(no subject)
Title: Custodian (1 of 8)
Author: Alsike
Rating: M (Warning: character death, but not angsty)
Pairing: Yeah... various...
Fandom: Alert! Psychotic crossover AU fic! WMC, Criminal MInds, and Law and Order SVU in this chapter.
Summary: At some point in our lives we make a decision. Do we live on the bright side or the dark side of the law?
What changes when we choose one over the other?
Now, for my customary apologies: I'm sorry! This just sort of happened. Characters may be very OOC, but they also have made vastly different life choices, so just go with it, please.
Custodian
Corpses were nothing new in this job, but Jill still cringed every time she saw one. She hung back in the doorway and popped open her tin of Altoids, offering them around before taking one. Claire took one with barely a nod and scanned the room through her tinted glasses. She always seemed to have an invisible checklist in her head that she was going through. Jill had no idea what she saw, but the younger woman had the irritating tendency of being right all the time.
Emily smiled at her as she took a mint, putting it on the back of her tongue so she could keep it pressed against her soft palate. She dropped to her knees beside the body, pulling on latex gloves. “Stabbing, brilliant,” she muttered, her voice muffled.
Jill gritted her teeth and tried not to look at the blood-soaked shirtfront. The bodies were always fresh, so the scent of decomposition wasn’t an issue, but after three years of this she still hadn’t trained her gag reflex. Sometimes she wished she hadn’t been disbarred in New York, but then she remembered the vats of papers and webs of lies that had been her life and didn’t regret it so much.
She sidled past the body towards the computer. And this way she got to fake her own evidence instead of trying to convince the judge and jury that she wasn’t completely bullshitting them (which she was). She had won cases with paperwork that looked like it had been faked by a four year old. That had been until the asshole that had had this job before her submitted a warrant with the forged signature of the same judge who was on her bench. If he had bothered to run it by her first she would have caught it.
Claire’s blunt voice cut into her internal griping. “How long?”
Emily glanced up. “Two hours? The rug is shot; we’ll have to dump it. Then its just ammonia and elbow grease.”
“The body?”
“I’ll drop him in an alley outside an ATM. He’s perfect.” Emily glanced back at the body and frowned. She lifted the corpse’s arm and looked at it. Jill gulped and turned away. “No defensive wounds through. That’s strange, especially because he was stabbed from the front.”
“Not that strange if it was a trained assassin,” said Claire. She crouched down to inspect the body as well. “Look, only two entry points. He knew what he was doing.”
Emily was still frowning, but she reached into the corpse’s coat and pulled out a wallet. She flipped through it. There was a scrap of paper with two phone numbers on it in the money pocket, which she plucked out and held out to Jill, who had to lean over the body to grab it. Claire took the wallet and tucked it away. She tossed a flash drive at Jill, who snagged it with a flourish.
“That’s a new virus they want us to try. Stay and help Prentiss clean up.” Without a goodbye Claire turned and walked out the door.
Jill shook her head and flashed a wry grin at Emily. “Seriously, our little princess needs to get laid.”
Emily laughed, but kept focused, pulling out a bundle of plastic trash bags to pack the corpse in. “I love that you call her ‘our little princess.’”
Jill tapped the power key and jimmied the flash drive in. “It’s perfect, isn’t it?” Passwords, yuck. She glanced around the desk: a post-it on the wall. She typed in the code and crumpled up the paper. His desktop opened up, a snapshot filling the screen: a dog, a small child, a pretty blonde woman. His wife and kid? A frame was face down on the edge of the desk. She picked it up. The glass was cracked and the picture showed a hollow-cheeked, dark woman. She looked vaguely familiar. “Claire is obviously younger than us, but she gets put on our team and immediately takes over. And it’s pretty clear she has a higher rank than us. I stole her phone once, and I have seen none of those numbers before. I think she’s slumming.”
Emily snorted. “Slumming?”
Jill tapped the mouse and started installing the virus. “Those sweatshirts and sunglasses? She wears them like power suits.”
“Shit.” Jill glanced over. Emily flashed a badge at her. “Dirty cop.”
“Christ. We’d better pick up well.”
“Do you think they’ll notice the missing rug? Maybe we should get a replacement.”
Jill opened up the guy’s email. Same password. For a guy flirting with the mob he really didn’t get the concept of personal security. One new message.
Dear Tom,
I hate to start off a message this way, but I’m counting the days until you come home. I’m fine and so is little Lindsay. School is going well. I wish I didn’t have to work so we could be there with you. But I’ll enjoy our 70-degree weather while we have it. The orange tree is full of fruit and the genesta has just started popping (not to make you homesick). We miss you.
Love, Heather
There was an attached photo of the kid and dog under the orange tree. The sunlight looked artificial, it was that perfect. It was barely September and New York was already dropping below thirty at night. Jill spared a glance at the body. What was that idiot doing wasting his time here?
“No one’s going to notice. He’s not from around here. California, I think. It looks nice. I was planning on running away to there if the Cabots hadn’t hired me.”
“California?” Emily sounded sad.
Jill gave her a smile. “You’re a East Coast girl, I know.”
“Not by choice.” Emily looked up from stuffing the guy’s legs into the plastic bag and gave Jill a look that was a clear request for assistance. There was no way to avoid it. Jill jerked at the bag while Emily hoisted the man’s waist up. Then Jill was required to keep him in a sitting position while Emily bagged his top half. Long hot shower, she thought. Long. Hot. Shower.
“Help me get him down to the car.”
The virus was running just fine on its own. Jill helped Emily manhandle the body out into the hallway and then started picking the lock on the staff elevator. Five floors of stairs with a corpse, even in a tenement apartment, was asking for trouble. She was nearly finished when Claire showed up again. Emily tossed her the badge, and she nodded, unsurprised. She looked at Jill. “I have the keys.”
“It’s no problem.” Jill gave a last twist and the call button lit up. She had been so psyched when she got her first set of lock-picks. It was so much better than a pair of paperclips and a screwdriver blade. She grinned at Claire, slipping her picks back in her pocket, the pleasure hadn’t died yet. Claire raised her eyebrows in the look Jill preferred to interpret as repressed amusement. (The other option was ‘you are such an idiot’).
“So, who offed this guy?”
“Gilmores, probably,” Emily said, her voice muffled as she used her knee to shove the body through the doors. Jill watched the denim stretch. For someone as stiff and controlled as Emily, she certainly could bend when she needed to.
“Why are we cleaning up their messes?” It was rhetorical.
“Because a cop murdered in his own home screams mystery, and we don’t need the police tracing him to our other contacts in San Francisco,” said Claire, without a hint of irony.
Jill gave Emily a look. Higher rank, obviously. Emily just glared back and Jill quickly helped her keep the body upright. Claire pressed the button for the ground floor.
Outside Claire stood in the shadows acting as lookout while Jill and Emily stuffed the guy in the trunk.
“We’re totally the lackeys,” muttered Jill.
“I like to think of us as knights,” replied Emily, hoisting a gallon of ammonia on her index finger. “Body dump or start scrubbing, your pick.”
“I haven’t done the files,” Jill whined. But she took the ammonia and started for the elevator. Her arm brushed against a wet spot on her shirt, oh, so gross. She was wearing black, which hid blood well, but the psychological implications of a shirt that you had to wash blood out of were just not okay. It was going in the incinerator with the files, immediately.
Claire was in the hallway on her phone, as usual. Jill gave her a dirty look. Honestly, she liked her, but no team spirit.
“You want us to do it? But we’re a janitorial crew!” Claire hissed into the phone as Jill passed. She glanced back, interested, but Claire saw her and turned to the wall.
The files had been a surprise. Jill just looked at the titles and started bagging them. Cabots, Gilmores, embezzlement, kidnapping, torture. Whoever killed him, it was probably about time.
She rolled up the disgusting blood-soaked carpet and bagged it. Emily would be pleased. Still, Jill doubted she’d get a smile for it while they were working. The virus was finished and she took out the flash drive and changed her gloves before she re-encrypted the computer. Bloody glove prints were not particularly subtle.
Emily came back in with a mop and a bucket.
“I did the rug.” Jill said pathetically and cringed. Begging for praise did not look good on anyone.
Emily smiled and handed her the bucket.
Claire showed up and actually wiped down a few printable surfaces. Jill elbowed Emily. “Manual labor! The shock!” she whispered.
Then she felt guilty. “Claire.” Claire glanced at her, pushing her glasses up her nose. She had a penetrating look, but Jill wasn’t easily intimidated. “I was thinking we could all go out tonight, have a drink, check out the ladies, or lords, according to preference.”
That was another irritating thing about Claire; she made Jill’s gaydar ping like crazy, but she had no proof one way or another.
“Not unless it’s in California.”
Jill blinked. Even Emily looked up from where she was scraping the cracks in between the floorboards with a toothbrush.
“Apparently Detective Tom Hogan was a mole. He was working for us and reporting back.”
Jill nodded. That made sense for the files.
“And we’ve been assigned to root out all of his contacts. We want to stop the flow of his information.”
“We’re supposed to dispose of them,” said Emily quietly. Claire nodded shortly.
Emily was looking tortured. Jill grimaced and tried to put a spin on it. “The weather’s nice there, Heather said so.”
Claire looked at her blankly. “Heather?”
“His wife.” It was nice to know something that Claire didn’t for once.
Claire gave her a look that suggested she wasn’t as useless as she had previously imagined.
“Should I load his email onto the flash drive?”
“The virus should have taken care of it.”
“Cool.” Jill patted her pocket.
Emily tossed the toothbrush into the bucket and squeezed out the mop. “I think we’re done here.” She still wasn’t totally okay. Jill hated seeing her locked into those memories. She took the bucket from her and hooked her arm through her elbow.
“We’ll drop the rug in the river and go home to pack?”
Claire nodded. “The plane leaves at six pm. Be there at 5:15 at the latest, no checked luggage. And this is a public flight, so no equipment. We’ll be meeting a contact on the other side. She’ll have access to everything we need.”
Claire left. Emily took her bucket back and used the ammonia bottle to wedge the mop in and tried to balance the rug under one arm. Jill slung the sack of files over her shoulder and grabbed the rear end of the rug.
“God, she makes me crazy.” As an afterthought Jill grabbed the photo of the dark woman and stuffed it in her pocket. Maybe she would remember who she was.
Emily laughed. “Actually, you’re a lot alike.”
Jill frowned and almost tripped as they went around the corner. “What?”
“When you’re dealing with people you think are idiots, I couldn’t tell you apart. Well… except that you’re more obviously sarcastic. But you loosen up with friends. She just doesn’t have an off mode.”
“Or she doesn’t have friends.” That was bitter.
Emily shook her head. “I think she likes us. She didn’t turn you down when you suggested going out. We should do it. Morale.”
Jill arched her eyebrows. “Once a cop, always a cop.”
“I was never a cop!” Emily smirked. “Once a delinquent, always a delinquent.”
Hey!” Jill grinned. “I never got caught.”
* * *