sick the dogs

who: brett and december
where: the ecpd
when: wee hours

Brett was sat at his desk, and people gave him a wide berth. That wasn’t uncommon these days. It was common knowledge that Detective Trent was like a bear with a sore head when he was in a good mood, and he hadn’t been in one of those for weeks. Or, so it was said - these days, with the hours that he was clearly putting in, his colleagues weren’t willing to test the theory unless they had a damn good reason. And Brett didn’t see any reason why they should be disabused of their theories with regards to him. Especially not when he wasn’t actually working on the case for once. He was, in fact, staring at a mostly blank piece of paper, next to another piece of paper containing a familiar script, her last reply. He should just let it go, he knew, but he wouldn’t - which he also knew. He needed this. No - he knew he actually needed more than this, but this was all he could have, so he would take it. It wasn’t like the case was going anywhere anyway. Dead end after dead end. Yet he couldn’t put it down. Brett was no quitter.

Getting back to town proper had taken her a while. That time of night...it wasn't exactly high public transportation time, and December spent a good amount of time walking before she caught a cab to take her to the station. She didn't know if her cousin would be in or not, but odds were he would be. It wasn't like she didn't hear oh, everyone talking behind his back about how he was a machine, there day and night, doggedly working the cases he had.

It was still the wee hours when she got there, though later in the morning than she would have liked. Either way, she trudged into the station(it being a pretty empty place at this hour), ghosting her way through the building to find his desk. When she got there, she sat down heavily in the nearest chair she pulled over, and she stared at the floor for a long moment. She said it before she actually looked up. "Eric is The Tyger. You should go get him." she said, voice oddly quiet, flat sounding.

Brett heard her steps in the otherwise mostly empty department just before she sat down and he slid the papers to the side of his desk. Not away completely - that would have been far too obvious he was quickly hiding something and years working with the O’Malleys, whilst collecting evidence for their downfall, had taught him that it was often safer to hide things in plain sight rather than catch people’s notice hiding them properly.

In any event, December’s opening remarks pretty much made the letters an irrelevancy right now. He turned in his chair to face her completely. “...Run that by me again.”

"Thought I was pretty clear. The man you're looking for, The Tyger, runs around killing people and stuffing poems in their guts, then setting them on fire, shit like that--it's Eric. You should go get him. I mean, he might be gone by now, I didn't get here as fast as I would have liked, but you should go try." December told him, looking up, but not quite meeting his eyes. She felt too vulnerable at the moment to make eye contact with anyone, even her cousin.

“Eric - as in Eric Martens?” Brett asked, his tone one of almost disbelief and, in truth, he didn’t want to believe it. He didn’t want to believe it, yet he was already standing, already reaching for his badge and gun. He’d seen far too much in his years to let his own hopes get in the way of reality. His girlfriend had turned out to be a murderer, why not a guy he’d thought was a friend. The world just worked that way.

"That's him. Your friend, or sort of friend, something like that. My boyfriend, if you wanted to call him that. Eric. Runs the scrap yard. He fucked up a little bit back, got me suspicious, and tonight I went out there and straight up asked him. And he answered." She was quiet for a moment. "And I can never un-hear that. He's apparently got some vendetta against the Syndicate." She was quiet for a second. "Good luck."

Brett took in what she’d said. He hadn’t realised that her relationship with Eric had progressed to that level, not officially anyway, but right now, the confirmation didn’t get a reaction from him. Not outwardly. He stored the information away in the back of his mind, where it could be useful at another time, but right now, it was pretty much an irrelevancy when compared to the rest of what she had to impart. “Who hasn’t got a fucking vendetta against the fucking Syndicate - but that’s not the way to go about it,” Brett snarled, feeling a spike of hypocrisy, given his own actions. He might not have actually pulled the trigger on any of the O’Malleys, but he set the ball rolling and their downfall was the result. “Call for backup, I’ll meet whoever you can get out at the yard,” he told her, starting out across the room without waiting for confirmation, his tone clearly an order: he expected her to do what he told her, without hesitation or question.

She stared at the scuffed floor. The tiles in the department proper weren't any nicer than the ones in her morgue. She listened to what he said, though didn't look up, still in some sort of a state of shock. Where she just...didn't know what to do with herself, beyond what she was doing right now. Sicking the dogs on Eric. She was thinking about how they'd talked, about how she felt used even if he said that things had been genuine between them. And beyond that, of course, the part where things being genuine made it kind of worse. Because...well. That meant that something was massively fucked, didn't it. Said a lot about her, anyways. When he gave her the order, she watched him walking away, then stood up, picking up the phone on his desk. Back up. She could do that. Even if she knew by now Eric would probably be in the wind.