(27) I am what I am

~ Quinn ~

“You look like hell,” Jack said when I walked into the squad room the next morning.

“Feel like it,” I muttered as I stopped long enough to pour a cup of the lukewarm rotgut that passed for coffee around here.

“Want to talk about it?”

I shrugged, tossing my jacket over the back of my chair before sitting down. “Nothing to talk about.”

“Which means there’s a lot to talk about but you’re not sure you want to.”

“Yeah, no.” I picked up the nearest file and began thumbing through it. “Hell, when did we get this,” I barked, looking at the list of Doctor Freer’s patients on the day he was murdered.

“It came in this morning. Why?”

“Just…surprised me. I thought we’d need a subpoena to get it.”

“One of the men found the secretary’s desk calendar. It’s just names, nothing more. A start but we need a connection, something that says one of them may have had a hate on for the good doctor. Assuming he wasn’t just assaulted by some random punk.”

“Which you know doesn’t fit with the fact that he’s not the first or last one of the victims to have his cock stuffed up his ass, Jack.”

“Yeah, I know, and so far there’s nothing linking any of the four men.”

I hoped there wasn’t, because the last patient to see Freer was Blair Ryley. Which didn’t mean it was my Blair, but it’s an unusual enough first name that it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up with worry.

‘My Blair’. I should have laughed at that thought. He’d vanished and I had no clue where to. But as far as I was concerned he was mine. There had been a connection between us that he couldn’t deny, as much as he seemed to want to.

“We need addresses for all the people on this list.”

“Working on it, Quinn. Oh, the report came in on the two punks, umm murder victims. No trace elements found on them that could specifically point towards their killer, just as we figured.”

“And the others?” I nodded when Jack tapped the forensics files on Freer and Ward and I began skimming them until he dropped a printout on top of them. I read it slowly and smiled. “At least this proves that the same person killed them both, as if we didn’t know that from the MO.” Trace evidence from both bodies has been found that matched; flakes of skin and short strands of hair. “Too bad there wasn’t anything on the punks too.”

“Agreed, but we have a start for when we catch the freak.”