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Brandy pales as Creed elaborates on the origins of the box, slowly setting down the scalpel he was about to use on the tape holding it shut. "I better, uh, get some goggles..." he mutters, "And no. No, don't stay, uh--I got it." "Football, brother," Craig says, shaking his head with a scoff, "The Navidson Braves were playing. Aren't you from around here?" "Like we want him," Mercer mutters, apparently reflexively.
"Oh, same old, same old," one of them says--Mercer, distinguishable by his bushy mustache being longer than Craig's. "Just talking about the game. You catch it?" Craig snorts almost imperceptibly, loosening his tie and beginning to unbutton his shirt. "...Creed." Brandy prods the edge of the baggie with a pen. "Creed, is this from, ah, one of your...'girls'? Oh, jeez, man, I don't want this..." His weak protests fade out as he reluctantly starts scrubbing up, muttering to himself. Brandy, for all his faults, is fairly compliant when ordered to work--especially when those orders come from Creed.
Brandy--known to his mother as Brandon--flushes and half-sits up when Creed walks in, his empty hands held well above his waist. With a thin face still haunted by acne and slightly limp black hair Brandy fits right in with the NPD's dingy basement lab. Other places might be experimenting with advanced forensics, but here things still hark back to the 50'swhen the lab was built. "Hey, Creed," he says, sitting back down with a look of resignation, "What, uh, do you want me to look at?" Upstairs the locker room door opens as Charlie pulls his shirt over his head, letting in two of the detectives from Homicide. Mercer and Craig are about Charlie's age, a pair of blonds who almost look like they could be brothers. "So I said to him--" their conversation falls silent when they see Charlie. It isn't that most people give Charlie a hard time, at least most of the cops who care more about their jobs that interdepartmental gossip and old war stories. It's more...this. Broken off discussions and a pointed failure to notice Charlie's in a room.
"I'll be in touch. As will hospital administration, I'm sure." Jackie releases Charlie with a short hum, shaking her head. "If I can get your names and badge numbers for an incident report? And crack a window if you're going to smoke, Jesus." It doesn't take long for Jackie to jot down what she needs from Creed and Charlie before she takes hold of Grace and escorts her away. Grace waves an awkward goodbye over her shoulder at both of the detectives--Charlie in particular, something Creed probably isn't that surprised by. Outside, the weather is still bright and sunny. The hospital sits placidly on its rambling grounds, betraying no sign of the chaos that unfolded inside. After getting their parking validated by a surly security guard Creed and Charlie are free to leave on whatever their next step is. (Is that just a breeze, or did Creed feel something shiver in his coat?)
"I don't know." She glances at Charlie out of the corner of her eye. "On the other hand...judging by what we saw up there, you're probably not safe here either. Mr. Inez..." She shakes her head, flicking wet hair over her shoulder. "No, if it was airborne, we'd have seen more than this. Just...come back if anything doesn't feel right. Anything." She leads Charlie back upstairs, winding through the halls and ignoring the occasional second looks they get. (Also, Charlie soon finds that hospital issue flip-flips are not very comfortable at all.) Grace perks up at the sound of a pitched argument as they come closer to where they started--one that bursts into clarity as they open the closest set of doors. "What? What?" A short, roundish brunette hisses at Dr. Rosen. "You did not just say that to me, you sh*teating little pr*ck!" "I'm only trying to explain--" Dr. Rosen no longer looks quite so contrite, frustration boiling over into his pinched expression. "Explain it to Dr. Piet!" The woman snaps. She turns around to look at Grace, fury mingling with relief. Dr. Rosen, meanwhile, sags against a wall, taking another puff of his cigarette. "Jackie." Grace relaxes as Jackie brusquely checks her over, then moves to do the same thing to Charlie.
As far as Creed can tell Dr. Rosen is being sincere in his ignorance--he certainly seems to be sincere in his slight wince at Creed's words. "You don't know what it's like," he mutters, glancing away, only for his eyes to widen at the sight of a small figure rushing down the hallway towards them. "There's some sandals." Grace sounds doubtful as she opens a closet, reaching for a dangling metal chain above. "Maybe...maybe you ought to wear a mask too."
"I don't know what's going on," Dr. Rosen insists, "I wish I did. This is probably going to cost me my job, after all. It'd be nice to be able to tell my wife why." He pulls another cigarette out of his pack and offers it to Creed, looking weary: "What a g$@@+&n clusterf##!." "What I do know? Patients presenting with symptoms I've never seen before start showing up in the ER or the morgue. I was going to write a paper on it, get my name in a few journals...I wouldn't have done it if it was anyone else, you understand? But this disease isn't affecting anyone important." He pauses. "It wasn't, anyway." "I'd keep an idea on your partner, if I were you." He blows smoke towards the ceiling. "Whatever was in that man's throat was trying to get out." "Sure. Just a sec--hi, Jackie?" Grace runs through a brief but sufficient account of the last little while, leaving out some of the less believable parts. "Okay. See you soon." She hangs up and turns back to Charlie, worry creasing her features. "She'll meet us upstairs. We should take the back ways. Follow me."
Grace glances briefly at Charlie's bare torso before turning her head, wringing out her dripping hair and eyeing the wall until Charlie is decent. "Let's not," she agrees, shaking her hands dry, "God. I need to call the nursing admin, can you hang on?" She approaches a wall phone and blows dust off of it, cradling it to her ear, and dials. "Keep your voice down," Dr. Rosen hisses, glancing up at the scurrying orderlies. Resignation crosses his face as one of them looks back and then leans over to whisper to her colleague. "Jesus. Come on." Dr. Rosen rakes a hand through his disheveled hair and pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, lighting up with slightly shaking hands. "That...that wasn't supposed to happen, I assure you. I never meant--" He stops himself, squeezing his eyes tight: "He's alive. Not much longer, but for now." "I never expected that," he murmurs, opening his eyes and looking at Creed almost pleadingly, "That's not how a fungus behaves. That's not how anything behaves. Do you understand that? What that could be?"
"Until the bleach--" The showerhead rumbles alarmingly overhead before discharging any icy blast of bleach solution that stretches on interminably until it's suddenly replaced by almost uncomfortably hot water, lashing Charlie's pale skin red. Grace sucks in a sharp gasp and turns off her shower, the muffled sound of her rummaging following soon after. A pair of green scrubs is lashed over the top of Charlie's shower. Meanwhile, if Creed waits patiently, Dr. Rosen does eventually emerge, splattered in unpleasant fluid and still nauseous-looking. A few orderlies and nurses flow out behind him, two remaining to continue work on what's either Tio's wounded body or corpse. Dr. Rosen looks like he wants to say something, but knows better than to actually open his mouth.
The furor created by Creed's interruption more than masks his sleight of hand. The oddly secured box vanishes into the folds of his pocket just before a nurse attempts to shove him out of the way.
"Get off of here!" She snaps, unable to move Creed's planted weight. "Stop!" Dr. Rosen comes around the bedside and gestures outside. "Look, I don't--if you want to berate me, do it in five minutes!" Outside and down a few halls, the elevator dings open in front of Charlie and Grace. She steps through and presses the down button through a glove, waiting nervously the few floors to the basement. Grace seems to know her way down here, in the bare concrete bowels of the hospital, snaking through dully flickering fluorescent lights to a bare tile room. She pushes Charlie towards a narrow shower stall. "Take off your clothes, throw them in the bucket, and turn the red lever. Keep your eyes and mouth shut until the water stops." She darts into her own shower stall next to Charlie's and soon has the water running--with a sputtering curse and the exclamation: "Jesus, it's f*$#ing cold!"
Grace slaps the call elevator button with a gloved hand and stands awkwardly away from anything else in the hall, including Charlie. She glances at him out of the corner of her eye, lips thinned. There's precedent for an arrest, Charlie recalls from his early academy classes, but only if someone is directly harmed by Dr. Rosen's negligence. There's a certain amount of wiggle room on what that means, but by and large it'd probably cause more harm than good to make an arrest just yet. On the other hand, making the good doctor sweat a little in a cell might feel pretty good. Meanwhile, Creed walks in on a chaotic, whirling scene punctuated by the hiss and click of hospital machinery and hurried medical chatter. Tio is hard to make out underneath and inside of the crowd of seven people at his bedside, all gloved and masked. "It's seeping again," a blue-gowned man says, hunched over Tio with his back to the door, and Dr. Rosen bends over with the aspirator Grace was using earlier to suction something. He's wearing a regular mask himself this time, already tacked to his skin with sweat at the edges. Creed's experienced eyes skim over these details and dozens of others--the open biohazard container, the dribbles of blood on the ground, the darkening gore on Tio's dangling hand--and one thing stands out of the usual bustle around a stabilizing critical patient. There's a second, barely filled biohazard container, almost lost amongst a mess of tubing on the crash cart rolled up by the bed, sealed shut with a very unhospital-like wrapping of electrical tape.
"If you don't let that a!@&*@# leave I'll try to keep my hands to myself," Grace snaps back at Creed, tension strung through her voice. "Come on." She takes off down a side corridor, cursing softly but creatively, glancing over her shoulder periodically to check on Charlie. "We should take a service elevator. Don't--don't touch anything, all right? And don't rub your eyes or around your mouth." She shakes her head sharply. "Can you arrest him? For--I don't know, reckless endangerment?"
Creed roll Wits + Investigation
Dr. Rosen stares at the tableau in front of him, featureless behind his odd mask. When he pulls it off with his shaking, lacerated hand it leaves his hair swept at a rakish angle, almost charmingly tousled. It frames his bloodless face and wide, fixed eyes incongruously as he mouths something inaudible.
The rising pressure of accusation pulls him back from whatever reverie he was in. He snaps his gaze across Creed, Charlie, and Grace with a completely different focus than he had before. "You all need decontamination showers," he says, clipped and even, "Then--then--" Dr. Rosen looks back at the team furiously working on Tio, whose screaming has shriveled to a thin mewl, lips thin. "Showers. Then we talk about--" He shakes his head, pushing his hair sleek against his scalp. "Grace, show them. I have to--" He breaks away to Tio's bedside, elbowing a technician out of the way and giving instruction in that clipped, even, and very faintly shattered voice. "He's right," Grace says, hand hovering at the level of her face for lack of anywhere else to put it, "We have--bleach showers, God, that son of a b+*##--"She elbows open the door with a clean shoulder and holds it for the detectives, if they choose to follow her.
The blow grazes Dr. Rosen skull, a sufficient warning not to proceed further in any case. "We don't know!" Dr. Rosen's attention is diverted by the arrival of the crash team, who hesitate in the door at the scene they're dealing with. They dutifully followed his barked instructions, wrapping up in glove and masks against against the gory mess Tio has made of himself. "Nobody told me," Grace says, her hands shaking as she assists in opening his airway for a tube, another nurse slipping in beside Charlie to inject Mr. Inez with something hopefully very strong. "Nobody told me," she repeats, with rising disgusted indignation, whipping her head around to stare at Dr. Rosen standing by the wall.
"Infectious protocols!" Dr. Rosen snaps, taking a broad swing at Creed as he focuses on the crisis playing out across the room.
Too broad, it turns out. Instead of striking the surprisingly nimble older man Dr. Rosen drives his fist onto the sharp metal edge of a connector box. He curses fiercely and clutches his hand to his chest, scrabbling at the cuff of his now ruined surgical glove.
Grace jerks back from Tio with fury and horror, staring at her blood-soaked gloves. She almost touches her face, her eyes snapping up to Charlie. "Gloves!" She shouts at Charlie, pointing at a box of large latex gloves. "Gloves and masks and--where are the glasses? Where are the glasses, you negligent bastard!" This she snarls at Dr. Rosen, tearing her contaminated gloves off.
Creed's shove jerks Dr. Rosen out of his trance, sending the man fumbling through his labcoat. He pulls on blue surgical gloves and a white cloth hood with a fine mesh over the eyes.
"Let go of that patient!" Dr. Rosen shouts, moving up next to the bed and throwing an arm out over Tio's body. Grace finally hears him clearly and snaps her head around to stare at him, infuriated. "I need to staunch the bleeding--" she insists, fumbling in her scrubs for yet more supplies, when suddenly Tio goes slack, eyes rolling up in the back of his head. He keeps screaming, though. "F+#+," Grace breathes, grabbing a handful of gauze from the shelf above the bed.
Grace pulls an odd tube-and-bag contraption from one of her deep pockets and thrusts it into Tio's mouth, pumping with one hand while she struggles to restrain Tio's arm. The why of that hangs in fleshy strips from the man's jagged nails, blood pulsing messily from furrowed skin. His feet slam the foot of his bed with an audible crack--whether from plastic or bone is hard to say. Grace doesn't slow down, struggling to suction something friable and ragged from Tio's airway that tears itself into clotting pieces in the tube. Tio's scream starts as a gurgle and rises into a long keening as he arches his back and dribbles foam and broken pieces of the obstruction from his mouth.
"Don't! Dr. Rosen barks, grabbing at the sleeve of Grace's scrubs, but the blue cloth barely brushes his fingers, even with Creed's unintentional additional propulsion. Oblivious, Grace bends over the seizing man in the bed, shouting instructions that Mr. Inez is clearly not following as she struggles to pull his hand from his throat. "Don't touch him! Grace! Dr. Rosen shouts again, horrified.
Dr. Rosen's gaze flickers to Grace, who looks straight back with contrition (but with a hint of unsteady rebellion below). He turns back to Charlie in an instant. "It's still under analysis," he says evenly, "Of course you realize that 'biological' covers a broad category. It could be a byproduct of a disease that the original plant suffered before it was refined. It could be any number of potential contaminants introduced at any step of the refinement process itself. It could very well be a disease the addicts themselves already possessed and came to share by spreading needles." "In my professional opinion, I respect that police work runs a little faster than medicine--but isolating exactly what is afflicting the patients here is going to take time. I'm willing to send you a copy of my paper when I've finished analyzing it." Despite having assumed an air of resigned professionalism Dr. Rosen is still almost palpably smug. This is a man who is standing on his own turf, and he knows it. He might have a witty little bon mot to add, just to rub it in, if not for the sudden alarm blaring from the very room the detectives just left. Grace pales and slams through the door, already paging for a Code Blue as Tio Inez thrashes on his bed, mouth tinged with violently red foam. He claws at his throat with his remaining hand, eyes streaming bloody tears as he chokes.
Dr. Rosen pauses, assessing Charlie with a careful eye, and when he speaks again it's more measured. "You don't need a warrant to ask questions." He straightens his lab coat and shakes his head. "If you could get one." He leaves that hanging obliquely for a moment. "There's nothing I can do to help you, officers, and since you've already obtained access to a patient without notifying his attending doctor I suppose you have whatever evidence you think you need. But please, tell me what you think I can do to stop you from wasting any more time at my hospital."
Charlie has a knack for picking up on subtle cues--the twitch of an eyelid, the slight curve of a mouth. Here, it's the stiffness of Dr. Rosen's hands, the sharpness of his tone, and a dozen almost imperceptible cues that betray his nervous fear underneath his bluster. Doctors and junkies apparently share the same expressions when they think they've gotten caught.
"You're questioning me?" Dr. Rosen scoffs--actually scoffs, a sound that requires quite some practice. "Ridiculous. Nurse, if these men are done bothering my patient, please escort them out--and I expect to have a word with you later."
The nurse in question is barely visible behind the tall, broad man in a white coat who flings the hallway doors open with both hands. "Who are you?" He snaps, hands on his hips as he glares down at the detectives. With bright green eyes and tousled dark hair touched with grey at the temples he cuts a distinguished figure, standing at least half a foot over Creed or Charlie. "What are you doing with my patient?" "Dr. Rosen, they're cops," Grace protests, worried knitting her brows together. "I told you--" "Does this look like a police station to you? Or an interrogation room?" He cuts Grace off with a sharp hand gesture, still focused on the men in front of him. "I want your badge numbers."
Tio reaches across his chest to gently cradle his stump as Creed speaks, eyes wide. "I...look, I'm sorry, man, that's--that's f&#@ed up." He sucks a breath through his stained teeth. "I never had to be in no hospital before for the junk, all right? I shoot clean. I swear, I swear I do, sterile and everything, I wash up good, I ain't never gotten sick like this." "S%!$." He closes his eyes and lets his head fall back. "If he's letting kids do this s~@&...f~*@ 'im. It was C, okay? Caesar. He told me he got this wild stuff off some guy out of town. Didn't say nothing about f+&@ing mold." He cracks his eyes open and smiles joylessly: "You see that f%$~er, you give him one for Tio, okay? And your girl."
"Call me Tio." Tio settles back onto his newly fluffed pillows, still smiling guileless, despite--or possibly because of--Creed's bluntness. "That's funny, man. What's the saying, though? Caveat emperor?" He laughs raspily, shifting in bed, and looks to Grace beseechingly. "I'm dying of thirst over here, beautiful. Think you could get me some juice?" "Of course, Mr. Inez." Grace is smart enough not to waste her warning glance on Creed, instead shooting it at Charlie on her way out. Tio maintains his easy smile until the door closes behind Grace. "Caveat emperor," he repeats, with a bitter note, and wariness shutters his features, "Man, you know I'm not talking. Come on."
Grace briefly grimaces at Creed's colorful terminology--an odd reaction from a hardened ER nusre: "Yeah, that's the one." The elevator dings open and Grace strides to room 23, resting a hand on the door and turning back to the detectives with a quirked brow: "Don't give him a hard time, all right? He's not a bad guy." With that, she pushes the door open, smiling with a warmth she's yet to show the detectives. "Mr. Inez, how are you feeling?" "Hey, pretty lady!" The man in the bed looks like nothing so much as well-chewed jerky, his dark brown skin nicked with numerous scars and abrasions. His eyes are almost shockingly bright, though, especially for a man missing his right arm below the elbow. "Any news on my ride out of here??" "Not yet, Mr. Inez." Grace motions at Creed and Charlie. "These men have a few questions for you, though. Do you feel up to answering them?" "You brought me cops, mi corazon?" 'Mr. Inez' folds his good hand over his chest, looking wounded. "You hurt me." "Don't sass me," Grace says, supressing a smile as she walks over to fluff his pillows. "You're not in trouble. Right, gentlemen?"
The patients and staff they pass aren't remarkable--it's the regular mix of harried expressions, pain, and confusion. Rosewood Memorial ER serves a fairly beleaguered demographic. "He wants to get out and score," Grace says, leaning against the elevator wall and looking up at the ceiling, "And the girl ended up in the morgue. The rest of our overdoses have checked themselves out." "The rest of them kept their arms, though." She lowers her gaze to the detectives, her mouth in a thin line. "We had to amputate. The...discoloration, that's what he called it? It spread. Do you have any idea where this is coming from?"
Grace has her arms folded tight across her chest, tired determination evident in the set of her jaw. "He's just finishing up. I haven't had a chance to talk to him yet. Isabel is on it." She tucks some loose strands of hair behind her ear. "But yeah, let's get you upstairs. Come on." "He's been here two days--he came in right after the girl," Grace says as they walk, pushing through the hospital doors and crowds efficiency, "We've been stalling to keep him here, but there's only so much we can do, you know?" "I still can't believe no one told you," she mutters as they step onto the elevator.
Rosewood Memorial Hospital was founded almost at the same time as Navidson itself, and it shows in its rambling structure and generations of buildings. Elegant turn of the century charm sits next to modern concrete and glass on the wide hospital grounds. Most people need a map to navigate it, but Creed isn't most people. Not that it matters much--the new ER building stands out with the cranes and construction markers proliferating around it. When the detectives pull up a slender blonde in blue scrubs with her hair in a rough bun turns away from the paramedic she was deep in conversation with outside the front doors and makes a beeline for their vehicle as they park in one of the designated emergency zones. "Are you here about the overdoses?" Charlie will recognize Grace's voice.
"He's conscious, for what it's worth," Grace says, "I don't know how much longer we're going to be able to hang onto him. I'll tell Dr. Rosen to expect you."
There's a long moment of silence. "They didn't die," she says, suddenly low and intent, "One of them is still here. He's in room 23, 5th floor. Nobody told you that?" She stops, briefly. "Whatever is in this new stuff, it's organic. I heard the path doctors talking about it."
"Those might be other patients," Grace says, hesitantly. "I'm...not sure this is something we should discuss over the phone."
Helen flushes and smacks Creed's arm lightly with her newspaper, mischief in her small smile. "Vincent Creed, you awful man," she tuts,"Tell me more when you get back." "Grace? Grace! Hey, Grace--" At the desk, the phone line goes muffled for a moment. All Charlie can make out is slightly harried female voices, before the phone is cradled to a new ear. "This is Grace." Her voice is tired and soft, but still pleasant. "You have some questions about our Jane Doe?"
"Oh..." The receptionist trails off, her chipper tone faltering. "Ah, I'm afraid I don't know. The Jane Doe, huh?" "Oh, don't say that." Helen ashes her cigarette and smiles warmly. "Someone has to file your paperwork. So..." she lowers her glasses and leans in, conspiratorially, "Anything juicy?" Helen is a bit of an enthusiast when it comes to police work. "Um, would you maybe want to talk to one of the nurses who were there?" It's easy to picture the hospital receptionist twirling the phone cord around her finger. Her nervousness bleeds through the line. "I think Grace is around...hey, Marcie, have you seen Grace?"
Detective White doesn't need to say anything to express his amusement, just raise one brow slightly as Creed walks by. He's not a man of many words, but he tends to get his point across all the same. "Rosewood Memorial Hospital, good afternoon," the woman who answers the phone chirps, "I'm afraid Dr. Rosen is in surgery at the moment, but I can have him call you back in about an hour. May I ask what this is regarding?" Helen sits right next to the coffee maker and the small lunchroom--she tells people her most important job is keeping her boys awake and fed. Officially, she's a civilian liaison, but most of the detective still call her a secretary. "Milk and sugar," she says, pushing a warm mug Creed's way with a sparkle in her eyes. Helen is almost as much an institution as the precinct headquarters themselves, with her imitation pearls and sensible brown loafers. She keeps a bowl of inedible hard candies on her desk that make great ammunition for elastic band slingshots.
The death certificates and autopsy reports make for dry reading, for the most part, detailing the usual effects of long term drug addiction on the human body. The clinical descriptions of wounds, scars, and infections pale next to the haggard faces of the dead strewn on the worn wooden desk next to them. Two of the deceased are Does, while the other three are Marvin Thompson, Beatrice Donall, and Maria Estevez. Marvin and Beatrice had fairly long rap sheets, and Charlie actually arrested Marvin last month for possession. Maria and the Does (a middle-aged white man missing two fingers on his right hand and a young Native or Latina woman with a small scar on her lower lip) aren't known to the police force, but shared their habits with Marv and Bea. The doctor's statement concerns the Jane Doe, running down the treatment she received at the ER--which was mostly taking a cold corpse's pulse and calling the code. One small amendment to the statement stands out: Patient showed discoloration around injection site consistent with M.R. and T.I. - Dr. Richard Rosen There's something more about the Jane Doe, though this doesn't come out of the file folder - this comes from Creed's trips out to the reservation. She's April Bone, the niece of Chief Gordon Bone, and she turned seventeen just a few months ago.
"They're just junkies." Weissberg dismisses Charlie's questions with that one statement while glaring at Creed. "It doesn't look like this was intentional. The guys downstairs think something might have contaminated the batch, but nobody's gotten their hands on any of the product yet." "Check out emergency in Rosewood, shake down some of your pals, and leave the voodoo dolls in the desk. I want names and I want the product. Nothing fancy, nothing weird." Weissberg steps back from the desk. "Got it?" Without waiting for a response he heads back to his desk across the room. White looks up from his casework and raises his eyebrows at Creed. "You're gonna give that boy a heart attack," he murmurs. The file folder on the desk contains more information, but not much. There are copies of the death certificates of each victim, a brief statement from a doctor, and a few black and white photos of the deceased clipped to the back.
Nearby, Detective White stifles a suspiciously cheerful cough as Weissberg clenches his teeth behind thin lips. The tendons on the burnt half of his face twitch briefly before he composes himself. "Cut the s$~+, Creed," he snaps, flipping open the case file. Nearly illegible chicken scratch covers the first visible sheet of paper--a death certificate. "Since last week the number of heroin ODs at Rosewood ER have tripled," he says, stabbing a finger onto the 'cause of death' line. "Five deaths so far. Somebody's got a hot batch out there, and I want them off the streets. Think you can handle that?"
The Navidson Vice Department smelled like an institution. Ancient coffee grinds mingled with stale cigarette smoke in the air while the tang of cleaning chemical lingered long after Flores and her cleaning crew came through in the small hours of the morning. Dust, paper, cheap suits, shoe polish, sweat, Helen's overly floral perfume. The detectives in the bullpen where mostly hip-deep in casework by two in the afternoon, the large window panes on the west side of the room spilling sunlight across their hunched shoulders and manila folders. Helen had the radio turned to an oldies station again, so Elvis crooned softly over the scratching of pens and shuffling of papers. Sergeant Weissberg stalked through the tableau with his usual irritated expression. It twisted the burn scars that blanketed the right side of his skull into even starker relief against his otherwise handsome face. "Creed, Miller." He dropped a slim folder on their shared desk, his one eye swiveling between the two of them. "Catch Sasquatch yet?" |
