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scribal_goddessThe thing about Seattle is that even the police stations are proud of their coffee.
Not that I was in any state to properly enjoy it; the combined forces of fading adrenaline, a long night, and boredom had caused me to take an unscheduled desk nap. A nap which was rudely interrupted by a hand holding a cup of what looked like suspicious station coffee, but tasted like the first step towards forgiveness, maybe mine.
I was really, really out of it.
“Well, well,” said an exasperated voice that I recognized from over the phone, “I should have guessed. What part of ‘do not confront Christian Grey’ didn’t you understand?”
I looked up at a scowl, which matched the uniform. Officer Rayne was in maybe her late thirties, early forties, had short hair, and looked like a particularly strict grade school teacher.
Well, it wasn’t the first time I’d faced the music after throwing the rules away when they kept me from doing the right thing. It was kind of a pity, though – I’d been starting to like Officer Rayne.
“I know you hear this all the time, but it sort of happened on accident.” I smiled at her without any real hope that it would help. After all, she was just doing her job, and I was undeniably in her way.
She snorted, then gestured at the other cop in the room, the one who had firmly cemented his role as good cop when he’d given me the coffee. I hadn’t noticed anything except that his hand held caffeine on the first go – now I saw that his hair was gathering around his ears out of some frantic herd instinct, and that he had the eyes of a long-time officer. Better yet, at least as far as I was concerned, he had a smirk threatening to escape his professional expression.
“Tell him that,” Officer Rayne said. “He’s Officer Cross.” Then she turned to him. “Frank, meet the newest pain in my ass.”
The smirk poked its head out the door. “The private detective?” Cross asked.
“One of two.” Officer Rayne’s exasperated sigh and the subsequent widening of the smirk were good signs.
I decided that was as good of an opening as any.
“Lindsay Pilot,” I put in. “Usually, I’d have come into the station under my own power, but…”
Officer Cross’ smirk was approaching Cheshire proportions. Apparently, word had gotten around the station while I’d been busy taking a desk nap.
“Miss Pilot,” he began, “We need to take your statement regarding the events of last night - well, earlier this morning,” he amended, checking his watch.
To make a very long story extremely short, I told him the essentials. There were holes in the story – usually magic-shaped ones – that I was just too exhausted to try and patch up, but Officer Cross didn’t ask me many questions. By the time I was finished, it was the dog end of the night and my mouth tasted like cold station coffee and a dead hamster. All I really wanted at that moment was to go home and crash on the bed, safe in the knowledge that Christian Grey was currently taking his nap in a cell. Maybe some time in the next century, I’d go boil myself in the shower.
Officer Rayne, who was a good cop with a healthy dose of cynicism, bought approximately fifty percent of it. Officer Cross, who was cast as the sympathetic cop today, just sat and listened and took notes. Lots of notes. Notes that I was too groggy to read upside down, even if he hadn’t been a good enough cop to keep his arm in front of them so an irrepressibly curious and irredeemably nosy witness couldn’t see what he was writing.
It might even have worked if I wasn’t too tired to get nervous, or even to give a damn.
I finished everything with a skull-splitting yawn. The coffee was gone, and it hadn’t even made a dent in my by now monumental caffeine tolerance.
Cross flipped through his notes. “So, in the time since you were last in contact with Officer Rayne, you and miss Aliea Veldon followed Christian Grey to Bellevue in order to observe his actions, have been harboring a fugitive from a mental hospital, followed said fugitive to Christian Grey’s place of residence, somehow came into contact with two members of his security team, discovered that he was staying at the Fairmont, immediately went to the Fairmont, again attempting to find said fugitive, and… entered the hotel room. You neglected to tell me how, by the way.” His voice was quiet and not quite amused any more. The smirk had disappeared some time during my statement.
I decided to cut to the chase. “You know it’s all in how you phrase it,” I told him, “I do actually know my job, and you’ll find that nothing that Allie and I have done in the course of our investigation has been against the law.”
Technically, we’d probably been guilty of trespass in Escala, but trespassing was one of those laws that’s easy for the police to ignore if nobody’s actually complained to them about it. I didn’t think that Taylor was going to complain. Besides, all they had was a vague glow on the security cameras.
“It’s your job to check, of course,” I added.
“Of course,” Officer Rayne replied dryly.
“As far as Leila being supposedly a fugitive from a mental hospital, Allie cleared that with Officer Rayne,” I added, “I’m not a psychologist, but I believe she’s been wrongfully imprisoned. She definitely wasn’t committed voluntarily, and she can’t have been committed here by a family member with power of attorney, because her husband is deployed and her parents are still on the east coast. As far as I know, she’s still listed as a missing person in Massachusetts.”
“She is, actually,” Officer Rayne told Cross, “I looked her up yesterday.”
“If you can get a hold of the records of the hospital in Massachusetts, as well as the one here, I’ll bet you a cup of coffee that you’ll find that Christian Grey or someone who traces directly back to him had her committed at both of them.”
Cross looked at me with subdued interest again, while Rayne seemed not to know whether to perk up or not.
“Did she tell you which hospital?” Cross asked me.
She hadn’t, and I sincerely doubted she was going to want to talk to me now. I realized that I was going to go home to that pile of neatly folded sheets on the pull out couch and the accusing silence that lurks in hollow places, like the inside of emptied soup cans and the extra mug sitting in the sink.
I shook my head. “I’d start from the one closest to Escala, or just the downtown area, and work my way out,” I said. “I think that maybe he’d have tried to keep her close by.” My unprofessional knowledge of psychology had firmly placed Grey in the box of ‘asshole who will milk the most human suffering possible out of any given situation.’ It wasn’t an unbiased assessment, but it was right anyway.
“That your hunch?” Cross asked mildly. I noticed that he’d dropped the whole somehow getting places at three in the morning angle of questions for the time being. The benefits, I supposed grimly, of cooperating with the police.
“We found Leila downtown,” I told him, “unless a twenty three year old woman who currently weighs about ninety pounds soaking wet and has two injured arms managed to walk all the way across Seattle after breaking out of a psychiatric ward, she hasn’t come from very far away.”
This time, Officer Rayne smirked at Officer Cross and he frowned at her.
“If you could tell us once more for the record why you went out hunting for your houseguest at three in the morning,” she continued, using the kind of professional voice that encourages you to fill in the blanks.
That sounded like a wrap-up question if I’d ever heard one. “She left us a note that she was going to confront Christian Grey,” I replied, summarizing quickly, “It was sort of imperative that someone find her and talk her out of it.”
“Did you fear that she would commit suicide?”
I’d known the question was coming and it still stuck sideways in my throat like a fishbone. I tried to explain and couldn’t get that barb of emotions out, so I swallowed quite a bit.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Any particular reason why?” Officer Rayne asked, leaning back and crossing her arms at me. “As you’ve explained to us, you’re not a psychologist. Why did you choose to go and try to help Leila on your own? Why not call in the police, especially if you thought she might force entry somewhere? Why not bring in a professional, someone who actually is qualified to assess the situation and to keep things under control?”
I’d thought I was too tired to be angry. What would have been a flash of irritation at the way that Officer Rayne had detached herself from the situation, the way she picked it all apart after the fact, on a full night’s sleep and in daylight, coiled behind my ribs.
“It’s not that -” I stopped myself before I said too much, forced myself to wait until my eyes no longer burned. “Look, I know the signs,” I told the officers, “you don’t have to be a psychological genius to -” I stopped myself again. It didn’t seem to be working. Anybody who says I have an analytical mind and a sharp tongue hasn’t seen me falling apart in a police station at the first wince of dawn after a difficult case. “She’s got scars from attempts,” I said instead. “Grey was abusive to her in every possible way, and I know that at least two of her attempts were prompted by contact with him. I should have called the police, but I thought we could catch her before she got to Escala, and you’ve already heard – and agreed with – my unprofessional opinion that she’d panic at the first sign that someone wanted to hospitalize her again. I can’t say I blame her.”
I pushed my glasses up and rubbed at my grainy eyes. A strain of music floated past my ear as I saw the dusty, denim blue haze of Officer Rayne’s aura. Something with horns. Bizzarely, I smelled the sweat of horses and had the distinct impression of gravel crunching under my feet. It was gone when I looked at her again through my glasses, and saw the wrinkles forming on her forehead, and the bags under her eyes that only come with living on a diet of coffee and useful work.
It was terribly quiet in the interview room for quite a few minutes. Long enough for my anger and frustration to saddle up and go out prospecting to find my lost adrenaline, and for disappointment to put on its house slippers. I presumed that I’d eventually be let go, and so would Allie. But they were going to put Leila in a tiny box again, at least until they’d contacted her parents and decided whether or not she should have been in a psychiatric ward in the first place.
I couldn’t help the feeling that I’d failed her.
“What’s going to happen to her?” I asked Officer Rayne. Her expression did a brief, bad impression of a smile.
“Special Victims is sorting out a safe place for her,” she said. “Pending an assessment to make sure she’s not still a suicide risk. She’ll contact you if she wants you to know any more, until then -”
“Yeah, I know. Give her some space.”
Officer Rayne walked me out down the halls dimly lit by the pre-dawn greyness coming in through the windows, which had already overpowered the buzzing fluorescents. Allie was sprawled on one of the benches, asleep with her face tucked into her elbow, looking for the entire world like napping on couches in police stations was ordinary and fairly comfortable. Rayne and Cross must have interviewed her first, before they got around to me.
I proceeded to shake her awake.
“What, no coffee?” she said to Officer Rayne as soon as she’d levered herself up from horizontal and was on her way to her feet.
“Only the first cup is free,” Rayne replied, a little sharply. I concentrated on her expression for the first time since I’d left the interview room, and wondered sleepily why she looked so frustrated. Then I wondered if she was angry at us. “If you’d been good little detectives, we might let you visit for a while, but as it is -”
“As what is?” I asked, and then found myself staring cross eyed down my nose at Officer Rayne’s finger.
“I don’t know what you two idiots thought you were doing,” she said in a very angry undertone, “but you came very close to jeopardizing this investigation. Grey is likely to press charges against you both, now that he’s got that expensive lawyer in there with him, and your names are all over our case files. Do you know how that looks to a judge, especially when your ex-military friend went all Die Hard and probably would have shot Grey if we got there a minute later?”
“Taylor’s more of an acquaintance,” said my mouth.
Even Allie glared at me.
“Look, I know your type,” Officer Rayne said to me, “You’re a smartass with an overdeveloped sense of justice who thinks that you can make a difference. In most circumstances, you’re probably even right about it, as long as you stay out from underfoot of official investigations. But when you do stick your fingers into the official pie, it’s not just a millionaire businessman sueing you – it’s days of police time fixing what you’ve screwed up, it’s contaminated crime scenes and crucial evidence that’s suddenly inadmissible, it’s disqualified testimony, it’s you potentially getting hurt or even killed. You think you’re Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, Nero Wolfe, Dupin? You’re in the wrong century. After ten years of experience, you should know better than that.” She shook her head, stepped back, and glanced between me and Allie. “Both of you should. Just… go home. Don’t leave town, someone might decide to call you in later.”
With that, she turned and left.
So did we, racing the sun home in a cab. The world was just waking up around us: in half an hour or so, cars would race down the streets like ants down the corridors of an anthill, thoughts and instinct driving forward, building. Everyone in their appointed place, doing their appointed task. At dawn, the city no longer felt empty, but made of numbers and delicate gears, the way the mathematicians dreamed of it. It was a city that breathed the easier, I thought, now that it was no longer playing unwitting host to Christian Grey. It was the poorer for having failed Leila, and despite the early rays of the sun painting the buildings gold, I knew it would be a long while before my conscience let me forget how much better it would be if I could reach back and erase the past. If I stopped arriving just a minute too late.
When I opened the door to the apartment and the comforting hand of the sunlight between my shoulder blades was long gone, the spare sheets were still neatly folded on the couch, and there were still empty cartons of Chinese lying on the floor, collecting silence like dust, echoing with doubts.
I went to bed. Allie was there to chase the silence away.
Well, it wasn’t the first time I’d faced the music after throwing the rules away when they kept me from doing the right thing. It was kind of a pity, though – I’d been starting to like Officer Rayne.
“I know you hear this all the time, but it sort of happened on accident.” I smiled at her without any real hope that it would help. After all, she was just doing her job, and I was undeniably in her way.
She snorted, then gestured at the other cop in the room, the one who had firmly cemented his role as good cop when he’d given me the coffee. I hadn’t noticed anything except that his hand held caffeine on the first go – now I saw that his hair was gathering around his ears out of some frantic herd instinct, and that he had the eyes of a long-time officer. Better yet, at least as far as I was concerned, he had a smirk threatening to escape his professional expression.
“Tell him that,” Officer Rayne said. “He’s Officer Cross.” Then she turned to him. “Frank, meet the newest pain in my ass.”
The smirk poked its head out the door. “The private detective?” Cross asked.
“One of two.” Officer Rayne’s exasperated sigh and the subsequent widening of the smirk were good signs.
I decided that was as good of an opening as any.
“Lindsay Pilot,” I put in. “Usually, I’d have come into the station under my own power, but…”
Officer Cross’ smirk was approaching Cheshire proportions. Apparently, word had gotten around the station while I’d been busy taking a desk nap.
“Miss Pilot,” he began, “We need to take your statement regarding the events of last night - well, earlier this morning,” he amended, checking his watch.
To make a very long story extremely short, I told him the essentials. There were holes in the story – usually magic-shaped ones – that I was just too exhausted to try and patch up, but Officer Cross didn’t ask me many questions. By the time I was finished, it was the dog end of the night and my mouth tasted like cold station coffee and a dead hamster. All I really wanted at that moment was to go home and crash on the bed, safe in the knowledge that Christian Grey was currently taking his nap in a cell. Maybe some time in the next century, I’d go boil myself in the shower.
Officer Rayne, who was a good cop with a healthy dose of cynicism, bought approximately fifty percent of it. Officer Cross, who was cast as the sympathetic cop today, just sat and listened and took notes. Lots of notes. Notes that I was too groggy to read upside down, even if he hadn’t been a good enough cop to keep his arm in front of them so an irrepressibly curious and irredeemably nosy witness couldn’t see what he was writing.
It might even have worked if I wasn’t too tired to get nervous, or even to give a damn.
I finished everything with a skull-splitting yawn. The coffee was gone, and it hadn’t even made a dent in my by now monumental caffeine tolerance.
Cross flipped through his notes. “So, in the time since you were last in contact with Officer Rayne, you and miss Aliea Veldon followed Christian Grey to Bellevue in order to observe his actions, have been harboring a fugitive from a mental hospital, followed said fugitive to Christian Grey’s place of residence, somehow came into contact with two members of his security team, discovered that he was staying at the Fairmont, immediately went to the Fairmont, again attempting to find said fugitive, and… entered the hotel room. You neglected to tell me how, by the way.” His voice was quiet and not quite amused any more. The smirk had disappeared some time during my statement.
I decided to cut to the chase. “You know it’s all in how you phrase it,” I told him, “I do actually know my job, and you’ll find that nothing that Allie and I have done in the course of our investigation has been against the law.”
Technically, we’d probably been guilty of trespass in Escala, but trespassing was one of those laws that’s easy for the police to ignore if nobody’s actually complained to them about it. I didn’t think that Taylor was going to complain. Besides, all they had was a vague glow on the security cameras.
“It’s your job to check, of course,” I added.
“Of course,” Officer Rayne replied dryly.
“As far as Leila being supposedly a fugitive from a mental hospital, Allie cleared that with Officer Rayne,” I added, “I’m not a psychologist, but I believe she’s been wrongfully imprisoned. She definitely wasn’t committed voluntarily, and she can’t have been committed here by a family member with power of attorney, because her husband is deployed and her parents are still on the east coast. As far as I know, she’s still listed as a missing person in Massachusetts.”
“She is, actually,” Officer Rayne told Cross, “I looked her up yesterday.”
“If you can get a hold of the records of the hospital in Massachusetts, as well as the one here, I’ll bet you a cup of coffee that you’ll find that Christian Grey or someone who traces directly back to him had her committed at both of them.”
Cross looked at me with subdued interest again, while Rayne seemed not to know whether to perk up or not.
“Did she tell you which hospital?” Cross asked me.
She hadn’t, and I sincerely doubted she was going to want to talk to me now. I realized that I was going to go home to that pile of neatly folded sheets on the pull out couch and the accusing silence that lurks in hollow places, like the inside of emptied soup cans and the extra mug sitting in the sink.
I shook my head. “I’d start from the one closest to Escala, or just the downtown area, and work my way out,” I said. “I think that maybe he’d have tried to keep her close by.” My unprofessional knowledge of psychology had firmly placed Grey in the box of ‘asshole who will milk the most human suffering possible out of any given situation.’ It wasn’t an unbiased assessment, but it was right anyway.
“That your hunch?” Cross asked mildly. I noticed that he’d dropped the whole somehow getting places at three in the morning angle of questions for the time being. The benefits, I supposed grimly, of cooperating with the police.
“We found Leila downtown,” I told him, “unless a twenty three year old woman who currently weighs about ninety pounds soaking wet and has two injured arms managed to walk all the way across Seattle after breaking out of a psychiatric ward, she hasn’t come from very far away.”
This time, Officer Rayne smirked at Officer Cross and he frowned at her.
“If you could tell us once more for the record why you went out hunting for your houseguest at three in the morning,” she continued, using the kind of professional voice that encourages you to fill in the blanks.
That sounded like a wrap-up question if I’d ever heard one. “She left us a note that she was going to confront Christian Grey,” I replied, summarizing quickly, “It was sort of imperative that someone find her and talk her out of it.”
“Did you fear that she would commit suicide?”
I’d known the question was coming and it still stuck sideways in my throat like a fishbone. I tried to explain and couldn’t get that barb of emotions out, so I swallowed quite a bit.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Any particular reason why?” Officer Rayne asked, leaning back and crossing her arms at me. “As you’ve explained to us, you’re not a psychologist. Why did you choose to go and try to help Leila on your own? Why not call in the police, especially if you thought she might force entry somewhere? Why not bring in a professional, someone who actually is qualified to assess the situation and to keep things under control?”
I’d thought I was too tired to be angry. What would have been a flash of irritation at the way that Officer Rayne had detached herself from the situation, the way she picked it all apart after the fact, on a full night’s sleep and in daylight, coiled behind my ribs.
“It’s not that -” I stopped myself before I said too much, forced myself to wait until my eyes no longer burned. “Look, I know the signs,” I told the officers, “you don’t have to be a psychological genius to -” I stopped myself again. It didn’t seem to be working. Anybody who says I have an analytical mind and a sharp tongue hasn’t seen me falling apart in a police station at the first wince of dawn after a difficult case. “She’s got scars from attempts,” I said instead. “Grey was abusive to her in every possible way, and I know that at least two of her attempts were prompted by contact with him. I should have called the police, but I thought we could catch her before she got to Escala, and you’ve already heard – and agreed with – my unprofessional opinion that she’d panic at the first sign that someone wanted to hospitalize her again. I can’t say I blame her.”
I pushed my glasses up and rubbed at my grainy eyes. A strain of music floated past my ear as I saw the dusty, denim blue haze of Officer Rayne’s aura. Something with horns. Bizzarely, I smelled the sweat of horses and had the distinct impression of gravel crunching under my feet. It was gone when I looked at her again through my glasses, and saw the wrinkles forming on her forehead, and the bags under her eyes that only come with living on a diet of coffee and useful work.
It was terribly quiet in the interview room for quite a few minutes. Long enough for my anger and frustration to saddle up and go out prospecting to find my lost adrenaline, and for disappointment to put on its house slippers. I presumed that I’d eventually be let go, and so would Allie. But they were going to put Leila in a tiny box again, at least until they’d contacted her parents and decided whether or not she should have been in a psychiatric ward in the first place.
I couldn’t help the feeling that I’d failed her.
“What’s going to happen to her?” I asked Officer Rayne. Her expression did a brief, bad impression of a smile.
“Special Victims is sorting out a safe place for her,” she said. “Pending an assessment to make sure she’s not still a suicide risk. She’ll contact you if she wants you to know any more, until then -”
“Yeah, I know. Give her some space.”
Officer Rayne walked me out down the halls dimly lit by the pre-dawn greyness coming in through the windows, which had already overpowered the buzzing fluorescents. Allie was sprawled on one of the benches, asleep with her face tucked into her elbow, looking for the entire world like napping on couches in police stations was ordinary and fairly comfortable. Rayne and Cross must have interviewed her first, before they got around to me.
I proceeded to shake her awake.
“What, no coffee?” she said to Officer Rayne as soon as she’d levered herself up from horizontal and was on her way to her feet.
“Only the first cup is free,” Rayne replied, a little sharply. I concentrated on her expression for the first time since I’d left the interview room, and wondered sleepily why she looked so frustrated. Then I wondered if she was angry at us. “If you’d been good little detectives, we might let you visit for a while, but as it is -”
“As what is?” I asked, and then found myself staring cross eyed down my nose at Officer Rayne’s finger.
“I don’t know what you two idiots thought you were doing,” she said in a very angry undertone, “but you came very close to jeopardizing this investigation. Grey is likely to press charges against you both, now that he’s got that expensive lawyer in there with him, and your names are all over our case files. Do you know how that looks to a judge, especially when your ex-military friend went all Die Hard and probably would have shot Grey if we got there a minute later?”
“Taylor’s more of an acquaintance,” said my mouth.
Even Allie glared at me.
“Look, I know your type,” Officer Rayne said to me, “You’re a smartass with an overdeveloped sense of justice who thinks that you can make a difference. In most circumstances, you’re probably even right about it, as long as you stay out from underfoot of official investigations. But when you do stick your fingers into the official pie, it’s not just a millionaire businessman sueing you – it’s days of police time fixing what you’ve screwed up, it’s contaminated crime scenes and crucial evidence that’s suddenly inadmissible, it’s disqualified testimony, it’s you potentially getting hurt or even killed. You think you’re Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, Nero Wolfe, Dupin? You’re in the wrong century. After ten years of experience, you should know better than that.” She shook her head, stepped back, and glanced between me and Allie. “Both of you should. Just… go home. Don’t leave town, someone might decide to call you in later.”
With that, she turned and left.
So did we, racing the sun home in a cab. The world was just waking up around us: in half an hour or so, cars would race down the streets like ants down the corridors of an anthill, thoughts and instinct driving forward, building. Everyone in their appointed place, doing their appointed task. At dawn, the city no longer felt empty, but made of numbers and delicate gears, the way the mathematicians dreamed of it. It was a city that breathed the easier, I thought, now that it was no longer playing unwitting host to Christian Grey. It was the poorer for having failed Leila, and despite the early rays of the sun painting the buildings gold, I knew it would be a long while before my conscience let me forget how much better it would be if I could reach back and erase the past. If I stopped arriving just a minute too late.
When I opened the door to the apartment and the comforting hand of the sunlight between my shoulder blades was long gone, the spare sheets were still neatly folded on the couch, and there were still empty cartons of Chinese lying on the floor, collecting silence like dust, echoing with doubts.
I went to bed. Allie was there to chase the silence away.
* It’s not a modern detective drama if nobody banters with some friendly but disapproving officers of the law.
** Again, I owe Gehayi research kudos for figuring out which hospital Grey used to unlawfully imprison Leila. And for doing a damn lot of timelining and other detective work.
*** Officer Rayne may have been borrowing my reading list. Sherlock Holmes should be fairly obvious, but the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries are written by Dorothy Sayers, Nero Wolfe belongs to Rex Stout, and Dupin stars in Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue. Other book recommendations from my years long research project on how to write mysteries includes The Thinking Machine stories by Jaques Futrelle, Lord Darcy Mysteries by Randall Garrett, Inspector Lynley Mysteries (The TV series, not the books,) and Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple mysteries.
**** Damn. I’d intended this to be much happier… but Lindsay’s overdeveloped sense of responsibility doesn’t necessarily allow for her to be happy when she thinks she could have done more to help someone. And I totally wanted sap but forcing it wouldn't have worked. There’s always the epilogue, though!
** Again, I owe Gehayi research kudos for figuring out which hospital Grey used to unlawfully imprison Leila. And for doing a damn lot of timelining and other detective work.
*** Officer Rayne may have been borrowing my reading list. Sherlock Holmes should be fairly obvious, but the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries are written by Dorothy Sayers, Nero Wolfe belongs to Rex Stout, and Dupin stars in Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue. Other book recommendations from my years long research project on how to write mysteries includes The Thinking Machine stories by Jaques Futrelle, Lord Darcy Mysteries by Randall Garrett, Inspector Lynley Mysteries (The TV series, not the books,) and Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple mysteries.
**** Damn. I’d intended this to be much happier… but Lindsay’s overdeveloped sense of responsibility doesn’t necessarily allow for her to be happy when she thinks she could have done more to help someone. And I totally wanted sap but forcing it wouldn't have worked. There’s always the epilogue, though!
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no subject
Date: 2013-12-03 04:16 am (UTC)Here's the link to the comment dealing with where Leila was when and why:
http://das-sporking.livejournal.com/558600.html?thread=15697416#t15697416
no subject
Date: 2013-12-03 04:40 am (UTC)Thanks for the link!
no subject
Date: 2013-12-03 01:07 pm (UTC)“So, in the time since you were last in contact with Officer Rayne, you and miss Aliea Veldon followed Christian Grey to Bellevue in order to observe his actions, have been harboring a fugitive from a mental hospital, followed said fugitive to Christian Grey’s place of residence, somehow came into contact with two members of his security team, discovered that he was staying at the Fairmont, immediately went to the Fairmont, again attempting to find said fugitive, and… entered the hotel room. - Well, that sounds bad when you put it like THAT...
Will Leila be OK?
On the upside - Grey got arrested! YAY!
no subject
Date: 2013-12-03 03:35 pm (UTC)It's her job to be suspicious, and to tell off private detectives who make a nuisance of themselves and nearly tangle up her investigation. ;D
You'll learn more about Leila in the epilogue, but for a given value of Okay, Leila will be all right. :D
Grey getting arrested is going to be the highlight of everyone's Tuesday, I think. Knowing him, he managed to add verbally abusing the police and obstructing justice to his charge list.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-04 09:28 pm (UTC)Gotta say, the next chapter of 'Shifting Colours' is not being written easily.
Are A and L ever going to find out who/what Grey really is?
no subject
Date: 2013-12-04 09:50 pm (UTC)It's that time of year, unfortunately. I was hoping to get the Epilogue out by Tuesday, but finals want to kill me, so I feel your pain. Plus, the epilogue covers a lot of crap - I'm going to have to put Grey's position in my worldbuilding in there, because there was too much information for any other place. (And it's really awkward, because I need to explain some things that both of them should know about already...)
My only hint is that there are no creatures in my universe, just people. What he's doing is magic, for a given value of magic, but he doesn't control it.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-04 01:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-04 01:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-08 12:43 am (UTC)I hope Grey's super ego is making him shake with such great anger that he will be tortured by it. :P Either that or he feels genuinely remorseful and apologises to his victims, but that doesn't seem very possible, haha.
What about his aura that is eating up all the other women's? :X He didn't need to be near them to inflict some form of suffering on them, so how are they going to get rid of those nasty tentacles?
I'm not too worried about Lindsay and Allie, actually. They can always disappear for a while if they need to! ;)
no subject
Date: 2013-12-08 01:50 am (UTC)You'll figure out what happens to Grey as soon as I get away from these final projects and take-home finals. And all about his aura.
Too true: Allie and Lindsay can hop the next train out of dodge if they have to. :D