Cause and Effect

by Brooke Edwards

  The blinds are still closed and his eyes are on the bleary side so he has no idea what time it is until he reaches for his phone. There’s a double-digit number next to the message icon, and the display reads 10:17 a.m. He blinks a couple of times until the number by the little envelope resolves into an 11, and clears his throat as he taps his way to the list.

  The first few are a mix of his mother and Derek, and then there’s one from an unknown number, one from Nick Pearson, and several from James. His head doesn’t hurt nearly as much as it had, but nausea curls in his gut as he opens the most recent message from James.

  call me or Derek as soon as you read this [23:19]

  He hits Dial without bothering to look at any of the other messages. James answers it on the fourth ring, sounding breathless. “Danny, hey,” he says. “Are you okay?”

  “Just woke up,” Daniel says, voice more of a croak than anything, but he clears his throat again. “Better than yesterday, at least. What’s with the messages?”

  “Someone from Green Haven probably tried to call you last night too.” There’s a brittle edge to the words. “Coy Fairhall and a couple of other prisoners escaped during a transfer yesterday. They’re on the loose. The van’s GPS signal cut out near New Canaan, and the bodies of two guards and the driver were dumped in Bridgeport.”

  Daniel’s breath catches in his throat, and he coughs after a second. “Se—seriously?”

  “Deadly,” James says. “An officer from Green Haven is coming down today to coordinate with us. They think he’s coming back our way.” He laughs, the sound bleak. “Unfinished business, you know.”

  Panic starts to spread like ice in Daniel’s chest. “You’ve got someone on Derek, right?” he says, scrambling up and out of the tangle of the blanket. The key to the safe is still around his neck, thankfully, and he heads straight for the door. “Make sure someone sticks to you like glue, boss. I should be there soon—”

  “Not on my watch, you won’t be,” James snaps. “Your mother called Derek this morning, and we’re not letting you come back until you can actually type out a coherent text message. She asked us to come and check on you if you hadn’t sent a message that made sense before noon today. You’ve seriously just scraped in.”

  “Overreaction!” Daniel protests. The thought of Derek and James bursting into his apartment is more than a little horrifying. He’s pretty sure he drools in his sleep. The blackmail pictures never would have gone away. “So my texting skills suffer when I’m sick, sue me.”

  “That’s really Derek’s area,” James says. “But don’t think he won’t. You’re staying home today, and I’ll make a call when we hear from you tonight. If I see your face in the station before I’m sure you’re better, I’m going to personally punch it.”

  “What, you don’t need Derek to do that for you too?” Daniel drops back down onto the sofa, eyeing the door warily.

  “Oh, sick boy’s got jokes,” James says. “Go back to sleep. Stay in touch or I’m gonna send Kay over there.”

  Daniel hangs up on him. “This is becoming a pattern,” he says to himself. He gets back up and ends up putting his entire utility belt, gun and all, on over his sweatpants. The adrenaline prickles at his skin as he fills a glass of water at the sink and drinks it quickly, trying to get rid of the dryness in his throat. When he settles back on the sofa, it’s with one eye on the fire escape and the other on the front door. He can’t stop his eyes from drifting back to where his cell sits on the opposite end of the sofa. He doesn’t even have Peter Saracen’s number—there’s no way he can call and warn him.

  His vision starts to blur the longer he stares at the rectangular patch of black against the pale cushion without blinking. “Dammit.” He snatches it up and blinks a few times, waiting for his eyes to clear.

  Make sure someone tells Saracen [10:58]

  He throws his cell back to the other side of the sofa and buries himself in the blanket nest with a whine that never happened, because no one is there to say it did. Just the dark, silent TV and the remains of the soup all over his side. Daniel throws the blankets off and runs for the bathroom. Suddenly all he can smell is stale air and plaster dust and the faint coppery smell of not-quite-fresh blood.

  The soup doesn’t taste anywhere near as good the second time.

  3

  Peter is painfully aware of the small Taser Tia had left in her underwear drawer for him. “If the pepper spray doesn’t feel like enough,” she’d said earnestly, showing him where she’d put it. The pepper spray was a comforting weight in his pocket, he had to admit. He couldn’t be confident in his own ability to throw a decent punch even if his life depended on it. Anything to even the odds was going to be a bonus. He’s self-aware enough to realize that the creeping cold that takes up residence at the back of his neck and the pit of his stomach is all paranoia. Not even entirely warranted paranoia, part of him is sure. The only reason he’d gotten caught up in the whole thing had been his own lack of self-preservation. He hadn’t been a target until he’d made himself one, and he definitely won’t be doing that again.

  “Keep to yourself,” he mutters to the empty living room. Hours of silence in his own head have not done him any favors. The thought of walking the half a block to work is paralyzing, but not nearly as paralyzing as the thought of staring at the wall until Tia gets back, and then having her march him there herself. He might not have a lot of pride left, but he has a little. Enough for that to be a bitter pill to swallow, and enough to urge him slowly to his feet with a hand stuck in his pocket to make sure the pepper spray was ready at a second’s notice.

  He keeps his phone in his other hand, screen unlocked and finger hovering over the shortcut to Tia’s contact. It’s still light outside when he leaves, but that doesn’t stop him from skittering every time someone comes within a yard of him. His heart pounds against his ribs, frantic and racing, and he breaks into an unsteady jog barely a hundred yards from the red-and-green sign on the street. Bette looks up at him as he crashes through the front door and almost topples headfirst into a pair of women unlucky enough to be waiting between the counter and the door. He just manages to tip to the side and catch himself on the fish tank against the wall. The goldfish watch him with beady, judgmental eyes. “Sorry!” he yelps.

  One of the women looks at him with vague concern, but the other doesn’t look up from her bright, dangerous fingernails.

  He pushes off the fish tank, deliberately not looking down at the goldfish. Bette’s face is twisted up, her eyes crinkling, and his cheeks burn. “I’m just—” He waves in the direction of the kitchen and flees. Marty looks up from the cutting board full of mushrooms with furrowed eyebrows, and Peter looks away, panic bubbling up his throat, and throws his coat at the pile in the corner. The dishwashing station is empty, and much safer than Marty’s concern.

  Napping on and off for most of the day and demolishing more of the soup mountain in his fridge does wonders for the lingering headache, but Daniel can’t shake the tension in his shoulders and jaw. He types out and deletes at least a dozen text messages to Derek, starting a new one every time he remembers the stark bruises Coy’s hand had left behind on his face and the pale scars that still stood out. He doesn’t send any of them, tossing his phone across the sofa each time. Figuring out whether the random bursts of nausea were left over from the day before or brand-new and psychosomatic is too much to focus on so he just rides them out, remembering to breathe through it and deliberately not dwelling on all the memories. Channel surfing doesn’t hold his attention for more than a minute at a time, and eventually he drags himself up for a shower.

  Some of the tension melts away under the hot water with the remnants of the fever-sweat. More goes down the drain when he’s clean-shaven again. The stubborn bit that remains probably isn’t going anywhere, but he can deal with that.

  He orders a pizza a little after six, and finds a channel showing reruns of The Office. Determined to sleep in his actual bed instead of on the so
fa, he takes the blankets back into his room while he waits for the pizza. He overtips the delivery guy, the smell of pepperoni and cheese heavy and tantalizing in his nose. After existing solely on soup and ibuprofen, solid food is a revelation. He sits cross-legged on the sofa with the box on his lap, hunched over the pizza, and eats until his stomach hurts. He’s embarrassed that he doesn’t even make it through half the pizza before that point. The leftovers go on top of the soup containers still in the fridge. He taps out a message to James before plugging his phone in to charge, setting an alarm, and crawling into bed.

  I WILL be back in the morning [21:11]

  James has been squinting at the message for the last hour.

  “If you can read it, he’s fine,” Derek says from the sink. He’s rinsing the plates he’d insisted they use for the Chinese instead of eating from the containers. “He’s probably trashed his own apartment out of boredom and already has a cab booked to the precinct in the morning. Good thing too, you got exactly nothing done without him today.”

  “I was trying to be a gracious host.” James puts his phone down. “I couldn’t exactly drag you out in the squad car, and we had to wait for the Green Haven guys to come down. That’s what delegating is for.”

  The dishwasher door creaks, almost covering Derek’s snort of amusement. “Did anyone you delegated to get anything done?”

  “I can hear the judgment in your voice.” James crosses the kitchen and picks up the handful of cutlery from the sink to dump in the dishwasher basket. “My team is a well-oiled machine—”

  “What are you doing?” Derek bats his hands away. “That is not how you put knives in there, James. They haven’t even been rinsed—there’s still peanut sauce all over them!”

  “That’s what they go in there for, Derek.” James pushes past his hands and puts the cutlery exactly where he’d planned to in the first place. “Dishwasher.”

  “I’m going to break your legs.” Derek’s voice is quiet and calm. “I don’t know if you’re trying to kick me or it’s some misguided attempt at getting in my pants, but if you don’t go to sleep in the next five minutes, James—”

  James covers his mouth with his hand. “Shhh,” he says. “We’ve had such a nice day, don’t ruin it.”

  Derek kicks him. Hard. James wrenches his hand away before he can bite. “Nice day?” Derek kicks at him again. “You are the absolute worst. I’m going back to my own office tomorrow, serial killer or not, because I am never going to work with you again.”

  “Why aren’t we sleeping?” James shoves a pillow at Derek’s face. “This is not the way to spend a night after the day we’ve had.”

  Derek makes a garbled sound, pushing back against the pillow. “—why I chased you across your yard!” He yanks the pillow out of James’s hands and rolls over with it, taking far more than half the covers with him to the far edge of the bed.

  “Derek.” James reaches out, fingers splayed, to slide his fingers under the soft fabric of his shirt. “Derrrrrek.”

  “Don’t even try.” The muscles under his fingertips are tense, and James starts kneading at them in unspoken apology. “I’m still mad about the dishwasher.”

  James sighs, still kneading. They’re slowly loosening under his fingers, and he keeps seeing the cold flash of fear that had passed over Derek’s eyes when he’d told him about Coy Fairhall’s escape. It makes it easier to not take the arguing personally. “There isn’t a wrong way to load a dishwasher, I am not giving you that satisfaction. Not to mention that cleaning the dishes before you put them in defeats the entire purpose of a dishwasher.”

  The next thing he knows, he’s flat on his back, blinking with the change in position and instinctively shifting his hips up to meet where Derek is straddling him. His eyes are bright enough that they seem to catch every bit of the streetlight glow from the cracks in the blinds. James settles his hands against Derek’s hips and squeezes lightly. “Ah. Domestic bliss,” he sighs out.

  Derek bites at his bottom lip in retaliation, vibrating with silent laughter under James’s hands. James surges up, catching him off guard, and rolls until Derek is spread out beneath him. “We can argue about laundry tomorrow after work,” he promises, leaning down to nip at the soft skin over Derek’s collarbone. “I have some very strong opinions about fabric softener that I just know you’re gonna hate.”

  “You’re the wor—” The words die around a punched-out gasp.

  Walking into the station settles a prickling at the back of Daniel’s neck that he hadn’t realized was even there. Kay wraps him in a smothering hug and holds him there for an uncomfortably long time. He can hear James snickering, and he pats at her back a little desperately. “Please let me go.” The words get lost in her hair.

  “The prodigal son returns!” Martine calls from cross the bullpen, echoed by a “hooray” that he can’t identify and doesn’t really care about, too busy struggling for air.

  Kay pinches his cheeks as he finally wrenches himself free of her grip. “You look so much better!” He flinches away from her hands.

  “I feel better,” he insists, stumbling backward. “Please get those claws away from my face. I shaved, there’s no protection.”

  “Smooth as a baby’s butt,” she croons, patting him on both cheeks before clicking her headset and sauntering back to her desk. Her phone voice is half an octave higher than her normal voice. It never fails to make him frown. “NYPD.”

  “Why did I miss this place?” He sees Cohen Bailey across the bullpen and, a second later, James’s back as he scrambles toward his open office door. “Why did I miss these people?”

  Sitting down in his desk chair is a vaguely religious experience. It molds to his back like it was just waiting for him to come back, and he spins it around once. He can tell that no one even sat in it while he was away, and the thought makes him feel warm. None of the files left on his desk are active, so he pushes up from his chair and heads over toward Martine’s desk. “Want to catch me up on the latest?” he asks as she swivels to face him.

  “Sure,” she says, getting up and heading toward the hall. “Everything’s set up in a room. No real developments yet. We got an ID, nothing surprising there. Long rap sheet but no one has taken responsibility. If it was a rival group, everyone would know about it now, but all our CIs are coming up empty.” Daniel follows her into the conference room. “It could just be a regular murder, sure, but the double-tap in the back and dumping in the East is classic gang MO.”

  “Good way to throw off suspicion,” Daniel says, coming to a stop in front of the whiteboard. “Disguise it as a gang killing to stop us looking into any other avenues.”

  “True,” Martine allows. “Roman here didn’t appear to have much to his life outside, though, so finding a suspect or motive is going to be tough. Could be worth mentioning all the same. We could get lucky, I guess.”

  “Where’s all this optimism coming from?” Daniel snorts. “All right, so there’s not much movement happening here.”

  “It’s not the priority right now.” Martine’s eyes narrow. “You sure you’re up to this, and didn’t just come back to make sure you didn’t miss anything on the Fairhall hunt?”

  “James wouldn’t have let me come back if I was a liability.” Daniel meets her eyes steadily. It’s not a lie. “Fill me in.”

  Peter wakes up late, with gritty eyes and a sour taste in his mouth. The sounds coming from the kitchen make him panic, briefly, before his ears pick out the off-key caterwauling and the hum of the radio. Common sense makes him reasonably sure that someone breaking in wouldn’t be wrestling with Tia’s prehistoric coffee machine and singing along to the Top 40. He buries his face in the blankets for a few minutes, breathing in and out slowly, until his heart rate comes back down to something closer to normal.

  “Pancakes, sleepyhead!” Tia calls eventually. “You need to open the syrup!”

  “Coming!” He almost gags, and rolls out of bed, detouring to the bathroom. He gargles with the
mouthwash, bouncing on the balls of his feet and waiting for the burning feeling to overtake the grossness. He must have tried to eat his pillow in his sleep; it’s the only explanation.

  Tia is at the stovetop when he gets into the kitchen, wearing sweats that he’s pretty sure are his puddling around her feet and a polka-dotted tank top. It smells overwhelmingly like melted butter and vanilla, and Peter takes a deep, steadying breath. Tia beams at him when she turns around, brandishing the spatula. “I think the cap is stuck to the syrup bottle,” she says. “If I keep trying to unstick it, I’m gonna throw it through the window. That’s on you.”

  Most of the precinct’s officers have been filtering in and out of the conference room designated as headquarters for the manhunt over the last couple of days, but Daniel hasn’t left the room since he first went in. Kay knows that it’s only been a few hours, not even a full day yet, and she shouldn’t really be as concerned as she is. She’s ventured into the room to deliver messages a couple of times, and it’s the look in Daniel’s eyes that worries her more than anything. He looks a thousand times better than he had a few days ago, but there’s a tightness in his face that adds years, and they don’t sit well. She’s been working for the NYPD since she left college and has seen new officers come, old officers go, and some of the worst things that human beings can do to each other. Fifteen years ago, she would have said that that cliché of a cop who fixates on “the one that got away” was just that. A cliché. Sure, every old-timer had a case or two where the perp walked, or it went cold before they ever brought anyone in for it, one that burned them up a bit, but the obsession was always overblown in the action movies. She’d never seen an actual human being spiral like that until she saw James, still reeling after his wife’s sudden death, almost lose himself down the rabbit hole over a handful of missing street kids. She’d helped Sam make blanket forts in the break room most nights after clocking out, for the better part of six months. James had lost a dozen pounds and gained a few hundred yards in his stare in half a year as the other officers, his boss included, told him to let it go.