Right after the party

[billboyd]

Bill is still thinking about going home when his phone rings. He isn't particularly surprised. He'd almost been expecting it. Threes, after all.

"Boyd," he says, and whomever is on the line says nothing for long moments. Bill senses more than hears that the line is still open, and merely waits. He's about to say something ("You have three bloody seconds to identify yourself, fuckwit," is what springs to mind), when the caller finally speaks.

"Thank God."

Susan's voice is a long, slightly quavering exhalation that confirms all of Bill's worst fears about what had happened earlier in the night ("No injuries in the fire," he remembers Redden saying, and remembers thinking it was oddly phrased).

"What now?" Bill says, because there is no question that it's something. He ignores the fact that he doesn't actually want to know, ignores the thrill of uneasiness her tone (genuinely relieved, her voice completely lacking the sracastic element that normally characterizes it -- when she's talking to him, at least) sends through him. She doesn't answer immediatedly, and Bill listens to her breathing, long, deep breaths that aren't entirely steady. Unlike her, just like her screaming fury from earlier, and he wants to sigh or snarl, or both, because this is getting bloody old quickly. Bill's nerves are already wound up, already jittering and jumping, and this is only making it worse, ratcheting up his level of anxiety until he feels ready to twitch right out of his own skin. "Bleeding Christ, Susan," he finally snaps. "What the fuck?!"

"You're driving," she says -- randomly, as far as Bill can tell -- and her voice is remarkably clear and even, considering Bill can still hear how unsteady her breathing is. "Pull over."

He pulls over quickly enough to leave a shriek and the smell off heated rubber hovering in the air. Something about the way she'd said it.

"I want you out of that car. It's too distinctive. I'll send a couple of uniforms to pick it up. Don't drive it anymore."

He doesn't have to be told that this is serious. "I won't be going into protective custody either, Susan," he says, but softly. He doesn't want to piss her off (though he recognizes that it may be unavoidable), but she needs to understand that very clearly.

"I wasn't going to even ask," she says, and there is a wry edge to her voice that reassures him a little. No more dead cops if she can take that tone with him. He likes it a hell of a lot better than it's predescessor, frankly. "I don't want the hassle of all that damn paperwork anyway. Do you know how many forms you have to fill out to discipline one asshole for insubordination? It's a nightmare."

"One of life's tragedies," Bill agrees sardonically, but his hands are reaching under the wheel to drag his trouser leg up and work his gun free of the ankle holster. She's made him nervous. "So, was there a specific reason for this call, or did you just want to make me extremely twitchy?"

"Twitchy is just a bonus," she says, and fucking giggles at him.

Relief, he thinks, which is the only rational (if somewhat surreal) reason for Susan to be giggling at him. She's relieved, and it warms him, though he'll never tell her that. But that doesn't answer the question of why, exactly, she's so relieved to speak with him. "I suppose," he says carefully, "that I'm still not to go home?"

"You could, I suppose, but it'd be counterproductive for someone who doesn't want to be in police custody to come to a place that's crawling with cops."

"I see," Bill says, thinking hard.

"There were two men," she says, amusement dropping from her tone abruptly. "I had uniforms on your apartment, just on the doors, waiting. Entrances and boltholes, only. I hadn't even given an evacuation order, Bill. They must have come straight from the Bloom kid's building, or near enough. What the hell could they have been thinking?" But she continues without giving him time to answer, which is fine, since he has no idea. "They walked right in the front doors, took the elevator to your floor, and invited themselves inside. We had the building empty, cordoned off, and a tactical team in position in less than ten minutes. It's like they came here to die."

Or like they were sent there to die, Bill thinks, but doesn't say. It's speculation.

"They came out shooting. There was nothing for us to do but take them down."

"Who? Are they even Dominguez's people?" Bill asks eventually, because it just doesn't compute. He's sure she knows that.

"If they were, they aren't anymore." Her voice is laced with unmistakable satisfaction. It's the sort of smug-but-revolted pleasure all cops just can't quite help feeling at the death of a cop-killer. The sort of thing that can only really be shown to another cop, because only another cop could really understand it. Bill feels it, too, elated relief mixed with a painful, sickening clench of guilt at the feeling. He ignores it as well as he can while he listens to Susan flipping through papers on her end. "Emilio Cuevas and... Jordan Christianson. Ring any bells with you?"

"Cuevas," Bill repeats thoughtfully. "He's Dominguez's sister's kid. A meth-freak. Related, but not someone Dominguez usually uses. He's in my files if you need next-of-kin information. Mother's name is Isabella. Nice lady."

Which is true, Bill had met her a couple of times. She hadn't liked him. Of course, MacKinnon hadn't been meant to be particularly likeable.

"How do you remember this shit," Susan grumbles. Bill can hear the scratch of her pen on paper. "What the hell is this, Bill? It doesn't make sense!"

"Not unless what happened is exactly what was meant to happen," Bill says thoughtfully.

"A set up?" Susan muses. Her tone is curious, but he thinks he detects a slight note of satisfaction in it as well. He isn't surprised. Susan is far from stupid. "You think the fire was a fuck up." It's not a question.

"I think it's possible," Bill says. "If you'll check their rap sheets, I'm betting you'll find out that one of them was a firebug. Probably Christianson. I don't know his name, but I don't remember anything about Cuevas having fire-setting tendencies. It isn't totally outside the realm of possibility that Dominguez would send Cuevas after Bloom. He probably didn't think it would take anyone with any skill to get the job done, in that particular instance. But he wouldn't have sent him for me. Not unless he was trying to get rid of him."

"No family loyalty?" Susan mumurs.

It sets off a buzz of something in Bill's head unexpectedly. Not about Dominguez, either (which is stupid as fuck, not to mention careless and dangerous), but about Kate. Kate Beckinsale.

Sometimes connections are obvious, like electric lines running from pole to pole. Sometimes they aren't so obvious, buried power lines marked by tiny orange flags at uncertain intervals, things barely noted at the edges of perception. And sometimes they're all but invisible, not even marked, and you only know they're there if you happen to stumble over one and get a nasty fucking shock. This feels like that last to Bill.

Like a nasty fucking shock.

Bill had once had a professor at Uni who'd referred to this sort of leap of logic as thinking with the hind-brain. Bill doesn't quite agree with that, since the hind-brain governs instinctive and animalistic responses rather than actual thought, but he understands the designation all the same. Moments like this, moments when he makes connections this way, always feel a little instinctive; triggered by instinct, if not actually carried out by that portion of the brain.

It's a sort of free-association slide toward awareness, Susan's off the cuff comment about family loyalty sending Bill's brain through a series of sharp, sideways curves (he thinks of the Mafia, first, of the fact that Dominguez's little empire doesn't run along the same vein, he doesn't hold the sort of regard for his family that would allow him to expect the sort of unquestioning loyalty of the Milanos or the Genoveses, certainly not the kind of solidarity the Torettas had shown one another, going down to the last member under the collapsing weight of their enterprise no matter how many deals the FBI offered them), interspersed with oddly bright pauses, moments of clear understanding (and a damn good thing, too, because the last thing LAPD needs is a crimelord of that magnitude making life even more fucking difficult, not to mention the entanglements with the FBI that sort of thing would inevitably produce, as well as the PD's own organized crime division, who had so far been content to leave Dominguez to Narc, since drugs are his primary endeavor) that don't quite string together, things he senses are important, but can't clearly see how until he reaches the end (the deeper he'd got into Dominguez's organization, the more Bill had feared FBI involvement because of the boundaries and borders Dominguez habitually crosses, and for a while his worst fear had been waking up and finding Dominguez on the FBI's hitlist...) of that line of thought.

And then there it is. Beckinsale. Not this year, but last? Maybe the year before. Bill isn't sure when, but he knows where he's seen the name before. Organized Crime. He digs a little deeper into the dusty files in his mind where he keeps interesting but not neccessarily useful bits of information, his hands gripping the steering wheel as though it's his connection to this realization.

"Bill?" Susan says, jangling interruption, and Bill snarls silently at the windshield.

"Wait!" he snaps, and she does, because she knows well enough how he works sometimes, she's seen it before.

Beckinsale. Richard Beckinsale. There it is. Art theft, forgery, smuggling across international borders, organized prostitution... He can look up the details when he gets somewhere with a phone line. He has to, because ("She's not my cousin!" Nic had blurted out, sounding utterly revolted at the notion,) if there is some sort of connection between the Beckinsale's and Ian McKellen, then Bill bloody well needs to know it.

It could be money, merely the social connection of two rich men, but if it isn't...

He thinks briefly about the look on Kate's face, that wary recognition, and then about the look on McKellen's, which hadn't been anything quite as clear.

But his gut tells him that McKellen is a dangerous man, and Bill is inclined to trust that assessment. The only question is, how dangerous. McKellen's name doesn't call up twitches of recognition the way the Beckinsale name had, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything.

And if the connection is more than merely social, more than just the happenstance of everyday interaction between wealthy peers... well, that's a whole different ball game, isn't it.

"Bill," Susan says again, and Bill's hands flex and grip around the steering wheel.

"For God's sake, shut up, Sue!" he snaps, clenching his jaw hard to keep from spitting further venom at her.

If it's business, if it's fucking business, then the question becomes what business? What does McKellen do? Bill has always got the impression that McKellen is old money, wealthy family, nothing better to do with it than throw it into the pseudo-entertainment industry. He had asked, yeah, but he hadn't looked closely because McKellen is a sort of periphery figure, not directly working with the industry, and because everyone had told him basically the same story.

If that's wrong, it alters some very basic assumptions, the most fundamental of them being that the homicides themselves are unrelated to one another, aside from the fact that the resultant hits had all been executed by the same person.

That might still be true, of course, but if organized crime is involved, something of Beckinsale's calibre, then it is very possible that it is not. It's possible that they had been quite a bit more specifically motivated.

And at this point, his investigation is going exactly nowhere. The more he finds out, the more fucking unclear things get.

Also...

"Bill," Susan says, this time with audible impatience in her voice.

"What?" he snaps, barely aware of doing it.

"Tell me!"

He opens his mouth to do it, automatic, and then closes it so quickly he bites the fuck out of his tongue. He swallows an obscenity, mind racing to come up with something to tell her.

Because he sure as hell shouldn't be thinking about this now. It has nothing to do with the situation at hand, the very real and very dangerous situation that his attention should currently be devoted to, the one that is a department-fucking-sanctioned investigation. The one that is currently threatening his life. What the fuck is he doing? How the hell did his perspective on things become so bloody skewed?

"I can't," he lies smoothly. "I lost it. I thought for a second that I had... something. But no."

God, he's a total fucking prick. Stupid, stupid bloody prick!

Susan says nothing for several long, tense seconds. "You might want to get your head out of your ass, Boyd," she says finally. "I think you're starting to become immune to the smell of your own bullshit."

He smiles in spite of the fact that she could cause him trouble, if she wants to. "Let it go, yeah, Sue? It was something else."

"What the fuck else could be important right now?" she demands, voice low and tight.

"Ask me another time," he says, because he can't quite make himself lie to her again (and not only because he understands that she will take a lot from him, is willing to let him do things his own way most of the time, but if he lies to her too often, that will change), and because the only way to get out of this situation is for her to let him out of it.

There is another long silence (Bill is convinced he can actually hear her grinding her teeth), but eventually she does. "Okay. Fine. But you want to wrap your brain around this situation, Bill, and you want to fucking do it yesterday. If this was Dominguez, you won't have long to figure things out before he takes another shot at you."

"I know, Sue," Bill says, but gently. "I'll get my arse in gear. Sorry."

"Sorry?" she repeats, incredulous. "Okay, who the fuck are you and what have you done with Bill Boyd?"

Bill chuckles -- though some distant part of his brain is noting that he really fucking needs to watch himself, because uncharacteristic behavior can't help him, even if it's uncharacteristic for the better. "Working on my interpersonal skills," he says. "Acting like someone people actually like, remember? You shouldn't discourage me. I think I'm making progress."

"You're making me nervous," she says, her tone only half-joking. He doesn't answer. There isn't any point. "Anyway. I called to tell you about the corpses in your apartment."

"And to make me abandon my car," he adds. "Which I'm not going to do. Not yet."

She sighs. "Tomorrow. No later. You'll need to come to the station anyway, Bill. There's no way you can avoid making a statement on this."

"I know, and that's fine. But I need it for tonight."

"Don't go out looking for information tonight, Bill," she says sharply, and he's only mildly irritated at how well she knows him. "You still have a price on your head. It would be beyond stupid."

"I'm not an idiot," he says, and she snorts her disagreement, but doesn't call him on it, though she knows as well as he does that it's meaningless, just something to say that is neither an agreement nor a refusal.

"Look," she says instead, voice dropping slightly. "Do you need me to bring you anything from here? Is there anything... you need out of here." It's carefully phrased, but the inflection is unmistakable.

Bill hesitates. He's not sure why he's surprised. "No, Sue," he says carefully. "I'm not hiding anything." Not true, but he isn't hiding anything there. Everything he has that he doesn't want anyone to see is on his laptop in the Mustang's boot. "I wouldn't ask you to do that, if I was."

And that isn't true, either, probably, but since it's not going to be tested in this situation, it's moot. He chooses not to look too closely at it.

Instead of answering, she changes the subject. "Your psych eval crossed my desk yesterday. You'll be happy to know you aren't insane."

"Good on me," Bill says, and she snorts. He can imagine her grin. With a start of surprise, he realizes that he misses her. He misses working with people he trusts like he trusts the people in Narc.

With his life.

Of course, he'd staple his own lips together before he said something like that out loud.

"I've got to go, Bill. I've got a hell of a lot of clean up ahead of me."

"Aye," he says. "Better you than me."

"Cram it, Boyd," she says, but without rancor. "Watch your ass, Bill. I'll see you tomorrow."

And if her tone holds the slightest hint of threat, they can both pretend it doesn't mean anything, later, if they choose to.

That's one of the things he's always liked about Susan. She knows when to let go of the reins when it's obvious that they aren't doing anything but slowing him down.

"Goodnight, Susan," he says softly, and rings off.