Downstairs Offices – Homicide Division

[Zachary]

Continued from: Restaurants etc; Zocalo Cofeehouse

Zack settled himself down at his desk, pulling the first file from the small stack at the back, and flipping it open. He would have preferred to be out in the field but sometimes paper work as mind numbingly dull as it was had to be done. In fact it had to be done far too much for his enjoyment, but such was life. You couldn’t just do all the fun.

The detective glanced up from his work to change pens, catching Captain Calhoun eye for a moment. He didn’t like what he saw in that glance – he knew the man well enough to know when he was thinking about straddling him with yet another un-wanted partner. Zachary just hoped he was being paranoid in his thinking, bending back over the file and scanning the notes. It had only been a day or so since his last one, and normally it took Calhoun a while to find someone stupid enough to be partnered up with him.

[Zachary]

Captain Calhoun kept looking over towards him and it was starting to worry Zachary, making him feel more and more with each passing minute and caught glance that he perhaps he wasn’t being paranoid and any moment now the dreaded words were going to come from his Captain’s lips – ‘New’ and ‘Partner’.

Either that or Zachary was outwardly looking as if he was about to go crazy and head to the clock tower and Calhoun was trying to decide if it was worth attempting to cut him off. Shaking his head from such depressing thoughts, he pulled an active case file towards him, a pair of unsolved murders, where the only link was they were both discovered in the same place at the same time. They had both been at the same club the night before. Both had been killed in different ways, were different sexes and there appeared no link or no motive for either aside from common theft. And Zachary couldn’t believe such elaborate deaths were just because the killer wanted to steal something – unless all he was interested in stealing was a life.

[Julian]

Continued from Julian's Apartment

Almost a full half an hour late thanks to the traffic, Julian had rolled into the station parking lot and slammed his car into a free space, sadly one that was in the sun, yet another notch on the day's tally chart. It was seriously beating him around and he hadn't even set foot inside the actual station yet.

He was now looking for Captain Calhoun. Julian had met him before, a few days ago now, when he'd been assigned to the Southwest Police Station and the Captain had wanted to get a feel for the new rookie who would be joining his team. It had gone pretty well and Julian liked the guy quite a bit; he seemed tough but fair as he imagined most Captains were. Or should be. Not that he had much -or any- experience in that field, he guessed that this job would either solidify those ideals of his or tear them down; hopefully it would be the first thing.

It didn't take the young detective long to locate the downstairs offices and Calhoun actually spotted him first, waving him over to his office before Julian had gotten two steps into the 'bullpen'. He walked with a slight bounce to his step; he was excited and couldn't help it even as he kept his expression calm and serious as he could.

[Zachary]

He glanced up from his notes as someone entered the bullpen, taking in the restrained excited gait, eyes travelling over to Calhoun who seemed to have been expecting the newcomer and exhaled softly. Zack couldn’t recall ever seeing the young man before and he looked back down at his notes, ignoring the sinking sensation in his gut.

Zachary knew he’d been pushing Calhoun pretty hard recently but the Captain wouldn’t do something as heinous as palming him off onto someone he’d never seen before, someone who hardly looked old enough to be a police officer at all, let alone a detective… would he? The kid was in for a shock if that was the case.

Resisting the urge to flee the room – he was starting to get hungry and anyway, he wanted another look at the crime scene and how it had seemed before the actual crime – he bent his head back over his notes, garish crime scene photos spread over his desk.

[Julian]

Captain Calhoun was busy as it happened, Julian could tell pretty immediately he was something on his mind and Julian wasn't that great of a people reader so it had to be pretty blatant. He gestured across the bullpen to a man sitting behind the desk, warning him to 'watch his mouth' before he disappeared into his office and Julian was left standing by the door. Yeah, the day really had it out for him in his opinion.

Still, there was no use standing around like an idiot, and Julian started towards the desk and the man sitting behind it almost immediately. He stopped at the side, hands in his pockets. "Hey there..." he faltered almost immediately, seeing the photos out of the corner of his eye, "uh, wow, that's... that's a lot of blood..."

[Zachary]

Any less experienced and Zachary would have likely pounded his own head into his desk in frustration as the new guy came to stand next to him, either ignoring or oblivious to all the mental ‘Keep Out’ signs that were erected in his posture. So Calhoun really hated him after all, or just refused to believe that he could work perfectly fine on his own. No offence to the kid, but Zack didn’t need a partner and like all the others who had come before him, he would just have to get rid of him.

“Yes, being cut open from chin to toe and having most of your insides twisted so your body is near inside out will leave a lot of blood behind. That was a woman once,” Zachary said in a dismissive tone, without looking at the newcomer. Even though there were two bodies in the photos he was sure the eyes would have been drawn to the most bloody and disturbing body.

He stood and gathered the photos back into their brown sleeve, slapping the file shut and shrugging his coat on. Zachary was starting to get really hungry and now he’d been lumbered with a new partner there was no need to stay at his desk any longer. He grabbed the file and began to walk towards the exit. “Come on then.”

[Julian]

Julian hesitated just a fraction of a second (a little green thanks to Zachary's colourful words), confused for a beat as t where they were going so suddenly before he snapped to it and followed after the older detective.

He fell into stride with him after a few steps and looked across his shoulder. For a moment he didn't speak, his mouth opened but no sound came out as he apparently thought better of vocalising his query as to their destination. An inner monologue threaded through his mind for a few more paces before he plucked up the courage to speak, "So, uh, where are we going?" he paused, "I'm Julian, by the way, Julian Mercer."

[Zachary]

Zachary had thought for a moment that he might have been partnered with a mute, watching out of the corner of his eye as the younger man’s mouth opened and closed without sound. It was a trait he had picked up from the job, watching people without seeming to – people always relaxed and showed guilty secrets on their faces if they thought the other was looking away. It was something he was sure the new boy would learn soon enough if he couldn’t already. Part of him was annoyed he was using interrogation tactics on his partner, even passive aggressive ones while another part of him was annoyed he was annoyed.

They were nearing the door now and Zack held out the folder, slapping it lightly against Julian’s chest as he turned and faced him directly for the first time. “Zachary Stikker. We’re going to get something to eat before returning to take a look at the crime scene. You’re lucky kid, I’m slap in the middle of a murder investigation. Read up on it while I drive.”

Continued at: Main Streets with Julian

[Zachary]

POST TIMESKIP

The hum and blue glow from his computer screen was the only company Zachary had for the moment and that was just the way he liked it. Blinking, he peered at the screen, focusing on the black text and the flashing curser which reminded him where he had left off the sentence. The case had not been going well, in fact it hadn’t been going anywhere at all and frankly it was starting to bother him. Aside from the violence he’d been unable to locate any sort of link between the victims, either the ones who were found together or even overall. One was always male, the other always female but the ages varied, the actual manner of death, the location, where they had last been seen, even the times between the killings. There should have been a clear escalation in the deaths as much as he hated to think that, or worse a ritual element such as the death occurring at the same time but nothing.

Calhoun was no doubt lurking somewhere in the station, waiting for the finish report and any update Zachary could give, even if they both knew nothing new had come in. And unless they had a dramatic stroke of luck, he didn’t know what they could do – they had quite simply run out of evidence and were simply rehashing the same old ground, thoughts following in on each other in an endless circle.

The ‘they’ in his thoughts turned his attention towards his partner, who had doggedly stuck it out for the two weeks despite the less than auspicious first day. Zachary had decided to let the incident drop from comment, giving the kid a break if only because it wasn’t that unusual. Chip was another who was lurking somewhere – unless he’d gone home and Zachary had managed to miss it. As much as he hated to even think it, the kid wasn’t doing too terrible.

[Julian]

Not thinking about a certain blonde wasn't really going at all well, all the way in from the parking lot Julian was musing on the weather and traffic conditions and which route she would take. Some would probably call him paranoid because, hey, she was a grown woman, she had made the trip from her mother's a hundred time before and it wasn't even that far. Maybe it was the job, already getting to him and making him overprotective of her in every little aspect. The point was that she was driving alone, at night and he happened to know there was a psychotic murderer on the loose. Well. Probably more than one, it was LA after all. That could of course have been the case god knew how many times before he had made detective and he wouldn't have known about it but the point was that he did know and it bothered him.

Only when she called to tell him she was home safe would he feel like he could concentrate properly but until then he had to just push on and make the effort.

Before he was even aware that he'd walked the whole distance he was standing at his desk, looking down at his chair. Starting slightly, he lowered himself into it, clearing his throat and looking across at his partner, "Er, sorry about that. Just had to make a call," he picked up and then dropped his tie again, trying to find where he had been in the mound of paperwork he had miraculously managed to accumulate over the two weeks he had worked there.

[Zachary]

Sometimes, Zachary thought his new partner was almost a zombie, the way he could move through areas he had come to know without actually seeming to see any of it, the elder detective having watched his approach. It almost amused him – almost – even if he could detect some kind of worry in the other man, possibly connected to the phone call and whoever had been on the other end. He gave a soft grunt, eyes lowered back to his work as Julian apologised, telling himself that he didn’t care one way or another if something was bothering the man, just as long as he was able to keep working.

Out of the corner of one of his eyes, he watched as the kid fumbled around with the piles of paper on his desk. It wasn’t as though Zachary could claim to be anything better, his own desk almost creaked under the weight of different reports and forms that either had to be worked through or were somehow important. There was an order to them however, even if Zachary was the only one who could actually understand that order. Different piles of… stuff, littered everywhere and the only one that nobody was allowed to touch under pain of death was the collection of thin files located to the left of his computer, half shoved under the keyboard. The ultimate in cold cases, but the ones that he just couldn’t let go. Sooner or later, Julian would have a pile too of that he was sure.

He just wished he wasn’t.

“You have the autopsy report for the latest male victim?” Zachary asked suddenly, taking pity on the floundering and wanting to give him an excuse to really root through to find whatever it was he was looking for.

[Julian]

Julian was trying very hard to separate work and home, very hard indeed. It was already hard and he couldn't really lie to himself - or to Shelley - that it didn't bother him, that he didn't worry more than ever about her, about his family and her family vicariously, even though she reassured him not to, just to focus. It was hard. So he tried to put the phone call out of his head again as he surveyed the papers that had managed to over take his desk with fairly bewildering ease over the course of two weeks.

Looking up as his partner spoke, Julian had a moment of blank thought, thinking, 'oh shit where did I put that?' before he snapped out of his mini internal panic, "Oh, uh, yeah, yeah just a second I do. Under here..." Julian hunched over his desk, sifting through the papers and trying to hide his slightly red face from Zachary, "... uh, somewhere..." For a further minute he shuffled and moved papers around before he found what he was looking for and held it out to Zack across the desks, before pausing, retracting it for a moment to strip the post-it-notes he had stuck to it and scribbled notes on from the front, before he extended it again, "You think we missed something?"

[Zachary]

In Zachary’s mind, Julian needed… something. Something that would move him on from the ‘green’ newbie state he appeared to be stuck in. Two weeks wasn’t very long he knew, but he had to stop getting embarrassed every time he was put on the spot. On the days in which he was feeling particularly malicious towards the world as a whole, he allowed himself to imagine that the something that the kid so badly needed was a kick up his behind. Of course, he’d never go through with it, mostly because Julian would probably look at him as though he had killed his – maybe – non-existent dog and Zachary didn’t feel up to deflecting wounded puppy dog eyes.

Nothing at all to do with the fact that he was starting to think Julian wasn’t all bad; he just didn’t feel like having to deal with that. Zack didn’t want a new partner but if he had to have one then he most certainly didn’t want to get attached to him.

New partners were like all the plants he had owned over his life – they never lasted.

“Thanks,” Zack grunted as he accepted the file, trying to make it appear as though he hadn’t noticed the red face, ignoring it for now although knowing Julian, just ignoring it would somehow make him feel worse and then they would be right back to kicked puppy. “You never know, the killers must have left something we can use.”