had worked a lot of outbreaks in his day. He'd presided over Legionnaires' disease outbreaks. He'd managed clusters of HIV. He'd traced an outbreak of Hep-C back to a single tattoo parlor, a singularly filthy place in Mattydale, and it hadn't been a problem.

 

None of those cases, not a single one, had required the constant presence of a sheriff's deputy at his side. None of those cases had been murder. When Nick Barrett died at seven o'clock in the evening, the day after he'd been brought in, the difference became official.

 

"His parents never even made it here." Dave turned away. He had no idea why the parents hadn't come right away. Maybe they couldn't get a plane to Syracuse on such short notice. Maybe they couldn't afford it. It wasn't his place to judge. Hell, maybe Barrett's parents were in jail. Dave had plenty of experience with that, didn't he?

 

"They were notified, right?" Ken put a hand on Dave's shoulder as they watched orderlies go about removing Barrett's body from the ICU.

 

"Yeah. Yeah, the chaplain from the school made the call. I guess we should get on the horn with him." He swallowed. "I don't… I don't understand why someone would do this. The killer would know. If he knows enough to release the bacteria where we'd expect to find meningitis, he would know some of these people would die."

 

"That's right." Ken wrapped an arm around Dave's shoulders, and he let himself accept the safety Ken offered for now. "That's the difference between first and second degree murder, for the record." He gave Dave a little squeeze. "The victim's still dead, but it matters under the law."

 

Dave closed his eyes. He wasn't a doctor right now. He was just an omega, like any other. He might not deserve comfort, but he needed it. If he wasn't mistaken, Ken was an alpha. It was natural for Dave to respond to him. It didn't have to be a big deal. "Yeah. I guess. I guess I just don't understand why, you know? I suppose I don't have to, I can still do the job, but I'm a scientist."

 

"You're always going to want to know why." Ken guided him out into the hallway, out of the way of the orderlies. "Yeah, I don't know why they do it."

 

"With some of them, I can kind of wrap my head around it. The victim did something, in some way, to make the killer think they deserved it." Dave pulled back enough to be able to walk and headed toward the elevators. He had a report to walk, and a notification to make. "I don't have to agree, but I can follow the logic. I can grasp the chain of events. This? There was no way the killer could have guaranteed that any one victim would die, but he knew that someone would."

 

Ken knew his way around the hospital by now, or at least between the different parts that were Dave's world. He pressed the button that would take him back to the emergency department and Dave's office. "Sometimes people are just evil. I know you don't like to think that about anyone, but it happens."

 

"Even evil people have some good in them." Dave closed his eyes. "I knew a terrible guy, bilked thousands of little old ladies out of their life's savings. That kind of thing. He wasn't trying to claw his way out of poverty or anything, he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He was just greedy, and he didn't care about poor people. But let me tell you, he was at every event in his kids' lives until he got caught. He was at every baseball game, every dance recital, everything."

 

Ken jolted. "Stanek. I knew I knew that name."

 

Dave looked away. He wasn't going to pretend it didn't hurt, but most people reacted that way. Ken wouldn't be any different. "It's not exactly common."

 

"No, no it's not." Ken held the elevator door for him. "How did you stay out of jail? I thought your whole family was in there."

 

Dave glared. He didn't care who saw them. "I stayed out of jail because I didn't do anything wrong. I figured out what they were into, avoided getting involved with them and their money like plague, and refused to help hide what they'd done."

 

"Sure you did, buddy." Ken huffed out a laugh. "You went against your own family?"

 

"Believe what you want. They don't speak to me anymore, if that helps your opinion at all." Dave walked toward his office. "The wardens at both my mom's and my dad's places told me they've requested no contact from me. So there you have it." He headed toward his desk.

 

Ken reached out to stop him. "What're you doing?"

 

Dave looked down at his desk. He looked at the stacks of paper awaiting him and then back up at Ken. "I'm flying an airplane, Ken."

 

Ken shook his head and grabbed Dave's coat from the back of the door. "Nope. Come on. You've been going non-stop since yesterday. I don't think I've seen you eat, and I know you only got a couple hours' rest. You're going home. You need a decent night's rest and something to eat."

 

Dave's jaw dropped. "We're in the middle of a homicidal outbreak of meningitis and you want me to go curl up and have a nap?"

 

"A full eight hours, buddy." Ken gently lifted Dave to his feet. "And some food. Don't make me bust out the milk and cookies. Crook or not, you're no good to anyone if you're passed out in a heap."

 

Dave bristled at the slight on his integrity, but he didn't fight Ken's urging. He was right, after all. Exhaustion lowered the body's ability to fight infection, and vaccines only went so far. The meningitis wouldn't be a problem; that vaccine worked well. The influenza vaccine was more of a guess than a science and if he got sick there wasn't anyone to fight the outbreak.

 

Ken brought Dave home, and he insisted on bringing Dave up to his apartment. "Do you actually have food in this showplace?" he asked. He stuck his thumbs into his belt loops and looked around.

 

Dave blushed. "I do, actually. I've got some stew I made ahead and froze." He hesitated. "There's enough for two, if you're hungry."

 

Ken stiffened for a moment. Then he relaxed. "You didn't season it with anything from that lab, did you?"

 

Dave chuckled. "No, no I didn't. And I don't bring samples home and stick them in the fridge either."

 

He heated up the stew and on a whim opened a bottle of wine. It wasn't much, nothing fancy, but Ken whistled when Dave set the table. "You're pulling out all the stops, aren't you?"

 

Dave blushed again. "It's been a long day. That poor kid died. Maybe it's nice to dress things up a little, take a moment to enjoy the little things."

 

Ken acknowledged this with a nod and sat down to eat. "So. What made you pick this place?" He gestured around with his glass.

 

Dave considered his words before replying. "Well, first and foremost, it's close to Silver Oak. I didn't want to be too far away, you know? And it was comfortable. There's a gym on site, places to walk, that kind of thing. I don't exactly keep nine to five hours, so that was important. Second, I wanted an older building."

 

"Really?" Ken snorted. "You wanted to live in an old, abandoned factory?"

 

"Sure. It's something that has history in the city, but instead of just letting it sit here and decay, they've repurposed it. Better to see the building recycled than to see all the materials in a landfill, right? And it honors the city's past, without being stuck in it." He looked down. "I don't know. In New York a building ten years old is historic. It's constant demolition and construction. I like that they found a way to not do that here."

 

Ken looked away for a moment. "I hadn't really thought of it that way. I'd just kind of resented that they turned it into luxury apartments." He huffed out a little laugh. "My great-grandfather was killed here. Industrial accident."

 

"That's terrible!" Dave put his fork down.

 

"They didn't have a lot of health and safety regulations in those days." Ken grinned. "Obviously I didn't know him. It was just one of those things. It felt like they were making light of those times, when they turned it into luxury apartments. But I guess you're right. It is better than just razing it and pretending those times didn't exist."

 

"Maybe we can get them to put up a memorial. A tree in the courtyard, maybe. Something living." Dave blushed again. He hated that he kept blushing so often. Sure, it was a natural reaction to an attractive alpha, but that didn't make it any less embarrassing.

 

When dinner was over, Dave went to clean up. There wasn't much to do, just rinsing the dishes and sticking them into the dishwasher, but Ken followed him into the kitchen anyway. When Dave stood up from the dishwasher, he found Ken only inches away from him.

 

"Tell me you're feeling this as much as I am." Ken's eyes had gone dark and a little flush added color to his light skin.

 

Dave could have denied it, but Ken would probably have known he was lying. Dave didn't want to be a liar. He nodded and ducked his head, ashamed of himself. He shouldn't be thinking of himself, of lust, at a time like this. He should only be thinking of the job. His own urges should be put off until people were safe.

 

But Ken was right here, right now. He gently lifted Dave's chin and turned his face back to Ken. "I've got to hear you say it," he said, in a voice that was only slightly strained. "Come on, Dave."

 

"Yes." Dave whispered it, but once he'd said the word it was like a dam had burst. "Yes," he said again, meeting Ken's dark eyes. "Yes, I want this."

 

Ken claimed Dave's mouth for his own, rough and demanding. Dave hadn't known he needed that until those plush lips were on his. The stubble of his chin rubbed against Dave's smooth cheeks like sandpaper. Ken braced himself against the counter, one hand on either side of Dave to pin him to the counter.

 

Dave couldn't go anywhere, and he didn't want to.

 

When Ken slipped his tongue against the seam of his lips, Dave opened up without hesitation. There wasn't any room between them now, not enough to slip a piece of paper between them. Dave could feel the hard line of Ken's need against his body and he wanted.

 

He slipped his hand under Ken's shirt to feel his hot skin, prompting him to strip the shirt off. "We should move this into the bedroom." Ken nibbled at Dave's ear as he spoke. "I want a place to put my gun."

 

Dave refused to think of that as an innuendo.

 

He led Ken into the bedroom, walking backward so he didn't have to look away from his partner. This wasn't like Dave. He hadn't known Ken for forty-eight hours, but Dave had been the one to mention taking the time to enjoy life. He stripped off his own shirt and tossed it toward the hamper as he walked into the bedroom. If he was going to go outside the norm for him, he might as well go whole hog.

 

Ken removed his holster and placed it, and the gun, on the nightstand. Dave made a conscious choice not to think about it and focused instead on the way Ken turned his attention to Dave's pants. God, it felt good to have those hot, callused hands on his body. He lifted his hips so Ken could remove the offending fabric, both underwear and trousers, in one fell swoop.

 

He was naked now, completely bare for Ken, while Ken was only half bare for him. He reached up to help Ken with his jeans, but Ken batted his hand away. "Not yet," Ken told him. "Want to get you ready first." His voice, raspy with desire, was lost enough to get Dave ready all by himself.

 

Dave didn't trust himself to speak. Right now, he'd have done almost anything Ken asked. He just nodded and parted his legs. Whatever Ken wanted, Ken would get.

 

Ken rummaged through the nightstand to find lube and condoms. After a moment, Dave could feel a cool, lube-slick finger sliding into him.

 

Dave let himself relax into the preparations. He and Ken were new to one another, but Ken knew exactly how to touch him to get him going. When Ken finally slid into him, Dave gave a little shout of joy. Nothing had ever felt so good or so right.

 

Some guys needed to talk during sex. Dave wasn't a fan, and apparently neither was Ken. Ken gritted his teeth and set a furious pace. If Dave believed in such things, he might have thought Ken was possessed. Dave wrapped his legs around Ken's waist and held on tight as his pleasure built inside of him.

 

When his release came, it hit like a wave. It brought with it white light that obscured Dave's vision and conscious thought. He didn't come back to himself until Ken was cleaning him up with a warm, wet washcloth. "Thank you," he told Ken. He could just about manage a little smile.

 

"Thank you." Ken tossed the cloth toward the bathroom. "You're incredible."

 

"So're you." Dave moved over, making room for Ken. The implication was clear.

 

Ken didn't even put up a token resistance. He just slid into bed beside Dave. "Commute's shorter from here anyway," he muttered into Dave's ear.

 

Dave figured he should probably be offended by that, but he didn't have it in him right now. He was still warm and boneless from their amazing coupling a few moments ago, and Ken was grinning so he was probably joking. "Coffee's good too," he muttered.

 

He rested his head on Ken's chest. As Ken wrapped his arms around Dave, it occurred to Dave that he could hear Ken's heart beating. And that was a pretty good sound.

 

***

Ken woke up with his arms full of warm, handsome doctor.

 

He wasn't exactly the kind of guy that stayed the night, most of the time. He usually headed back out to the farm. Now that he thought about it, he should probably let Mom know where he was. He was an adult and he did adult things all the time, but given his profession his mom worried.

 

He dropped a kiss onto Dave's cheek and slipped carefully out of bed. It took him a few minutes to figure out how to work Dave's coffee pot, because Ken didn't have a damn engineering degree, but he figured he'd either make it go or make it blow up after a few minutes and then he found his phone.

 

Hey mom. I'm ok. Stayed the night in town.

 

That should be enough. Mom respected him enough not to ask too many more questions than that. Ken had hookups. Everyone had hookups, for crying out loud. Even Mom had hookups, although those happened less often now that she was in her sixties.

 

He headed back into the bedroom and found Dave just waking up. "I either started a pot of coffee or got you put on the terror watchlist," he informed his new lover.

 

"Awesome." Dave yawned. "Shower?"

 

So maybe last night hadn't been a one-time thing. Or maybe it had been and Dave just didn't think the night was over yet? Whatever. Ken was going to enjoy it while it lasted. "Awesome."

 

Dave's shower could have fit ten people if they were really friendly. Ken and Dave could have showered together if they'd been straight colleagues determined not to look or touch. As it happened, neither of them had much interest in not touching. Apparently maybe-crooks from New York liked giving head in the shower. Who knew? Ken wasn't about to complain.

 

After showering, they grabbed breakfast and headed into the hospital. Apparently the chaplain at Le Moyne had gotten in touch with Nick Barrett's family. They were devastated, of course. Apparently they hadn't quite understood the seriousness of the meningitis diagnosis. Now it was too late. The college was going to pay to have the body shipped back to California.

 

It was about as much as anyone could do.

 

The patients in the hospital were holding steady for the moment. No one from the Justice Center not included in that initial batch of seven inmates tested positive for hepatitis, and no new patients presented with the disease for the next several days. That gave Ken and Dave the breathing room they needed to investigate the cases they needed.

 

Ken dragged Dave all over the county, but most of the sites they visited were places Dave suggested. They went to two different pharmaceutical companies to ask questions about their meningitis supplies. Ken tried to ask the questions at first, but after the first five minutes he felt like he was hitting his head against a brick wall.

 

Dave stepped in, and it was like having a translator back in Afghanistan. The pharmaceutical executives knew Dave wasn't exactly on "their" side, but he spoke their language and had this magical ability not to step on their toes or piss them off. Dave and Ken got to go into the labs and examine the companies' supplies of the bacteria, which all proved to be intact just like Dave's samples at the lab had been.

 

Unfortunately for Ken, that left the criminal side of the investigation spinning on its wheels. They didn't have any new leads by the end of the first week of the investigation. He needed to find some other approach to find a suspect. If he couldn't find it through the sample, he'd have to find it through the motive.

 

He sat down with Dave over the weekend to brainstorm. Dave, apparently, didn't do weekends. That was fine during an investigation, because Ken didn't do weekends when he was in the middle of a case either. If Dave was that much of a workaholic all the time, however, it could spell trouble.

 

That was a problem for later though. Right now, Ken would accept the help. "Okay. So what could motivate someone to release a deadly bacteria? Terrorism?" He stood in front of Dave's whiteboard and wrote the word TERRORISM in big letters.

 

Dave leaned his chair back and shook his head. "No. Too… no. It's like we spoke about before. Meningitis isn't a good terror weapon. It's too short-lived and too hard to transmit. Terrorists like diseases that are easily passed, like smallpox or anthrax."

 

"It disturbs me that you know this." Ken scratched at his stubble.

 

"I did intern with the CDC." Dave jerked a thumb at one of the many certificates on his wall. "We did plenty of work on bioterror. What about sending a message?"

 

"What the hell kind of message does someone send when they kill with a bacteria, other than terrorism?" Ken wasn't being sarcastic. He truly couldn't puzzle that one out.

 

"Remember the anthrax attacks in 2001? That person was most likely trying to make a point about vulnerabilities. At least as near as we can tell, because he was never caught." Dave tossed a pen up into the air and caught it.

 

"You keep saying 'he.' Why do you assume they're a man?" Ken scrawled the word HE on the whiteboard.

 

Dave dropped his jaw. "I guess force of habit," he said, after a moment. "We don't see a lot of women committing these acts, and there aren't a ton of women in this field. You're right though. That doesn't mean this one isn't being done by a woman."

 

"That would change the motivation though." Ken tapped the capped end of the marker against his cheekbone as he thought. "Obviously women can have just as wide a variety of motivations as men, but generally speaking when they commit murder they do it for very specific reasons. Someone is going to hurt, or has hurt, them or a family member. They almost never kill just to make a grand gesture."

 

"I'll take your word for it." Dave narrowed his eyes at the whiteboard. "You should probably add what we do know about this suspect up on the board."

 

Ken did. It wasn't much. "The person isn't making any announcements."

 

"So it's not about them." Dave stood up. "It's not about them, it's about the disease. Whatever statement this person is trying to make is about meningitis, specifically, instead of about them or about vulnerabilities. They've released the illness in places we know are vulnerable to meningitis outbreaks and they haven't bothered to hide the fact that this is a deliberately released illness."

 

"What would be the point they're trying to make?" Ken tugged at his hair. "What points could they possibly have to make about meningitis other than the fact that it kind of sucks?"

 

"Well, for one thing, there's not a lot of research dollars going into meningococcal disease." Dave shrugged. "There's limited funding to go around and, since not many people get it and it's got only a ten to fifteen percent fatality rate when there aren't complications, it gets a lower priority than things like HIV or influenza."

 

"Huh." Ken raised an eyebrow. "So if we had someone that had lost a relative to meningitis…"

 

Dave nodded slowly. "Sure. I can see that. I'd rather not, but I can see that. I guess your job kind of shoves you at people for whom that's a logical next step. 'Hey, I just lost my baby brother to meningitis, so now I'm going to actually decimate the city.'"

 

Ken snickered. "No one wants to admit that about cops. You can be the nicest guy in the world, but you don't meet anyone on their good days. You only meet people on the days when they think decimating the city because they're having a bad day seems like a reasonable choice. It starts to wear on you, after a while."

 

"I guess so." Dave walked around his desk. "I guess it's a good thing you're doing the job instead of me. I don't think I could handle it. But then again, you still think I'm hiding my family's ill-gotten gains somewhere."

 

"Are you?"

 

"No." Dave glared, not that there was much heat in it. Ken kind of felt bad about that. He'd have felt worse if Dave had any real way to prove he wasn't hiding anything.

 

The office door opened, and a young guy in a white coat walked in. He looked familiar and when Ken took a look at his ID he recognized the name. Tony Whalen was the med student Dave had pulled in to help out in the lab. He stood a little taller than Ken, with large blue eyes that were just a little too wide for his face.

 

"Doc Stanek? I've got those lab results you asked for."

 

Dave smiled and relaxed when he saw Whalen. "Tony, thank you. You remember Deputy Sykora, right?"

 

"Of course." Whalen glanced around the office. "So this meningitis thing is kind of scary, huh?"

 

Dave nodded. "Meningitis is always pretty scary, but yeah. It's kind of a big deal."

 

Ken watched as Whalen's eyes flew back to the whiteboard. "Do you think someone's doing it deliberately?"

 

Ken smirked. "Well the vials aren't getting there by themselves."

 

Whalen frowned. "Shouldn't we be informing people? Warning them?"

 

Dave sat down on the edge of his desk. "What exactly do you think that would do, Tony?"

 

"It would let people make their own, informed decision about whether or not to go into places that are meningitis hot spots." Whalen's face darkened. "I thought you were all about freedom of choice."

 

"Oh, I am." Dave nodded. "Here's the thing. The folks in prison? They didn't get to choose whether or not to be there."

 

"That's debatable." Ken crossed his arms over his chest.

 

Dave held up a hand. "Not in the short term. Sure, their life choices put them there, assuming they're guilty and weren't arrested based on false or faulty information, but they didn't get a choice about going into that particular place at that particular time. Prison's all about the lack of choice. That's kind of why it's a punishment, right? And those kids at Le Moyne, Tony. What's your solution there? Tell kids not to go to college? Nick Barrett was from a remote farming town in central California. He wanted to be a teacher. He had to go away to college if he wanted to be a teacher, which means he had to stay in a dorm.

 

"And that means he didn't truly have a choice about going into a meningitis hot spot."

 

Whalen's throat worked while he considered how to respond. "But Doc, if he'd stayed at home he'd have lived. And he could have chosen to go home to avoid the outbreak and come back when it was over."

 

"And the folks in prison?" Dave crossed his arms over his chest. "We've stabilized the patients with HIV and Hep-C, but it's a near thing. I can't guarantee they'll survive."

 

"They shouldn't have done the things to get those diseases in the first place." Whalen shook his long blond hair over his shoulder.

 

Ken had privately been thinking the same thing, especially given that the men were in jail, but hearing it said out loud made his blood run cold. "Whoa, buddy," he said, holding his hands up. "Slow your roll."

 

Dave closed his eyes. "You don't know how those guys got those diseases in the first place. It's not on you, or on anyone else, to judge them. Speaking as your faculty advisor, I'm going to advise you to go and read up on victim blaming. I've got a reading list I'll send you." He opened his eyes and gave Whalen a thin, brittle smile.

 

Whalen looked at the ground. "Alright."

 

"Thanks for getting me those results, Tony."

 

Whalen took his leave, with a backward glance at the whiteboard.

 

Ken watched him go. "Do you think you were a little harsh on him there?"

 

"Nope." Dave stood back up. "Your job doesn't allow for a lot of compassion. You can't chase someone down and arrest them if you're sitting around and feeling bad for them, or wondering if their reasons for doing what they did are legit or not. This job, you need empathy. You can't sit there and write people off like that, or you start to play God.

 

"The guy who tested positive for HIV? He caught it through a sexual assault. Now it's going to have a profound effect on how the meningitis affects him. Does his having been victimized by that man, back then, make it okay for him to have stolen a car? No. Does it make it right for someone to kill him this way? Also no.

 

"One of those guys with Hep-C caught it at a tattoo parlor that was the source of a big outbreak a few years ago. Should he have maybe gone to a better tattoo parlor? Yes. Does that mean he deserves a death sentence from some jerk trying to make a statement? No. That attitude from Whalen, that these patients don't matter because they've committed crimes, is sickening."

 

"Do you think you're a little biased?" Ken put a hand on Dave's shoulder. "Because of your family and stuff?"

 

Dave laughed and shook his head. "My dad used to say the same thing, before he got caught. Used to say that spending money on prisoner healthcare was a waste of taxpayer dollars. Seems funny now, right? No, it's just the right thing to do.

 

"If nothing else, most of those guys will get out eventually, or else they'll come in contact with people who will. And they'll carry their diseases to people on the outside." Dave met Ken's eyes. "They might be in jail, but they're still part of the community."

 

Ken sighed. "Yeah. Yeah, they are. And I have to admit hearing it put the way Whalen did was kind of grotesque." He ran his tongue against the back of his teeth. "What do you know about that guy, anyway?"

 

"He's a good enough kid." Dave looked up at him. "Straight; comes from Chicago. He does a lot of volunteer work. I'm kind of surprised to see that attitude about the prisoners coming from him, you know? You already know he volunteers at the Justice Center as a teacher, so how could he possibly be willing to write them off like that?"

 

Ken nodded. "Yeah. That's a little disturbing. I wonder how many of those teachers would have access to Le Moyne too?"

 

"Worth looking into." Dave was already going back to his computer.