Aliens on Aventine Hill

Joseph [Part 9]

Derek lifted his mug to take another sip of his coffee, only to be struck by a wave of disappointment. He peeked at the bone-dry bottom with one eye and shrugged, sliding back in his swivel chair and stretching his arms above his head with a yawn.

His eyes drifted to the record player in the corner. It had long reached the end of the album and had been skipping for a while now. Derek rose from his chair, stopped the needle and slid the stylus away. He glanced back at Elias, "Start it over or put something else on?"

"I don't care."

Derek rolled his eyes, tucking the vinyl back in its sleeve and setting it back in the milkcrate he'd brought from home. He looked through the others and then at his watch, and then at Elias again, "Jeez, it's late."

"You're welcome to go home," Elias replied without looking up.

Derek frowned: The two of them had been in their office for what seemed like an eternity. Derek had finished up some old paperwork and filed some new inquiry reports, but he'd wasted the majority of the afternoon milling about with the other officers, many of whom always felt the need to make some pitying remark about his assignment to Elias.

The remarks he resented, the partner he didn't. Elias could be cold and aloof, there was no denying that, but Derek didn't mind. Anything was better than the hothead-hotshots he'd been forced to work with in Los Angeles, officers who'd assumed their version of the law was the only version, regardless of whether or not it matched what the books decreed.

Elias was entirely different animal, Derek thought, glancing at his partner again. He bent the rules to his will—their trip to the morgue had made that much obvious—and he tended towards intimidation over rapport—sympathy wasn't his strong suit—but everything he did, he did with painstaking care and inspiring intensity.

Case in point, Elias had spent the entire afternoon and evening at his desk poring over one manila folder. It was a thick folder, Derek supposed, though not so thick that it should've taken this long. In fact, Elias seemed stuck on one single page.

Derek craned his neck to try and catch a glimpse of it. The formatting suggested it was an incident report, one tied to some sort of ongoing investigation. His eyes flicked to the manilla folder. Not theirs. An older one.

There was only one that Elias could've pulled. Derek himself had pulled it just a few days earlier.

"What're you looking for?"

Elias glanced up, "What?"

"I already went through the Rhea Blakesley file two days ago," Derek shook his head. "I didn't find anything of importance."

Elias looked back down at the papers on his desk and sighed, "I'm just trying to make sense of something."

"Oh?" Derek perched himself uneasily on the edge of the desk. Something in Elias' tone bothered him. Something unfamiliar. The silence that followed was more characteristic of his partner. Derek cleared his throat, "Maybe you should sleep on it. You do know it's past eleven, don't you?"

"I'm aware."

"Well?"

Elias let out a deeper sigh as he set the papers aside and leaned back in his chair, "Well, why don't you tell me why you pulled the Rhea Blakesley file in the first place?"

"Because I thought it might be able to give some insight into Blakesley. Grayson Blakesley, that is," Derek paused, "er, Remy Blakesley as it might be."

"A rather unimportant detail, don't you think?" Elias raised an eyebrow. "It's not as if he's Norman Bates. Remy's not a second personality, just his legal first name."