21 Weeks: Week 1

  *****

  Dinner done, Beck was left on her own in the Williams’ living room. Figuring they wouldn’t have them up if they didn’t want people looking at them, she moved down the pictures that lined the wall. Disneyland. Knott’s. Aquariums. Pumpkin farms. The Williams were clearly a family that liked to play together.

  “Adreene needed some help with her homework. Kevin will just be a minute.” Sandra came into the room with two cups of coffee and a smile.

  “Thanks,” Beck said as she took one.

  “You’re SWAT too, right?”

  “I was,” Beck said.

  “Guess that means you’re good.”

  “I guess.”

  “Good.” When Sandra glanced to the doorway, Beck realized this was the real reason she had been brought there, dinner just foreplay for the conversation they needed to have. “Kevin wasn’t a cop when we got married. I knew what I was getting into, though, marrying a soldier. This is what he wants to do. All I want is for him to come home safe every night. Can I count on you for that?”

  “I’ll do everything I possibly can.” Beck trusted Sandra understood any absolute could only be a lie.

  “That’s all I need to know.” Clearly, she did, and Beck reached for her cell as it vibrated on her hip.

  “Sorry.” She knew Sandra had to be used to it. Glancing to the message, Beck realized instantly what it meant, but decided to let Williams be the one to tell his wife when she heard his footsteps on the stairs.

  “Did you get it too?”

  “Yeah,” Beck responded.

  “We’ve gotta go,” Williams said. “I’ll be back.”

  Kissing his wife goodbye, he situated his gun into its holster, and Beck couldn’t begin to imagine how it must feel for the woman every single time.

  7 - Claron Lane - Thursday, 8:25 p.m.

  They were looking for a clown. There was a moment when Beck held out hope Williams was screwing with her when he relayed the description from dispatch, but his own weary acceptance assured Beck he wasn’t.

  Tape up when they arrived at the scene, a number of spectators stood beyond it - people who had abandoned their computers and televisions to catch the real-life drama unfolding outside their houses. Though, victim on his way to the hospital, where the paramedics were pretty sure he wasn’t going to make it, the main show was over.

  Flashing his badge, Williams got them past the perimeter, and Beck came to a temporary stop as she realized they weren’t the first detectives on the scene.

  “Bishop, Cockburn.” She forced her feet to move as Williams made it to them first. “What are you guys doing here?” Williams asked.

  “Martinez asked us to take it,” Bishop said. “Why are you here?”

  “Martinez called us too,” Williams responded.

  As much as Beck wanted to believe it was all a big misunderstanding, she knew it wasn’t. Martinez wasn’t the type to make many mistakes. He certainly wasn’t going to make one that cost the department double overtime. This was a test, a test most likely to determine if Beck and Bishop could work together. If they failed it, only one of them would be sent packing. Her future with the force contingent upon whether or not she could get along with Bishop, even for the next thirty minutes, Beck wondered if she should just go ahead and kiss her badge goodbye.

  “Who called it in?” Williams asked.

  “Woman in 286. Flanagan.”

  Looking to the house across the street, Beck spotted the fifty-something woman pressed full-nosed against her living room window.

  “Do we know whose house this is?”

  “Dan and Cheryl Wheeler.” The first words Bishop said directly to her since day once - unless one counted the “Get the hell out of my way” he grumbled the day before when she met him in a doorway that wasn’t big enough for the both of them - Beck glanced his way.

  “Have you talked to them?”

  “They’re not home. They’ve been on vacation for a week. The vic is a friend who was checking on the house for them.”

  “Do you think someone followed him here?” Williams asked. “Or was someone waiting for him?”

  “Neither,” Bishop answered. “According to Mrs. Flanagan, the friend has only come around once before this, three days ago. But there was a light on in the house last night. Said, at the time, she didn’t think anything of it.”

  “So, someone took up residence while the Wheelers were gone, and their friend had the unfortunate luck of walking in on him?” Beck theorized.

  “Dressed as a clown,” Williams added.

  “That’d be my guess,” Bishop said, and Beck turned her attention to the house. Eyes moving slowly up its facade, they snapped to the right upstairs window as the blinds fell closed.

  “You don’t think that person would be dumb enough to hide back inside, do you?”

  “We checked the doors and windows. Everything’s locked. Why?”

  “Because there’s someone inside the house.” Beck unsnapped her gun from its holster.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just saw him.”

  “This guy just stabbed someone to death. Why would he go back inside?” Bishop asked.

  “Why is he wearing a clown mask?” Beck questioned in return. “I think it’s safe to say there is some measure of insanity involved here.”

  Though his skepticism was obvious, Beck noted it didn’t stop Bishop from pulling his own standard-issue Glock as he waved over her head.

  “Get these people back inside their houses,” he ordered the officer who rushed over. “The perp may still be here.”

  Nodding his understanding, the officer rushed off to rally the troops, and Beck ceded to Bishop’s command when he said he and Cockburn would go around back and she and Williams should take the front.

  Fairly certain no one had bothered to get the house key off the victim, if it was even still on him, Beck shouldered up to the edge of the doorframe, nodding back when Williams nodded her way, and spun through the dark entrance as he kicked the door open.

  Identical sound echoing through the first floor, Beck knew Bishop and Cockburn had made it inside. Though, when they paused to listen in the hopes the perp might give himself away, there wasn’t a sound to be heard.

  Climbing the first three stairs, where she could keep eyes on both the stairway and the first floor, Beck watched Williams move across the living room, silently clearing it. When he made it to the doorway on the other side, he met Cockburn underneath it, returning to the bottom of the stairs a moment later.

  “There’s a back staircase. They’re going up that way.” Williams nodded Beck up the front stairs, and, reaching the top, Bishop and Cockburn materialized at the other end of the dark hall.

  Four doors between them, two on each side, it made sense for them to take the one closest. Which put Bishop in the front room where Beck had seen the blinds move. Tipping her head to him as a reminder, Bishop seemed little concerned as he stepped through the door, and Beck turned into the room to her right.

  Checking around its sparse furnishings, the lingering twilight provided light enough as Beck looked beneath the bed, moving, at last, to the closet. With a quick glance behind her to ensure she was still alone, she slid her fingers into the concave handle, throwing the door open and taking a step back, gun at the ready. Needlessly. Closet empty, Beck assumed the room was a guest room, getting no full-time use.

  Her space cleared, she went back through it, peering around the doorway before she stepped into the hall. Watching Williams come out of the room across from her, she could tell he had found nothing, and she slid along the wall toward the room where Bishop was still searching.

  Gun hanging by his side when Beck got there, Bishop turned at her footsteps in the doorway, and she knew he too had come up empty. Wondering if she really could have imagined it, it occurred to her it didn’t really matter. Even if she had seen it, the fact they had broken into the house and didn’t find a killer inside wasn’t going to play
well for her in the recap.

  Dropping back against the wide doorframe, Beck’s eyes caught on the mirrored closet door, and the stark white face reflected within it. Gun up, she pivoted, watching Bishop’s eyes go wide as she aimed his way. Shot ringing out as a bright red nose appeared at his shoulder, the knife in the perp’s hand clattered to the floor as he flew back into the wall.

  Spinning and fumbling his gun up, Bishop kicked the weapon out of reach as the crazed clown began to laugh, seeming to realize, just as Beck did, that, until that instant, Bishop had no idea he was there.

  8 - Claron Lane - Thursday, 9:10 p.m.

  “You know, most detectives don’t put a hole in someone their first week.”

  “It’s not my first week.”

  Beck had sincerely hoped, with her move to Homicide, she would be seeing a lot less of Internal Affairs. Standing face to face with a Metro rep her fourth day was kind of quashing the dream.

  “It was a good shoot.” It was Bishop, amazingly enough, who came to her defense, and, his reputation less volatile than hers, the I.A. rep dropped the attitude.

  “I’m sure it was,” he said. “Still have to follow procedure.”

  Gun sinking into a plastic bag, the man made off with it, and, half-armed, Beck turned to face her new colleague. Or nemesis. The details hadn’t entirely worked themselves out.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Yeah. You too.” Beck couldn’t tell if Bishop was still shaken from events inside the house, or if it pained him to say it.

  Glancing to where Williams and Cockburn stood across the yard, Bishop watched them talk for a moment, and Beck watched