Since You Went Away - Chapter Five: The Secret Heart
Title: Since You Went Away - Chapter Five: The Secret Heart
Authors: i-must-go-first & UbiquitousMixie
Fandom: Brenda/Sharon, The Closer
Rating: PG-13 (Overall M)
Word Count: 6379
Disclaimer: Not ours. Please don’t sue.
Summary: A late-night craving and a coincidental meeting lead a certain deputy chief to discover that there’s much more to the inimitable Captain Raydor than meets the eye, and to realize that her mama was right: sometimes all a single woman really needs is a good girlfriend.
Authors’ Note: We wanted to thank all of you for the wonderful comments you’ve been leaving. Your kind words mean so much to both of us. As your reward, we present to you the big revelation of Sharon’s secret and a heaping helping of angst. Let us know what you think! Enjoy!
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Brenda Leigh Johnson was not a sports fan and, after having grown up with three brothers, had learned to tune out all extraneous noise about batting averages and fouls and touchdowns. Nevertheless, it did not take an expert to know that there were far too many teams on the basketball court that morning, all clamoring to get ahead of the game. The crime scene was noisier than usual, swarming with members of Major Crimes, FID, the FBI, paramedics, coroners, and several other black and whites.
With practiced ease, Brenda blocked them all from her peripheral vision and focused instead on the reason why this circus had convened in the first place: the lifeless body at her feet. When Brenda crouched down and gazed into the empty face of Rosalie MacGuire, everything else bled away, leaving her momentarily alone with the victim. Her head was cleared of the frustration of the cluttered crime scene and her worries about the delivery of her sofa faded away, leaving her with enough single-minded clarity to wonder what on earth had happened to lead to this woman being shot twice.
A silently efficient coroner’s assistant turned Rosalie onto her side so the deputy chief could survey both bullet wounds: one had entered her chest just above her left breast, while the other had pierced her back in the center of her abdomen. Brenda frowned. Which shot had come first? Had she been shot by one individual, giving her time to turn around before she was shot again? Had it been Officer Reyes, who had arrived at the scene to respond to a call of suspicious behavior? Or had it been Rosalie’s partner or, worse, someone else altogether?
From what she had gathered from Sergeant Gabriel and Lieutenant Provenza, Officer Reyes had interrupted a drug deal and was claiming that there had been another woman and a man with Rosalie when shots were fired. He got off three rounds before a bullet grazed his shoulder, Rosalie was hit, and the other two suspects fled the scene.
Brenda let out an exasperated sigh, her mind swarming with questions about the gaping holes in the details of the officer’s account of the incident. Though she was inclined to trust one of her boys in blue, she could not shake the hunch that there was more going on than she had been told. Who sold drugs in the middle of an open basketball court in the middle of the morning? And, given that the drugs and money were missing, had Rosalie been selling or buying, or just in the wrong place at the wrong time?
The blonde pursed her lips, eyeing the wounded officer where he sat beside the ambulance, a medic pressing fresh gauze to his injury. She had yet to personally speak to Reyes, having spent her short time at the crime scene being apprised of the details by Gabriel while simultaneously doing her best to thwart the intrusive FBI.
It didn’t help that Special Agent Fritz Howard was still the LAPD’s liaison, nor did it help that FID had plastered the crime scene with its offending red tape. It wasn’t so bad that she had to deal with Fritz (even though she couldn’t look at him without wanting to ask how Ms. Orange Toothbrush was doing); the worst part was that Captain Raydor was nowhere to be found.
Though Brenda admittedly preferred Sharon Raydor to Captain Raydor, the blonde just knew that this whole ordeal would be so much more orderly and contained if she were there with her little notepad and superior know-it-all attitude. Sergeant Elliott was probably a perfectly fine detective, but just seeing him blocking all access to the injured officer made Brenda want to stomp her foot and order him to leave.
Lieutenant Provenza peered down at the woman’s body. “Sergeant Dingbat over there is insisting that we allow Officer Reyes to go to the hospital before we interview him.”
“Absolutely not,” Brenda said, allowing Provenza to help her to her feet. “Not till I talk to him.” She glanced over at Fritz, who was now edging his way closer to where she needed to be. Elliott, to her dismay, seemed more than willing to cooperate with the FBI.
Brenda narrowed her eyes in their direction. “Where on earth is Captain Raydor?!”
“Not here,” Provenza replied helpfully, earning himself a baleful glare from his superior officer. “The Wicked Witch has flown away.”
Brenda blew an errant strand of hair from her face, settling her lips into a frown. “That’s extremely unhelpful,” she snapped. She took a deep breath, and then another. “I wanna know everything there is to know about this girl and Officer Reyes, Lieutenant.”
“Already on it.”
Brenda nodded and sidled up alongside Lieutenant Tao, who was helpfully directing SID in cataloguing three of the recovered casings. “Have you gotten anything from FID?”
“Nothing solid, Chief,” he replied sympathetically. He informed her of the sweep they were doing for the unaccounted-for bullet casings and the perimeter search that was being conducted for the missing suspects, adding that Detective Sanchez was following up with area hospitals and clinics. Gabriel was following up on the 911 call, directing his search efforts at the potential witnesses.
Almost everyone was where they needed to be, working diligently to fit together the pieces of a mismatched puzzle. And yet the scene was pandemonium, because what should have been a well-oiled machine was instead three separate entities working against each other for their own benefit. Brenda knew, just knew, that FID would be on her side if Raydor was where she needed her to be. Was the older woman too busy poking her nose into other people’s business to attend to her own?
She nodded again as Tao concluded his report, casting another glance in the direction of the ambulance, where the two men were closely huddled around the officer. “Oh, for heaven’s sake...this is ridiculous!” she exclaimed, drawing curious stares from Tao and Flynn. She reached into her purse and pulled out her cell phone, dialing the number she’d come to know by heart.
The phone rang twice before Brenda heard the captain’s clipped, short tone. “Raydor.”
“Captain, why are you not at this crime scene?”
There was a brief pause. “Because, Chief, I requested the day off several months ago through the proper channels.”
“Whatever it is that you’re doin’, I need you to wrap it up and get here. I’ll have Lieutenant Tao text you the address.”
“With all due respect, Chief Johnson, my division is perfectly capable of handling this in my absence.”
Had Brenda been listening, she would have caught the despondent lilt to the other woman’s voice. However, if she had been listening, she wouldn’t have been Brenda. “That wasn’t a suggestion, Captain Raydor.”
A lengthy silence during which Brenda’s impatience mounted ensued, and then: “Yes, Chief.”
Brenda wouldn’t acknowledge that she’d worked herself into a tizzy by the time the black Accura pulled up forty minutes later, but she did acknowledge that that was what her daddy would’ve called it. She glimpsed Raydor -- that was how she was thinking of her, completely in work mode, as Captain Raydor -- in the passenger seat and felt a twinge of relief mingle with the irritation that was coursing through her body.
The twinge disappeared as the other woman remained in the passenger seat, talking with the driver, to whom the deputy chief paid no attention. Rolling her eyes, she ducked under the dual layers of red and yellow crime scene tape and marched over to the vehicle. She yanked the door open and a startled Raydor turned to her, green eyes widening momentarily.
“Well, captain, it certainly took you long enough. You may not have noticed, but this is an active crime scene, and several dozen people are waitin’ for you to do your job.”
Brenda finally looked at the driver of the car, her gaze magnetized to him by the glare she felt boring into her. That glare was familiar, and it would eventually occur to the blonde that she was making a lacklustre first impression on Sharon’s son.
Raydor got out of the car without a word, her own gaze frigid.
“Call me when they release you, Mom,” called the young man, confirming Brenda’s suspicions. “If it’s not too late, I’ll bring Cee over to the house.”
The captain nodded stiffly, already dragging her attention to the activity before her. “Chief,” she began in the cool, dispassionate tone that Brenda Leigh hadn’t heard in several weeks, “why is the ambulance still here? Presumably since the paramedics were called, Officer Reyes is in need of medical attention.”
“If I let that ambulance leave, between your people and the FBI I’ll have to wait through a month of Sundays to ask Reyes any questions that matter.”
Sharon didn’t blink or bother reacting to the implication that the questions asked in the course of an FID investigation didn’t matter. “FID will finish with the officer in question in a timely manner, since we’ve entered a seventy-two-hour reporting cycle. Obviously I have no control over the FBI -- but then, neither do you.” Brenda’s lips pressed into a grim line as that little jab hit home. “However, in any case, if Reyes’s condition is such that it warrants emergency care, any information that could be extracted from him now could hardly be relied upon in court.”
Brenda barely refrained from an eye-roll. “I’m quite aware of that, captain, but some straight answers, or even some crooked ones, would go a long way toward pointing my investigation in the right direction.” That added emphasis on Raydor’s rank truly hadn’t been intentional, but for heaven’s sake, the woman was acting like a bigger pain in the rear than her sergeant over there. “He has a mild concussion and a bullet grazed his arm,” the blonde added. “It’s not like he’s bleedin’ out from a severed limb.”
Sharon was already walking away, striding steadily toward Fritz, the paramedics, and Elliott. Brenda watched as the older woman spoke to her sergeant, conferred briefly with Fritz, and finally said something to the paramedics. They nodded and began to make unmistakable preparations to leave. Brenda’s jaw dropped in indignation and she set out at an undignified trot.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” she cried, signalling imperatively at the paramedics to stop. “What is goin’ on here, captain?” The emphasis was intentional that time. “Surely you didn’t just countermand an order given by a higher-rankin’ officer.”
Sharon remained as indefatigably calm as ever, but Brenda Leigh noted the minute tightening of the lines bracketing her mouth. She looked tired, the deputy chief involuntarily observed. Tired and preoccupied. “I merely suggested that Officer Reyes be taken to the hospital --” She didn’t pause, only raising her voice to remain audible when the blonde began to protest. “ -- accompanied by one of my people and one of yours, if both you and Agent Howard are amenable to that.”
“Oh.” Brenda Leigh stopped short, the wind taken out of her sails, as she noticed that Provenza was already in the ambulance with Reyes. “All right. I suppose,” she conceded grudgingly, and Fritz gave a sharp nod. She found herself hoping that he had indeed put in for that transfer back East that he’d mentioned to Willie Rae, and that it would come through soon.
Sharon pounded her fist twice against the back of the ambulance, waving the medics off. As they pulled away and turned onto the pothole-filled road, the captain shoved her hands into the pockets of the oversized cardigan she wore in lieu of her usual blazer and turned back to the separated couple. Finding it difficult to look the deputy chief in the face, she focused her attention on Agent Howard. “What is the FBI’s interest in this case?”
Fritz’s eyebrows twitched momentarily, as if he wanted to raise them and share an incredulous look with his wife before remembering that they were no longer on the same side. Sharon watched as he schooled his features and said, “We believe the victim has connections to a drug cartel we’ve been monitoring. It’s possible that her partner, whom we have yet to identify by name, may have intel that could lead to a significant bust.”
Sharon nodded, curling her hands into fists within her pockets. “I see. And the dealer?”
“May be unrelated,” Brenda cut in quickly.
“Or may not be,” Fritz countered.
Brenda glared at him. “Well, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see then, since I wasn’t given the chance to properly interview Officer Reyes.”
Fritz took a bracing breath. “He was the responding officer, Brenda. He didn’t have time for a chat with the suspects before the shooting began. You wouldn’t have gotten anything useful from him.”
“He may end up forgettin’ vital details between now and when I get to talk to him!” She huffed, pointing toward the blood spatter on the asphalt where Rosalie had lain. “For all we know, he may have been involved in this mess somehow!”
“Now you think he’s--what? A cop by day, a drug dealer by night?” Fritz retorted.
“Last I checked, it was mornin’.”
“That’s enough,” Sharon spat, rubbing her throbbing temple while she stared at the both of them. Her green eyes offered no patience for their bickering. “Let’s save the conspiracy theories for later and focus on the facts, shall we? Agent Howard, I suggest you follow up on your drug ring while Chief Johnson and I go to the hospital.”
“Actually, captain, I don’t relish the idea of sittin’ in a waiting room while our cop gets stitches. We should be at the morgue, where we can actually do somethin’ useful.” Brenda couldn’t hold back the superiority in her tone, feeling the need to assert her own authority over a case which she begrudgingly had to share.
Fritz set his jaw firmly and simply nodded. “I’ll follow up with your teams later,” he said, finally backing away.
“No need to rush,” Brenda muttered under her breath. She looked at Sharon, hoping to catch a sympathetic eye, and saw that the captain was miles away. Her nostrils flared. It was one thing not to have the undivided attention of her friend, but it was quite another not to have the attention of her captain. “I s’pose you’ll be needing a ride to the morgue?”
Sharon turned back to Brenda. “Obviously,” she drawled.
As they walked to Brenda’s car, the deputy chief realized she didn’t hear the ubiquitous clack of stiletto heels she’d come to associate with Captain Raydor. She surreptitiously glanced down at the other woman’s feet and glimpsed purple ballet flats beneath the cuffs of slim-fitting black denim.
The captain remained silent as they got into the car and fastened their seatbelts, and Brenda pointed them toward police headquarters, the one place in L.A. she could be reliably counted upon to find under any circumstances, from anywhere. After several minutes the stilted silence began to make Brenda uncomfortable, and since she didn’t have a ding-dong handy, she resorted to making conversation.
“So you were spendin’ the day with your son?” she began brightly. Sharon hummed, still gazing out the passenger-side window at a thoroughly uninteresting stream of traffic. “Special occasion?”
Sharon was silent for long enough that Brenda thought the older woman intended to ignore her; and then she said, so quietly that the sound of her voice was almost drowned out by the sound of wheels spinning on asphalt, “It’s his birthday.”
“Well, it’s nice that he wants to spend it with his mama. How old did you say he is?”
“Twenty-five,” Raydor replied in that curiously toneless way she had, not even bothering to look over at Brenda. “Th -- He is twenty-five.”
So much for conversation, the blonde thought. Very plainly, her passenger was Captain Raydor, not her friend Sharon. Was the other woman always such a bitch when her plans were interrupted by an investigation? She was a career police officer, for heaven’s sake. This could hardly be the first time it had happened. And her son was turning twenty-five, not five, so it was highly unlikely that Daniel’s balloons were popping and his ice cream cake melting while he wondered why mommy had to work. They could reschedule a lunch or a dinner or whatever it was you did with your adult son to celebrate his birthday.
And if she was totally honest with herself, there was a little part of Brenda that was offended by Sharon’s demeanor and her apparent lack of interest in the death of Rosalie MacGuire. Yes, the deputy chief had issued an order to the captain, but underneath the ranks and protocols, hadn’t the dark-haired woman heard Brenda Leigh asking her friend Sharon for a favor, for something that mattered?
Though Brenda was loth to admit it to herself, she briefly considered the possibility that perhaps Sharon really didn’t care all that much about the victims in her cases. Was it all just a job to her? Senseless deaths, especially of young women and children, always shook the deputy chief down to her very core. Had she misjudged Sharon?
No, she told herself. She recalled how deeply moved Sharon had been by Allie Moore and the victims of other shared cases. Sharon did care as much as Brenda did, but it was obvious that Captain Raydor had left her empathy at home with her stilettos.
As Brenda pulled her car into the parking garage that was woefully far from the building, she found herself feeling undeniably lonely. It didn’t matter that Raydor was sitting right beside her; she had hoped to have an ally during this case to help her muddle through the chaos of different departments stepping on everyone’s toes. She had also hoped, perhaps a little selfishly, to have someone on her side in her dealings with Fritz. Now that the love between them had been divvied up along with their possessions, only detached antagonism remained. Had it really been that hard for Captain Raydor to have her back?
She parked in her designated space and had barely cut the ignition before Sharon was whipping off her seatbelt and getting out of the car.
Brenda nearly growled in frustration. That woman was going to drive her straight to the loony bin.
“Where’s the fire?” Brenda called out, slamming her door shut as she hustled to catch up with the captain.
“I’d rather not waste time, Chief. I’d prefer not to be here all day.”
Brenda watched as the older woman tucked her hands once more into her pockets. “I don’t wanna be here all day either... There’s the rub, I guess, when you sign your life away to the LAPD.”
“I give more of myself to this career than most people, Chief,” Sharon said, her hair blowing across her face as she strolled briskly down the sidewalk. She shook her head, sending her hair back over her shoulder. “I don’t believe I was reaching for the stars by expecting one personal day.”
Brenda sighed. “I needed you here,” she explained, as if it were as simple as that. “I’m sorry that it just happened to be on your day off. I’ll tell the victim that she should’ve died tomorrow instead.”
Sharon pursed her lips, and Brenda could tell that she was trying to suppress whatever comeback had popped into her head. She wanted to know what was so pressing about this one day that had her all in a tizzy, but they were entering the building and stalking toward an elevator and Brenda knew that the other woman wouldn’t give her a proper response anyway. They rode in silence until they reached their floor, where they slipped into blue smocks.
Sharon tugged the door open, Brenda close behind. The smaller woman couldn’t help but shudder; no matter how many times she’d been in this morgue, she could never quite get used to the cold, sterile scent of death.
Dr. Morales glanced up as they entered, his forehead creasing beneath his cap. “Sharon? What are you doing here today?”
Sharon simply glared in response.
Oh, great, Brenda thought, curling her fingers into her palms. Of course Sharon’s good buddy Morales would react as if Brenda were the Wicked Witch of the South. Heaven forbid that she ask a fellow officer to interrupt her leisure time in order to do her job.
There were some pretty obvious parallels to be drawn there between the deputy chief’s current situation and the reception the head of FID faced on a daily basis, but Brenda was in no mood to draw them. She watched from the corner of her eye as the captain snapped on a pair of latex gloves. The improbably attractive pathologist was eying the older woman with disproportionate concern, which only sparked the chief’s ire. It wasn’t as if Brenda Leigh had just shot Sharon’s dog.
The blonde forced herself to relax her fingers and asked, “So, COD?”
Morales blinked balefully and looked down at the sheet-draped form on the stainless-steel table. “I haven’t had time to perform a complete autopsy yet, Chief Johnson. But in a pinch I’d go with the two large-caliber bullet holes in the victim’s chest and torso.”
Mocha-colored eyes narrowed. Brenda found herself wishing she’d brought one of her boys along. She didn’t like this feeling of being outnumbered, ganged up on. What was this, high school? “Specifically which one was the kill shot, doctor?”
Getting down to business, Morales turned the sheet back to reveal the young woman’s pale corpse, its flesh tinged the unnatural blue and pale green that spoke only of death. “Again, I’m not one hundred percent yet, but I think the shot to the abdomen is the one that killed her. The bullet ripped through a portion of her large intestine and her spleen. She would’ve bled out very quickly.”
“Crime scene was a blood bath,” Brenda agreed briefly. “Can you tell which was fired first?”
“Again, I can’t be --”
Uncharacteristically, Sharon interrupted. “Educated guess,” she muttered flatly, as if she were too tired to give her voice any inflection.
“From the trajectory of the entry wounds, she was shot to the upper left quadrant of the chest --” Brenda barely contained a wince as the young doctor produced a pair of the slender metal rods all pathologists used to measure the trajectory of gunshot wounds, the ones that had seriously dampened the blonde’s fondness for anything cooked on a skewer, and inserted one into the victim’s chest as if she were a giant hunk of meat. “It winged her collarbone, but missed any vital organs, so it wouldn’t have been fatal. You can see how the force of the shot spun her around as she began to fall, which is why the shot to her back looks as if it was fired from a slightly higher angle and more to the left.”
“So there were definitely two shooters. Not only were they standing roughly opposite one another, but these wounds were caused by different caliber bullets, right?” Morales nodded, and Captain Raydor added, “Which corroborates the statement Officer Reyes made at the scene.”
“Who fired which shot?” the chief asked quickly, something still niggling at her consciousness.
Morales touched Rosalie’s abdomen with a gloved index finger. “I’ve already sent the bullets to ballistics for confirmation, but I can tell you now that this one matches a round fired from a standard-issue service weapon.”
Brenda Leigh’s eyes narrowed further. “So Officer Reyes fired the kill shot, and he did it after Rosalie had already been shot by our other unidentified assailant?”
“Shit,” Sharon grumbled, reaching up to rub at the bridge of her nose, and Brenda whipped around to eye her in surprise.
“Is that your professional opinion?” the deputy chief shot back, but her attempt at humor made no impression.
Before anyone could say anything else, Brenda’s phone vibrated. She turned away slightly to answer.
“Chief,” said Gabriel, “Officer Reyes has been cleared to talk to us, but we have a small problem. We can’t find the statement he gave initially at the scene.”
“What do you mean, you can’t find it?” Brenda asked sharply, turning back toward an expectant Raydor and arching her eyebrows.
“Sergeant Klein from FID is here at the hospital with Julio and me, but he doesn’t have it --”
“No, he wouldn’t,” the deputy chief replied with studied patience. “The incident commander should have it.”
“Right. That’s you,” Gabriel pointed out meekly.
“No; the FID incident commander.” The blonde fought down an eye-roll. “Sergeant Everett.”
“Elliott,” Gabriel and Raydor corrected in unison.
“Whatever. He has it.”
“Ah, no ma’am, he doesn’t.”
“He lost it?” she squawked, her eyes bugging alarmingly, ready to tear into Sharon about the incompetence of her people.
“No, he didn’t lose it,” Gabriel replied in that smooth, patient tone that made Brenda think he would’ve made an excellent elementary school teacher. “He gave it to Captain Raydor when she relieved him. She must have it with her.”
Brenda Leigh swallowed a curse. Was nothing going to go right with this investigation? “So have Reyes give another one,” she suggested facetiously, but of course Gabriel took his boss’s response at face value.
“Um, that’s sort of... illegal.”
Even if it weren’t, it would be pointless, since it would just give Reyes the opportunity to make any changes he might desire to his original version of events. And given the gaping bullet hole in Rosalie MacGuire’s stomach that she’d just been examining, Brenda suspected he just might have that desire. “Just a minute.” Muffling her phone against her scrub top, the blonde scowled at the brunette captain. “You have Officer Reyes’s statement. Gabriel and Sanchez, not to mention your Sergeant Klein, can’t question him without it,” she said tautly, the little patience she’d had left having evaporated.
Sharon blinked. “Oh,” she said after a few seconds, and Brenda could see the wheels turning in her head. “Oh, right. Oops.”
Brenda Leigh’s jaw dropped as if it had come unhinged. “‘Oops’?” she repeated incredulously. “‘Oops,’ Sharon?”
“I forgot,” she said faintly. “I was distracted.”
“From the looks of it, you’re still distracted,” the younger woman pointed out none too charitably. “Look, I know this afternoon isn’t turnin’ out exactly how you had it planned, but what’s goin’ on in your personal life really isn’t relevant at the moment. We have a dead woman right here in front of us --” Brenda punctuated the statement by gesturing emphatically at the body between them, wanting Sharon to see the form as a human being whose life had been stolen from her, whatever the circumstances of her death. “ -- And an officer of the LAPD whose career could very well be over. I can’t handle two investigations by myself, especially not with the FBI nippin’ at my heels. You need to get your head in the game, captain.”
Sharon stared blankly at Brenda and, for a brief moment, Brenda wondered if she’d even been listening. And then, for just a split second, something odd happened. Sharon’s mouth tightened, her eyes took on a glassy sheen, and she looked as if she were going to burst into tears. Then her eyes cleared and the captain gave a terse nod and pulled off her gloves with a snap. “My apologies, Chief. I wasn’t aware that my performance was failing to live up to your expectations.” She cleared her throat, throwing a quick glance at Morales. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to arrange a ride to the hospital and personally deliver this statement.”
Brenda refrained from rolling her eyes at Sharon’s sarcastic drawl. “Maybe, if it’s not too much of an imposition, you can handle the interview yourself?”
“Whatever you say, Chief Johnson.”
Before Brenda could say anything else, the older woman shoved open the door and disappeared. Brenda could hear the slam of the trash bin in the hall, into which the captain had tossed her smock. She sighed, turning back to Rosalie’s body. She eyed a tattoo, some sort of Chinese symbol, on the woman’s ankle and mumbled, “I hate havin’ to be the bad guy.”
“Could’ve fooled me,” Morales quipped, snapping several photos of the gunshot wounds.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Brenda replied, perching her hands on her hips. Was this ‘gang up on Brenda day’? Had she missed the memo?
“It means, Chief, that you seem to enjoy being unnecessarily harsh with people.”
The deputy chief gawked. “I do not! And I wasn’t being harsh. I was doin’ my job, which is what she should’ve been doin’ too.”
The doctor rolled his eyes. “You called her in, didn’t you?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but yes. She’s the most qualified person in her division. I needed her expertise.”
“Is that supposed to be some sort of compliment? Did it not occur to you that she might have an actual reason for not working today?”
“Her son’s birthday. I heard. It’s just a birthday. They can celebrate tonight, just like everyone else in this line of work who has kids.”
Morales laughed incredulously. “Honestly...she calls you her friend?”
“I am her friend,” she shot back, a touch more hostile than she originally intended.
“Then act like it, Chief. She could use one today, not a boss riding her ass. Considering what she’s going through with her daughter, you could give her a break.”
Brenda opened her mouth to respond but stopped herself, confused. “What’re you talkin’ about? Today is her son’s birthday. What does that have to do with...” She trailed off helplessly, suddenly embarrassed by Morales’s superior knowledge of Sharon’s personal life as she realized she couldn’t even remember Sharon’s daughter’s name. She’d only heard the captain mention it once, after all, although she talked about Daniel frequently.
The doctor’s attention was finally diverted from Rosalie’s body. He lowered the camera to his side and stared at the chief with obvious surprise. “Vivien,” he supplied. “It’s her birthday as well, you know. That typically happens in the case of twins.”
Swallowing, Brenda looked back at the Chinese symbol. It made about as much sense to her as this conversation. “Captain Raydor has twins?” she asked in a small voice.
“You’re actually serious, aren’t you?” Morales had begun to look sympathetic, almost pitying, as he surveyed the chief. “She hasn’t told you anything.”
That stung more than Brenda wanted to admit, especially since Sharon obviously had told Morales... whatever there was to tell. “We haven’t discussed any situation with her daughter,” she replied stiffly, with dignity.
“She --” He stopped, crossed his arms, and leaned back against the door of one of the morgue’s refrigerated compartments. When he spoke again, his tone was formal. “Chief Johnson, I’m sure Captain Raydor would have let you know about the situation with Vivien if she felt that it was affecting her work in any way.”
“No.” Surprising herself, Brenda leaned over and grabbed the man’s forearm. “No, don’t do that. Whatever you think, Sharon is my friend. What’s goin’ on?”
“Look...if she didn’t tell you, maybe it’s not my place.”
“If you’re gonna be like that, I can play the boss card. It is affectin’ her work.”
“I know this may be difficult for you to grasp, Chief, but I don’t work for you. I work for the county. You can’t order me to tell you anything.”
Brenda twisted her mouth and bit the inside of her cheek, staring down at his shoes. “I’m not...orderin’ you to do anythin’. I obviously screwed up. I’m askin’ as her friend for you to please tell me what’s goin’ on.”
Morales sighed, looking at Brenda with a hopeless expression on his face. Brenda met his gaze, staring him down until he slumped his shoulders in submission. “Vivien’s in the Air Force.”
“Okay.” The blonde quirked an eyebrow. “What aren’t you tellin’ me?”
“Chief--”
“Doctor.”
He looked away from her and quietly said, “She’s M.I.A.”
Brenda stared. Missing in action. The words sent a chill down her spine. She was silent for several beats, and then her questions rushed out, tumbling over one another to pass her lips. “What? She -- for how long? Where was she stationed? What happened?”
The doctor held up his hands and pushed himself off the cabinet, taking up his camera to photograph the scratches on the victim’s head. “That’s all you need to know, Chief. If I were you, I wouldn’t push this with her. She doesn’t like to talk about it. Surely even you can understand that?”
“Of course,” Brenda replied, bristling at his tone. “I...thank you, Doctor.” She licked her lips and looked back down at Rosalie. The young woman was nearly twenty-six, according to the driver’s license that had been recovered at the scene. Had seeing her lifeless body reminded Sharon of her own daughter? She had a hundred questions and knew that she wouldn’t get anything else out of the pathologist. “Right. Can you do a tox screen on the body? I’d like to know if she was usin’ whatever she was dealin’.”
“Will do.”
Brenda nodded her thanks and drifted out into the hall. The trash can was partially open, the captain’s scrub top hanging over the side.
Brenda knew that she was somewhat single-minded when it came to her job, but she marveled at her blatant inability to see that Sharon, her friend, had been dealing with something greater than the job today. It stung to know that the other woman had refrained from confiding in her. What else had Sharon been hiding? What sort of friend was Brenda if she couldn’t be trusted with such a huge part of her life?
Pushing the disquieting thoughts aside, Brenda resolved to do what she did best: get to the bottom of things. She took the elevator straight up to Major Crimes, barely pausing to say a word to the scattered members of her team, and closed herself into her office. She sat down at her desk, grabbed a Snickers, jostled the mouse to wake her sleeping computer, and a few quick keystrokes later, she was viewing the personnel file of one Sharon Raydor.
As a deputy chief, Brenda had access to the jackets of all lower ranking officers -- a privilege she had never abused until now, when it was really necessary. And that wasn’t abuse at all, she reasoned. She skipped over Sharon’s background details, because reading all that would be like cheating on a friendship test, and zeroed in on a single item: the full names of Sharon’s children. Daniel Edward Tate and Vivien Raydor Tate. (Interesting that only one of the twins had Sharon’s surname as a middle name, Brenda thought briefly as she picked up her cell phone and scrolled through her contacts. There had to be a story there. She imagined Sharon and her faceless ex-husband battling it out in the delivery room.)
Deputy Chief Johnson still knew people at the CIA, and the people at the CIA knew everyone, so less than ten minutes later she was reading First Lieutenant Vivien R. Tate’s official air force service record, from graduating second in her class at Colorado Springs to the recon mission she’d been flying a brief two and a half years later over the foothills of Afghanistan in a remote, Taliban-heavy region abutting neighboring Pakistan, when her plane had been shot down. And then... well, and then nothing, as far as the U.S. Air Force was concerned.
Brenda stared at the blinking cursor amid the words on her screen in clear black and white until her eyes glazed over. Nine months; Vivien had been shot down nine months ago. She tried to think back, to remember if she had seen Sharon around that time, if the captain had behaved differently, if she had noticed anything at all out of the ordinary about the other woman. But Brenda’s mind furnished only precise details of the cases she’d been working early in the summer, of the frenzied activity surrounding the civil suit that had threatened her and the entire department. She heard Sharon’s Captain Raydor voice, speaking carefully and with unwonted gentleness, insisting, “Chief, hire an attorney.” That was, she realized, around the time she’d become aware that the clever, rule-bound, green-eyed captain wasn’t just going through the motions of her job, but was actually concerned about her. Under the circumstances, how in the world had Sharon had any compassion left to spare for Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson, a perpetual thorn in her side, who had made her own bed and, by all rights, should have been forced to lie in it?
Without thinking it through, Brenda dialed Sharon’s cell number. The call went straight to voicemail, which made perfect sense if Sharon was at the hospital with Reyes and co. She was just the type to actually turn her phone off. Brenda sighed, slightly relieved. What on earth would she have said? “Hey, Sharon, Dr. Morales has just told me how your daughter’s probably dead and today’s her birthday, so why don’t you just go on home now? Sorry about the misunderstanding!” Hardly.
A sharp rap sounded on her office door and Brenda looked up as Flynn stuck his head in. “Chief, no word yet on our first shooter, but Provenza and Tao are still canvassing. The good news is that Monica Stern, the other woman with Rosalie MacGuire this morning, is in interview two.”
The blonde nodded quickly. “Thank you, lieutenant. I needed some good news.” She removed her reading glasses, forcing her thoughts back to the case at hand. “I’ll be right there. It’ll do her good to make her wait for a few minutes.” A young woman was dead, and it was Brenda’s job to find out exactly why; she owed it to the victim to be fully present in the moment.
Doing whatever she could to make up to Sharon for this awful day would have to wait until later.
***
Authors: i-must-go-first & UbiquitousMixie
Fandom: Brenda/Sharon, The Closer
Rating: PG-13 (Overall M)
Word Count: 6379
Disclaimer: Not ours. Please don’t sue.
Summary: A late-night craving and a coincidental meeting lead a certain deputy chief to discover that there’s much more to the inimitable Captain Raydor than meets the eye, and to realize that her mama was right: sometimes all a single woman really needs is a good girlfriend.
Authors’ Note: We wanted to thank all of you for the wonderful comments you’ve been leaving. Your kind words mean so much to both of us. As your reward, we present to you the big revelation of Sharon’s secret and a heaping helping of angst. Let us know what you think! Enjoy!
-
Brenda Leigh Johnson was not a sports fan and, after having grown up with three brothers, had learned to tune out all extraneous noise about batting averages and fouls and touchdowns. Nevertheless, it did not take an expert to know that there were far too many teams on the basketball court that morning, all clamoring to get ahead of the game. The crime scene was noisier than usual, swarming with members of Major Crimes, FID, the FBI, paramedics, coroners, and several other black and whites.
With practiced ease, Brenda blocked them all from her peripheral vision and focused instead on the reason why this circus had convened in the first place: the lifeless body at her feet. When Brenda crouched down and gazed into the empty face of Rosalie MacGuire, everything else bled away, leaving her momentarily alone with the victim. Her head was cleared of the frustration of the cluttered crime scene and her worries about the delivery of her sofa faded away, leaving her with enough single-minded clarity to wonder what on earth had happened to lead to this woman being shot twice.
A silently efficient coroner’s assistant turned Rosalie onto her side so the deputy chief could survey both bullet wounds: one had entered her chest just above her left breast, while the other had pierced her back in the center of her abdomen. Brenda frowned. Which shot had come first? Had she been shot by one individual, giving her time to turn around before she was shot again? Had it been Officer Reyes, who had arrived at the scene to respond to a call of suspicious behavior? Or had it been Rosalie’s partner or, worse, someone else altogether?
From what she had gathered from Sergeant Gabriel and Lieutenant Provenza, Officer Reyes had interrupted a drug deal and was claiming that there had been another woman and a man with Rosalie when shots were fired. He got off three rounds before a bullet grazed his shoulder, Rosalie was hit, and the other two suspects fled the scene.
Brenda let out an exasperated sigh, her mind swarming with questions about the gaping holes in the details of the officer’s account of the incident. Though she was inclined to trust one of her boys in blue, she could not shake the hunch that there was more going on than she had been told. Who sold drugs in the middle of an open basketball court in the middle of the morning? And, given that the drugs and money were missing, had Rosalie been selling or buying, or just in the wrong place at the wrong time?
The blonde pursed her lips, eyeing the wounded officer where he sat beside the ambulance, a medic pressing fresh gauze to his injury. She had yet to personally speak to Reyes, having spent her short time at the crime scene being apprised of the details by Gabriel while simultaneously doing her best to thwart the intrusive FBI.
It didn’t help that Special Agent Fritz Howard was still the LAPD’s liaison, nor did it help that FID had plastered the crime scene with its offending red tape. It wasn’t so bad that she had to deal with Fritz (even though she couldn’t look at him without wanting to ask how Ms. Orange Toothbrush was doing); the worst part was that Captain Raydor was nowhere to be found.
Though Brenda admittedly preferred Sharon Raydor to Captain Raydor, the blonde just knew that this whole ordeal would be so much more orderly and contained if she were there with her little notepad and superior know-it-all attitude. Sergeant Elliott was probably a perfectly fine detective, but just seeing him blocking all access to the injured officer made Brenda want to stomp her foot and order him to leave.
Lieutenant Provenza peered down at the woman’s body. “Sergeant Dingbat over there is insisting that we allow Officer Reyes to go to the hospital before we interview him.”
“Absolutely not,” Brenda said, allowing Provenza to help her to her feet. “Not till I talk to him.” She glanced over at Fritz, who was now edging his way closer to where she needed to be. Elliott, to her dismay, seemed more than willing to cooperate with the FBI.
Brenda narrowed her eyes in their direction. “Where on earth is Captain Raydor?!”
“Not here,” Provenza replied helpfully, earning himself a baleful glare from his superior officer. “The Wicked Witch has flown away.”
Brenda blew an errant strand of hair from her face, settling her lips into a frown. “That’s extremely unhelpful,” she snapped. She took a deep breath, and then another. “I wanna know everything there is to know about this girl and Officer Reyes, Lieutenant.”
“Already on it.”
Brenda nodded and sidled up alongside Lieutenant Tao, who was helpfully directing SID in cataloguing three of the recovered casings. “Have you gotten anything from FID?”
“Nothing solid, Chief,” he replied sympathetically. He informed her of the sweep they were doing for the unaccounted-for bullet casings and the perimeter search that was being conducted for the missing suspects, adding that Detective Sanchez was following up with area hospitals and clinics. Gabriel was following up on the 911 call, directing his search efforts at the potential witnesses.
Almost everyone was where they needed to be, working diligently to fit together the pieces of a mismatched puzzle. And yet the scene was pandemonium, because what should have been a well-oiled machine was instead three separate entities working against each other for their own benefit. Brenda knew, just knew, that FID would be on her side if Raydor was where she needed her to be. Was the older woman too busy poking her nose into other people’s business to attend to her own?
She nodded again as Tao concluded his report, casting another glance in the direction of the ambulance, where the two men were closely huddled around the officer. “Oh, for heaven’s sake...this is ridiculous!” she exclaimed, drawing curious stares from Tao and Flynn. She reached into her purse and pulled out her cell phone, dialing the number she’d come to know by heart.
The phone rang twice before Brenda heard the captain’s clipped, short tone. “Raydor.”
“Captain, why are you not at this crime scene?”
There was a brief pause. “Because, Chief, I requested the day off several months ago through the proper channels.”
“Whatever it is that you’re doin’, I need you to wrap it up and get here. I’ll have Lieutenant Tao text you the address.”
“With all due respect, Chief Johnson, my division is perfectly capable of handling this in my absence.”
Had Brenda been listening, she would have caught the despondent lilt to the other woman’s voice. However, if she had been listening, she wouldn’t have been Brenda. “That wasn’t a suggestion, Captain Raydor.”
A lengthy silence during which Brenda’s impatience mounted ensued, and then: “Yes, Chief.”
Brenda wouldn’t acknowledge that she’d worked herself into a tizzy by the time the black Accura pulled up forty minutes later, but she did acknowledge that that was what her daddy would’ve called it. She glimpsed Raydor -- that was how she was thinking of her, completely in work mode, as Captain Raydor -- in the passenger seat and felt a twinge of relief mingle with the irritation that was coursing through her body.
The twinge disappeared as the other woman remained in the passenger seat, talking with the driver, to whom the deputy chief paid no attention. Rolling her eyes, she ducked under the dual layers of red and yellow crime scene tape and marched over to the vehicle. She yanked the door open and a startled Raydor turned to her, green eyes widening momentarily.
“Well, captain, it certainly took you long enough. You may not have noticed, but this is an active crime scene, and several dozen people are waitin’ for you to do your job.”
Brenda finally looked at the driver of the car, her gaze magnetized to him by the glare she felt boring into her. That glare was familiar, and it would eventually occur to the blonde that she was making a lacklustre first impression on Sharon’s son.
Raydor got out of the car without a word, her own gaze frigid.
“Call me when they release you, Mom,” called the young man, confirming Brenda’s suspicions. “If it’s not too late, I’ll bring Cee over to the house.”
The captain nodded stiffly, already dragging her attention to the activity before her. “Chief,” she began in the cool, dispassionate tone that Brenda Leigh hadn’t heard in several weeks, “why is the ambulance still here? Presumably since the paramedics were called, Officer Reyes is in need of medical attention.”
“If I let that ambulance leave, between your people and the FBI I’ll have to wait through a month of Sundays to ask Reyes any questions that matter.”
Sharon didn’t blink or bother reacting to the implication that the questions asked in the course of an FID investigation didn’t matter. “FID will finish with the officer in question in a timely manner, since we’ve entered a seventy-two-hour reporting cycle. Obviously I have no control over the FBI -- but then, neither do you.” Brenda’s lips pressed into a grim line as that little jab hit home. “However, in any case, if Reyes’s condition is such that it warrants emergency care, any information that could be extracted from him now could hardly be relied upon in court.”
Brenda barely refrained from an eye-roll. “I’m quite aware of that, captain, but some straight answers, or even some crooked ones, would go a long way toward pointing my investigation in the right direction.” That added emphasis on Raydor’s rank truly hadn’t been intentional, but for heaven’s sake, the woman was acting like a bigger pain in the rear than her sergeant over there. “He has a mild concussion and a bullet grazed his arm,” the blonde added. “It’s not like he’s bleedin’ out from a severed limb.”
Sharon was already walking away, striding steadily toward Fritz, the paramedics, and Elliott. Brenda watched as the older woman spoke to her sergeant, conferred briefly with Fritz, and finally said something to the paramedics. They nodded and began to make unmistakable preparations to leave. Brenda’s jaw dropped in indignation and she set out at an undignified trot.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” she cried, signalling imperatively at the paramedics to stop. “What is goin’ on here, captain?” The emphasis was intentional that time. “Surely you didn’t just countermand an order given by a higher-rankin’ officer.”
Sharon remained as indefatigably calm as ever, but Brenda Leigh noted the minute tightening of the lines bracketing her mouth. She looked tired, the deputy chief involuntarily observed. Tired and preoccupied. “I merely suggested that Officer Reyes be taken to the hospital --” She didn’t pause, only raising her voice to remain audible when the blonde began to protest. “ -- accompanied by one of my people and one of yours, if both you and Agent Howard are amenable to that.”
“Oh.” Brenda Leigh stopped short, the wind taken out of her sails, as she noticed that Provenza was already in the ambulance with Reyes. “All right. I suppose,” she conceded grudgingly, and Fritz gave a sharp nod. She found herself hoping that he had indeed put in for that transfer back East that he’d mentioned to Willie Rae, and that it would come through soon.
Sharon pounded her fist twice against the back of the ambulance, waving the medics off. As they pulled away and turned onto the pothole-filled road, the captain shoved her hands into the pockets of the oversized cardigan she wore in lieu of her usual blazer and turned back to the separated couple. Finding it difficult to look the deputy chief in the face, she focused her attention on Agent Howard. “What is the FBI’s interest in this case?”
Fritz’s eyebrows twitched momentarily, as if he wanted to raise them and share an incredulous look with his wife before remembering that they were no longer on the same side. Sharon watched as he schooled his features and said, “We believe the victim has connections to a drug cartel we’ve been monitoring. It’s possible that her partner, whom we have yet to identify by name, may have intel that could lead to a significant bust.”
Sharon nodded, curling her hands into fists within her pockets. “I see. And the dealer?”
“May be unrelated,” Brenda cut in quickly.
“Or may not be,” Fritz countered.
Brenda glared at him. “Well, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see then, since I wasn’t given the chance to properly interview Officer Reyes.”
Fritz took a bracing breath. “He was the responding officer, Brenda. He didn’t have time for a chat with the suspects before the shooting began. You wouldn’t have gotten anything useful from him.”
“He may end up forgettin’ vital details between now and when I get to talk to him!” She huffed, pointing toward the blood spatter on the asphalt where Rosalie had lain. “For all we know, he may have been involved in this mess somehow!”
“Now you think he’s--what? A cop by day, a drug dealer by night?” Fritz retorted.
“Last I checked, it was mornin’.”
“That’s enough,” Sharon spat, rubbing her throbbing temple while she stared at the both of them. Her green eyes offered no patience for their bickering. “Let’s save the conspiracy theories for later and focus on the facts, shall we? Agent Howard, I suggest you follow up on your drug ring while Chief Johnson and I go to the hospital.”
“Actually, captain, I don’t relish the idea of sittin’ in a waiting room while our cop gets stitches. We should be at the morgue, where we can actually do somethin’ useful.” Brenda couldn’t hold back the superiority in her tone, feeling the need to assert her own authority over a case which she begrudgingly had to share.
Fritz set his jaw firmly and simply nodded. “I’ll follow up with your teams later,” he said, finally backing away.
“No need to rush,” Brenda muttered under her breath. She looked at Sharon, hoping to catch a sympathetic eye, and saw that the captain was miles away. Her nostrils flared. It was one thing not to have the undivided attention of her friend, but it was quite another not to have the attention of her captain. “I s’pose you’ll be needing a ride to the morgue?”
Sharon turned back to Brenda. “Obviously,” she drawled.
As they walked to Brenda’s car, the deputy chief realized she didn’t hear the ubiquitous clack of stiletto heels she’d come to associate with Captain Raydor. She surreptitiously glanced down at the other woman’s feet and glimpsed purple ballet flats beneath the cuffs of slim-fitting black denim.
The captain remained silent as they got into the car and fastened their seatbelts, and Brenda pointed them toward police headquarters, the one place in L.A. she could be reliably counted upon to find under any circumstances, from anywhere. After several minutes the stilted silence began to make Brenda uncomfortable, and since she didn’t have a ding-dong handy, she resorted to making conversation.
“So you were spendin’ the day with your son?” she began brightly. Sharon hummed, still gazing out the passenger-side window at a thoroughly uninteresting stream of traffic. “Special occasion?”
Sharon was silent for long enough that Brenda thought the older woman intended to ignore her; and then she said, so quietly that the sound of her voice was almost drowned out by the sound of wheels spinning on asphalt, “It’s his birthday.”
“Well, it’s nice that he wants to spend it with his mama. How old did you say he is?”
“Twenty-five,” Raydor replied in that curiously toneless way she had, not even bothering to look over at Brenda. “Th -- He is twenty-five.”
So much for conversation, the blonde thought. Very plainly, her passenger was Captain Raydor, not her friend Sharon. Was the other woman always such a bitch when her plans were interrupted by an investigation? She was a career police officer, for heaven’s sake. This could hardly be the first time it had happened. And her son was turning twenty-five, not five, so it was highly unlikely that Daniel’s balloons were popping and his ice cream cake melting while he wondered why mommy had to work. They could reschedule a lunch or a dinner or whatever it was you did with your adult son to celebrate his birthday.
And if she was totally honest with herself, there was a little part of Brenda that was offended by Sharon’s demeanor and her apparent lack of interest in the death of Rosalie MacGuire. Yes, the deputy chief had issued an order to the captain, but underneath the ranks and protocols, hadn’t the dark-haired woman heard Brenda Leigh asking her friend Sharon for a favor, for something that mattered?
Though Brenda was loth to admit it to herself, she briefly considered the possibility that perhaps Sharon really didn’t care all that much about the victims in her cases. Was it all just a job to her? Senseless deaths, especially of young women and children, always shook the deputy chief down to her very core. Had she misjudged Sharon?
No, she told herself. She recalled how deeply moved Sharon had been by Allie Moore and the victims of other shared cases. Sharon did care as much as Brenda did, but it was obvious that Captain Raydor had left her empathy at home with her stilettos.
As Brenda pulled her car into the parking garage that was woefully far from the building, she found herself feeling undeniably lonely. It didn’t matter that Raydor was sitting right beside her; she had hoped to have an ally during this case to help her muddle through the chaos of different departments stepping on everyone’s toes. She had also hoped, perhaps a little selfishly, to have someone on her side in her dealings with Fritz. Now that the love between them had been divvied up along with their possessions, only detached antagonism remained. Had it really been that hard for Captain Raydor to have her back?
She parked in her designated space and had barely cut the ignition before Sharon was whipping off her seatbelt and getting out of the car.
Brenda nearly growled in frustration. That woman was going to drive her straight to the loony bin.
“Where’s the fire?” Brenda called out, slamming her door shut as she hustled to catch up with the captain.
“I’d rather not waste time, Chief. I’d prefer not to be here all day.”
Brenda watched as the older woman tucked her hands once more into her pockets. “I don’t wanna be here all day either... There’s the rub, I guess, when you sign your life away to the LAPD.”
“I give more of myself to this career than most people, Chief,” Sharon said, her hair blowing across her face as she strolled briskly down the sidewalk. She shook her head, sending her hair back over her shoulder. “I don’t believe I was reaching for the stars by expecting one personal day.”
Brenda sighed. “I needed you here,” she explained, as if it were as simple as that. “I’m sorry that it just happened to be on your day off. I’ll tell the victim that she should’ve died tomorrow instead.”
Sharon pursed her lips, and Brenda could tell that she was trying to suppress whatever comeback had popped into her head. She wanted to know what was so pressing about this one day that had her all in a tizzy, but they were entering the building and stalking toward an elevator and Brenda knew that the other woman wouldn’t give her a proper response anyway. They rode in silence until they reached their floor, where they slipped into blue smocks.
Sharon tugged the door open, Brenda close behind. The smaller woman couldn’t help but shudder; no matter how many times she’d been in this morgue, she could never quite get used to the cold, sterile scent of death.
Dr. Morales glanced up as they entered, his forehead creasing beneath his cap. “Sharon? What are you doing here today?”
Sharon simply glared in response.
Oh, great, Brenda thought, curling her fingers into her palms. Of course Sharon’s good buddy Morales would react as if Brenda were the Wicked Witch of the South. Heaven forbid that she ask a fellow officer to interrupt her leisure time in order to do her job.
There were some pretty obvious parallels to be drawn there between the deputy chief’s current situation and the reception the head of FID faced on a daily basis, but Brenda was in no mood to draw them. She watched from the corner of her eye as the captain snapped on a pair of latex gloves. The improbably attractive pathologist was eying the older woman with disproportionate concern, which only sparked the chief’s ire. It wasn’t as if Brenda Leigh had just shot Sharon’s dog.
The blonde forced herself to relax her fingers and asked, “So, COD?”
Morales blinked balefully and looked down at the sheet-draped form on the stainless-steel table. “I haven’t had time to perform a complete autopsy yet, Chief Johnson. But in a pinch I’d go with the two large-caliber bullet holes in the victim’s chest and torso.”
Mocha-colored eyes narrowed. Brenda found herself wishing she’d brought one of her boys along. She didn’t like this feeling of being outnumbered, ganged up on. What was this, high school? “Specifically which one was the kill shot, doctor?”
Getting down to business, Morales turned the sheet back to reveal the young woman’s pale corpse, its flesh tinged the unnatural blue and pale green that spoke only of death. “Again, I’m not one hundred percent yet, but I think the shot to the abdomen is the one that killed her. The bullet ripped through a portion of her large intestine and her spleen. She would’ve bled out very quickly.”
“Crime scene was a blood bath,” Brenda agreed briefly. “Can you tell which was fired first?”
“Again, I can’t be --”
Uncharacteristically, Sharon interrupted. “Educated guess,” she muttered flatly, as if she were too tired to give her voice any inflection.
“From the trajectory of the entry wounds, she was shot to the upper left quadrant of the chest --” Brenda barely contained a wince as the young doctor produced a pair of the slender metal rods all pathologists used to measure the trajectory of gunshot wounds, the ones that had seriously dampened the blonde’s fondness for anything cooked on a skewer, and inserted one into the victim’s chest as if she were a giant hunk of meat. “It winged her collarbone, but missed any vital organs, so it wouldn’t have been fatal. You can see how the force of the shot spun her around as she began to fall, which is why the shot to her back looks as if it was fired from a slightly higher angle and more to the left.”
“So there were definitely two shooters. Not only were they standing roughly opposite one another, but these wounds were caused by different caliber bullets, right?” Morales nodded, and Captain Raydor added, “Which corroborates the statement Officer Reyes made at the scene.”
“Who fired which shot?” the chief asked quickly, something still niggling at her consciousness.
Morales touched Rosalie’s abdomen with a gloved index finger. “I’ve already sent the bullets to ballistics for confirmation, but I can tell you now that this one matches a round fired from a standard-issue service weapon.”
Brenda Leigh’s eyes narrowed further. “So Officer Reyes fired the kill shot, and he did it after Rosalie had already been shot by our other unidentified assailant?”
“Shit,” Sharon grumbled, reaching up to rub at the bridge of her nose, and Brenda whipped around to eye her in surprise.
“Is that your professional opinion?” the deputy chief shot back, but her attempt at humor made no impression.
Before anyone could say anything else, Brenda’s phone vibrated. She turned away slightly to answer.
“Chief,” said Gabriel, “Officer Reyes has been cleared to talk to us, but we have a small problem. We can’t find the statement he gave initially at the scene.”
“What do you mean, you can’t find it?” Brenda asked sharply, turning back toward an expectant Raydor and arching her eyebrows.
“Sergeant Klein from FID is here at the hospital with Julio and me, but he doesn’t have it --”
“No, he wouldn’t,” the deputy chief replied with studied patience. “The incident commander should have it.”
“Right. That’s you,” Gabriel pointed out meekly.
“No; the FID incident commander.” The blonde fought down an eye-roll. “Sergeant Everett.”
“Elliott,” Gabriel and Raydor corrected in unison.
“Whatever. He has it.”
“Ah, no ma’am, he doesn’t.”
“He lost it?” she squawked, her eyes bugging alarmingly, ready to tear into Sharon about the incompetence of her people.
“No, he didn’t lose it,” Gabriel replied in that smooth, patient tone that made Brenda think he would’ve made an excellent elementary school teacher. “He gave it to Captain Raydor when she relieved him. She must have it with her.”
Brenda Leigh swallowed a curse. Was nothing going to go right with this investigation? “So have Reyes give another one,” she suggested facetiously, but of course Gabriel took his boss’s response at face value.
“Um, that’s sort of... illegal.”
Even if it weren’t, it would be pointless, since it would just give Reyes the opportunity to make any changes he might desire to his original version of events. And given the gaping bullet hole in Rosalie MacGuire’s stomach that she’d just been examining, Brenda suspected he just might have that desire. “Just a minute.” Muffling her phone against her scrub top, the blonde scowled at the brunette captain. “You have Officer Reyes’s statement. Gabriel and Sanchez, not to mention your Sergeant Klein, can’t question him without it,” she said tautly, the little patience she’d had left having evaporated.
Sharon blinked. “Oh,” she said after a few seconds, and Brenda could see the wheels turning in her head. “Oh, right. Oops.”
Brenda Leigh’s jaw dropped as if it had come unhinged. “‘Oops’?” she repeated incredulously. “‘Oops,’ Sharon?”
“I forgot,” she said faintly. “I was distracted.”
“From the looks of it, you’re still distracted,” the younger woman pointed out none too charitably. “Look, I know this afternoon isn’t turnin’ out exactly how you had it planned, but what’s goin’ on in your personal life really isn’t relevant at the moment. We have a dead woman right here in front of us --” Brenda punctuated the statement by gesturing emphatically at the body between them, wanting Sharon to see the form as a human being whose life had been stolen from her, whatever the circumstances of her death. “ -- And an officer of the LAPD whose career could very well be over. I can’t handle two investigations by myself, especially not with the FBI nippin’ at my heels. You need to get your head in the game, captain.”
Sharon stared blankly at Brenda and, for a brief moment, Brenda wondered if she’d even been listening. And then, for just a split second, something odd happened. Sharon’s mouth tightened, her eyes took on a glassy sheen, and she looked as if she were going to burst into tears. Then her eyes cleared and the captain gave a terse nod and pulled off her gloves with a snap. “My apologies, Chief. I wasn’t aware that my performance was failing to live up to your expectations.” She cleared her throat, throwing a quick glance at Morales. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to arrange a ride to the hospital and personally deliver this statement.”
Brenda refrained from rolling her eyes at Sharon’s sarcastic drawl. “Maybe, if it’s not too much of an imposition, you can handle the interview yourself?”
“Whatever you say, Chief Johnson.”
Before Brenda could say anything else, the older woman shoved open the door and disappeared. Brenda could hear the slam of the trash bin in the hall, into which the captain had tossed her smock. She sighed, turning back to Rosalie’s body. She eyed a tattoo, some sort of Chinese symbol, on the woman’s ankle and mumbled, “I hate havin’ to be the bad guy.”
“Could’ve fooled me,” Morales quipped, snapping several photos of the gunshot wounds.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Brenda replied, perching her hands on her hips. Was this ‘gang up on Brenda day’? Had she missed the memo?
“It means, Chief, that you seem to enjoy being unnecessarily harsh with people.”
The deputy chief gawked. “I do not! And I wasn’t being harsh. I was doin’ my job, which is what she should’ve been doin’ too.”
The doctor rolled his eyes. “You called her in, didn’t you?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but yes. She’s the most qualified person in her division. I needed her expertise.”
“Is that supposed to be some sort of compliment? Did it not occur to you that she might have an actual reason for not working today?”
“Her son’s birthday. I heard. It’s just a birthday. They can celebrate tonight, just like everyone else in this line of work who has kids.”
Morales laughed incredulously. “Honestly...she calls you her friend?”
“I am her friend,” she shot back, a touch more hostile than she originally intended.
“Then act like it, Chief. She could use one today, not a boss riding her ass. Considering what she’s going through with her daughter, you could give her a break.”
Brenda opened her mouth to respond but stopped herself, confused. “What’re you talkin’ about? Today is her son’s birthday. What does that have to do with...” She trailed off helplessly, suddenly embarrassed by Morales’s superior knowledge of Sharon’s personal life as she realized she couldn’t even remember Sharon’s daughter’s name. She’d only heard the captain mention it once, after all, although she talked about Daniel frequently.
The doctor’s attention was finally diverted from Rosalie’s body. He lowered the camera to his side and stared at the chief with obvious surprise. “Vivien,” he supplied. “It’s her birthday as well, you know. That typically happens in the case of twins.”
Swallowing, Brenda looked back at the Chinese symbol. It made about as much sense to her as this conversation. “Captain Raydor has twins?” she asked in a small voice.
“You’re actually serious, aren’t you?” Morales had begun to look sympathetic, almost pitying, as he surveyed the chief. “She hasn’t told you anything.”
That stung more than Brenda wanted to admit, especially since Sharon obviously had told Morales... whatever there was to tell. “We haven’t discussed any situation with her daughter,” she replied stiffly, with dignity.
“She --” He stopped, crossed his arms, and leaned back against the door of one of the morgue’s refrigerated compartments. When he spoke again, his tone was formal. “Chief Johnson, I’m sure Captain Raydor would have let you know about the situation with Vivien if she felt that it was affecting her work in any way.”
“No.” Surprising herself, Brenda leaned over and grabbed the man’s forearm. “No, don’t do that. Whatever you think, Sharon is my friend. What’s goin’ on?”
“Look...if she didn’t tell you, maybe it’s not my place.”
“If you’re gonna be like that, I can play the boss card. It is affectin’ her work.”
“I know this may be difficult for you to grasp, Chief, but I don’t work for you. I work for the county. You can’t order me to tell you anything.”
Brenda twisted her mouth and bit the inside of her cheek, staring down at his shoes. “I’m not...orderin’ you to do anythin’. I obviously screwed up. I’m askin’ as her friend for you to please tell me what’s goin’ on.”
Morales sighed, looking at Brenda with a hopeless expression on his face. Brenda met his gaze, staring him down until he slumped his shoulders in submission. “Vivien’s in the Air Force.”
“Okay.” The blonde quirked an eyebrow. “What aren’t you tellin’ me?”
“Chief--”
“Doctor.”
He looked away from her and quietly said, “She’s M.I.A.”
Brenda stared. Missing in action. The words sent a chill down her spine. She was silent for several beats, and then her questions rushed out, tumbling over one another to pass her lips. “What? She -- for how long? Where was she stationed? What happened?”
The doctor held up his hands and pushed himself off the cabinet, taking up his camera to photograph the scratches on the victim’s head. “That’s all you need to know, Chief. If I were you, I wouldn’t push this with her. She doesn’t like to talk about it. Surely even you can understand that?”
“Of course,” Brenda replied, bristling at his tone. “I...thank you, Doctor.” She licked her lips and looked back down at Rosalie. The young woman was nearly twenty-six, according to the driver’s license that had been recovered at the scene. Had seeing her lifeless body reminded Sharon of her own daughter? She had a hundred questions and knew that she wouldn’t get anything else out of the pathologist. “Right. Can you do a tox screen on the body? I’d like to know if she was usin’ whatever she was dealin’.”
“Will do.”
Brenda nodded her thanks and drifted out into the hall. The trash can was partially open, the captain’s scrub top hanging over the side.
Brenda knew that she was somewhat single-minded when it came to her job, but she marveled at her blatant inability to see that Sharon, her friend, had been dealing with something greater than the job today. It stung to know that the other woman had refrained from confiding in her. What else had Sharon been hiding? What sort of friend was Brenda if she couldn’t be trusted with such a huge part of her life?
Pushing the disquieting thoughts aside, Brenda resolved to do what she did best: get to the bottom of things. She took the elevator straight up to Major Crimes, barely pausing to say a word to the scattered members of her team, and closed herself into her office. She sat down at her desk, grabbed a Snickers, jostled the mouse to wake her sleeping computer, and a few quick keystrokes later, she was viewing the personnel file of one Sharon Raydor.
As a deputy chief, Brenda had access to the jackets of all lower ranking officers -- a privilege she had never abused until now, when it was really necessary. And that wasn’t abuse at all, she reasoned. She skipped over Sharon’s background details, because reading all that would be like cheating on a friendship test, and zeroed in on a single item: the full names of Sharon’s children. Daniel Edward Tate and Vivien Raydor Tate. (Interesting that only one of the twins had Sharon’s surname as a middle name, Brenda thought briefly as she picked up her cell phone and scrolled through her contacts. There had to be a story there. She imagined Sharon and her faceless ex-husband battling it out in the delivery room.)
Deputy Chief Johnson still knew people at the CIA, and the people at the CIA knew everyone, so less than ten minutes later she was reading First Lieutenant Vivien R. Tate’s official air force service record, from graduating second in her class at Colorado Springs to the recon mission she’d been flying a brief two and a half years later over the foothills of Afghanistan in a remote, Taliban-heavy region abutting neighboring Pakistan, when her plane had been shot down. And then... well, and then nothing, as far as the U.S. Air Force was concerned.
Brenda stared at the blinking cursor amid the words on her screen in clear black and white until her eyes glazed over. Nine months; Vivien had been shot down nine months ago. She tried to think back, to remember if she had seen Sharon around that time, if the captain had behaved differently, if she had noticed anything at all out of the ordinary about the other woman. But Brenda’s mind furnished only precise details of the cases she’d been working early in the summer, of the frenzied activity surrounding the civil suit that had threatened her and the entire department. She heard Sharon’s Captain Raydor voice, speaking carefully and with unwonted gentleness, insisting, “Chief, hire an attorney.” That was, she realized, around the time she’d become aware that the clever, rule-bound, green-eyed captain wasn’t just going through the motions of her job, but was actually concerned about her. Under the circumstances, how in the world had Sharon had any compassion left to spare for Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson, a perpetual thorn in her side, who had made her own bed and, by all rights, should have been forced to lie in it?
Without thinking it through, Brenda dialed Sharon’s cell number. The call went straight to voicemail, which made perfect sense if Sharon was at the hospital with Reyes and co. She was just the type to actually turn her phone off. Brenda sighed, slightly relieved. What on earth would she have said? “Hey, Sharon, Dr. Morales has just told me how your daughter’s probably dead and today’s her birthday, so why don’t you just go on home now? Sorry about the misunderstanding!” Hardly.
A sharp rap sounded on her office door and Brenda looked up as Flynn stuck his head in. “Chief, no word yet on our first shooter, but Provenza and Tao are still canvassing. The good news is that Monica Stern, the other woman with Rosalie MacGuire this morning, is in interview two.”
The blonde nodded quickly. “Thank you, lieutenant. I needed some good news.” She removed her reading glasses, forcing her thoughts back to the case at hand. “I’ll be right there. It’ll do her good to make her wait for a few minutes.” A young woman was dead, and it was Brenda’s job to find out exactly why; she owed it to the victim to be fully present in the moment.
Doing whatever she could to make up to Sharon for this awful day would have to wait until later.
***