push this one ahead of the queue?” Charles fluttered his eyelashes and smiled, sitting back on his haunches. “This will get out, sooner or later, and Moira will be pushing to close it quickly.”
“Who am I to spoil your early Christmas gift?” Frost smiled in a way that, Erik was sure, invited the little boy into getting into her sled. There was a cruel edge to it, a coldness which belied the sexual elegance of the rest of her, but even so, it was friendly. Emma Frost, the Snow Queen extraordinaire, would go the extra mile to spoil her favorite courtier. “Gentlemen, my body, please. Post-haste, if you will, Charles is waiting.”
With a little effort Summers and McCoy transferred the body of Sebastian Tojo to the gurney and zipped the bag closed. Both of them avoided standing too close to Frost, Erik noted, despite the fact that neither could resist using the height advantage to peek into her bra. The two of them then wheeled the gurney out the door and, presumably, down into the van.
“Thoughts?” Erik asked when Frost’s clicking heels stepped onto the tiles in the hallway and the two of them were alone, considering the indentation of the body on the bed, preserved in dried blood.
Charles wasn’t looking at him, but the corner of his mouth was curving towards his eye, as if he had a particularly amusing thought. “Well, Erik, I must say that if you are asking me if I have any suspects, you are the first on the list,” he said, carelessly showing his unprotected back.
Erik folded his arms across his chest. “Care to elaborate on that?”
“Mr. Tojo was murdered by a man he barely knew, if at all. The killer was, however, meticulously prepared for the murder. He walked in when Mr. Tojo was sleeping, possibly after he had been drugged. The incisions were made with a sharp implement, but I would wager it was more a knife than it was a scalpel. Emma will confirm the nature of the cut. The force and intent behind it indicates a seasoned soldier, not a surgeon.
“This is far from a first kill, I’m sure of that, but it is the first of its kind. It might be that I have simply been unaware of such killings, I grant you, but either way, they haven’t happened in Westchester. This is all for show, obviously, so he wouldn’t have bothered hiding it. Thus, I suspect the killer is new in town. So, who do we know of that has extensive military background and no history in this city?”
“Should I expect an arrest?”
“Of course not. There’s not a shred of evidence tying you to the scene, not a shred of evidence, in fact, that even hints at you.” Charles was smiling at him, open and flirtatious.
With the exception of everything he just said, Erik thought and shook his head. “I could step down from the investigation,” he said with as much seriousness as he could muster.
“Don’t be absurd.” Charles stepped away from the bed as it personally insulted him. “I meant it in a purely hypothetical fashion.”
“You are levying a serious implication against me; aren’t you concerned my judgment might be impaired?” Erik grinned, as he rarely got the chance to, and took the few steps separating him from Charles, until they were standing close enough to touch. They were flirting, he wondered, with a dead body between them.
“Please. The technicalities are one thing; the style is something quite different. This,” Charles waved his arm to encompass the bed, the room and the petals throughout, “is not like you, my friend.”
“Oh, so now I lack style. I could learn, you know. There is an art to it, when you think about it – a body must be a curious medium to sculpt. Not quite my type, this particular man, but I could make the effort.”
Charles’ red mouth stretched in a languid smile. “I love a challenge.”
“Working with a serial killer to solve a murder is merely a challenge now?”
“I was born in Westchester, Erik. Working with a serial killer to solve a murder is merely Tuesday. Or, as my month has been going, every working day and the occasional beer.” All of which included Charles at some point laying his throat bare for Erik’s perusal. If Erik was the least bit interested in hurting him, he had more opportunity than he’d had home-made meals in the last ten years.
Erik wasn’t yet sure what to make of that. People had pegged him as a killer the moment they knew about the Green Berets; his attitude earned him plenty of respect, but very little trust. “I have no alibi for last night,” he said, just in case.
“You were home, reading, not having dinner.” Charles looked at him and bit his lip. On anyone else it would be gesture of nervousness. On Charles, it was a mark of an endearing smile. “Which isn’t much of an alibi, I’ll grant you. However, you also have no motive, as I don’t believe you’ve ever met Mr. Tojo before.”
“I’ve never met many men I have killed, Charles.”
“How many of them have you laid out on a bed of roses, however?”
“I have staged a suicide or two, but your point is well made.”
Charles laughed, turned his back on Erik, relaxed and unconcerned, and moved out the bedroom to inspect the kitchen, leaving Erik to contemplate the bloodied bed. The victim has been positioned so that his head rested on one wrist, the other extended, a mockery of the recovery position. The bloodstains corresponded directly with the placement of the wrists – whatever drugs the victim had running through his veins were potent enough to induce a deep sleep. The man didn’t know he was going to die; the killer didn’t want him to suffer.
He was a killer, then, who didn’t delight in killing.
Charles was right to suspect him, Erik thought. Unbidden, his mouth curved into a wide grin, framing a silent laugh that seemed to echo throughout the empty room, reddened with blood and roses. Charles was right to suspect him and still he’d shown him his back, aware of the gun Erik carried, aware of the hundred ways he could kill him with his bare hands and the furniture.
Idiot, Erik thought fondly.
*****
Charles took a glance at all the photos, tapping his finger on the arrow key every few seconds, once the room’s edges aligned with those which were already burned in his mind. He flipped through the photos until the room became a blueprint on which a crime has been committed. The bed, the petals, the blood, the body; the pictures were snapshots of a frozen moment, but in each one there was a hint.
The fundamental law of physics: in this universe, the motion of each particle carried in it the information of where it had been previously. Every body had a history hardwired into its very being. If one could tap into the universal reserve, then the explosion of infinity could be wound up back to the singularity which begot it.
In Charles’ head, this was the world: snapshots in time, meticulously catalogued, with bright vines of intent connecting the past to the present, to the future. It made him a brilliant CSI, when he first started work in law enforcement. It made him a better detective.
When he closed his eyes the crime scene was before him, stripped bare of the milling police personnel, stripped bare of his own presence, of Erik, of anything which wasn’t there when the important events happened. The confined space stretched across miles, to make space for each detail, so that it was displayed as the single most important object, until it faded into obscurity at his command.
“I think,” Charles started, even though he didn’t think, in a manner of speaking, so much as he saw, as clearly as he saw the lines crisscrossing his palms, “Our killer is a tall man. Not necessarily large, but strong. There is a sense of effortlessness in the scene. He takes pride in it, makes an effort to display his success, taunts us even, but there is no passion there. It is all planned. It is all dry. There is a definite sense of accomplishment, yet it is not in the act of killing, but the accomplishment itself.” He opened his eyes to find Erik studying him over their shared desk space. “This display is a show. He has killed before. This is not an experiment. This is a show staged specifically for us.”
Erik raised his gaze from the few key photos they had printed. “We are talking about a man who kills with such amount of forethought that he brings in heaps of flower petals. It is more or less obvious he’s doing it for show.”
Charles blinked. Suddenly Erik’s gaze was hard to withstand. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say it’s not apparent. Sometimes I just… like to hear what I see. I’ll be quiet.”
Erik was already shaking his head by the time Charles was halfway done. “Talk. I don’t need silence to concentrate. I’ll let you know if anything catches my attention.” He went back to staring at the photos, leaving Charles to stare at him, in something which was indescribable. There was surprise there, and gratitude, and fear, because he would wreck this, he was certain, he would keep talking and this would collapse before his very eyes.
“I’m not saying there isn’t a chance of error,” he said eventually. “I make mistakes, now and then.”
“Interesting. I’ll be sure to make a note when you do.” Erik closed the file and stretched. The slim-fitting turtleneck didn’t ride up high enough to reveal skin, but it was close. It didn’t reveal anything Charles’ hadn’t already known about, like the taut abdominal muscles and a lean body, coiled like a serpent ready to strike. “The crime scene is getting us nowhere; anything left will be small enough for even you to overlook. What do we do next, look through the personal file?”
“Yes. Then we should interview the family and friends. We’ll see if he had any enemies, anyone with a motive.”
“He was a rich man. They typically have enemies.” Erik was already typing, no doubt searching for the file and formal associations of Mr. Tojo. The laptop taken from the scene gave him access to the victim’s Facebook account, which in turn should yield a list of a hundred names: a hundred possible suspects.
“Mr. Tojo was generous.” Charles flipped through his mental catalogue of the crime scene and the apartment and found it dotted with small gifts, things made by hand or bought with the intent to brighten someone’s day. The few photos on display were of parties, of people enjoying each other’s company. “I doubt he was in anyone’s bad books.”
“He has been murdered,” Erik noted with a small smirk and no teeth whatsoever. “I figure he was generous enough to lend money, but not enough not to incautiously hint he might like it returned. Maybe his jealous girlfriend found him lending money to his ex.”
“Ah, but then we would have twelve haphazard stab wounds, not four surgical cuts on his wrists. Passion tends to be obvious in a murder.”
“Enthusiasm is not passion, Charles.” Erik watched him. He did that often. He would pause whatever he was doing and just watch, until Charles was certain the room could fall away in a quantum explosion, leaving behind nothing, and Erik would still only have eyes for him. It was a heady feeling. It wormed underneath his collar, caressing his skin every time he moved. Erik watched him with the same rapt attention he bestowed on the results of crimes and their perpetrators, and Charles felt naked under his gaze. It was funny, really. He could shed his sweaters and slacks; he could leave his underwear pooled on the clothes and walk down the busiest street, yet he would never feel as naked as he did when Erik was giving him his full attention.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” he stammered.
“The so-called crimes of passion are enthusiasm gone wrong. True passion is not fiery; it’s more like ice. It’s like a vacuum into which everything else in the world pours.”
He blinked and suddenly the room had fallen away, because Erik was elsewhere. His gaze was focused on the distance, unhindered by walls and the chaos of the bullpen, reviewing a story only he was aware of.
“Passion is fire by definition,” Charles said cautiously, feeling like he was on foreign soil. Dictionaries were a familiar ground; a thesaurus was more of a Canada. The same in theory, slipping his grasp in practice. No wonder it made sense to Erik, who had traversed continents and slid into a new profession like it was a new outfit.
“Is it?” Erik went back to looking at him, though his eyes remained distant. “Have you ever felt it, then?”
Charles blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“What’s the police protocol for wanting things?”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.” Charles picked up a file from the desk and thumbed through the pages. “I have plenty of things I feel strongly about.”
“Like broccoli.”
“I have no particular feeling regarding broccoli.” He didn’t avoid dishes containing the plant, if there were other things in it that he enjoyed, but there was something about the texture that made him swallow the pieces without chewing and quickly douse the aftertaste with wine.
“You eat it funny,” Erik said, then indicated the photos Charles was flipping through. “Any progress?”
“The scene? Relatively little. I doubt I’ll be able to get much further without more data. I did get a preliminary tox report, which tells us no more than the killer had access to morphine. That’s all. How about you?”
“He wasn’t exactly friendless. Not a whole lot of family though.” Erik hit print and the machine spit out a dozen pages, each with a brief dossier. He gathered them into a single stack and flipped through it, until one caught his eye. “I’d start with the cousin. He should be able to point us further.”
Charles nodded. The photo was of an attractive Asian man in his late thirties, with hair dyed a lighter brown. “Cousin it is. Do you want to drive?”
Erik was already shimming into his soft leather jacket. “I don’t really care.”
An unusual answer from a person who had been at the mercy of his driving skills previously. Charles grinned. “Flip you for it?”
