Chapter Text
Tim doesn’t come back.
Not after a lap of the hospital grounds; nor after two, or three. Not after Lucy paces down every hospital hallway, just in case he came in through a back entrance and took a wrong turn. He had been pretty out of it.
She calls Angela to check, but he didn’t head back to the station to help with the investigation, either. And he didn’t go back to his house. It’s still an active crime scene—CSU are still there, and someone would’ve seen him come by.
And so, an hour passes without any news on Miles, or Tim, or their gunman.
It doesn’t escape anyone that they still don’t know why Tim’s house was targeted. But with every second that passes where Tim doesn’t come back, the dread creeps into Lucy’s veins, settling in alongside the building certainty that he was the target, that there was no random chance to any of this.
Lucy calls Angela again after her fourth fruitless lap of the hospital, growing restless and itching for something to do, something that isn’t sitting in the waiting room, watching the doors and going out of her mind. She wants to drive back to the station to help there, but Celina is terrified for Miles, and Lucy doesn’t want to leave her friend to ruminate worst-case scenarios alone.
She’d also be lying if she didn’t admit that some part of her is still holding onto the hope that Tim might be about to walk back through the lobby’s entrance doors any minute now.
“Any luck with the shooter?” she asks the detective.
Angela’s heavy sigh is a bad sign. “No.” Lucy’s heart sinks. “At this point, we’re just praying the techs can get the footage off Tim’s security camera for an ID.”
Lucy pauses, brows scrunching together in confusion. “That wasn’t the first thing they asked Tim to do? He has the app on his phone; it would’ve taken him seconds to send the footage over.”
“No one knew he had a camera on his front stoop until the techs found it twenty minutes ago,” the detective says. “Tim didn’t mention it.”
Lucy’s stomach twists as she recalls the absent look in Tim’s eyes when he’d been questioned—she wouldn’t be surprised if he’d missed a lot of details like that, or information that might’ve been useful. The camera trained on his front stoop is hidden, custom installed by a friend and easy to miss if you don’t know where it is—it’s a small lens concealed in the screw hole of his house number, right next to the door.
She blows out a sigh, trying to shake off the sinking feeling that’s been pulling at her. “I hope he’s back soon.”
More vulnerability bleeds into her voice than she would’ve liked.
“Me, too,” Angela agrees.
Neither of them want to consider the possibilities if he isn’t.
It’s after another hour of waiting and pacing and lapping the hospital without any updates that Lucy decides she can’t stare at the hospital walls for a second more. She gives Celina the longest hug she can, making her friend promise she’ll call if she hears anything, before heading back to the station.
When she arrives, the techs are still trying to get the footage from the front camera. They’re still having patrol officers keep a close eye around the hospital in case Tim shows. Still waiting for news on Miles.
Still, still, still. It’s agonising.
In a desperate attempt to distract herself from the helplessness, Lucy dives headfirst into anything and everything she can—reviewing CCTV from random side streets near Tim’s house; repeatedly asking the tech team if they’re getting anywhere with Tim’s security camera; re-reading Tim’s bare-bones statement in case they missed something hidden between the lines.
None of it helps. It doesn’t move the investigation forward, nor does it dissipate the hell of the unknown that’s eating her alive.
It crosses her mind on more than one occasion that maybe Tim just doesn’t want to be found right now. This isn’t the first time he’s blamed himself for something that wasn’t his fault—far from it, in fact—, and maybe the shock drove him to run.
But Lucy knows Tim, and he would’ve checked in at some point by now. Whether after seeing the twelve-plus missed calls, or just after a couple hours had passed, he would’ve wanted to know how Miles was doing, especially since he feels somewhat responsible.
All the same, Lucy doesn’t stop trying his phone every so often, to no avail.
Every time she hears his voicemail, that short, matter-of-fact message that almost taunts her, it reminds her of the days that swallowed him alive. The ones that culminated in the end of their relationship, when he walked out without an explanation and didn’t come back.
This feels like a strange echo of that, and Lucy hates her mind for drawing that parallel.
Tim’s changed now. He wouldn’t do that again.
Right?
Miles pulls through the surgery somewhere in the afternoon.
Despite being painfully aware of every second that ticks by, Lucy’s losing track of the hours at the same time, buried in CCTV footage and anxiety. All she knows is that it’s been too long since Tim walked out.
Once he’s awake, Lucy tears herself away from her desk at Celina’s call. Arriving back at the hospital, she can’t help the way her eyes scan the lot, and the waiting room, and every hallway she passes, just in case she catches sight of him. The moment she loses any spark of hope is the moment she starts to lose her grip on her composure, and she can’t afford that right now.
When they step into Miles’ room, he looks tired, but otherwise okay—no doubt they’ve got him on some pretty strong painkillers to mask the worst of it.
“How are you feeling?” Celina asks, her voice soft as half-lidded eyes drift towards hers. She immediately takes the seat by his bedside, while Lucy stays standing at the foot of the bed.
“Like I got hit by a semi,” he mumbles, words slurring together through exhaustion and sedatives.
Celina’s face softens in such a way that Lucy finds herself again wondering if there’s something there that her old roommate hasn’t told her about. “I bet.”
He winces slightly, shifting his head, and Celina reaches out to adjust his pillow.
“Can we get you anything?” Lucy asks.
Miles’ eyes snap in her direction like he hadn’t realised she was there. Through the exhaustion clouding his expression, he looks somewhat surprised to see her.
“No, thanks,” he says, giving her a couple of slow blinks, like he’s checking she’s real. “Is—is Sergeant Bradford alright?”
Lucy’s chest seizes.
It’s a reasonable enough question—Miles got shot in Tim’s house, after all—but Lucy hates that she doesn’t know how to answer it. Instead, her eyes dart to Celina, who’s already looking at her with pinched eyes.
Out the corner of her eye, Miles clocks the silent exchange. His shoulders tense, Texas drawl dripping with exhausted anxiety.
“Oh, God, what was in that thing?”
Lucy whips her head back to Miles just in time to watch sharp concern break through the effects of his sedation, but Celina’s the first to break the shocked silence.
“What was in what?” she asks.
Miles shifts like he’s trying to push himself upright, before wincing. His eyes screw shut as his head lands back on his pillow. “He—he… didn’t he get stuck with something?”
The world grinds to a shuddering halt.
“What?” The word barely makes it past her lips for the tension coiling Lucy’s body into stone.
Miles gives a few more slow blinks, alarm shining in his eyes. “After he shot at me, the guy lunged for Tim with a… something.” Frustrated, he waves his hand in the air, as though the motion will pull the memory into focus. “Looked like a syringe, but I couldn’t…”
As he trails off, Lucy swallows, looking back at Celina. The growing anxiety in her friend’s eyes definitely mirrors a fraction of her own.
Miles misreads their silence, though. “Did—did I imagine that?”
The thing is, he might have. Pain does funny things to the mind.
But with every blink, Lucy pictures how wrong Tim had looked in the waiting room. The absent eyes and unsteady tremors. How some of his mumbled words had slurred together. The speck of blood on his neck.
She’d read it all as shock. Just the aftershocks of watching his rookie almost bleed out in his home.
But what if…?
“If he was drugged…” Celina murmurs, horror colouring her words as she reaches the same conclusion Lucy has.
If he was drugged, Tim was a target. Probably still is.
With ice-cold fear rushing through her, Lucy spins on her heel and runs from the room.
“Tim—Tim was probably drugged,” she pants into her phone, sprinting across the hospital parking lot.
Angela’s voice isn’t shocked though, just… anxiously resigned. “Yeah, that picture was forming here, too.”
As she’s pulling her car door open, Lucy pauses. “What?”
“We got the footage from the front stoop,” Angela clarifies.
“And?”
“We’ve got our guy’s face; running him through the database now. It looks like he wasn’t expecting that Tim would have company.”
Lucy hates every single thing that implicates. “What happened?”
“He shot Miles and tried to go for Tim,” Angela explains. “Even though Tim pushed him pretty fast, the syringe in his hand came back with blood on it, the plunger halfway depressed.”
So Tim would’ve gotten a small dose of whatever was in there. “And the adrenaline would’ve been enough to disguise the pain.”
“Exactly.”
As much as the thought sickens her, Lucy can’t shake something. “But… if he was going to—to take Tim, why not just do it there? Leave Miles and go?”
Angela’s brief silence tells Lucy she’s been considering the same thing. “When Tim pushed him, the guy fell pretty hard. Maybe he broke something, I don’t know,” she speculates. “Or maybe he figured he wouldn’t have a good enough shot at taking Tim without the full dose.”
It’s almost reasonable—which means it’s painting a picture Lucy can’t bear the thought of.
She swallows her nausea, knuckles going white against the steering wheel.
“Look, I’ll fill you in on the rest when you get here,” Angela says.
“The rest?” It’s more of an instinctive response, because what else is there? But as much as she wants it, Lucy knows she won’t get anything else right now, and lets out a ragged exhale before the detective can confirm as such. “I’m ten minutes out.”
She spends the rest of the drive trying to ignore the scenarios flying through her head, her imagination running circles around her sanity.
Someone showed up at Tim’s door, shot the visitor they weren’t expecting, and almost definitely drugged Tim with some kind of sedative. And now Tim’s gone.
Against her will, Lucy pictures him bleeding out in a back alley. Bundled in the back of a van. His body cold, clothes waterlogged at the bottom of the ocean. Selfishly thinks of the bridge between them that they never fully mended, everything she never got to say.
Her breath catches at the overwhelm, and by the time she makes it to the station, she’s spiralling. She barely manages to pull herself together by a few loose threads as she runs into the building, bolting straight for the detectives’ station.
Without a word, Angela leads her over to one of the monitors, the familiar sight of Tim’s front stoop projected on the screen.
“Our guy said something… weird,” she leads in, before hitting play on the footage.
In the video, the man walks up to the front door looking calm, nonchalant. His casual air is creepy knowing the context, his stance alarmingly normal in a slouchy grey hoodie and no sign that he’s about to shoot someone behind the door.
The door opens.
“Sergeant Bradford,” he says in greeting, a salesman-esque grin stretching his lips.
There’s a hollow pause as he clocks what must be Tim’s surprised expression at a stranger using his working name.
“Huh,” he continues, tone coloured in surprise, almost like he wasn’t expecting to have the right house. “You really can get everything for a price these days. Even a sealed police address.”
Lucy’s blood turns to ice.
“Who are you?” Tim’s voice is cold and sharp, his guard all the way up. Immediately distrustful, like always.
The guy’s grin is still casual, like he’s just catching up with a neighbour. “I’m with a service.”
“What kind of service?”
“A specialist one, buried in the dark corners of the internet.” He’s so calm about what he’s saying that, if Lucy didn’t know better, she might wonder if he was joking. “Don’t worry, it’s not as personal as you might think.”
From there, everything happens so fast.
The man begins to reach for his back pocket. Inside, Tim’s floorboards creak with movement—Miles’ footsteps. The man’s gaze flits over to the rookie, eyes growing wide with surprise, clearly having been unaware of anyone else’s presence up to that point.
He abandons his back pocket and pulls a gun from inside his hoodie, and the gunshot slices through the room along with Miles’ agonised cry.
As Tim yells out, the man goes back for his pocket, pulling out the syringe and lunging forward through the doorway. But he doesn’t make it far, staggering backwards, his heel catching on the door frame. He lands hard on the outside paving with an agonised groan.
It’s a moment before he pulls himself to his feet, by which point Tim is already on the phone with 911, repeating reassurances as Miles cries out in agony. Eyeing the syringe in his grip, half-empty with a bloodied tip, the shooter weighs his options in a split-second, ultimately deciding to break for it.
The footage is paused on the blurred figure leaving the frame as he bolts down the driveway, and Lucy feels sicker than she did on the drive over.
She tries to pull herself away from how personal this is. Tries to forget the absent look in Tim’s eyes, the sedatives fogging his mind while he’d pressed further into her side. The same sedatives that had been in his system when he left the waiting room and never came back.
Oh, God.
“Any—are there—is the guy in our system?” she manages to get out.
Angela shakes her head. “Searches came up empty. Techs are now doing a facial recognition scan online.”
Lucy’s stomach twists as she remembers the guy’s comment about the dark corners of the internet. “You think this is some kind of organisation on, what, the dark web?”
“It’s the closest thing we’ve got to a lead.”
She has to lean her weight against the desk at the thought. “If something’s happened to him—”
“We’ll find him.” Angela sounds certain enough for the both of them, and Lucy tries her best to hold on to that.
Now with an actual face to look for, Lucy finds herself once again knee-deep in the same CCTV footage as before, trying in vain to outrun her thoughts and escape the puzzle pieces all slamming perfectly into place.
A visitor from the dark web, from a ‘service’, knocking on Tim’s door, shooting Miles, and trying to drug Tim. And now Tim is missing.
It’s not as personal as you might think. That means it’s somewhat personal, right?
But, clearly, Tim didn’t know the guy. So was he there on behalf of someone else? Did that someone else decide to finish the job later on?
As she swallows the unease sitting uncomfortably in her throat, she’s pulled from her thoughts by the clack of Angela’s heels across the vinyl floor.
“We’ve got something,” she calls out. Her tone isn’t hopeful; it’s thrumming with an undercurrent of urgency that does nothing to abate Lucy’s dread.
As she trails after the detective towards the tech department spotting Grey, Nyla, and a couple of others crowded around a monitor, she’s expecting a photo. Some kind of profile on a site. Maybe even Tim’s address on the dark web, or his name on a hit list.
A video doesn’t once cross her mind as a possibility; but there it is, flickering footage blown up on one of the screens.
It’s grainy, an elevated perspective from the corner of a ceiling, looking down on a room lit by a single bulb. Buried in shadows at the far end is a figure slumped in a chair, hands tied behind his back.
Tim.
“It’s live,” one of the techs murmurs. “Found the feed in a quiet corner of the dark web.”
Lucy thinks she might throw up.
Her worst fear, the fog that’s been curling in at the corners of her mind since Tim disappeared, is playing out right in front of her eyes. He’s been taken.
In her periphery, another monitor is displaying lines of code, flickering with satellite maps and co-ordinates. The guy in front of it types and clicks with urgency, trying to trace the stream’s signal.
Lucy prays it works.
On the feed, a door slams shut, rattling the camera violently, before a figure begins to walk towards Tim, his back to the camera. He’s tall, with a solid frame and broad shoulders, casting a shadow over Tim’s slumped form.
Angela stiffens.
“That’s not our shooter,” she murmurs.
She’s right, Lucy realises—the man at Tim’s door was slender and short. Lucy can’t bring herself to comprehend the implications of that, of more than one person being involved in this. Her body just coils tight with fear, eyes locked on Tim as the people around her do their best to locate him.
The creases in the man’s dark jacket catching the light as he crouches down, putting himself in Tim’s line of sight as his eyelids flutter.
Blinking a few times, Tim tries to get his bearings. It’d be impossible to miss the way his body tenses when he sees the person in front of him.
“Morning, sunshine,” the man says. Definitely not their shooter—the voice is completely different. Lower, with a timbre that crawls down Lucy’s spine.
Tim murmurs something incomprehensible in response that the static-filled audio doesn’t pick up.
When the man speaks again, his voice drips with quiet, unmasked glee that makes Lucy’s stomach turn. “What, no smile for me?”
She stops breathing entirely when he swings.
Tim’s head snaps to the side as the man’s fist makes contact with his cheekbone, the violent sound through the speakers disguising her own strangled yell.
Caught by surprise, Tim lets out a low groan, face scrunching with a wince.
The man just chuckles. “Oh, this is going to be fun.”
As soon as Tim dares to lift his head, the man swings again—same point of impact, another pained groan, but more restrained this time. Already fighting to not give too much of himself away.
Lucy involuntarily leans onto her back foot. Even Angela shifts, her voice tightening with panic.
“You got anything?” she asks the techs.
All she gets is a headshake. “The signal keeps bouncing.”
The detective lets out a quiet curse.
Lucy figured a livestream would be easy to track. She shakes her head, nails digging into her palms as she watches Tim try to pull himself upright. As he does so, Lucy clocks the lack of fear in his expression—when Tim eyes his captor, he’s not looking at him like he’s trying to figure him out.
“What, had to tie me down to finally get a fight?” Tim says, his voice rough. “Couldn’t make it fair?”
Finally?
The man barks out a laugh, and it feels eerily familiar in a way that makes Lucy’s skin crawl. But her brain refuses to connect any dots, still frazzled from the fear.
“That’s not what this is about, sweetheart,” the man leers. “It’s not entirely personal. You were just… convenient. Call it two birds with one stone.”
It’s Tim’s turn to laugh, and it sounds wrong. Quiet and cold. “Convenient? You sent a Craigslist hitman to my door.”
Part of Lucy wants to laugh at the familiarity of Tim’s dryness.
The man’s head tilts. “I’ll admit, that wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Sorry about your friend.” He doesn’t sound apologetic in the slightest, and Tim stills, his spine straightening further.
Then Lucy remembers that he doesn’t know Miles is okay. She wonders if the guilt is eating at him, and it carves a hole behind her ribs.
The silence stretches, and Tim just stares his captor down. Lucy knows she’s trying to steady himself against the emotions—he’ll never show weakness in front of a criminal if he can help it, especially not one that’s kidnapped him.
On the other monitor in Lucy’s periphery, the numbers keep spinning, endless clicks and maps and images that don’t mean anything to her. It’s dizzying, especially because the tech’s expression makes it pretty clear that they’re not making kind of progress on pinpointing a location.
Her attention narrows back to Tim when he finally speaks. “If this isn’t personal, then what is it?”
The man hums, like the secret he’s keeping is some exciting surprise. “You’ll see soon enough,” he says. “Just know that I’m going to have a great time watching you bleed, among other things.”
The bottom of Lucy’s stomach drops out. What the fuck does that mean?
With that ominous statement, the man leaves, his face shrouded in shadow and static. The livestream cuts out with the slam of the door.
Lucy can’t move.
Through the ringing in her ears, she hears Lieutenant Grey pace back to the bullpen, rounding everyone up. The words Sergeant Bradford has been kidnapped ring through the room like a gunshot. Somehow, despite what she’s just watched, hearing it spelled out like that just makes it more real.
Tim has been kidnapped.
Angela’s still by her side, watching over the techs’ shoulders. Stress is obvious in the tight set of her shoulders, but she’s focused, determined, and doing a hell of a lot better shutting off her emotions than Lucy is.
Lucy feels like she’s about to drown in her own panic, water filling her lungs as she tries to catch her breath.
“Did you manage to track anything?” The detective asks again, anxiety seeping through the cracks in her words.
She gets another defeated no. They have nothing. But they’re going to keep trying, because they have to.
Lucy can’t tear her eyes from the now-black monitor where she’d just watched Tim tied down in a dark room, her own frozen reflection staring back at her.
“Hey,” Angela says. Lucy doesn’t realise the soft hue of the detective’s voice is aimed at her until a gentle hand comes to rest on her back. “We’re going to find him.”
Lucy nods, because she can’t let herself consider any other outcome.
She forces herself not to think of the sound of the captor’s fist against Tim’s cheekbone. Nor the pained groan that had slipped past his lips. Nor the way the shadow’s laugh had grated Lucy’s ears in a way that feels terrifyingly familiar. Nor the implications of among other things.
Instead of screaming or crying out, or tugging at her hair as she hyperventilates herself into a pile on the floor, she breathes. Tries to pull herself together. Pulls herself away from the weight of this. Tries to watch it from a distance. Tries to play the footage back in her mind like it’s anyone else.
It isn’t anyone else, though. And as much as it kills her, that fact is of some use here.
“Tim knows that guy,” she says.
Even through the grainy footage, that much is obvious. Tim hadn’t flinched. Hadn’t scanned the man over like he was trying to figure him out. Even when Tim was still pulling himself into consciousness, one look at the man’s face was enough for him to know who he was dealing with.
And Tim’s not self-destructive enough to taunt a complete stranger after he’s been kidnapped.
Well. She hopes so, anyway.
“One thousand percent,” Angela nods, turning on her heel and crossing the station in large strides. Lucy follows, casting one last look at the black monitor like Tim might appear again before she walks away. He doesn’t.
They come to a stop in front of a cluster of officers who’ve been helping with the investigation.
“Alright, listen up!” Angela calls out. “We need to go through all of Tim’s recent arrests, or anyone he’s arrested who has recently been released from prison—anyone who’s anyone who might hold a grudge. Keep a lookout for someone with possible links to the dark web, or whom Tim might have a particularly personal connection with.”
A murmur of assent runs through the officers.
The search is long, painstaking, and agonisingly fruitless. The list of people who might hold a grudge against Tim and would have the resources to pull something like this off isn’t exactly short, so hope isn’t lost too quick, but it does get buried under a thick layer of exhaustion as the hours pass.
Lucy can’t sit still. She paces between tasks, weaving between desks, flitting between searching recordings and scanning more CCTV footage and trawling through a selection of Tim’s arrests and calling to check in on Celina and debating with every footstep whether she should call Genny.
She can’t shake the image of Tim from her mind. Slumped over, in pain, and completely helpless.
The thought of him being alone in that room makes her chest ache even more. She knows he’s strong, but being alone and helpless like that is something she’d never wish on anyone—hopelessness creeps up on you faster than you’d ever expect. She just hopes Tim trusts that they’re coming for him.
And that video being live, on the dark web. What kind of purpose could that possibly serve? Entertainment? Some kind of taunt for their sakes? The idea of other people having a front-row seat to Tim’s pain makes Lucy feel sick.
She knows all too well that one livestream increases the likelihood of another. What they saw wasn’t some cheap camera set up on a tripod for a shoddy proof-of-life video. That camera had been installed, the lightbulb purposefully hung for the best view.
With her mind grasping at some fucked up silver lining, Lucy knows the permanency of that set up means they’re most likely planning on keeping him alive for a while. She just doesn’t know if she could stomach that sight again.
In the end, she doesn’t get a say in the matter. Obviously.
The second livestream comes through four hours after the first. The same group of people from before wind up crowded around the same monitor, watching the same camera perspective of the same room. No chair this time, though—now, Tim is sat on the floor, back leaning against the far wall, hands still wrenched behind his back.
Something else is different, too; something that becomes clear the moment Tim looks up. When he catches sight of his visitor, cheekbone bruised a deep shade of purple, Tim visibly stiffens, a new tension running down his spine as he pulls himself upright.
The figure walks under the lightbulb as he crosses the small room, and everyone crowded around the monitor understands immediately. It’s a different person from before. Taller. More slender. He’s wearing a light jacket with jeans.
The new man doesn’t speak, and neither does Tim. Tim just tracks the man’s movements with narrowed eyes as he approaches, before stepping sideways into the shadows, just out of sight.
A metallic scraping pierces the static, and the man drags a large, heavy metal container into the frame. It reaches waist-height, and the top side shimmers strangely under the light.
Lucy’s heart stutters when she realises it’s filled with water.
Tim is grabbed by the back of his collar and pulled up, barely able to get his feet under him as he’s dragged across the floor. Some part of Lucy’s mind fires off that he’s probably been drugged—but she doesn’t get to finish her thought before her hand is clasped over her mouth, catching her scream as Tim’s head is forced under the water.
He tries to fight back, thrashing blindly, but his hands are still restrained and there’s only so much he can do. Lucy swears she holds her breath alongside him, only pulling in oxygen when he’s yanked back above the surface after what feels like an eternity, dripping and coughing and gasping for air.
It’s not long enough before he’s forced back under.
Her heart pounds like it could break from her ribcage and save him. She can’t bear the sight of this, but she finds she can’t tear her eyes away. Even when she blinks, split-second reprieves from the torment, it’s burned on the backs of her eyelids.
The techs are trying to trace the livestream again. The buzz of urgency intensifies with every second that passes, with every stretch that Tim’s torment continues.
It goes on for too long.
An endless cycle of being plunged underwater before being pulled back up for air, just long enough to keep him alive and awake and suffering. The thrashing starts to weaken after a while, the fight draining out of him along with the oxygen. Tim’s body starts to slump, leaning harder against the side of the container like he doesn’t have the strength to keep himself upright.
Lucy doesn’t think she’s ever been so terrified, feet rooted in place.
But just when it seems like Tim’s body is finally giving up on the fight, losing the last of his grip on consciousness, light spills in as the door to the room opens.
A silhouette stretches across the ground and Tim’s tormentor looks up, annoyance visible in his posture.
It’s strange, feeling relief at the sight of Tim getting thrown to the floor.
It’s over, for now. But the limpness in his body is chilling.
The tormentor turns and slinks towards the door. And for the first time in hours, Lucy feels a spark of hope—because they catch sight of his face.
He’s a stranger. Sharp, angular features. Dark eyes and dark hair.
The room pounces on it. The techs grab the image, blowing it up on the monitor. Beside her, Angela calls for them to run a facial search.
Lucy’s eyes are still on Tim, feeling unrelenting relief at the sight of his body jolting with a cough right before the feed shuts off. He’s alive, and that’s all she has to hold on to right now. But it’s something.
The man is Robert Wilson. 37. A construction worker from West Hollywood.
The only reason he was in their system was because of a minor traffic offence two decades ago. Tim wasn’t even on the force back then, and Robert has had nothing remotely close to an offence since.
They contact his workplace and his landlord. He lives alone, pays his rent, works his hours and does his job well. Hell, he went to work today, the full damn shift—his boss sent the footage over to prove it. He was still at work until three hours ago. So, at the very least, he wasn’t instrumental to the actual kidnapping.
They deep dive into anyone that could possibly be considered some kind of accomplice, but, again, nothing comes up.
For all intents and purposes, he seems like an ordinary man.
It makes Lucy’s skin crawl. She’s just watched him waterboard a police sergeant on the dark web. And he’d seemed so calm doing it.
The warrant to search his house raises confusing alarms. His car, his phone, and his laptop are all gone, and there’s no trace of any illicit activity in his home. They keep officers posted up outside in case he shows, with he hopes that if he does, maybe they’ll get an idea of how far away they’re holding Tim. But Lucy has this sinking feeling that it’s not going to pan out the way they’re hoping.
Or maybe it’s just an awful sense of hopelessness taking root far too early.
The third livestream comes in the middle of the night. Lucy’s startled alert from her slumped position in front of one of the bullpen computers by someone calling out.
She runs over just in time to see the first punch land—an uppercut that snaps Tim’s head back.
Tears sting at her eyes. She can’t help but feel like they’re failing him with every second that passes. She knows he’s probably not thinking that—but, honestly, it’s hard to tell what he’s thinking amidst the static.
By now, Tim looks like he’s holding himself together on nothing at all. He’s slumped back, weight heavy against the back of the chair he’s been returned to, arms still restrained behind him. Lucy doubts he’s slept, or even so much as passed out for enough time to be of any benefit.
Every one of his blinks seems to take a frame too long. He’s alert, the pain likely holding him captive in consciousness, but his body seems to want to fight against him. She knows he won’t let it.
His hair is still damp, water reflecting the light from the single bulb.
It’s not until someone in her periphery makes a comment that she realises the person throwing the punch to Tim’s temple is different, again. It’s not the first person, nor Robert Wilson, nor their shooter. This man’s hood is pulled up, but he’s shorter than the others, with broader shoulders.
Lucy wonders if he’s another terrifyingly innocuous-seeming civilian.
He must be, for the way Tim’s clearly steeling himself to give nothing away. Three clumsy blows to the head without so much as a grunt.
But a particularly sharp kick to the ribs sends the chair he’s on clattering to the ground, and a pained moan slips free. Lucy’s breath catches and she finds herself staggering back as the man kicks him in the ribs.
She shouldn’t run from this—they need all the information they can to help Tim. She has to watch, but—
“Chen.”
Her eyes stay on Tim, swallowing as more kicks land unceremoniously. There’s no plan, or rhyme, or reason, just violence for the sake of violence.
“Chen—”
“What?” The word forces itself out through gritted teeth.
“You don’t have to watch this.” Angela’s voice is soft. The words are almost a relief, but…
“I can’t just…” Her voice fails around the lump forming in her throat.
The detective picks up a pile of papers, holding it out between her and the monitor. “We need to keep looking into Robert Wilson. There are still a couple more acquaintances we need to look into, and we haven’t given up on trying to find him. The officers on it could use a hand, and probably some supervision.”
It’s clearly an out, and Lucy shouldn’t take it. She knows she shouldn’t. She can’t run from Tim’s suffering any more than he can.
But the pained shout he lets out as a blow lands particularly hard, curling in on himself as he spits blood across the floor, rattles her so intensely she thinks she might puke.
“Forcing yourself to stay here and put yourself through this isn’t going to help him.” Angela’s voice is firm and no-nonsense, and she waves the papers closer, refusing to back down.
The worst part is, the detective isn’t wrong. All Lucy’s going to achieve by standing here is giving herself more and more nightmare fuel. But letting Tim out of her sight, even if it’s just through a screen, feels oddly like betrayal.
With a shaky sigh, she grabs for the papers blindly, throwing Tim’s pinched face one last look before she forces herself to turn away—committing his pain to memory, like she could ever forget what she’s fighting for here.
“Got it,” she murmurs, crossing the bullpen before she can think twice.
Somehow, Robert Wilson ends up being a dead end.
Lucy spends two hours trading notes with officers at the surrounding desks, scrawling through Robert’s friends and family members—none of them have heard from him in a while, and definitely not in the last week. And he still hasn’t shown at his house.
He’s gone. The best lead anyone could possibly hope for in any investigation—a face and a concrete ID—and it’s faded into the darkness.
Lucy doesn’t want to lose hope, but she sees Tim’s agony every time she blinks.
With every set of footsteps that passes through the bullpen, she wonders if it’s someone coming over to tell her about another livestream. Another opportunity to watch the most important person in her life try so hard to bury his agony in the face of torment with no apparent endgame.
Eventually she moves herself into the breakroom, away from the concerned murmurs of the officers around her. Not only is their worry for their sergeant fuelling her own, but their ill-disguised concern for her isn’t helping in the slightest. If someone else offers her a granola bar, she’s pretty sure she’s going to sob.
Despite the breakup, it’s like everyone knows how badly she still loves him. How badly she wants to forgive him.
She tries to run from that train of thought before it overwhelms her, continuing on her investigation into Robert Wilson, no matter how hopeless it seems. Looking for any small passage out of their dead-end lead.
She digs as far as she can into the early hours, until she’s fighting the pull of sleep, slumping forwards over the breakroom table. She keeps catching herself, blinking herself awake, sipping at black coffee that just tastes like Tim.
It only does so much. Soon, her head is falling against her arm, eyelids fluttering, and her efforts to pull herself upright don’t do anything.
When Lucy startles awake some time later, she’s blinking away memories of the livestream playing on loop behind her eyelids. She swears the memory of Tim’s agony rings out into the breakroom. Every punch, every kick, every pained groan she’d heard through the mess of static.
It’s too much.
It all feels far too hopeless far too soon.
They’ve had no attempts at contact, no ransom request, no signs of anyone wanting anything in return for Tim’s pain. And God knows how many people are in on it—every person that’s appeared on that livestream has been a new stranger.
Overwhelmed, Lucy stands from her chair, the legs scraping noisily across the floor. She stumbles out of the room, out of the bullpen, out of the station into the frigid night air. She feels numb, the hair raising on her arms without the cold registering.
As she walks aimlessly down the streets swallowed by darkness, the moonlight shrouded by cloud cover, she thinks of Tim’s eyes, sparkling and angry and devastated and full of life. She thinks of how hollow they’d looked when she last saw them, marred by shock and the drugs she’d been blind to.
She hasn’t lost him yet, she knows that, but she can’t escape the looming feeling that she’s about to. The wave of grief swallows her whole, the relentless anxiety buzzing through her and drowning out everything else.
It’s probably why she doesn’t see the blow coming.
The back of her head aches.
Sparks burst across the backs of her eyelids as Lucy tries to pry her eyes open, lightning strikes spanning through her skull. A low groan escapes her lips, but she barely hears it for the ringing in her ears.
Blinking doesn’t make much of a difference. The world remains a dimmed blur, shifting strangely around her.
Lucy knows something is wrong.
That knowledge doesn’t change the fact that, amidst the haze, she can’t pull any pieces together. She can’t recall anything about where she’s been, or where she is. Time is meaningless.
Out of nowhere, a hand grabs at the scruff of her neck, and a strangled scream slips past her lips. The shock extends some of her awareness, though—she’s in a wooden chair, hands bound behind her back.
And now, somewhere through the blurry haze, there’s someone calling her name. It's distant, a familiar voice, layered beneath a metallic clanging that slices through her aching skull.
As she’s pulled from her chair, Lucy knows she’s in danger, knows she should fight back, but she can’t. Her body feels like dead weight.
She’s dragged across the floor until her torso hits a solid edge, a strange, familiar shimmer in her periphery.
The world refuses to come into enough focus to make sense of anything, but she can still hear that voice, and holds onto it like it's an anchor. It's hoarse, desperate, terrified, it’s—
Tim. Oh, God, it’s Tim.
She’s barely managed to pull the pieces together before her head is plunged underwater.