After Adam's death, the Captain had asked Gunnar three times if he wanted to transfer out of homicide. Three times, Gunnar had said no. Whether or not he was a homicide detective, people would keep killing people. But if he stayed on the job, he'd be able to bring closure to their families. And if he did his job right, he would at least ensure the killer never had a chance to try again.

Still, each body exacerbated the wound in his heart. He'd hoped by now it would scar over, but it still hurt. And inside of that hurt rested a slow simmering fury. Nothing he did could bring a loved one back. The best he could offer were answers. And sometimes, not even that.

His new partner, Juanita, handed him a cup of convenience store coffee as he crossed the precinct office to his desk. "Rough morning?" She asked.

"Olivia's kitten got sick. I thought he was going to die." Gunnar took the coffee and opened up the perforated section on the lid. "The poor thing hadn't eaten in days, and I didn't notice. Sign me up for Dad of the Year."

"He's doing better now?"

"The vet was good." Competent, good-looking, and kind. Gunnar shook his head at himself. He really was the worst, ogling the doctor who had acted so quickly and professionally to save their pet's life.

“That's good," she said. Juanita was a no-nonsense beta with a solid frame that would have been chubby if she didn't spend so much time in the gym. They'd been together for a little over three months, and Gunnar liked her, but he couldn’t trust her. Not after what had happened with Charles. Juanita was cautious with Gunnar as well. Maybe she’d heard the rumors about his meltdown, and the perp he’d had to "let walk". Cops gossiped like lawyers and old fishwives.

Maybe Gunnar was reading too much into the situation. Anyone would be pissed if their perp walked on a chain of evidence technicality. Gunnar had handled everything properly, but the critical fluids sample had gone missing, and as lead detective on the case, he’d been responsible. Even if the fault lay with his partner. Even if Gunnar could have proven it, which he couldn’t. He’d had only circumstantial evidence.

A partnership of three-years, wiped away by suspicion and doubt.

They’d transferred Gunnar to give him a "fresh start", which was the polite way of shuffling him under the rug. Not that the change was entirely a bad thing. At least after selling the old home and moving to a new place, everything Gunnar saw didn’t remind him of Adam. Gunnar was healing. He only thought about Adam every few minutes instead of every second of the day.

"Don't bother sitting down," Juanita said as he put his bag on his chair. "I was about to text you with the address of the scene. We caught a case. I tried getting it assigned to somebody else but – –."

Gunnar had a sinking feeling in his gut. "Why?"

"Witness on the street first called it in as an OD."

Reported as an O.D. Which meant a body, laying out for how long? Overnight? Gunnar's skin went cold. Adam had left been out overnight. Stabbed and bleeding until he died.

"Gun? Gunnar?" Juanita had a hand on his upper arm.

It had been a year. Gunnar had gone through the therapy sessions, said what he was supposed to say, did what they told him to do, and now he had to hold it together. As a homicide detective, it was his responsibility to speak for the dead and ensure they got justice.

Gunnar blinked and forced himself to take a sip of the coffee. She'd put too much sugar in it, as usual. "I'm sorry," he said. "I’m just tired from this morning. Thanks for this."

"I tried to get Wilkins to take this one. There's a G.S.W. in a warehouse near Pratt circle, but – –."

"It's fine. Fill me in on the way to the car."

Juanita did. The body had been called in as an overdose, unfortunately common in Liberty's de facto red light district. The victim was male, likely a prostitute, found slumped over and leaning on a dumpster, legs spread with the crotch of his skinny jeans slit. One of the EMTs noticed probable ligature marks on the neck. Maybe he'd gotten them as a part of his night’s work. Maybe he'd been murdered. It was their job to find out.

A uniformed officer stood outside the circle of police tape. He was stocky, with a square jaw and a snub nose. Gunnar didn't recognize the officer, but Juanita called out, "Thompson!"

Officer Thompson looked relieved as he waved them over. "Detective Xi."

Next to him stood a young woman with a long blonde wig, slightly off center. Her nails were cut short and painted bright red. She stood with her back to the crime scene. She'd been crying, and mascara ran in trails down her face. She blotted her tears with a now dark gray, shredded tissue, which shadowed the area around her eyes like she'd been punched.

The weather was getting warmer, but she was still underdressed for it in a hot pink miniskirt and a form-fitting tank top that bared both her midriff and her tits almost down to her nipples. In the bright sunshine, her clothing looked out of place, and Gunnar wondered briefly what she had been doing so late to have her out, still in "uniform", at this hour of the morning.

Officer Thompson nodded to them both and said, "This is Carla. She called it in. Carla, this is Detective Hernandez and Detective Justice."

Carla looked at them skeptically, “Justice, huh?”

“Yes, ma’am. Can you tell us about your friend?”

“I thought he ODed, but why'd they send out two detectives?”

“We’re here to find out what happened.”

Carla folded her arms beneath her chest and swallowed. "His name's Reese. Or at least that's what he tells...," she sobbed. "Told people. I gave him the Narcan. Sometimes the shit they put in the drugs will make you stiffen up when you OD, but he was cold. I should've seen he was cold." She wiped the damp gray tissue under her eyes again.

Juanita pulled a fresh one from her purse and handed it over. "How long have you known Reese, sweetheart?"

"About three months. We ain't close. He was high most the time, always telling people he was going into rehab, but he was high." Carla shrugged. “I hadn’t seen him since Monday, and maybe was thinking he’d gone through with the rehab this time, gotten away, you know.” She shook her head. “Course he didn’t. Sometimes the drugs is all that helps with things, especially when you've got a sweetness, like Reese did. He was too trusting, always trying to see the best in his clients, and always thinking one of them was gonna sweep him away like he was living in some movie." She shook her head. "I don't know much, but I do know we live in no movie. You do what you have to, and you try not to get knocked up."

They asked her more about Reese, his drug habit and his clients, but Carla and a couple of other girls had been at a party, so she hadn't seen him that night. "You want to talk to Dom. He ummm..., manages the omegas."

"Reese was an omega?" Gunnar cut in. He shouldn't have been surprised. He had been doing this job long enough to know that the people society said needed the most care were the ones who got the least help.

Carla nodded. “He’s a small town kid. Was.” She gripped the tissue in her fist. “We didn’t talk much. I mean, I know I’m falling apart but...we didn’t even talk that much, you know. Busy. And I’m a beta. Dom keeps the omegas on a tight leash, I mean...”

Not tight enough. Though dollars to donuts, Dom, was the one who had hooked Reese on drugs in the first place.

"You know where he might find this Dom?" Gunnar asked.

Carla's fist tightened on the tissue, and she averted her gaze. "He's around. I don't really deal with him. Don't tell anyone I said anything about Dom, okay? Please."

Juanita put a gentle hand on Carla's shoulder. "We don't want to get you jammed up."

"Everybody's going to know I've been talking with you." Carla shook her head. "Pino's already gonna be mad I'm so late."

"Pino's your boyfriend?" Juanita asked, but all of them knew it wasn't a question, even as it was a lie. Pino was her pimp. At least Carla seemed clean. She didn’t have the tremors of long-term addiction, and while her teeth were a little crooked in the front, they looked white with no hints of decay at the roots. At least not yet.

Gunnar hated this part of his job the most. He could speak for the dead, but ultimately, it was the living who suffered.

"Officer Thompson, why don’t you take Gunnar over to speak with the Medical Examiner. I'll be along in a few."

Gunnar nodded, grateful to his new partner. As an alpha and a man, he already had two strikes against him in keeping their witness comfortable. If there is anything else to learn from her, Juanita would have a better chance of finding out and building a rapport to follow up with her later. "Sure thing, Nita."

Thompson reiterated the basics of the case as Gunnar snapped on his latex gloves and fitted the crime scene booties over his boots.

As he ducked beneath the line of police tape and approached the body, his footsteps muffled by the crime scene booties, a feeling of wrongness swept over Gunnar.

Gunnar walked a slow semicircle from the far corner of the dumpster around the body. The man's knees were bent with legs spread. Rigor had taken hold, stiffening him into a statue that was both pitiful and obscene.

It didn't look like an OD. Reese’s jeans had been slit, but the underwear beneath, a bright red and slightly shiny fabric, was intact. That was the first thing that didn't make sense. Male prostitutes usually didn't need to provide ready access to their cocks.

Maybe his jeans had been cut in the rear as well, but Gunnar wouldn’t know until the body was moved for processing. Either way, the bruising around Reese’s neck was severe. They’d presumably been covered by a bright red scarf of what, at first glance, seemed an identical material to the underwear. The scarf was now untied with an end hanging from each shoulder, probably when the EMTs had been assessing him.

His death could've been an accident, a client’s "game" gone too far, and ending with a panicked body dump in the bright hours after dawn when this area was the least active. But Gunnar didn't think so. The site was too exposed, and the positioning was too deliberate.

Someone had murdered this man. With intent.

The medical examiner, Dr. Garmin, a tall, dark brown man with wide brown eyes and long braids pulled into a rough bun at the base of his neck, knelt beside the body. He glanced up as Gunnar approached. "Preliminary cause of death looks like manual strangulation," the doctor said. "Best guess between midnight and 2 AM."

"That's prime time for this neighborhood. Someone would have seen. You think the body was dumped here after he died?"

"It's possible." The doctor pointed at Reese's wrist. "Do you see these marks here?"

The doctor pointed to sharp, narrow depressions in the skin. Gunnar felt ill. "Zip ties?”

"Looks like it.”

It made no sense to jump to conclusions. Zip ties were easy enough to acquire at the local home store. Still, cops used zip ties.

Gunnar felt disloyal for even thinking it. He was new to the precinct, but he and some of the other alphas had gone out for drinks last Friday, while his mom was watching Olivia for the evening. It had been pleasant, shop talk and some sniping about sports. Normal night. Normal guys.

Gunnar was so wrapped up in his own thoughts that he nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard Juanita mutter, "Es un pobre," from behind him. "Poor man, left out here like so much garbage."

Gunnar’s gut agreed. The world's oldest profession was still also one of the world's most dangerous. “Did Carla give you Reese’s last name?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Juanita said. “She was pretty spooked when you asked about Dom.” Juanita’s tone was level, but Gunnar couldn’t help feeling like he’d screwed up. Alphas did better playing bad cop than acting as a kind, helpful ear. Juanita added, “And who knows if Reese is even his first name. We’re going to have to run his prints. He was strangled?”

“And likely dumped,” Gunnar said. “Possibly zip tied before that.”

“Carla did say she hadn’t seen him around for a couple of days.”

“Doctor, could those scars on his wrists been for a day or longer?”

Dr. Garmin looked up. “It’s possible. They look raw, but if he was pulling at them for a while, they wouldn’t have been able to scab over.”

Juanita knelt down beside the body. "His hair looks dyed."

Honey brown with touches of blond. His eyebrows were a darker brown. His face had an almost boyish look that in combination with his frame, reminded Gunnar vaguely of Dr. Chandler. Even dead, the omega’s scent still clung. Cotton candy, now mingled with the scent of rot.

"Carla’s right. He was an omega," Gunnar said.

"You can smell it on him even now?"

Gunnar shrugged.

"Must've been dangerous for him being in this line of work. If he got pregnant."

"Maybe. I figure he used condoms. Or maybe he just gave head." Gunnar hated thinking about this. His alpha instinct led him to want to protect omegas. For a moment, the memory of Adam in the morgue, waxy and pale with a deep gouge on his cheek, overwhelmed him. Gunnar tasted antiseptic on the back of his tongue. According to the autopsy, Adam had been stabbed in the side from behind, thrown down, and stabbed again twice more before his assailant had taken his money and ID and ran.

This was different.

"I think we should look for similar cases," Gunnar said.

"You think someone did this before?"

"I don't know."

After fruitless knocking on doors, and a quick, tasteless lunch, Gunnar and Juanita made their way back to the precinct.

Gunnar had been searching through cold cases to see if any resembled how Reese had died when his cell phone began vibrating in his pocket. He glanced up at the old, stuttering clock in the records room. Outside, the sun might be shining, but here it was always gray. He pulled out the phone, and his heart began to beat a little faster when he saw the number for his daughter's after-school program.

Had Olivia gotten into another fight? After she had broken a little girl's nose who, in Olivia's words, had deserved it for being so mean, Gunnar had warned his daughter that if she lost control like that again, she would have to stop her Kung Fu training for a month and miss the early summer tournament. She'd promised, but as upset as she had been today, Gunnar wondered if she'd be able to keep her word.

He picked up the phone. "Detective Justice," he said automatically. "Is everything okay?"

"We were calling to verify that you had picked your daughter up at school."

Verify? "What are you talking about? She's with you on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays until 5:30."

"She didn't come to the bus stop, and one of the other students assured us she was going home with you. Your kitten, Puff, is sick, and – –."

"And you just decided to trust another eight-year-old and let my daughter wander off on her own!" Gunnar was both furious and terrified. His stomach churned; his skin was cold. He could barely hear the pathetic and frankly guilt toned protestations of the counselor on the phone.

Where was Olivia?

Memories of Adam, cold on the slab, floated behind his eyes. Except for this time, the body wore Olivia's face. Small, broken.

The woman was still talking. Gunnar couldn't hear her. Her words are like noise. They didn't have meaning. Just guilt.

Gunnar hung up the phone. He had given Olivia a simple, pay-as-you-go, flip phone to use just in case she got into trouble. She hadn't called, but he could call her. He tapped the second automatic number of his contacts- the first had been reserved for Adam, and he couldn't bring himself to use it anymore- and listened as it rang and rang.

He had failed his husband. He would not fail his daughter. He was a cop, in a police station. He'd get somebody to put out an APB. And an orange alert. Whatever he had to do.

His phone started ringing again. He didn't recognize the number. A part of him wanted it to go to voicemail, just to keep the line free, but what if it was someone who had found Olivia?

He picked the phone up again as he ran up the stairs from the record room, taking them two at a time.