by Aiden Bates
Ryan sighed. "I don't think that I can be with someone who doesn't respect me, Nick. That's besides the blatant disregard for human life. We'll take some time apart and see where we stand." He turned around. "I'll have someone drop your suits off, or something." Ryan walked away.
Nick collapsed to the ground. He'd had everything within his grasp, and lost it all in the course of twenty-four hours. He'd had a baby on the way who he would probably only see every other week if he were lucky. He'd had an omega who loved him, and looked up to him, who was now walking away from him without a second glance.
He didn't know what he could have done differently. That was the problem, of course. He probably should have held his temper when he was talking to Ryan. He did respect Ryan, as an omega, but he couldn't bring himself to believe that a guy who worked the way that Ryan worked had ever solved a single case.
He ordered Steven's body to be held and headed down to Cold Case, where he went to work tracking down possible boltholes for Will O'Neal until morning. Lt. Devlin called him into his office at around ten, and the look on his face was not one of happiness.
"Yes, sir?" Nick tried not to sweat.
"So let me get this straight," Devlin said. "You were already told that you were on thin ice with this partner, and this case. You responded by sleeping with your partner, getting your partner pregnant, kicking your partner off the case after he secured the confession for you, and now goading a suspect to suicide."
Nick counted to ten. "It wasn't like that. None of it was like that."
Devlin raised both eyebrows. "So Detective Sergeant Tran's pregnancy is a religious event? An immaculate conception? That's funny, he told me he was an atheist."
"Okay…?" Nick blinked. "I mean, yes, he's pregnant, and I'm the father, but it's not like I planned that. These things just happen." He scowled. "Why does everyone know this?"
"We're detectives, Nick. We detect things. It's a fun little thing we do called our jobs. Let's talk about you kicking your partner off the case when you didn't have the authority to do so. Not even close."
Nick sighed. "Look, the guy couldn't solve his way out of a sack."
"Not true. Not true at all. He's got over a hundred solves under his belt. That doesn't count inter-agency cooperation. His methods might not be yours, but they work. And here's the thing. We paired him with you so that you would learn some new techniques. Not so that you could sit there and try to assert some kind of imagined authority over him."
Nick stared at his superior. "You're kidding."
"I wish I were, son." Devlin shook his head. "Of course, now he's permanently taken himself off the case. You're completely on your own for finding a fugitive on his own turf, who's got his own connections in the community. I wish you luck, buddy, you're going to need it.
"And let's talk about Steven O'Neal for a second, shall we? I get that he wasn't your kind of people. He did a bad thing. But we're not just here for the shining stars, okay? Treating suspects with compassion gets results. They're people, like us, and we get a lot further and have a lot fewer violent takedowns when people know that we're not out to hurt them.
"You, Nick, are going to spend your time filling out every piece of paperwork relating to an inmate death. I'm going to ask Ryan to handle media inquiries out of the goodness of his heart. But Nick, really think about that, would you? Your inability to see beyond black and white cost you a family today." He waved his hand and dismissed Nick.
Nick returned to his seat. He still couldn't bring himself to feel bad about Steven. He was angry about Ryan, but a lot of that anger was directed inward. He loved the guy, and he'd lost him all by himself. He'd let himself get angry, and he hadn't even really tried to figure out how to respect Ryan as a colleague. He'd just gone ahead and run with the notion that he was in charge.
He'd lost something precious, and he didn't think he could ever get it back. He glanced over at Steven O'Neal's file and finally let a tear fall.
Chapter Fourteen
Ryan worked through the small hours of the morning. Lt. Frisk had sent him a list of new responsibilities to go along with his shiny new rank, and he needed to make sure that he understood all of the nuances of his new role before he stepped into them. She'd also assigned three new cases to him, for which he was profoundly grateful. There was nothing to distract him from his grief like good, hard work.
He grieved for Steven. Steven was a murderer, it was true. He'd been a kid when he'd committed his crime, but he'd also hidden his crime for years even though he knew what he'd done and knew that it was wrong. Ryan had a hard time forgiving that, but it wasn't on him to forgive, or even to judge. He'd known a lot of kids who were scared, and who were brainwashed into doing things that they shouldn't. He knew that Steven regretted what he'd done.
Ryan mourned the loss of life. All lives had value, even criminal lives. Even the life of a killer should be saved. While Steven had murdered James, and had covered up Maureen's murder, he'd also done everything he could to try to shelter Katherine and Joe from their father’s rage. He'd been open about his crimes when confronted by them, not trying to hide anything. Why was his life worth any less than anyone else's?
Hell, even Ted Bundy had helped from prison, and he was literal human filth. Steven was a man who had done a terrible thing but had tried to be better. There certainly were people out there who were so depraved that they couldn't be redeemed, at all, but they were few and far between, and Steven O'Neal was far from one of them.
Ryan had grief of his own to deal with, too. He'd thought that things were better with Nick. Nick had insisted that he respected Ryan, that he trusted Ryan, but at the end of the day he'd shown his true colors. Why had Ryan not seen through him earlier? Why had Ryan not hardened his heart and kept his bedroom door closed? Now he was pregnant, and stuck.
The worst of it all was that Ryan still wanted Nick. He knew that Nick didn't respect him. Nick didn't respect him as a cop and Nick didn't have much respect for the basic value of human life, either. Nick still thought that they could maybe be together after the case was over. Just until the case plays itself out, he'd said. And Ryan wanted that with all of his heart.
He didn't want to raise a baby by himself. He had no support structure in place. He had no one he could turn to for guidance, or even to watch the baby if he got called in to work on a weekend or late at night. If they were together, one of them would have taken on that role, or they could have dropped the baby off with one of Nick's numerous relatives.
Now it was just him. The baby would grow up in the back of a police car.
That wasn't the only reason he grieved, of course. It was just the most practical, and with a baby on the way Ryan had to be practical. He was going to miss waking up in the morning with his alpha beside him. He was going to miss going to sleep tucked into his alpha's arms. He was going to miss their easy camaraderie, and the way he could feel safe just being around Nick.
But he couldn't go back. Nick had torn him down, more than once, because he didn't feel comfortable with the way Ryan worked cases. Nick couldn't handle equality in their relationship at work, and Ryan had worked too hard to let someone take away everything he'd worked to achieve.
So Ryan blinked back the tears and focused on the job. He had a runaway from a foster care situation whose foster parents hadn't reported her missing. Instead, it was the school that reported her missing. It could turn out to be nothing, but the girl had no history of running away before.
He had a case where patients at a series of elder care homes, all in the same network of facilities, presented with a spike in the same injuries within a narrow window of time. At some point, usually around three months, the spike in injuries would end abruptly and the pattern would begin again at another home. Some of the patients, already in frail condition, died while in the hospital, although it was difficult to say whether or not the injuries they sustained were the direct cause of their deaths.
Ryan had seen that type of case before.
The culprit would be a care worker, usually frustrated with the challenges involved with taking care of patients with severe disabilities. Their frustrations would spill over into the way that they treated their patients, and that would be the end of it. For whatever reason, the chain of facilities wouldn't terminate the employee or bring the matter to the state for charges, but quietly transfer them to another facility.
The third case turned out to be a reported case of suspected child neglect. He'd be working this one with a DCF caseworker, Mary Charbonneau. He'd worked with her before and he quite liked her.
He sent a message to Mary requesting a meeting to go over the case and, as soon as it was decent, headed out to the school involved with the first case. The missing girl’s teacher, who had reported her missing, was willing to speak to him, and the vice principal came out of class to talk to him about her.
Ryan learned that she'd only been with this foster family, and this school, for about two weeks. Mrs. Wilson didn't know the circumstances, and didn't need to. The girl's behavior had changed from shy but reasonably willing to engage with other students, to withdrawn, inattentive and fearful in the days before her disappearance. She had one friend in the whole school.
Ryan asked to see Molly. He had to wait to interview Molly until one of her parents could come to school, and once Molly's mother walked into the meeting room Ryan knew what had happened. He shook Molly's mother's hand with a smile. "So," he said, sitting down, "how long have you been hiding the missing girl?"
Molly's mother's jaw dropped. "I'm not—you can't—don't you need a warrant to search my house?"
"Mom!" Molly wailed.
"I didn't search your house, ma'am." He managed a little smile. "It was Molly's face, and yours, that gave you away. We're all going to have to go to the police station, and you're going to have to give a statement. She's going to need to be checked out, by a doctor."
"My husband's a doctor," Molly's mother said and hung her head. "He took pictures."
Ryan took her hand for a second. "That's good. It would have been better, from a legal perspective, if he'd gotten her to a hospital, but we'll work that out. Okay? You're trying to help a scared and hurting little girl. Come on. I'll give you a ride home, and we'll all head out to headquarters together."
The little girl shrieked when she saw him, but Molly's mother got her calmed down. They all rode in Ryan's unmarked car, with Molly and her friend wrapped up in blankets together in the backseat. "What's going to happen now?" the mother asked in a whisper.
"Well, for one thing, we're going to call DCF. I've got a meeting with one of their caseworkers today anyway; I'll see if she's available. She'll raise holy hell about those foster parents. Look, this kind of thing does sometimes happen in foster families—just like it sometimes happens in other families. I was in foster care for eight years. My fosters were never like this.
"But that's beside the point. What's going to happen is that we're going to focus on that little girl and her needs. That's my whole job, keeping her safe, okay?"
"Can she stay with us?"
Ryan squirmed. "That's going to be up to a judge. It's worth a try. I've got a family lawyer from Southie who might be able to help." He passed her a card from Steven O'Neal's lawyer. "He fights for his clients, and he won't take cases that he knows are wrong. But you stay with that girl right now, okay? She trusts you. She's terrified, and she's confused. She needs someone she trusts to help her navigate everything that's happening."
He called Mary from headquarters and got her to meet up with them at the hospital, where she met him with both case files. "Well, this ended better than I thought it would," she commented. "Good job here. It's good to have you back. I thought we might lose you to Cold Case."
"Never." Ryan made a face. "Even a forty-year-old abuse case is still Abused Persons." He pushed aside his grief. "What do you think we can do to help this girl out? The family wants to keep her with them, and she trusts them."
Mary winced. "I don't know. They should have done the right thing and reported the abuse right away, but I can see where they wanted to make her comfortable and gain her trust. For now, they're giving her a place to stay and keeping her fed. It's an acceptable temporary solution, like letting her stay with neighbors until a longer-term solution is found."
Ryan hoped that would be a good start, and they moved on to working out a strategy for investigating the neglect report. The family was new to the area, but the child in question showed longer-term signs of neglect. Ryan agreed to investigate the family's history and see what he could find.
He made sure that the family in the hospital had his contact information and headed back to headquarters. He was intent on working on the nursing home case, which seemed straightforward but would require a lot of time and effort to tease out a conviction. He had a lot of work to do, between that and digging into the family for Mary.
He went home that night and wolfed down something simple. He didn't feel up to cooking and barely felt up to getting takeout. His poor baby was probably suffering terribly from all of the stress hormones and from the poor diet, but what could he do? He was who he was. He would recover, in time, and he'd go on like he had before. He'd find a way.
He lay in his bed after dinner and tried to focus on the good things. He'd done some good today. A little girl who had been living in fear was going to get to go and stay with people she trusted. It might not be a permanent placement, but they were going to try what they could for her and see what happened. In the meantime, she was safe and could go back to school.
Hopefully they would get help for the neglected child in Grafton. He had no doubts about his ability to nail the employee at the care home chain. If he was lucky, he'd be able to get the chain itself, because they wouldn't keep moving the employee if they didn't know what was wrong.
This was Ryan's job. He was good at it. He loved it, and he wasn't going to let Nick chase him away from it.
Work chugged along smoothly for the next couple days. Ryan's mind drifted now and again to the Townsend-O'Neal murders, but he forced himself away from the subject. He needed to let the wound scab over before he started poking at it. He did call Rosa, and tell her that he was off the case but that one of the killers had given a full confession right before taking his own life. She shared his grief about that.
"I would have liked to have spoken with him about it. I would have liked to understand why." She sighed and sipped from something as she spoke.
"He was thirteen at the time of the crime. He was brainwashed, in essence, although within that framework he still chose to do what he did. I know that he did regret that choice. He tried to atone in smaller ways, for what he did. It's a sad story, really."
"Maybe you'll come down here and tell it to me sometime soon. You know, now that you're off the case and all."
Ryan hesitated, and then he opened up his calendar. Why shouldn't he let himself connect? "How does Saturday sound, ma'am? I can meet you on Saturday afternoon, anywhere that you like, and I'll tell you the whole thing as I know it so far."
"I'd like that." They made the appointment, and Ryan smiled his first genuine smile in days.
Not long after that, Pat Tessaro sauntered into the squad room with his alpha ginger scent trailing behind him like a cape. He was one of the better guys from Cold Case, but Ryan wasn't dumb enough to think that a couple of hours bonding over mystery movies with beer made him one of the guys. "Hey, Ryan. Heard about the promotion. That's awesome news, buddy."
"Thanks, man." Ryan tried for a professional smile. "What's going on? Is there something I can do for you? Some cold case that relates back to something from our records or something?"
Tessaro laughed. "No, no, nothing like that. I just wanted you to know that we got the results back on that baseball bat. It was definitely the murder weapon for the second victim. It bears out both Leanne O'Neal's story and Steven's. We've got him. It's the conviction we all wanted."
Ryan didn't have to fake a s
mile for that, even if his smile was a little bit tempered. "That's fantastic news, man. I'm really happy for everyone."
"So you're going to come back and help us take down Will O'Neal, right? I mean, you're not going to step back and miss the happy ending." Tessaro sat on the end of Ryan's desk.
Ryan shook his head. "Nah. I'm not part of that team. I'm good right where I am."
Tessaro frowned and picked up a pen from the desk. "That's crap, man. We wouldn't be where we are now if it weren't for you and everything you did, and everyone back in Cold Case knows it. Come on. Just come back and be there for the takedown. You don't even have to do anything, dude. Just watch if you're more comfortable. This is your collar."
Ryan glared at him. "I'm off the case, Tessaro. I'm off the case because Nick wanted me off the case. He doesn't know that I contributed; he thinks it was just blind luck. And yeah, he made that clear, again and again. So no. It wouldn't be appropriate for me to go ride along and play the good little junior detective again."