Flashback, Part II

More of the sequel...for real, guys, if anyone's out there, for the love of god give me some feedback!

Novel: Sacrifice
Chapters posted: 3-4
Current novel length: 11901
Excerpt length: 4367
Editing: Again. substantially cleaned up, although strange continuity errors may still exist

CHAPTER THREE - Monday morning
Hashek’s raccoon eyes were gone when she appeared in the morning, although she still looked tired. “Don’t tell me you didn’t get any sleep after we left the scene?” I asked as she plopped into her desk chair across from me.

“I slept. Kind of. Here.” She tossed a Dunkin Donuts bag at me.

I caught it and looked inside to find an egg bagel, my favorite. “You brought me breakfast?”

She produced another bag, set it on her desk, and pulled out a danish. “I brought us breakfast.”

“Oh, really?” I asked with raised eyebrows, but I’ve never been one to look a gift bagel in the mouth, and I had my first bite in my mouth before she could answer. “And to what do I owe this honor?” I mumbled through it.

“Consider it a peace offering.” She bit into her pastry with relish. “God, I love -”

“You’re late, Hashek.”

I hastily swallowed and looked up at the lieutenant, who had just appeared next to my partner. Hashek, on the other hand, took another leisurely bite of her danish, chewed, swallowed, and then looked up at him and said calmly, “Good morning, Lieu.”

“Late call-outs do not equal late show-ups, Detective. Your partner and I were both here on time.”

Hashek sighed and set down the danish. “Would you believe my cat turned off the alarm clock?” she attempted, co-opting an excuse that I had once truthfully used when I arrived late.

Morgan crossed his arms and scowled at her. “You don’t have a cat.”

“Oh, yeah. In that case . . .” She picked up her paper bag, which I could now see wasn’t empty, and held it out to him. “Will a blueberry muffin get you off my back?”

He gave her an incredulous look. “There’s a blueberry muffin in there?”

“Yup.”

He whisked the bag out of her hands and eyed it hungrily. “Consider me off your back. Give me ten minutes to eat this, and then the two of you meet me in my office for a brainstorming session.”

“Yes, sir,” we chorused. When the lieutenant was gone, I turned back to Hashek and raised my eyebrows. “Obviously I still have a lot to learn about working with you guys.”

She stuffed the last bite of danish into her mouth and patted my hand. “Stick with me, kid, and you’ll figure it out eventually. Now, let’s go.”

* * *

Morgan was just swallowing the last bite of his muffin when Hashek pushed open the door to his office without bothering to knock. “Come on in,” he invited dryly, brushing crumbs off the front of his suit.

“Sorry,” Hashek replied distractedly, making herself at home in one of the chairs across from the lieutenant. “So . . . brainstorming?”

“Right.” He crumpled up the muffin wrapper, tossed it into the wastebasket next to his desk, and slouched back in his chair with his hands laced across his abdomen. “We didn’t get time last night to really field any ideas, so I figured we ought to do that before I send you out to chase your tails.”

“I guess that means no one was overcome with remorse and confessed in the last six hours or so?” I asked with exaggerated disappointment.

“Sorry, no. We’re going to actually have to do some work on this one. So, ideas, either of you?”

“The daughter definitely has to be talked to, like you said last night,” I offered. “She’s got something in that head of hers that could help us. I just wish I knew what it was.”

“Like whether she’s the one who plugged her mother or not?” Hashek asked with a small smile.

“Maybe.”

“Well,” Morgan interjected, “whatever it is she knows, she’s on the top of the interview list. Have you got plans to cover that?”

Hashek and I exchanged a look and then she nodded, keeping her eyes on me for agreement as she supplied an answer we hadn’t discussed. “We’ll try her this afternoon. Someone who must have gotten even less sleep than me left the witnesses’ contact information list on my desk, including hers.”

“That would have been McNeil,” Morgan supplied. “He was on patrol when the call came in. Good kid.”

“Conscientious kid,” Hashek allowed. “Whether he’s good or not remains to be seen.”

“Whatever you say.” Morgan looked at me. “What else have you got, Tony?”

I didn’t like doing things like this on the fly in a new partnership until I knew my partner and I were on the same wavelength, and Hashek and I were still working on that. I shot a glance at her and received a slight go-ahead nod. “Well, she was a defense attorney. There’s probably hundreds of convicted criminals in jails around here that had an ax to grind with her.”

“Not to mention the occasional prosecutor,” Hashek added. “Some of them don’t take losing lightly.”

Morgan, seeming to accept that, made a note on his blotter. “What about the husband?”

Hashek shrugged. “Maybe. D’Argenzio, you got a look at him, didn’t you?”

“For all of three seconds,” I replied, “and for most of those three we were both occupied with a hysterical teenager. But for what it’s worth, he didn’t seem to be giving off obvious I’m-a-psycho-killer vibes, and he did seem truly concerned about his daughter.”

“We’ll keep him on the list until we have something more concrete than a lack of ‘vibes’,” he said. “Any other possible suspects?”

Hashek and I looked at each other again, but this time we both came up blank. It was my turn to shrug.

“Ok,” he sighed, “what about useful witnesses? Other than the daughter and the husband - they’re a given.”

“People she worked with,” suggested Hashek. “Partners and paralegals from her firm.”

“Friends,” I added, “if we can find out who they are. That’ll probably have to come from the husband.”

“Makes sense.” Morgan straightened up in his chair, re-assuming an air of authority. “Either of you got a theory you want to try out while we’re here?”

We thought about that for a few seconds. “There’s always the ‘jealous husband’ theory,” I said dubiously. “Or the ‘greedy heir wants her money’ one.”

Neither of my companions looked particularly impressed by that. “Personally, I prefer the ‘prosecutor gone bad’ theory,” Hashek spoke up.

“Yeah, because you’d love to get D.A. Hansen by proxy,” Morgan reminded her with a smirk.

“Maybe.”

Not having gotten a rise out of her, he opted to get back on track: “So if you’re going to talk to the daughter this afternoon, what are you going to do this morning, before that?”

“Can the D.A.’s office get us a list of defendants she represented in, say, the past year?” I suggested. “We could mine it for suspects.”

Hashek nodded. “And a list of prosecutor’s she’s faced?”

“I’m sure they can,” Morgan said with a nod. “They’re not going to throw up roadblocks when it comes to one of their own getting killed.”

“Damn,” Hashek said suddenly, elbowing me. “We just assigned ourselves a morning of cross-referencing databases. My favorite.”

“At least you’ll suffer together,” Morgan said, grinning. “Now go on, get out. Get back to me if you find something good. In the meantime, I’ve got to call my wife.” He motioned us absently to the door, already reaching for his phone.

Hashek looked at me and rolled her eyes as we obeyed the lieutenant’s order. “And it’s not even nine o’clock,” she whispered over her shoulder to me as I opened the office door and followed her out.

“Maybe he forgot his lunch,” I replied with a shrug.
* * *

Half an hour and one cup of coffee for each of us later, the fax machine on the other side of the room began spitting out page after page of court records involving Gabrielle Young, all alphabetized by prosecutor’s last name. For the most part, Hashek and I just observed this flurry of paper, but every few minutes it would build up past the maximum depth of the tray and one of us would have to go over and retrieve the newest pile, bring it back, and dump it on top of the pages that had already taken over our desks.

After another half hour of that, the machine paused for a few seconds, seemed to gasp in exhaustion, and resumed printing, this time a list of the current status of every defendant Young had represented in the New York area in the last eighteen months. I watched the pages build up in the tray for a few minutes while Hashek studiously ignored both it and me, lest she get stuck with having to fetch this batch. Deciding to play the accommodating partner, even though we both knew it was her turn, I sighed, took another look at our adjoining desks, which were beginning to resemble a scaled-down ski slope, and stood up. “I’m pretty sure you could suffocate under all that paper,” I mumbled to myself as I headed across the room.

“Is that all of it?” she asked as I dumped my latest armload in front of her a minute later.

“I think so.” I paused. “Maybe.” I glanced over my shoulder at the fax machine, which was still at rest. “I hope so.”

“Thank god.” She picked up a handful of paper and eyed the information printed on it. “Oh, hell. Did you realize this stuff is single-spaced?”

I picked up a page of my own and examined it. “This is going to be painful.”

“Yeah,” she sighed. “Well, we may as well get started while the coffee is still hot.” She picked up her coffee mug with one hand and started shuffling through the paper pile with the other, looking for something resembling the beginning of the list.

We sat opposite each other for almost an hour, legal pads and print-outs in hand and gradually slumping lower and lower in our chairs as it became harder to read the lines of tiny print and copy down relevant information without getting dizzy. Occasionally, one of us would lower a page back to our desk and mark something with a highlighter or pencil, or drop the paper into our lap and stretch or yawn.

It was during one of her stretches that Hashek happened to look up and catch me watching her. I quickly dropped my eyes back to my pile, shuffled yet another page from lap to desk, and sighed, “Ten down, one hundred ninety-nine to go.”

She looked at me blankly for a second and then burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?” I asked when she hadn’t stopped giggling after a few seconds.

“I’d practically forgotten either of us knew how to talk,” she said with a grin. “Do you think this would go faster if we started a round of ‘ninety-nine pages of names on the wall’?”

I gave that a second of semi-serious thought, then shook my head. “But I think I’d be a lot more willing to sit here and do this if we had ninety-nine bottles of beer sitting here too.”

“Tell you what.” She straightened up in her chair and set down the pile she’d been working on. “We get through this list without killing ourselves or each other, and I’ll buy you a beer after work.” She paused. “As long as you buy me one, too.”

I contemplated the still-mountainous pile of papers in front of us. “Ok. As motivations go, I can work with that one.”

“Me too.” She sighed and glanced down at the page on the top of her pile. “We’ve been working on this for an hour already. You find anything?”

I shook my head. “Nothing worth reading twice. A bunch of parolees,” I began, flipping through my recent pages, “a couple of prosecutors that appear multiple times, and a damn long list of satisfied customers. You?”

“Same.”

“Damn.”

“Agreed. I think we’re going to really earn those beers.”

* * *

Two hours later, we were making our way to the stairwell, print-outs in hand and looking forward to lunch at the diner when Hashek, who had been focusing on reading out names from the list to see if either of us recognized them, rounded the inside of a corner next to me and promptly bounced off the guy who had been coming from the other direction.

We both grabbed for her, but he got to her first and steadied her by the elbow, giving her a slight smile. “Whoa, there. You ok, Mila?”

Very few men called my partner by her first name, and the ones I’d seen do it were almost all old enough to be her father. This guy, although he had a few silver hairs peeking through at the temples, definitely wasn’t. In fact, he probably wasn’t more than ten years older than me, if that.

So who was this guy, and how did he know her well enough to use her nickname? I stopped behind and slightly to the side of her and waited to be introduced.

Nothing.

After a few seconds of watching them watching each other, I cleared my throat. Hashek jumped guiltily and quickly pulled her arm out from under the guy’s hand. “I’m fine, Chris.”

Chris, huh? I tried to remember if I’d ever heard her mention anyone named Chris.

He let her reclaim her arm, but he braced his free hand on the wall above her head and leaned over her. “You sure? I hit you pretty hard.”

She stole a glance at me and my curious expression, flushed slightly, and managed to joke weakly to the guy, “Yeah, well, you should watch where you’re going, buddy.”

He raised his eyebrows and grinned at her. “I wasn’t the one trying to walk and read at the same time. That’s like rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time - it just can’t be done.”

She gave him a sheepish smile and tried to back up a step, but she had misjudged the distance between her back and my front, and she nearly tripped over my left foot. Keeping her eyes on the other guy and the smile on her face, she kicked me pointedly in the shin. I got the message, and I backed up.

“We’re on a new case,” she explained to him, as she took advantage of the extra room I’d allowed her to retreat another inch, then added inanely, “We’re trying to narrow down a list of names,” and showed him the pages she was still holding.

“Ah, so that’s why you had to run out on me last night,” he said with an understanding nod. “New case.”

Now I wished I hadn’t obeyed her silent order and backed away. This was the guy she’d been on a date with? I wanted a closer look! I cleared my throat again, more loudly, and stepped around Hashek to hold out a hand to the guy. “Tony D’Argenzio,” I told him, faking polite confusion. “I don’t remember meeting you at the scene last night, sorry.”

“He wasn’t th-” Hashek began, then stopped abruptly.

The other guy, having no such qualms, accepted my handshake with ease. “That’s because I wasn’t there.” He glanced at Hashek, whose lips were seamed tightly closed. “It was my night off, actually. Oh, uh,” he added when I continued to look expectant, “I guess Mila hasn’t mentioned me, huh? I’m Christian Matthews, the chief M.E.”

I suddenly flashed back to Morgan teasing Hashek about the coroner who had a crush on her. “You’re the - ow!” I broke off when Hashek, knowing where I was about to go with that, jabbed a knuckle into my back. “I mean, hi. Nice to meet you.”

“Same here,” he said with a nod, then leaned around me to look at Hashek, who trying and failing to disappear behind me. “You going to be free to finish up our date some time soon, Mila?”

She coughed, nodded, and then quickly looked away from him. “Yeah, of course. Look, we have to get going, we only have a little while to grab some lunch before we have to be back here. I’ll, uh . . . I’ll give you a call, ok?”

“Yeah, sure.” He looked confused by her hasty agreement, but accepted it and didn’t say anything else as Hashek quickly pulled me into the stairwell and started urging me down the stairs.

I went, but watched her over my shoulder while I did it. “That guy was where you were coming from last night?”

“Yes,” she snapped. “And I’ll thank you not to -”

“And he calls you ‘Mila’,” I added. “Must be serious. How long you been seeing this guy, anyway?”

She ground her teeth and glared at me. “Shut up.”

“Hey, it’s a thing about us cops - we get curious.”

“Yeah, well, go be curious about something that doesn’t involve me. Move it!” she ordered, giving me a shove that made me trip down the last two stairs.

“Geez.” I grabbed the handrail and pulled myself to a stop on the ground floor. “You could have just asked.”

She just rolled her eyes and marched past me.

CHAPTER FOUR - Monday afternoon
“A veggie burger?” I asked, staring at her, twenty minutes later.

She looking up from her menu in surprise. “You got a problem with that?”

“Well, no. It’s just . . . a veggie burger?”

She pulled a sheaf of papers out of her bag and started shuffling through them. “Well, it’s either that or have you up my ass about how badly I eat yet again.”

“I don’t -” I began defensively.

She interrupted with a slight smile on her face before I could get out more than that. “Yes, you do.”

“More power to you,” spoke up our waitress, the indomitable Moira, who had been watching our exchange with amusement. She patted me on the shoulder approvingly. “Someone’s got to get her eating better.”

“Your loyalty astounds me,” Hashek told her dryly. “Can I please just get my lunch without the lecture, for once in my life?”

I was tempted to point out that she had started the lecture, but Moira was already walking away from out table, and a comment like that needed an audience to keep it from just sounding petty. I settled for giving Hashek a smug look and then making a show of focusing on my share of the list of names.

Hashek took a sip of her soda, and for a few seconds, I could feel her watching me, obviously waiting for my next argument, but I managed to disappoint her and remain quiet.

* * *

“So,” Moira asked a few minutes later as she set down a platter holding Hashek’s veggie burger with one hand and the one holding my gyro with the other, “I guess you guys must be on a new case? I haven’t seen you in here together for weeks.” Then, without giving either of us time to answer, she seemed to suddenly remember the reason for my absence and turned to give me a probing look. “How’s your leg, Detective?”

I fought the urge to roll my eyes, and dutifully answered, “It’s fine.”

“Yeah, if you don’t count the limp,” Hashek teased, giving my ankle a gentle kick under the table.

“You keep doing that,” I grumbled at her, drawing up my leg and making a show of rubbing the spot where she’d kicked me, “and I can arrange for you to get a limp of your own so we’ll be a matching pair.”

She froze with her burger in one hand. “Yes! Right!”

Moira and I looked at each other, confused. “What, ‘right’?” I asked Hashek. “You actually want me to make you limp?”

“Matching up pairs. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing.”

I blinked.

“With the list,” she explained impatiently. “We’re supposed to be pairing up the lists, right? Comparing the people on each one?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“That’s what I thought.” She dropped her lunch, startling Moira, who was still standing next to the table, and reached for her phone. “I think I know a way to make this a lot less painful.”

Moira raised an eyebrow and looked to me for elucidation. “Painful?”

I could only shrug. “Beats me. Less painful how?” I asked Hashek.

She shook her head and started dialing. “Never mind. Wait.”

I had a bad feeling this was going turn into another Lunchus Interruptus, and I glanced up at Moira, who obviously had enough experience with Hashek to be having the same thought. “I’ll grab some boxes,” she whispered to me as Hashek, oblivious, continued to hold the phone to her ear and wait for whoever she was calling to answer. I nodded and gave the waitress a grateful smile, and she turned and disappeared into the bustle of the lunchtime crowd.

“Hello?” Hashek blurted abruptly, startling me. I jumped and turned to look at her, but her attention was focused on the phone. “Hi, it’s Hashek. I need you to do me a favor,” She paused, listening. “Can that wait? This is imp- come on, please? I promise, if you do this for me I will be your willing dating slave tomorrow.”

I stared at her, wondering who she was promising slavery to and what, exactly, a “dating slave” did.

“Thank you!” she sighed, sounding relieved. “Ok, see, I need some help dealing with this set of lists D’Argenzio and I are trying to cross-reference. We’ve got a couple hundred names, and we’re trying to pull out the ones who appear multiple times or who are on parole. We’ve been at it all morning, and - no, it’s not on disc. Just on paper, from the fax machine.” She paused again. “That was what I was going to ask you. If we get the lists to you, can you write some kind of program to compare them?”

I listened with growing appreciation as my partner continued to negotiate our release from paperwork hell: “They’re from the D.A.’s office. Basically, names out of a bunch of court records. Do you think you can do it?” A roll of her eyes at the phone. “I know you can do it. I mean, can you do it? . . . Well, good. What do you need from us, specifically? . . . Oh.”

This eavesdropping was getting me nowhere. My hunger got the better of my curiosity, and I went to work on my gyro, which had been getting cold while I listened to Hashek. As a result, I had a mouthful of meat and tzatziki sauce when she turned to me and demanded, “Do you know what a text file is?”

“Mmph?” I mumbled, and hastily swallowed. “What do you mean?”

“He says we need to get him ‘text files’ of the list. Do you know what that entails?” she repeated impatiently.

“Um . . . does he mean, like, a file that’s just plain text?”

She echoed my question into the phone and then nodded to me. “Yeah, he says it can’t be a Word file or anything or it will be much harder.”

“I know what it is, then.” Seeing where she was going with this, I put down my lunch and reached for my own phone. “Does this mean you want me to call the D.A.’s office and see if they can put the lists in that format? And who are you talking to, anyway?”

She ignored the second question, and told me to, “Yes, but hold on for a sec,” before returning to her conversation. “Tony’s going to call them. Can we e-mail them to you, or do you need them burned to discs? . . . Ok, I can do that. We’ll send them to you as soon as we get them. Thank you!” She hung up the phone and was just reaching for her burger when Moira reappeared and whisked the plate out from under her hands. “What the . . .?”

“I had a feeling you’d be needing these,” Moira told her, brandishing the styrofoam containers she’d brought over, and proceeded to carefully scrape each of our plates into one.

Hashek blinked. “Oh. Uh, thanks.”

Moira shrugged. “Make sure you get around to eating these some time today, you two. I have a sneaking suspicion that last time you didn’t.” She closed the boxes, smiled at us, and handed them over. “Don’t worry about the check. The boss and I know that one of these days the two of you will actually finish a meal here and pay.”


“I don’t know what we’d do without her to boss us around,” Hashek half-joked as Moira walked away from our table.

“Agreed.” I paused, formulating my next question carefully: “So . . . who were you talking to? The M.E.?” I asked, naming the only person I could think of that she might offer to date.

“Huh? No. Why would you think that?”

I coughed self-consciously. “Well, you said you’d date him . . .”

She grinned and shook her head. “No, I said I’d be his dating slave.”

“What’s the difference? Other than transfer of ownership, I mean.”
“Well for one, I don’t think Dan Lowe would be interested in dating me.” She paused. “You couldn’t infer who I was talking to from the conversation? You’re slipping.”

I scowled. “You’re more cryptic than you might think. So if you’re not dating him, what was with that comment?”

“I promised I’d try to set him up with someone I know. He wanted to get an update out of me before agreeing to do the lists.”

“Anyone I’ve met?”

“Not unless you know anyone in the Crime Lab.”

“I don’t think so,” I said after thinking for a second.

“Then, no.” Apparently done with this conversation, she stood up. “Let’s get going. I want to listen in when you call the D.A.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You could call them, you know.”
“Nah.” She picked up the box containing her lunch. “I didn’t even get to eat a fry yet. That’s what I’m focusing on when we get back to the office.”