square one

Who: Danny and Brett
Where: ECPD
When: Morning

Danny wasn’t quite hungover, but he had followed up the interaction with more booze from home. Even now his coffee was slightly spiked to take the edge off and he was forcing himself to not think about Rachel as he tried to focus on the words on the newspaper page and not how angry she’d gotten with him for no good reason. It seemed ridiculous, but he wasn’t going looking for her to ask. Didn’t matter that much. Until he found her dead.

Brett entered the office looking like a bear with a sore head, at least half of which was literally true. He'd drunk far too damn much last night, and the hangover had started immediately to remind him of that fact, and it was of a type that he was fairly sure it would be his constant companion throughout the day. It was demurely a day where he didn't want the first news to be that Eric Martens, The Tyger, had apparently decided that, despite everyone now knowing his identity, he was going to strike again. And at Iakov Konovich, no less. Oh, if course it could have been some other sadistic fucker who has launched the guy out of the window and set fire to him, but Brett knew where his suspicions and the suspicions of the department lay. And he's been out drinking away his frustrations last night and then sleeping the booze off, rather than being out there trying to catch him.

It was rare that Brett looked worse than Danny. Danny rarely nursed a hangover, either from never letting the alcohol really leave his system or from having been a damn good drunk. But today Brett didn’t look just gruff, he looked hellish and gruff which had Danny pouring a second cup of coffee before venturing towards the taller man. “It tastes like motor oil but it helps,” he said as he set it down in front of Brett then went to his desk. Things weren’t good between them, not since their fight and Danny had done his best to avoid Brett when able, but considering Brett’s state, not helping would be a bigger jerk move than helping.

Brett took the coffee of Danny and upnodded, which was the closest he came to thanks right now. "What's the latest?" He asked, taking a large gulp, even though it wasn't fixed the way he'd usually take it. Right now he wanted the caffeine.

“At the moment? What’s in the paper. Konovich is dead and Martens is in the wind.” Danny shrugged a little then flipped open the short file on the mob boss. He hadn’t been dead long enough to earn a thick file. It would grow exponentially in the new few hours, that much was certain. “Any ideas where we start looking for him?”

“Nice to know that we’re getting our leads from the city rag now,” Brett deadpanned. He hadn’t even picked up a paper today. He didn’t need another reason to be fucking depressed with the damn world right now. “As for Martens - no fucking clue. Hunted high and fucking low for him yesterday and hell, found so fucking little about him we’d figured he must’ve slipped town. Now there’s this. So - wrong again.”

Danny gave Brett a look but instead of commenting just shook his head. “No guesses that he might go after Konovich? If I go back through things he was plowing through the Syndicate. Is there anyone else left that he could decide to murder?”

“Course there was always the chance that he’d go after the Konoviches,” Brett spat out, not liking the suggestion that they’d missed something. “Or the Cusacks, or any of the others in the Syndicate. But they’re generally locked up tighter than a nun’s ass - and they don’t take kindly to police interference. As for if there’s anyone else - course there fucking well is. Half the damn city? The rest of the Syndicate? You’ve seen what he’s done - he’s a fucking psychopath.” And someone who Brett had thought was a friend. Someone who he thought was helping him with the investigation. He was a damn fool - and now he was a damn fool with a hangover.

Danny waited out Brett’s yelling, surprised at how patient he was with the man. Maybe it was because he understood being hungover. Maybe it was just a cop thing, that you knew not to attack another cop for missing something. People missed things and then people died. Konovich wasn’t a good man, but it wasn’t some crazy fool’s job to take him out. “Alright, who from the Syndicate is left that matters? He just wiped out the head of the family if our vice group’s intel is worth a damn. That leaves them in a shambles, falling apart...” He looked Brett, trying to work through this. Even if they Konoviches didn’t the cops sitting on them, maybe there was somewhere they could stake out waiting for Martens. Direction would be a start, better than where they were now.

Brett forced himself to think about the question instead of just reacting. Of all the people in the department, he probably had the best working knowledge of the Syndicate, even if he didn’t have the proof to enable the department to turn any of that knowledge into arrests and convictions. But the Syndicate had taken a battering recently, and so Brett’s knowledge would be old. “They could have reshuffled things with the recent murders. And I’d have to cross check the lists of the dead,” Brett hedged before he actually gave any sort of an answer, his voice gruff, yet his anger under control. “But used to be that Konovich’s right hand men were Gregor Sidorov and Petrov Androvich - if they’re still alive, they’d be the ones looking to step into his shoes. Other than that, he has family - wife and a son. But if Martens was going after them, then it would have made more sense to deal with them last night.”

“Would they let his wife take over?” Danny asked, not sure how the dynamics worked within a family like that. He hadn’t been detective that long and certainly hadn’t been involved in the crime family layouts like others. “And his son, how old is he? Maybe he’s too young for Martens to consider a threat to take over.” Already though Danny was getting up, trying to find a uniform to pull files on the two names Brett had. It was a start, if they were alive, they needed to be checked out as targets.

“No way that the wife would take over,” Brett chuckled. “Met the woman, once. Though, when I say ‘met’, more like ‘was in the same room as.” He’d been acting body guard for one of the O’Malleys at the time, at some party or other. “Unless she plays a damn good game - which I doubt - the broad was purely there for show. As for the kid? Who knows. Think he’s still at school. Know that he was out of the damn country until recent, Europe somewhere, but other than that, couldn’t tell you. But the Syndicate doesn’t limit itself to family connections. If you’re good, you can work your way up to the top. Meritocracy in the mob - the new world, don’t you know,” he added, sarcastically.

Danny gave the names to the officer, sending him off to find out if they’d been found dead or not and get addresses otherwise. “Alright no go on the wife, and she was spared. The kid’s a kid, in school so maybe not ready to step up and take up the family mantle.” He reached for his mug, taking a hefty gulp. “Alright so anyone who works in the family is worth taking over. Does anyone else stick out to you? The family is starting to lose their hold on things. Which means every hotspot they have in town is a target. Is there even a motive for this guy taking out the Syndicate?”

“Hell, if the Syndicate is starting to crumble, the big winners have to be the other factions in town - Don DiGiovanni’s got to top that list. They have the most to gain. There’s nothing in the files to suggest that Martens has any connection to the DiGiovanni family, but then there’s nothing in the files on Martens that’s anything worth anything.” After all, he hadn’t been a suspect until yesterday. “Just the usual - war record, ran a scrap yard - nothing to set alarm bells ringing at all until he basically confessed everything to the coroner. Now, the one thing he didn’t take ‘credit’ for is the shit that went down in the park that started all of this, but right now, no fucking way I’m giving that man the benefit of the doubt on anything. Right now, he’s guilty until proven innocent of every last thing that’s gone down in this city over the passed few weeks. Which brings us to the fact that it’s not just Syndicate guys that have gone down. Some of it’s pretty damn indiscriminate. Which, maybe that means he’s not got mob ties. Hell, at this stage I wouldn’t be surprised if he said that he was on a fucking mission from God himself or some bullshit like that.”

“Vigilante then,” Danny said shaking his head. “Minus the park being...awful in its own way, the other murders those were...far from indiscriminate. I’ve read the files, the guy took his time. Made them pay. There’s no way he wasn’t...releasing some sort of aggression towards them. Or just..really fucking insane.” It was like turning in circles which had Danny rubbing his forehead. “Why the coroner?” Maybe that was something.

“Because she was dating him,” Brett said, dryly. “Didn’t suspect a damn thing - he never gave her any reason to. They met after this all began, got on and... yeah. So don’t rule out that whole ‘really fucking insane’ part. Said this guy is a psychopath, right? Or he is until the damn lawyers get involved and no fucking way he’s getting off with a damn insanity plea.”

“They were...oh God.” That was disturbing. Dating someone who’d done the autopsies on his victims. “That’s just twisted. Alright yea, fucking crazy still in the mix.” Danny rubbed the back of his neck and shook his head. “I don’t...we need somewhere to start Trent.”

“Yeah - tell me something I don’t know. We pretty much tore this city apart yesterday, looking in every place that we could find that had a connection to the bastard. But he’s one step ahead of us. Pretty much comes down to what it always does,” Brett said, resisting the urge to massage his temples. “We run down every lead we have, turn over every stone and if that doesn’t turn anything up, we do it again. And again. He can’t hide forever.”

Danny nodded, finishing off his mug of coffee. “Alright then, we start again. Let’s do it.” He got up again, nodding towards the mug in Brett’s hand. “You’re going to want to finish that if we’re starting back at square one.”

Brett glanced at the coffee, then downed it. “Fuck - if we’re starting back at square one, I’m gonna need a whole lot more than that,” he grumbled, half to himself, as they got down to work. It was going to be a very long day.