Sentinel Fic 'Rag and Bone' Jim/Blair NC17 1/2

[janedavitt]

Written for the Spook Me Ficathon. The masterlist is here

My monster was 'Shape-Shifter' and my two secret prompts, both of which are in the story, slightly obliquely, but they're there, were: "Bloodlust!" and "Curse of the Faceless Man".

Many thanks to ozsaur and dustandroses for organizing this and many grateful thanks to t_verano who read the first draft and pointed out a dozen places where the plot didn't make any sense at all and thereby saved me confusing everyone who read it.

The fandom is 'The Sentinel', it's slash, with a Jim/Blair pairing, the fic is set in S2 and has references to the S1 episode, 'Cypher'.
Wordcount is 20,184 so I've had to split it into two parts to post. There's a link at the bottom of this to part two.




Rag and Bone

"A fool there was and he made his prayer
(Even as you and I!)
To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair
(We called her the woman who did not care)
But the fool he called her his lady fair-
(even as you and I!)

'The Vampire' by Rudyard Kipling


The hunger's become both an enemy and a friend. The cramps in his belly, well, they hurt, as does the scrape of damp, dank concrete against his face as he tries and fails to find a comfortable position. But only the dead feel no pain. And he's starting to anticipate the agony as a break in the monotony.

The thirst is simply a constant; an unvarying, unrelieved torment. He can't decide what he'd sell his soul for, though; water, or the chance to stretch out his legs.

At first he was scared and angry but now he's just bored.

If he wasn't delirious, he thinks that might worry him.



***

Two Weeks Earlier

Jim stared down at the body, plagued by a sense of wrongness that he couldn't quite pin down. Blair felt it, too, judging by his restlessness and his pallor; though that could have been down to his desire to get the hell out. Blair didn't deal well with murder victims, and this one, young, blonde, once pretty, would be pushing a lot of his buttons. He was over by the window now, staring out at the rain striking the pane, with his fingers drumming a matching beat on his leg, because he knew better than to touch anything.

Jim didn't have buttons when it came to murder. Just a quiet determination to find the person responsible, no matter who the victim was.

Okay, a dead child, that was maybe a little harder than most to deal with.

This was no child; he estimated her to be late-twenties, though the way in which she'd died made it hard to tell. Gaunt, filthy, her broken nails crusted with blood as if she'd used them to claw her way free of some prison -- or attacked someone -- and she was lying in the middle of a clean, comfortable apartment that was, apparently, her home.

What's wrong with this picture?

"Jim? We're ready to take the body now."

Jim turned his head and gave the medical examiner a brief smile as they both stepped out of the way of the two men lifting the corpse onto a gurney. "Sure, Dan. I've got a witness to question but I'll swing by later and see what you have for me."

Dan rolled his eyes. "Make it much later. Even tomorrow. I need to autopsy the victims from that house fire on Ridgeway, and I was hoping to get home before midnight --"

"Dan…" Jim wasn't above cajoling if it got his case moving quickly. "This one's a real challenge. Interesting."

Dan pursed his lips. "They're all interesting," he said. "But, yes, there're a few points --"

"Oh, God, where are they taking her?"

The voice from over by the doorway was high, distressed, and Jim winced. Dealing with distraught friends and family wasn't high on his list of favorite activities. His only witness -- the victim's roommate -- had been removed from the scene while the Forensics team did their initial sweep. The building superintendent had grudgingly unlocked the apartment across the hallway, number 212, currently empty, and let them use it. She'd been given a chair, a cup of coffee, and a uniformed officer to watch over her until Jim had finished his own examination of the crime scene.

The uniform hung back, his face sheepish, as if her dash forward had caught him off guard. Jim made a mental note to talk to him later and replace that look with one of pure misery. Idiot.

Dan shrugged and walked toward the door, giving the woman blocking it a sympathetic pat as he passed her. "Later, Jim," he called back.

Jim took a deep breath and went to deal with his witness. The woman who shared Anna Bancroft's apartment was disturbingly similar to the dead woman. They were about the same build, with the same light hair, although Diane Simons had hers done up in a complicated twist, not hanging in a snarled, grimy tangle.

"Where?" she repeated.

Jim really didn't want to be blunt, but it was difficult to dress up the truth. "To the morgue. The medical examiner -- that man you just saw -- will need to do an autopsy --"

"Oh, my God!"

He gave her a tight, patient smile that was meant to be reassuring, and led her back into 212, after giving Blair a whistle to get his attention and a crooked finger to get him moving.

The apartment was furnished with the basics and was clean. The air smelled damp, rather than stuffy, as if the windows had been opened recently and the rain-soaked air had swept through them, though they were closed now. Diane sat down in the chair she'd been in before; upholstered back and seat, but with smooth wooden arms that she gripped, her fingers flexing nervously.

Blair took a seat on a deep, comfortable couch opposite her. A nice couch; if it hadn't been upholstered in fire-engine red, Jim would have approved of it wholeheartedly, but he couldn't picture it in his loft, not really.

"An autopsy…" Diane shuddered. "That's horrible."

Blair leaned forward, his pallor replaced by a more natural color. "You know, some tribal cultures consider --"

Jim suppressed a sigh and joined Sandburg on the couch. He was ninety percent sure Blair made these stories up. Ninety-two percent sure. One day, he was going to care enough to do some research on them and eliminate the eight percent of doubt. He allowed Sandburg thirty seconds to explain about releasing spirits through painted patterns on the skin along lines of force (if he didn't live with him and know he was clean, Jim would swear the kid was high on something other than life) and then shut him up with a terse, "Chief".

"Yes, Jim?" Wounded blue eyes. Oh, he'd pay for that later. Blair had ways.

"I'd like to ask Ms. Simons --"

"Diane," she said, too automatically for it to carry any suggestion of intimacy or flirtation. "I'm -- I was Anna's cousin."

That explained the likeness.

"And you live with her in that apartment across the hall? Number 215?"

"Just recently, yes." Diane blew her nose with a prosaic efficiency that made Jim feel better disposed toward her. He wasn't unsympathetic, but he needed to start work here, and so far she hadn't been very helpful. "My place had termites and I didn't want to go back… she said I could stay here. It's been about a month, I guess."

"And the date you last saw her…?"

Diane met his eyes, her own dry now, shadowed with bewilderment. "I don't know what you mean. Breakfast. I saw her today at breakfast." The two apartments had identical layouts and she gestured vaguely toward the small kitchen, visible through an archway off the main living room and then frowned as if she'd expected it to be the one she'd eaten in.

It was five in the afternoon. The woman who'd just been carried out of her former home had been severely dehydrated, her cheeks hollowed by hunger.

"Breakfast?" Jim repeated. "That's just not possible. You saw the body --" Blair gave him a disappointed look as if he'd been callous.

"Oh, my God." Tears welled up again. "I know, I know, okay. But I swear it was today, I swear. She -- she spilled her juice and it ran off the table onto my skirt and I had to change and I was late and I yelled at her, can you believe that? And when I came back out, she'd gone and I never -- I never saw her --" The tears choked up the halting account of a scene Jim imagined had played out in more than one household in the city that morning. Blair had done it to him only the week before, except it'd been that green sludge he drank and it had crawled across the table, giving them both time to get out of the way.

He'd given the kitchen table in 215 a cursory glance and seen the sticky residue coating it -- smelled it, too; sweetly acidic. Orange and tangerine. It had been wiped up; he'd seen the tracks the cloth had made through the pooled liquid, but juice was tenacious and whoever had done the cleaning hadn't done it well. His vision had sharpened as he looked for fingerprints, and he'd just found a partial and was losing himself in the intricate whorls when an elbow in his ribs had jolted his concentration.

He received a second jab in the same spot and realized that his attention had drifted again. God; twice in the space of thirty minutes? What the hell was wrong with him? This time it had been the nap of the fabric on the arm of the couch, luring his fingers into stroking it over and over. His fingers were faintly sticky and he sniffed them curiously. Citrus. Juice from the table in Anna's apartment? Had he touched it when he was zoning? He'd have to ask Sandburg later.

Blair gave him a casual, rather than meaningful look, covering for him perfectly, and brought him back into a conversation which seemed to have been all empty reassurances that you never knew, did you, but you couldn't live life thinking that way, yadda-yadda.

He gathered his thoughts and resisted the urge to tread on Sandburg's foot or something by way of repayment for the painful dig. Diane was staring at him, her eyes speculative, and he wondered, as he always did, if he'd drooled or something. God, he hated zoning.

"We'll need to track Ms. Bancroft's movements after she left here," Jim said, and took out his notebook and pencil to avoid that searching look.

"Well, she went to work, of course," Diane said. "She's a legal secretary at Paulson and Downs, over on Century Road, two blocks away. She's been there for, oh, five or six years, I think."

"Okay." Jim made a note of the address. "And you didn't speak to her at all after that? No phone calls, e-mails?"

"No." Diane shook her head. "I'm between jobs right now; I was in a hurry this morning and stressed because I had an interview." Her mouth twisted in a rueful smile and then quivered. "I didn’t get the job and I spent the afternoon going around half a dozen agencies. I got back here planning to take a long soak and cry on Anna's shoulder over a bottle of wine, but the door was open and there were all these people and I pushed past them and I saw Anna -- oh, God!"

"I know," Jim said, hoping that she wasn't going to cry again. "And that would have been --" He consulted his notebook. "About 4.20 p.m.?"

"I suppose so," she said vaguely. Her voice sharpened. "Sorry, but I didn't check my watch."

"It's okay," Blair said, shooting Jim an admonishing look. "The police who responded to the 911 from the apartment told us when you got there."

She gave him a grateful smile. "Did they? Well, that's kind of them."

It wasn't the way Jim would have described officers doing their job, but he let it pass.

"You identified the body --"

"They made me," she said, transferring her gaze to Jim again. "When I said I lived there, they took me over and made me -- made me look, made me -- she smelled." Her hand came up to cover her mouth. "I feel sick."

"I can imagine how distressing it was, ma'am," Jim said. He could hear how wooden he sounded and he didn't know why he was finding it so difficult to sympathize with her. He could tell Blair was going to be all over him when he left, wanting to know why he couldn't lighten up at times like this; show a bit of empathy. Nice to have something to look forward to, along with the autopsy.

He stared at her. "Can you explain the condition of the body? You're certain it was your cousin, Anna Bancroft?"

Her heartbeat was steady, her eyes unblinking. "Yes, of course I'm sure. And, no, I can't, I just --" She lifted her hands helplessly. "It's impossible."

"No," Jim said. "It's just strange." He ignored Blair's snort and continued questioning her, making notes like 'single', 'quiet', 'hasn't dated in a year' and a direct quote, delivered with convincing force: 'Enemies? Anna? No!'.

When he thought he had enough to be going on with, he stood. "I'll need you to come down to the station and make an official statement tomorrow morning, Ms. Simmons. Around nine, please." He passed over his card. "Here's my number if you can think of anything that might have a bearing on this."

She took his card and stood, glancing around. "I can't -- where can I stay? Can I go back --?"

"To the apartment?" Jim shook his head. "The Forensics team will be in there for a while and it's an active crime scene. And you won't be able to remove anything from there, either. I'm sorry."

She bit her lip. "Oh. Not even clothes -- a toothbrush?"

"Sorry."

Blair was a solid lump of disapproval by his side but Jim didn't care. Procedure was procedure.

"Maybe you can stay here," Blair suggested. "We could ask the superintendent."

Diane sniffed wetly. "Just across from where she -- I couldn't possibly."

"There's a motel at the end of the block," Jim said tersely. "How about you check in there for the night?"

"We can drop you off," Blair said, his eyes bright with the zeal of a man doing a good deed. "We're going that way."

Jim opened his mouth to point out that they weren't and then closed it again. He didn't have anything to hold her on, but that didn't mean that he wanted to lose track of her. "Sure."

She picked up the large purse she'd been carrying when she walked in, according to the uniforms; a purse that had been searched with her permission and revealed nothing beyond the usual crap and clutter women carried around with them. Jim remembered picking up Carolyn's purse once and being shocked at the sheer weight of it. "Thank you." Her smile wavered when it was focused on Jim and warmed appreciably when it moved to Blair. "And whoever did this --?"

"I'll find him," Jim promised. "Or her."

"Or what," Blair muttered, low enough that Jim guessed it was meant just for his ears. "Man, talk about freaky."

Blair sure had a knack for summing up a situation.


***


"Roommate? Cousin?" Mr. Paulson shook his head slowly, a measured rejection of what they'd told him. "No. Impossible. Anna was my late wife's niece -- which is in no way why she was hired, in no way -- and she has no cousin named Diane. Impossible. No."

Paulson's repetitive manner of speech was driving him crazy, but Jim forgot his annoyance and concentrated on absorbing this new data. "You're sure?"

Paulson rolled his eyes expressively. "Why, yes, Detective, I am. But don't take my word for it." He leaned over and pressed a button on the intercom on his desk. "Mary? Come in, please."

"Who is --?"

"She's Ray Downs' secretary," Paulson said. "Anna's best friend." Annoyance seemed to impose unnatural brevity on him.

The door opened and a young woman, eyes swollen, face tear-blotched, came in. "Yes, Mr. Paulson?"

"These… gentlemen wish to ask you some questions." Paulson's gaze went to Sandburg as if to underscore the irony of calling cops gentlemen, especially when they looked like hippies. Jim had introduced Sandburg as his partner, without elaborating on his role, so the assumption that he was a cop was understandable. He didn't think Sandburg looked any worse than usual, but he was used to him. "About Anna."

"She was such a lovely woman. I don't understand it." Mary sniffed, her gray eyes blinking away tears. Jim was starting to feel soaked in grief, dripping with it. "She left here at four -- a little early, but she wanted to do some shopping and she'd --"

"Yes, yes, I told her it was in order," Paulson said, waving his hand impatiently. "She'd stayed late the night before. Quite in order, quite."

Mary gave a helpless shrug. "And she was fine."

"She left at four?" Jim said. The 911 call from Anna's apartment had been logged at 4:05. Two blocks. Stairs. It wasn't impossible, but people would have noticed a woman breaking Olympic records for the sprint. Anna walked to work, according to Paulson, and she didn't own a car. They'd have to check to see if she'd been picked up by a taxi. "Are you sure?"

Paulson's breath exploded in an outraged puff of air. "Detective Ellison! I saw her leave myself. Four precisely. Not a minute earlier, not a minute later."

Mary nodded. "That's right."

"Her cousin arrived home at 4:20," Jim said, thinking aloud. "The uniforms were already there. From the 911 tape, Anna made the call herself."

He'd heard it, a weak, unraveling whisper, husky and defeated, five simple words: Anna. I'm Anna. Help me.

"Impossible."

"And then her cousin arrived and identified the body."

"Her cousin?" Mary gave Jim a doubtful look. "I'm sorry, I don't know --? What cousin?"

"Diane Simons," Sandburg said helpfully. Jim let him talk. "She lived with Anna."

"What?" Mary shook her head firmly. "No. No, she didn't. Why, I was over at Anna's every week; we had a girl's night, you know, watched a movie, drank a bottle or two of --" She caught Mr. Paulson's eye and cleared her throat. "A glass of wine, chips, if we weren't dieting, you know… we talked…neither of us is seeing anyone and we--" She shook her head again and the broken fragments of sentences became whole, decisive statements. "She lived alone. It was a one-bedroom apartment, for heaven's sake, and even when I'd had too much to drink, she never asked me to sleep over; I always got a taxi home."

Jim felt his face slacken with shock, quickly followed by panic. One bedroom? Shit, of course there was only one. There had been a tiny spare room -- smaller even than the space Sandburg inhabited -- but it had smelled musty, unused, and there had been no bed, just a table piled high with boxes.

Fuck.

"What was she wearing?" Blair asked abruptly as Jim tried to make sense of it all. "Anna, I mean, when she left work."

Paulson frowned and hesitated long enough that Jim wouldn't have trusted anything he'd said, but Mary answered at once with a description of the outfit Diane had been wearing. The body had been dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved cotton shirt; Diane in a white silk top and navy suit.

Diane Simons, last seen checking in at the Plaza Motel (Cable TV! Complimentary Newspaper and Continental Breakfast!), had just moved to the top of his suspect list.

In fact, right now, she was the only name on it.

One bedroom.

How the hell had he missed that?

***

"I don't know, Jim," Blair said for the third time. "I missed it, too."

"It's my job not to miss blindingly obvious -- Hey! It's a green light, buddy, green; move it, will you?"

"I don't think he can hear you no matter how loud you yell." Blair being soothing was just about the most annoying thing on the planet. "And we're almost there."

"Yeah." Jim gave him a sidelong glance. "And if she's still there, whoever the hell she is, I'll cook dinner all week, okay?" He slammed his hand against the wheel, jarring it painfully. "I can't believe this. Simon's going to -- God."

"He'll understand."

"Will you just give it a rest?" he snarled. "I screwed up. Big time. Simon's going to rip me a new one and I deserve it."

Sandburg nodded, his hair falling across his face. "That's it, Jim. Put on the hair shirt. Start the self-flagellation early --"

"Do you mind?" Jim inquired acidly. Blair dealing out sarcasm was better than sympathy, but not by much. "I'm being realistic."

"None of this makes sense."

"That's supposed to be news, Chief?"

"No, think about it. We've gotten so caught up in finding out that Diane isn't who she said she was that we're overlooking the other inconsistencies."

Jim opened his mouth to blast Sandburg -- and maybe the idiot who'd just cut in front of him, too -- but changed his mind. The kid was right.

"Yeah… nothing adds up. The whole case is screwy, start to finish."

"Alive and well in one place; dead and --" Blair shuddered. "Skin and bone, man, skin and bone, somewhere else."

"It's impossible," Jim said. "Which is good."

"It is?"

"Yeah." Jim signaled a right and turned into the motel's parking lot. "Because it means we can forget about trying to make it make sense."

"Huh?"

Jim turned off the engine, feeling suddenly better about the whole deal. "Sure. Forget about what we were led to believe -- and look at it a different way; a simpler way."

He watched Blair get it, his mouth rounding in a silent 'ohh…' of comprehension.

"We only have Diane's word for it that the body was Anna's," Jim said, spelling it out. "From the photographs in the apartment, it was a reasonable match, but let's face it, the way that body looked, it could have been anyone."

Blair grimaced, obviously remembering the state of the corpse. "Yeah."

Two people, not one in two places. And 'Diane' was in Anna's clothes…

Blair jerked upright, the seatbelt tightening with a clunk and spoke what Jim was thinking. "Jim! It was her! Anna was Diane!"

"Faking her own death, you mean?" Sandburg nodded. "It's neat and tidy," Jim said slowly, already finding the weaknesses in the theory, "and you're right; Diane sure as hell looked more like the woman in the photographs than the victim did, but you're forgetting the 911 call; she told us her name was Anna with her dying breath."

"That doesn't mean she wasn't lying," Sandburg said.

"Cynicism," Jim said with an approving nod. "Huh. I'm rubbing off on you. Fair point, especially as Anna had only just left work, with witnesses to prove it who know her well and had no reason to lie." He thought it over. "And that Anna was healthy and fit and the body wasn't -- but why fake your death? And who was the body?"

"My head aches," Sandburg said after a short silence, in which Jim could almost hear his brain working furiously.

"No kidding," Jim muttered and got out of his truck, only to discover, as expected, that Ms. Simons had checked in, yes, but wasn't in her room, and, from the absence of her coat and purse, wasn't ever planning to check out officially.


***


They got back to the station, with Jim prepared to face Simon's wrath, and discovered that he was in a meeting. Jim headed down to the morgue with an unaccustomed feeling of relief, Blair lagging behind, his reluctance clear.

"You don't have to, you know."

"It's easier every time." Blair was already fish-belly-white and breathing shallowly through his mouth.

Jim put his hand on Sandburg's arm and guided him into an alcove by a row of filing cabinets. "Blair -- you don't have to," he repeated. "I'll fill you in. Go back upstairs; grab us both some coffee, and if Simon turns up, keep your head down, okay?"

"You zoned today," Blair said, his full lower lip jutting out stubbornly. "Suppose it happens in there?"

God, the kid drove him nuts, but Jim couldn't think of anyone else he wanted backing him up. Affection, unspoken, unacknowledged, was always present between them, had been from early on, but there was respect, too, and it was that emotion that made Jim draw back his hand after a single pat delivered to Blair's cheek. Belatedly, he realized that he was still holding onto Blair's arm, not that Blair was trying to break free. He glanced down at his hand, curled around the green and brown plaid of Blair's shirt and absently rubbed his thumb over the swell of muscle. The pattern danced in front of his eyes, complex, an intricate weave of shades and strands --

"And that makes twice," Blair murmured. His hand had just delivered a hard tug to Jim's hair, leaving a patch of scalp stinging.

"Sandburg, can you find a kinder way to snap me out of these?" he demanded.

"I tried talking, I tried shaking you," Blair said patiently. "After the hair pull, I was going for something even more drastic, so just be glad it worked."

"What were you going to -- no, don't tell me." Jim stepped back. "Okay, you're with me. Don't faint, don't puke, don't make me say 'I told you so'."

Blair sniffed and then went a shade paler. "God, the smell down here…"

"You get used to it." Jim eyed him with some sympathy. "There's a jar of goop inside the door that you can smear under your nose; supposed to cut the stink down."

"I tried that, remember? Gave me a rash."

"Oh, right."

"But it's not a bad idea," Blair said. He patted himself down and then extracted a small brown bottle from his jeans pocket.

"What the hell is that?"

"Essential oil. Lavender."

Once opened, the scent of the oil made Jim's nose prickle and his eyes water until he'd gotten used to it. He didn't bother asking why Blair was carrying it around with him, but it helped Blair to endure the morgue for a full three minutes longer than his previous best, and that was enough time for them to discover that the body on the table was Anna.

Fingerprints didn't lie the way people did and Anna's prints were on record following a minor burglary at her apartment four years before. She hadn't requested that her prints be destroyed after the investigation was over (it had been local gang of teenagers paying for their addiction, not to drugs, but the latest in clothes, games, and computers) and they were there in the system.

"The body's severely dehydrated and judging by the stomach contents, or lack of them, she hadn't eaten for a few days, but that's not what killed her," Dan said, his hands deft as they parted the lank hair on Anna's head. "See that? What you have there is a standard blunt force trauma. I noticed it at the scene but I wanted to do some X-rays to make sure. And from the marks on her wrists and ankles, she's been tied up. Rope. I found some fibers in her skin and sent them to the lab and they should be able to give you the type."

"Someone hit her with something," Jim summed up. He shook his head. "Just wasn't enough to torture her…"

Dan gave him a curious look. "We don't know what happened yet, Jim."

"She couldn't have fallen -- weak from hunger -- hit her head?" Blair asked from the doorway, his words escaping on carefully shallow breaths.

"No." Dan sounded definite. "From the location of the depression, that wouldn't have been likely; it's on top of her head and the skull's caved in -- look, you can feel the floating fragments of bone under the skin."

The door closed on Blair's rapidly retreating figure and Jim exchanged a grin with Dan. "He's getting better."

"Hey, any day he doesn't pass out is an improvement," Dan said dryly. He chewed his lip. "Jim, I don't recall seeing anything near where the body was lying that she could've hit her head on."

"Nothing close," Jim agreed. "She could have staggered a few yards?"

"Not a chance. Not after that killing blow. And given her physical condition, I don't think she could have traveled far, so where was she being held without food or water?"

"Beats me," Jim said. "It can't have been in the apartment; the only room that had a lock was the bathroom, and it was as flimsy as they usually are --"

"And on the inside of the door," Dan pointed out, beating Jim to it and earning himself an eye roll. "Plus there would have been a water supply."

"Yeah…We'll find it," Jim told him. Anna's fingernails had been choked with dust as well as her own blood; she'd broken free of somewhere.

Jim was just glad there had been no splinters of wood mixed in with the dust and blood. Blair's head was filled with enough gruesome images for one day; if he started thinking that she'd been inside a coffin, well…


***


"What do you mean, all the prints in the apartment -- both apartments -- match Anna Bancroft's?"

Simon wasn't yelling, but his voice still hurt Jim's ears, each syllable a hammer blow of sound and fury.

"Captain, I don't get it either." Jim made a helpless, palms-up gesture. "We interviewed the neighbors and no one saw Anna arrive, just the police, and then this Diane woman. Which doesn't mean much; someone not making any noise and with a key could have easily slipped in unnoticed. The two apartments are at the end of an L-shaped corridor; the short end, and the elevator's just around the corner."

"Pretty private," Simon conceded. "Not going to help us." He shot Jim an exasperated glance. "These fingerprints --"

Jim had remembered seeing Diane's hands gripping the wooden arms of the chair she was sitting in and got the Forensics team to lift prints from the chair in 212 and the table in 215. The results hadn't been what he wanted to hear. Simon wasn't the only one feeling frustrated.

"I saw the Simons woman's hands on that chair, Simon, and she didn't have a chance to wipe the prints off. And that juice spill was recent."

"She could remembered she'd touched the chair and doubled back to take care of it," Simon said. He arranged the papers on his desk into a pile, stared at them, and then tossed them aside to fan out untidily. "When you were interviewing the employer, maybe."

"If she'd wiped the chair, where did the prints we lifted come from? Anna was in the morgue by then," Blair pointed out, bringing Simon's fulminating glare down on his head.

"'We', Sandburg? Since when are you part of my forensics team? Did I miss a memo?"

"Give the kid a break, Simon," Jim protested. "He's right."

Simon got up and poured himself some coffee. "This doesn't make sense."

"Twins?" Jim hazarded.

"With the same fingerprints?" Simon shook his head. "And there's no mystery about this woman; she's lived here all her life; the uncle would've known if she had a twin."

"Uncle by marriage," Jim said, but he knew Simon was right. This case just wasn't adding up.


***


For the second time that day, Jim stood in Anna Bancroft's apartment. Something Dan had said had been nagging at him. Weak as she was, Anna couldn't have walked far -- and why go to her own apartment to call 911; anyone would have made the call for her once they saw the state she was in.

Unless she'd been held close enough that it made sense to go there.

The dust in her hair was still being analyzed, but Jim had taken a pinch of it in his fingers when Dan was washing his hands and it had been from standard plasterboard as far as he could tell, mixed in with detritus from cobwebs.

"She was kept around here, I'm sure of it," he said to Blair. He stared at the walls. "Not in here, because we'd have found a hiding place… but close."

Blair stood beside him, his hands in his pockets. He still smelled of lavender but the scent was muted now, already absorbed into the complex, ever-changing superficial smell Blair carried with him unknowingly. Jim wondered sometimes if people realized just how impossible it was to cover up the natural scent of a body. He could cut through all of the red herrings of soap, shampoo, and deodorant and identify the core smell, the signature scent, the one no amount of scrubbing could erase. It wasn't susceptible to being broken down; it was elemental, tagged in his head with a name for people he knew well.

Blair… Blair smelled nice.

"If she clawed her way out of somewhere, made the phone call, and then was hit on the head, who hit her?" Blair asked.

"I don't know. The Diane woman, most likely."

"And who was masquerading as her at the office?" Blair persisted. "Diane again?"

"I don't know," Jim ground out. "I don't know how the fingerprints can be the same; I don't know why she was targeted, why she was left without food or water, why she was killed --"

"You can guess that last one," Blair said, his voice soft. "Someone had to stop her talking."

Jim turned and looked at him. Blair's eyes were shadowed with tiredness, as if the day had worn him out, but he was there, he was sticking close. "She said enough, Chief. She asked for help. And we didn't get there in time."

"No, we didn't." Blair stepped closer, and closer he didn't smell of lavender; it was as if Jim was drawn in deep, inside Blair's personal space, with everything else outside. "But you're here now, Jim. Look down. Follow her tracks from the phone. Follow them back to the point of origin."

Blair was running his hands up and down Jim's arms, encouragingly, the touch firm and confident. When had they gotten this relaxed around each other? That had to have a point of origin, too, but it was so early on, Jim couldn't isolate it.

He broke away reluctantly from Blair's touch and did what Blair had suggested. His fingers could feel the grit of dust deep in the carpet pile, a wavering line of it. He followed it back to the front door and, with a lack of surprise that was in itself a shock, across the hallway to the doorway of the empty apartment.

"In there?" Blair asked. "Jim, are you sure -- no, cancel that, of course you are. Sorry."

"We'll need the key," Jim said absently, still crouched down, the grit and dust digging into his fingers like Braille for Sentinels. "Stay here and don't let anyone in."

Blair swallowed. "Uh, sure." Jim straightened and began to walk to the elevator, just around the corner. Blair called after him. "Jim?"

"What?"

"Don't take too long, okay?"

He raised his hand in a reassurance of sorts and hid his grin because really, Blair jittery with nerves wasn't that amusing.

And he didn't blame him. This case was stirring up some memories neither of them wanted to surface.

***

Jim fitted the key in the lock and then paused and took out the key to Anna's apartment and compared them. "They're the same," he discovered.

"Really?" Blair peered at them. "Huh. What're the odds?"

"I don't know, but remind me to have a talk to the supervisor before we leave," Jim said, scowling. "So Diane could get in here any time she wanted, nice and quiet. Interesting."

"If you say so." Blair pushed the door open and walked in, flicking on the lights using a knuckle, not a finger, the way Jim had taught him. "So where do we go from here?"

Jim dropped to one knee and ran his fingers over the carpet. "Right where you're standing, Chief, so get out of the way."

"How the hell did I miss this?" he asked Sandburg a short time later when he'd found where the trail ended, behind a couch in the spare room. "It's like I walked around here blind."

Blair frowned. "It isn't like you, Jim. I mean, you weren't looking for anything, not in this apartment, and you never came into this room, but your senses, they see more than you consciously realize, and I'd have expected them to --"

"Yeah. Me, too. Especially once I found that sticky patch on the arm of the couch out in the other room. Diane must have come in here after breakfast and brushed against it; she wouldn't have walked around with her hands like that for long." Jim hauled the couch farther away from the wall without much difficulty; cheap piece of crap, the trailer-trash cousin of the aristocrat in the other room, and revealed an irregular hole in the wall.

Anna had been kept in a space no wider than a coffin, in the darkness. A soiled gag and frayed ropes were in the small space, thrown there by her captor, Jim guessed, tidying up the evidence. Diane must have come back, killed Anna after she'd realized she'd called for help, tidied up in Anna's own apartment, dumped the evidence in this one, and left quickly, knowing the police were minutes away from arriving. Then she'd walked in a short time later, all shocked face and facile tears.

Bitch.

He saw threads hanging from a nail where Anna must have painstakingly worked at the ropes which bound her; smelled the sour, organic reek of waste and the acrid stink of fear.

"Anna got free. She couldn't have known if Diane -- Anna --"

"Call her Diane for now." Blair's hand was a warm pressure on his shoulder.

"She couldn't have known if she was alone in the apartment, or if it was safe in her own, but she had to try." Jim ran his fingers over the ragged hole in the wall. "I don't know where she got the strength to break this down."

"People can do a lot more than you'd expect when it's life and death." Blair edged forward, frowning, intent. "And think about it; she had to get put in there. The wall would have been weak in places."

Jim nodded. "Yeah; I can feel the lines of a hatch or something. It's been plastered over; the paint smells fresh."

"No way of getting water or food to her once she was in there?" Blair shuddered. "God, that's just -- God."

"Easy, Chief."

"Why not just kill her?" The words burst out of Blair. "Hide her body -- yeah, okay, I can get that, but this? Who does this to someone? Why?"

"It's not your usual murder method," Jim agreed. "I guess the killer could have gotten a sick thrill out of living in her home, knowing she was dying slowly a few yards away --"

"Jim." Blair was ghost-pale. "Don't, okay? I'm going to be having nightmares for weeks."

"Then we'll both be losing sleep," Jim said. "You're noisy when you're tossing and turning."

Blair gave him a sidelong look. "You'd hear me?"

Jim smiled at him, and hoped it looked rueful, not guilty. "Hard to miss what you do when you're right underneath me."

"You hear a lot more than you should."

"I hear a lot more than I want to," Jim corrected him. "And before you ask, no, I don't -- not when you're --" He was blushing. A veteran of barracks living, and he was blushing trying to tell Blair that when it came to any number of bodily functions, Blair had more privacy with him than he would have with a normal roomie. "I dial it right down. Always. Right away. I go deaf. You're on your own, pal, you got that?"

"Hey." Blair patted Jim's thigh. "Easy. I know. And it's not like I'd mind --" He visibly reconsidered. "No, I would mind. Am I blushing? I feel like I'm blushing."

Jim smiled fondly, relaxed, distracted from the horror a foot in front of him. "Are you kidding? I could cook wieners on your face."

Blair punched his arm and they exchanged grins Jim was fairly sure qualified for a label of 'goofy'.

"It still doesn't make sense," Blair said.

Jim's grin faded. "Still doesn't," he agreed.

He went back to Anna's apartment on an impulse, and picked up one of the photographs of her in the living room. She was smiling in it, a mischievous, triangular smile, turning conventional prettiness into something charming. It was Anna in the photograph; no doubt about it; her desk at the office had duplicates of two of the photographs here, and Mary had confirmed that they were of the Anna she knew. He tried to match her face to the woman he'd questioned, the woman with her fingerprints, but one had been smiling, the other crying, a wad of tissues hovering around her face.

"Pick out a feature. Her ears, maybe," Blair suggested. "I read somewhere that they don't change, no matter how old you get." He walked over to a bookshelf and returned with another framed photograph in his hand. "Here. You can see her ear in this one."

"I don't know, Chief."

"You can do it." Blair didn't sound reassuring or overly confident; he just sounded casual. "Someone you saw a few hours ago? She's in your recent memory, Jim, as easy to access as something in your wallet. Just look for her and match it with this photograph."

Sometimes, he thought he could do things just because Blair believed he could. God help him the day Blair decided all Sentinels had the power of flight; he'd find himself shivering on a rooftop, ready to jump.

He sat down on Anna's couch -- no red for her; it was a bland, flowered fabric -- and closed his eyes; let Blair's voice coax him until he reached his goal. And when a picture, a snapshot culled from the movie of the day, was hanging bright and clear in his mind, he opened his eyes and stared down at the photograph in his lap.

"It was her," he said flatly. "It was her. It was Anna we interviewed."

"They both were…" Blair sounded interested now, in a way that was separate from sympathy or outrage. Intellectually captivated by a puzzle. He moved from the arm of the couch and slid down beside Jim, who didn't shift over, so that Blair was tucked into a small space, their arms bumping, their thighs aligned. "Single white female…"

"I remember the movie," Jim said. "But Anna didn't have a roommate. And no one could mimic her well enough to fool people she'd known for years."

"Someone did, though." Blair's forehead was furrowed. "Someone stole her life, all of it, borrowed it, used it, lived it --"

Jim chuckled. "Put like that, Mrs. Donnelly never bringing back our colander pales into insignificance, doesn't it?"

He expected Blair to smile, but instead he got a questioning, vaguely amused look that made him move over, ceding a few inches to Blair, just so that he could turn and meet that quizzical gaze. "What?"

"'Our' colander?"

Jim flushed. "Well, mine, I guess. Look, what difference does it make? Focus, huh?"

"I'm focused," Blair assured him. "I'm --" He broke off. "Body thief."

"Yes, you said that --"

"Skin-walker."

"What?"

"Name a culture and I can tell you their shape-shifter legends. They all have them: Greek, Celtic, Norse, Japanese… it's a persistent myth."

"Sure," Jim said. "Emphasis on 'myth'. Not real. A story. Or do you really think people go around turning into bulls to seduce young women?"

"Zeus and Europa," Blair said approvingly. "Nice. And, yeah, not literally, maybe, but it's an approach a lot of men think works pretty well if you mean building up their muscles, making a lot of noise, testosterone flying."

"But not you," Jim said, softly, gently, goading Blair. "You're more the kind who'd turn into a --"

"The words 'golden shower' had better not be what you had in mind," Blair warned him, his lips twitching.

Jim shook his head sadly. "For a god, that Zeus was a kinky kind of guy."

"Oh, I'm kinky," Blair said airily. "You have no idea of the depths of my depravity. I just don't go in for that one."

Jim gave the top of Blair's head a friendly knuckling. "So that's where my spare cuffs went."

"No, they're in the top drawer of your nightstand," Blair said promptly. "Along with the feather duster, and yes, I will get you drunk enough to 'fess up about that one day."

"Chief, you're killing me here." Jim shook his head. Feather duster? Not likely. He could just imagine the sneezing fit that would trigger. Real sexy. "Joking aside, Simon's going to have us both committed if you even breathe a word about shape-shifters."

"What if it's true?"

"Blair…" His automatic protest died away. Why argue, when he was so indisputably in the right? Blair was just fucking with him, anyway. "Fine. Shape-shifter, it is. Case solved. We look for the dead woman's live copy and we lock one of them up and bury the other."

"We still don't know why Anna was kept alive," Blair said, as if Jim hadn't just heaped sarcasm all over him. "Most shape-shifters kill the original."

"Will you stop this?" Jim said, his voice tight with irritation. Blair wasn't usually this persistent about a joke that wasn't going down well. "We've done all we can here. Time to go home."

And dream of thieves and skinless men, changing, transforming… and a woman dying slowly, voice and hands silenced, within her home, surrounded by her life, out of reach, just out of reach.

And that was like another Greek legend, but Jim knew all about Tantalus. He had since Blair had moved in.

***

By the end of the week, Anna Bancroft's death -- or disappearance -- or both -- was no closer to being solved than it had been on the first day. Blair was meeting Jim's occasional gibes about his shape-shifter theory with a bland indifference and refusing to talk about it, and Simon had gotten tired of making asides, in a voice loud enough for people three desks away to hear, about detectives who were considerate enough to give murderers free rides to motels, to make escaping justice really easy.

Jim spent time each day reading over the statements from Anna's co-workers and neighbors, trying to pin down the time the swap had been made between the real Anna and the impersonator, and failing. The switch, if switch it was, had been seamless. No employment agencies in Cascade had a Diane Simons on their books and without fingerprints he couldn't track her down under her real name. And he still hadn't come up with an explanation about the fingerprints. He'd known criminals who'd sanded their prints off their fingers, and he'd seen movies where spies wore false fingerprints over their own, but those stratagems were a little far-fetched given Anna's mundane life. Anna had been a normal woman in a normal job. Paulson was a lawyer, sure, but involved in nothing more exciting than the occasional divorce case. Small-time, respectable, a dead end.

The autopsy gave him a rough timeline for how long Anna had been without water -- three days -- but it didn't help. He had nothing.

And each night, he was dreaming of being suffocated, mummified, and was sleeping with the covers shoved to the bottom of the bed because he couldn't bear the feeling of being trapped.

***

Jim stirred his spaghetti sauce with one hand and groped for his wine glass with the other. Once he'd opened the bottle to add a splash to the sauce, it'd seemed like a good idea to pour them both a glass, and he was feeling a mild, pleasant buzz.

The tap of Blair's fingers on his laptop's keyboard merged with the clunk of the wooden spoon in a homely, familiar way.

"This is nice," Jim offered, moved to words.

Blair turned his head and smiled. "Yeah? Smells good from here."

"I didn't mean the --" A knock at the door interrupted him and he paused, automatically reaching out with his senses. One person, heartbeat a little hurried; could have used the stairs; could be agitated. It wasn't an exact science, no matter how many tests Blair ran. The data his senses gave him could be interpreted so many different ways.

"I'll get it." Blair stood and stretched his arms high, working out the kinks after being bent over his computer for an hour. Jim watched the teasing reveal of Blair's stomach as his T-shirt rode up high, Blair's slow, deep breath making his ribs and hip bones stand out sharply. The pattern of dark hair feathered on skin was, viewed objectively, fascinating, but there was very little about Blair's body that Jim could be objective about.

Blair lowered his arms and caught Jim staring. Jim refused to look away, even when the mild surprise in Blair's eyes turned knowing, hot.

They were adding straws to camels' backs with each look, each touch, each foray into flirting. Someone would break soon, fall to their knees. Maybe they both would. It was enough for Jim to know the attraction wasn't as one-sided as he'd always thought it was. For now, it was enough.

The knock at the door was repeated and Blair mimed an 'oops', his face happy, and loped over to answer the door. Jim shook his head, smiling, and scooped up a spoonful of the sauce to taste.

The spoon was still in his hand, dripping sauce, when Blair cried out, the sound holding a note of shock and fear, primal and pure enough to raise the hairs on Jim's body. He was moving toward Blair and the threat an instant later, the spoon still gripped in his hand until he tossed it aside.

Blair backed away and pointed at the empty doorway. "Jim -- it was her --"

"Diane?" Jim snapped.

"Yes, but -- Jim, wait, she wasn't --"

"No time, Chief." He spared a thought for his gun, but the corridor outside the loft was empty; he had to hurry. "Call for back up; get people over here," he threw over his shoulder as he set off at a run, thankful for the shoes he was wearing because he'd taken some trash out earlier and forgotten to remove them. The long apron was a pain in the ass, though, flapping as he ran.

By the time he reached the street, he knew he'd lost her. It was Saturday and the crowds of shoppers made it easy for a single woman to merge with them. He scanned the street, stretching his vision until his eyes blurred, the blue of the distant water of the bay telling him that he'd gone too far.

Fuck. Furious with himself for not being the one to answer the door, he retraced his steps, ignoring the curious or openly amused glances he was getting. It was a fucking apron. So fucking what?

When he got back upstairs, the loft door was open and there was a current of fresh air pouring out through it. Concern gripped him. Had she had an accomplice? Someone who'd come in through one of the other entrances to the loft?

"Sandburg!" he called out, after a cursory glance around. "Blair, where are you?" The draft was coming from Blair's room; he walked in and saw that the external door in there was wide open. Blair lay across the threshold, blood staining his forehead.

In the kitchen, the sauce bubbled; burning, sticking to the bottom of the pan.

***

"I just need to rest." Blair touched his finger gingerly to the dressing on his forehead. "Not concussed, not hungry -- sorry about the sauce, man -- just got one hell of a headache and I need some time to regroup, okay? You've got people looking for her and at least we know she's still around, so it's all good."

"Chief --"

"You're hovering." Blair lay back and tugged a blanket high, until it was tucked under his chin. He closed his eyes. "Go 'way, Jim."

Jim chewed the inside of his cheek. "Okay," he said reluctantly. He checked that the exterior door was secure, gave Blair one final look, and went to deal with the spilled sauce, scorched pan, and -- inevitably -- Simon.

***

"He heard a noise, went to investigate, and when he opened the door someone hit him. He didn't see who, he didn't see what."

"Does Sandburg walk around with his eyes closed or something?"

Jim gave Henri a cold look. "Not that I've noticed."

Hands held up, Henri backtracked. "Hey, the kid got hit hard; maybe he did see something and he's just forgotten it."

"Maybe." Jim eyed the stack of paperwork on his desk meaningfully and hoped Henri would take the hint that he really didn't want to listen to Blair get second guessed. "I'll pass on the good wishes."

"What?" Henri looked sheepish. "Yeah. Tell Blair I'm glad he's got a hard head, okay?"

Jim glanced up. "Tell him yourself."

They watched Blair walk over, the dressing on his forehead reduced to a Band-Aid, his step jaunty.

"Man, I thought his skull was fractured, the way you were going on." Henri shook his head and gave Jim's shoulder a friendly punch. "The kid looks fine."

"Yeah…" Jim said thoughtfully. "Just fine."

Except he still hadn't gotten Blair to tell him why he'd cried out like that, and whatever else Blair had wanted to tell him about Diane had been lost, a minute or two of his life sliced out of his memory by that single blow.

And Diane Simons had vanished again, leaving Jim wondering what the hell she'd wanted in the first place, and how she'd found out where they lived.

Questions, puzzles, impossibilities… he wanted answers, dammit, and they seemed to be in short supply.

Like anything resembling encouragement from Blair, whose easy warmth and smiles had been abruptly redirected this morning to Sandra Sullivan in Missing Persons, a statuesque redhead who'd turned Jim down when he'd asked her out a year earlier.

***

He can feel the world around him, hear it distantly; knows, somehow, when it's night and when it's day, although he's blindfolded and drenched in darkness, inky and absolute.

Absolute… absolution.

If this is hell, he's dead, and if he's earned this fate, he doesn't know how. He mewls, a soft, dry sound caught in the thickness at the back of his throat that fails to escape the gag he's wearing. Leather and buckles to silence his voice; metal cuffs around wrists and ankles. His captor's learned a lesson.

He can't escape as Anna did, and the reserves of strength his body and will possess are exhausted.

He thinks he knew this was waiting for him when he stared into Anna's prison and fought back panic. For a moment, all his pity had been directed inward, not at her -- he'd known. Oh, God, he'd known.

Like Anna in her final moments, he needs to say his name, to claim it, but he can't make a sound. He conjures up an image of a lemon, white flesh, oily peel, yellow, bright, and pictures the juice trickling over his lips and tongue. The answering dampness of saliva is barely felt -- he can't cry, either; he's tried -- so he settles for thinking his name, over and over, and he ends, as she did, on a silent plea.

Help me.




Part Two