by Aiden Bates
"I came to see what I was dealing with." He shrugged. "And to get some pictures, because I do like to get paid. It makes a difference, you know? But anyway. Hey, you're the lawyer on that case with the omega, right?"
"Yeah." Doug blinked at the sudden change in topics. "If you're referring to the case with the omega who killed in self-defense, then yes I am."
"How's that case going?" Pete tilted his head to the side.
"It's hard to say. There are three omegas on the jury, but they're all claimed." Doug led the rest of them out of the room. "I'm hopeful, of course, but I'm practical."
They headed out for lunch at a local cafe. Doug wasn't much in the mood for any food, but he was eating for two now and he had to make himself eat even when it was the last thing on his mind. After lunch, and that potentially valuable meeting with Pete Nolan-Morris, they went their separate ways and Doug headed back to the office.
He put in his time until traffic died down. He had plenty of work to do, after all, and a lot of it was different from anything he'd done before. He had people to supervise now, and work to bring in. He was giving interviews to journalists, both video and written, which apparently counted as business development. He needed to be on top of things for those interviews and he wanted to make sure that he was able to fend off any trick questions that interviewers might lob his way.
Once traffic had died down a bit, he headed back out to Needham. There, in the car, he turned up the radio to distract himself. He drummed along on the steering wheel, and he sang along when he felt the urge. He didn't care if he looked off his rocker to other cars; maybe they would just let him in then.
At home, he threw himself into cooking. The results were terrible and they wound up ordering pizza, but that wasn't the important thing. What mattered was that he was working hard and focusing on anything that wasn't the fact that his father was still languishing in prison for a crime he hadn't committed.
Much later that night, once Sean had gone to bed and Doug and Ray were alone, Doug couldn't distract himself anymore. He sat and stared at the fire, numb. "You know," he said, without moving, "I prepared for the worst. I did. I had the papers to remove Murphy from the case ready to go. But I don't think that I ever really believed, you know? I didn't believe that the worst would happen. I was prepared in fact, but not in theory."
Ray put his arm around Doug's shoulders. "That sentence probably made more sense in your head, but okay. I think I understand what you meant. But Doug, you've done everything you could. I mean I'm not sure what else there is to do."
"Well, getting Murphy tossed from the case would be an awesome start." Doug closed his eyes. "I don't want to say that I'm not used to failing, because that would be a real asshole thing to say and it's also not true. I lose cases. I lose important cases. Sometimes I lose them because I'm wrong. It happens. But this one—I'm not wrong, Ray. My father has been proven innocent, time and time again. I've jumped through every possible hoop. The state is willing to drop the charges, because they're ridiculous, but not the judge."
"Sometimes you get a judge who's just really bound up in this idea of being on the side of the prosecution." Ray sighed. "I mean me? I'm supposed to be. I'm the one who finds the suspects in the first place. I can't exactly be impartial after that, right? But the judge is supposed to be there to balance guys like me out."
Doug leaned into his alpha. "I just can't understand what his issue is. Is he seriously punishing my dad because I have the temerity to defend people accused of crimes? I mean that's how criminal law works."
"I have no idea, honey." Ray held him closer. "But I know that you've done all that you can do for this weekend. You're upset. I'm upset too. But we do need to keep on going with our lives."
Doug sighed. "I know. And we will."
They had their first ultrasound the next day, and their first meeting with the obstetrician. Dr. Winchester was a gruff, bearded man about Larry's age, who had an excellent reputation and wasn't judgmental. They had the ultrasound first. Doug didn't like it. He didn't like the gel. He didn't like the feeling of invasion. He didn't like the way that the ultrasound technician kept slipping up and calling him "mom."
And the baby didn't look like much. It definitely didn't look like a baby. It looked a lot more like a bean, deep inside his belly. "Are you sure it's okay?" he asked the technician.
"I'm not really supposed to interpret," she told him. "I'm just supposed to take the pictures, but I've taken a lot of pictures of babies at this stage and yours doesn't look any different to me." She simpered. "So, Mom, do you have names picked out already?"
Doug ignored her while Ray gave a proper and measured response. It was left to the doctor to assure Doug that yes, the baby was developing normally and seemed to be healthy. Dr. Winchester asked some questions about Doug's lifestyle, gave some advice about food and weight gain, and told him that he wanted to see him again in a month and that he wanted him working fewer hours. That was all.
On the way back to Needham, they stopped at the mall to buy some holiday gifts. Doug had things for Ray, but he needed some things for some of their other friends and for Sean and Sean's siblings. He picked up a few things for the baby in an attempt to get excited for the impending birth, but it wasn't working. How was he supposed to get excited for the new baby when his father was still in jail, for crying out loud?
He sat down with Ray the next day over their morning coffee. "I've been thinking about ways to try to prove my father innocent."
Ray rolled his eyes up to the ceiling, even though a little smile played around the corners of his mouth. "Of course you have."
"The problem is that we're trying to prove something that happened almost twenty years ago. I was a kid, I was sick. I wasn't exactly thinking in terms of, 'Oh, I need to remember this moment forever.' I was thinking, 'Ugh. Sick. Can't breathe.'"
Ray stilled. "Say that again."
Doug shook his head and wrapped his bathrobe a little tighter around himself. "It was bronchitis, Ray. I couldn't breathe because I had bronchitis. Not because my dad had done something to try to take me out."
Ray grinned and relaxed. "Of course not. He adores you. Always has and always will. That much is obvious, even from the back of court. Even that priest guy talked about it."
"I'm sure that's not how D'Cruze put it." Doug pulled back a little. "That guy always had it in for me. He wanted my parents to get rid of me. He even told my mother that it would be better for her to kill me, more forgivable in the eyes of God, than for her to raise an omega." He shook his head. "I'm not sure where he's getting that from. I mean that's not even in the Old Testament."
"You can start up the next big theological debate with the Order." Ray took Doug's hand, but his muscles felt tense to Doug. "I mean I don't know if it's even relevant. We need to find the proof that someone else killed your mother, not that your father was someplace else at the time."
"The problem is that there's no real way to prove that." Doug rubbed the back of his neck. "The tool marks on her remains are different, and we don't even know where the murder took place. There's no way to prove that Gagne killed her. Her head wasn't at Gagne's house."
"We can talk to him, see if he'll fess up to having killed her." Ray rubbed Doug's back. "We'll get to the bottom of this. We'll do it together, just like everything else with this nightmare of a case."
Doug leaned against his alpha. "Yeah. Yeah, we will. But I think I need to try harder to remember. I mean I was there. Those memories have to be locked up somehow."
Ray froze again. "Doug, don't do anything you'll regret. Don't do anything that will get you disbarred, or that would hurt you. Or the baby."
Doug chuckled. "I won't. But I can't even relax and enjoy this baby until we get my dad out of jail. I can't move on until we fix this! I can't enjoy the promotion. It's killing me, Ray."
Ray sighed. "See what you can find, I guess." He didn't sound hopeful, but that was okay. Doug didn't need for him to be.
***
Ray paced the bullpen room, hands behind him. "I don't like this."
Robles sighed. "What's not to like? We've got the guy who's good for it, and we know he's good for it on account of the, you know, heads. Heads are pretty solid evidence, Langer. People don't keep heads in their house unless they've got something to do with the detachment process."
Ray put his hand on the whiteboard, right in the gap on the timeline. "It's this part right here. That's what's keeping Larry behind bars. That's what the defense team is going to harp on and nail us with. And they're right. The only way to spring Larry is to convict this Gagne guy for Emiliana's murder. We can't even charge him with her murder yet because we can't show any contact between them."
"The church." Nenci crossed his arms over his chest.
"Nope. He wasn't a member of St. Dominic's until 2000." Tessaro scowled.
"The school." Morris snapped his fingers.
"Wasn't employed by the Lakeville-Freetown Unified School District until 2000 either. In fact, property records show that he bought his current home in 2000." Ray added a little smirk. "The papers are calling it the House of Heads, by the way. In case you'd already eaten your breakfast and regretted it."
"That's super gross." Morris grimaced and pulled back a little. "So what are we supposed to do here? Can we talk to him?"
"If his lawyer is present." Ray banged his head against the whiteboard.
"Instead of destroying government property, how about if we get a subpoena for his employment records and start tracing his whereabouts in 1998?" Tessaro tossed a pen up into the air. "I mean I don't know about you but I personally think that's a bit more productive, but you know, maybe you've got a thing against whiteboards."
"Screw you, Tessaro." Ray closed his eyes. "Okay, yeah. Let's get that subpoena and figure out where he was in 1998. Maybe that will start the ball rolling. It would be great if we could get Larry out by Christmas. I'd be satisfied if we got Larry out at all, quite frankly."
The document they required came through within a day, and once they had what they needed the school district was more than happy to give them a copy of Gagne's employment record. As it turned out, Gagne had a long history of difficulty with female students, female colleagues, and female administrators. Enough parents had filed complaints at the high school that they'd finally kicked him down to the middle school, in the hopes that having younger girls to teach wouldn't trigger whatever misogyny raged within him.
It hadn't worked. At the time of his arrest, he had almost as many complaints at the middle school as he did at the high school. Ray chose one complaint from the list to read out loud to the rest of the team. "'Mr. Gagne hasn't called on a single girl in class for the entire school year,'" he quoted. "This one is from March, so last school year. Oh, it's actually from one of our murder victims, Isn't that touching—Charlotte Delaney. It goes on. 'When my daughter, Ashley, confronted him about the fact that he hadn't called on a single girl during the entire school year despite the fact that class participation made up half of their grade, Gagne told her that girls' opinions don't matter, and neither do their grades.' How does this stuff just stay hidden in a file, so that no one can see it?"
Morris scowled. "I don't know, but it definitely pisses me off. If that guy were my daughter's teacher, I'd rip his head off."
"Right?" Ray shook his head and put the file down. "I'm not usually a big believer in violence but I'd be right there with you." He massaged his temples. "There's just one problem." His stomach gave a lurch.
"The English teacher is up there telling girls that their opinions and grades don't matter and you only see one problem?" Tessaro chucked a paper clip at him.
Ray flipped him off, but his heart wasn't in it. "Before he came to Lakeville, Dan Gagne taught in north-central Maine for six years."
Everyone fell silent as they processed the new information. "Crap," Nenci said, speaking for all.
"Right?" Ray punched the whiteboard. He ignored the hole he left in it. "It's unlikely that he'd come down here, kill some random stranger, and go back up to Maine to live out his life for the next two years."
"It's not impossible, but it's unlikely." Tessaro nodded. "Guys like him, guys with a specific type like that, they're not likely to come down to kill a random stranger."
On a hunch, Tessaro reached out to authorities in Oxbow, Maine. Just as Ray had dreaded, they'd had an astonishing outbreak of assaults starting in 1995. Those had escalated to disappearances by 1996, but they'd never found more than a few body parts. They continued to find parts on farms and in remote woodlands, but they didn't have any new disappearances after 2000 that couldn't be easily explained.
"Were the people who went missing all women, maternal types with strong personalities, between thirty-five and fifty?" Tessaro asked.
"They were," the sheriff told him. "We never could figure out exactly what was going on."
"We might have the answer to your riddle down here, but it's not pretty. If your ME has scans of the bones, maybe he could send them to our guy. He can compare the tool marks and let you know if they're the same." Tessaro managed to keep the disappointment out of his voice. Ray had no idea how he did it, because the unhappiness was plain as the nose on his face.
Ray sighed. It was back to the drawing board. He called the Plymouth County Jail, and he called Gagne's lawyer. He might as well set up an interrogation. Chances were minimal that a smug bastard like Gagne would be at all useful, but he was the only tool in Ray's arsenal right now. He was going to have to do what he could with it.
The next day he and Nenci headed down to the Plymouth County Jail. Gagne's lawyer, a guy by the name of Slonim, was waiting for him. "Now look. I'm advising him to shoot for a plea bargain, but I want to make it clear that until that plea bargain comes I'm strongly discouraging him from incriminating himself."
Once, only a few short months ago, Ray would have made a snide comment. Now he understood that not only was Slonim just doing his job, but also that Slonim's job was vitally important in the greater scheme of things. "I get that." He grinned. "Ultimately we're both shooting for the same thing here. You understand that I am going to try to get him to incriminate himself, though, because that's kind of my job and because I'm pretty sure that a guy with a bunch of murder victim's heads in his house is guilty as hell."
Slonim acknowledged this by tilting his head, just a little bit. "Still, I have to do what I have to do."
They went in and waited for their turn in a special conference room. This one wasn't confidential, intended for attorneys and their clients. This one was bigger and brighter, and the entire conversation would be filmed and recorded thanks to a two-way mirror. "Mr. Gagne. We meet again." Ray sat down across from the serial killer. Nenci sat beside him, while Slonim sat beside his client.
"I knew you'd be back. I know you've got questions." Gagne let his lips spread in a rictus that Ray supposed was supposed to resemble a smile.
"Dan, I'm going to strongly advise you against answering his questions. You should not be incriminating yourself at this time." Slonim half-turned in his seat to face his client.
Gagne rolled his eyes. His ability to respond in any other way was limited by the way he'd been shackled to the table. "Oh, come on, counselor. They found heads in my house. How much more incriminating can you get? I mean they didn't find me doing anything untoward with the heads." He smirked right at Ray. "But then again, it was still early in the evening."
"Spare me, Gagne." Ray shook his head. "You're not going to scare me or Nenci here out of the room, okay? We're not here to play games. We're not here to mess around. We're literally just here to find out more about your activities."
"Then you should let me talk about my activities." Gagne waggled his eyebrows.
Nenci stroked his beard. "You know, it's funny you should bring that up. There's no evidence of sexual activity on any of the heads. You want us to believe that there is, but there isn't. You avoid the company of women like p
lague, but you don't have a sexual interest in men. The priest tells us that your libido is normal, and you have a sexual interest in women, but you won't allow yourself to be near them. Why is that, I wonder?"
Gagne snarled, like an animal caught in a snare. "You shut up!"
Ray cleared his throat. "You know, most guys just go see a doctor for that kind of a problem. There's a pill, you know. Your insurance will cover it. But you chose a different path. You, you went on a multi-state killing spree."
Slonim scowled at Ray. "I know you didn't bring me all the way down here just to needle my client."
"Sorry." Ray shook his head. "We didn't. We did put in a call to Oxbow, Maine, after we got a look at your employment record, Gagne. We found a spate of killings up there that have your hallmarks all over them. We will, of course, be cooperating with their investigation."