Chapter Text
Adeline likes Will Graham. A quiet man with a soft, closed lip smile, an endearing mop of curls, and dog hair habitually decorating his clothes. She met him as his veterinarian, bumped into him often when he volunteered at the same shelter she did; occasionally had run-ins at the only local grocery store.
He’s nice to animals.
It seems like a small thing, but it’s really not. Vet medicine was infamous for its high suicide rate, and anyone close to the field could see plain as day why. Animal neglect, abuse, vitriol from ignorant clients.
Pleasant, handsome men who doted on their dogs like children were far and few between.
Will’s a teacher of some kind, she knows from snooping at his volunteer paperwork–though he did not specify in what capacity. Ood, really–the more she got to know him, the less that career path made sense. He wasn’t the most socially… graceful. Straight-forward, borderline rude. Refreshing to a doctor, less so to a student–or so Adeline imagined. She’d assume he wasn’t gifted many “#1 Teacher” mugs at the end of the year.
Adeline keeps things professional for two years. She’s not one to date–doesn’t have time between work, the shelter, and her particular hobbies–but things change one adrenaline filled, bloody evening.
“I need help!” she hears the yelling from the back, where she’s taking inventory of their onsite pharmacy. It’s almost 7PM on a Thursday night, she’s bone tired from back to back twelve hour shifts, but her heart kicks into gear the moment she recognizes the voice. Will Graham wasn’t a panicker.
Adeline rushes around the front counter with a vet tech on her heels. Will stands in her lobby, blood smeared on his slacks and button-up, a mess of fur and mud and gore in his arms.
“Oh my god,” the vet tech–David, their newest, greenest–turns white as a sheet, frozen in indecision.
“Guy had a knife, was beating the dog,” Will explains, voice raised but no longer out of control, just determined. He looks Adeline in the eyes, his gaze a carefully contained cyclone of raw emotion. “Please help–she’s losing a lot of blood.”
Adeline doesn’t say a word, doesn’t have to. She takes the poor thing from his arms and begins directing her tech. Assess the damage, stabilize, call in more staff for emergency over-time. It would be an expensive night for the clinic–she doesn’t hesitate.
The dog is not lucky, the knife wounds alone have nicked multiple important bits, and when the appropriate staff arrive Adeline dives head first into several hours of grueling surgery. Will Graham, she is informed by her staff, refuses to leave the lobby.
Despite it all, she stitches the last wound with a stabilized patient and an all-around optimistic staff. The nightmare wasn’t over, the next few nights would be a truer testament to the dogs' will to live, but for now everyone could take a deep breath. The urgent care was done–now the silent battle against infection came into play. The next shift could handle it from here.
She grabs the long-discarded collar while her staff busies with the last of clean up–a scuffed, faded name tag states “Lady Bug” in curly font. She leaves it behind for later documentation.
Adeline’s legs feel hollow and her eyes burn with exhaustion when she finally makes it back out to the lobby. The sun is just beginning to paint the morning in hues of orange and pink.
Will is still there, pacing with nerves, still covered in blood. They'd both pulled an all-nighter.
“Lady Bug’s okay for now,” her voice breaks him out of his trance. He bolts towards her with purposeful strides, diligently listening to her update. “It’s not good, she’s stable but that could easily change. We’ll need to keep her under observation for a few nights, watch for infection, make sure nothing has been missed.”
Slowly, to give him a chance to pull away, she raises a comforting hand to his shoulder.
“Any later and she would have died. You saved Lady Bug’s life.”
His shoulders sag incrementally, the urgency gone and leaving his body deflated, tired.
“Thank you,” he sighs, rubbing his eyes beneath his glasses. “I wasn’t even sure if you were open–couldn’t remember today’s schedule. Thank you for helping her.”
He smiles, amused, then adds: “Thank you for helping Lady Bug.”
She smiles in turn, exhausted but kind, nodding in assurance. Then a thought crosses her mind–the mirth fades. Adeline walks to their lobby cooler, pours them both a small paper cup of water.
“Can you tell me anything about who did this to her?”
Will’s expression shutters, a dark glean in his eyes and a stern tick in his jaw, but in a blink it's gone. Replaced with an almost professional neutrality.
“I was driving back from work, noticed a red pick-up pulled off the side of the road. White male, middle age, bald. He had her tied to the grill and was just… beating her, out in the open. Fists, boots, the knife.”
His lips thin, bloodless, and he takes a calming breath–she understands the need to recompose. His description paints an ugly picture, a senseless violence Adeline is unfortunately all too familiar with in her field. How many times has she put an animal back together, how many times has she failed and they've died a tortured death? And how many times were those not accidents, but the result of human cruelty?
“I had to pick between grabbing her and stopping him. Wasn’t able to get a plate. Is there an address on the tags, did she have a chip?”
A dark creature rears its grotesque head, claws scratching at the back of her consciousness. Not unfamiliar, but it has been slumbering for some months, awakened now by the mindlessness of Lady Bug’s condition. Adeline makes a split second decision.
“Nothing on the tags, and I haven’t had the chance to check for a chip,” she gives a defeated, exaggerated sigh, wiping both hands down her face in a performance of fatigue. “Listen, I’m exhausted–you don’t look much better than me. Let’s go home, clean up, get some sleep. I’ll have to file a police report anyway, and I can check for a chip then. Would you mind coming back here this evening?”
She can see he wants to argue, wants to check for a chip now, but his empathy stretches to more than just dogs–she looks a hot mess, the bags under her eyes are severe, her hands shake with every sip of her water she takes. She doesn’t have to fake it, she’s about ready to collapse.
Will relents, nodding in agreement.
“Right, absolutely,” he says. “I’ll come back later–thank you again. And I hope you get some sleep.”
She does, just not a lot.
After five hours of sleeping like a corpse, Adeline is up and packing a light duffle. Change of clothes just in case, gloves, a first aid kit with a scalpel. She puts on old work out clothes and a baseball cap–nondescript, forgettable. Takes a bus, leaves her phone at home.
Adeline had lied when she told Will Graham she’d wait until that night to scan for a chip. As luck would have it, Lady Bug has one.
Robert DeFranco. Address just at the outskirts of town, on the very edge of Wolf Trap. The red truck could be seen through Google maps, sitting in a dilapidated trailer park filled with residents the world would rather just rot than have to deal with.
One such resident wasn’t rotting fast enough.
She checks facebook to find more concrete evidence he still lives there before she commits. It’s a public account, filled to the brim with conspiracy nonsense, but recent pictures corroborate the chip's information. She doesn’t look too closely, she doesn’t have much time. He’s single, doesn’t have many friends. It’s enough for her to hunt him down.
The suns high in the sky when she reaches her destination, but the park is deathly silent save for the TV she can hear blaring from within her target abode. There are beer cans strewn across the front yard, the scent ripe enough to signal at least some are recent additions to the lawn decor.
She takes a chance, tries the front door–it’s unlocked. The hinges are loud, but she doesn’t hesitate. Based on the stench of alcohol coiling inside, Robert wouldn't notice a marching band busting down his door.
Predictably, she finds him passed out in a recliner, beer spilled in his lap.
Adeline sets her duffle down quietly, eyes roaming the trailer as she pulls out her gloves and knife. Disrepair was in every facet of the home–from mold, to burn holes in the carpet, to the window AC that produced cold air only in gurgled huffs. She spots a picture by the TV–a small child hugging a familiar, auburn fluff: a much younger Lady Bug.
She investigates the back two rooms of the trailer–an empty bedroom, the bathroom. No one else is here, which hopefully means Mr. DeFranco does not have custody of his son. Well, if he did, that was about to end–for the child's benefit, truly.
Adeline stands over the man's sleeping form, lip curling in disgust. There was a very obvious blood stain on his pant leg–he didn’t even bother to change after what he’d done. She thinks back to the mangled dog at her office, drowning in a cocktail of drugs just to stay alive, remembers the sheer terror and agony she’d seen in Lady Bug’s eyes before she went under.
Her knife strikes forward fast–she catches him between the ribs. Robert’s eyes shoot open, but he doesn’t make more sound than a startled gurgle. He looks at her with huge eyes, then down at the knife in his side. She waits for realization to begin to trickle in before she yanks it out.
He sputters, gasping, then begins to yell. It’s short lived. He tries to stand, immediately loses balance and falls, his face breaking his fall. Blood oozes from his nose and the chest wound, but it won’t be blood loss that kills him. It’ll be the collapsed lung; suffocation. He’ll die afraid, gasping, desperate. Just slow enough to regret his entire sorry life.
Adeline waits until the waste of a man stops moving, stops panting. Dies a drunken, bloody mess, alone save for his killer, gripping desperately at the trailer's stained carpet. She takes her gloves off, hides them in her first aid kit along with the knife. Puts a new pair of gloves on and starts knocking over furniture, glasses, pushes a table skew. Make it seem like there could have been a struggle. A break-in.
She peeks out a few windows–the park is still dead, whatever other residents that live here are either away at work, or maybe rotting inside their own trailers much like Robert had been. She takes her chance for a clean exit, duffle casually swung over her shoulder, gait unhurried. Like she belongs.
She takes the next bus home. Showers the lingering stench of DeFranco off her skin, washes it out of her clothes, puts the first aid kit in her purse before heading to work. She's found the best, most inconspicuous place to be rid of bloody items is with other, less sinister bloody items.
She's not surprised that Will Graham is already there, once again waiting in her lobby.
“I hope you were able to get at least some sleep,” she says in lieu of a hello. She doubted as a teacher he saw that kind of gore, that kind of suffering, often. “I know it’s not easy after seeing something like that.”
“Some,” he says politely, back to his usual, quiet self now that they're no longer in a crisis. It doesn't look like he's lying–he’s changed, but the clothing is terribly wrinkled and covered in dog hair. She imagines a fitful rest surrounded by his too-many-dogs. “You look, uh–better. I hope you got some rest too. I know a major surgery was probably not what you were hoping to do after a long day.”
Adeline laughs sardonically. “Isn't the first, won't be the last. It's part of the job.”
She has mercy on his back and invites him to her personal office. It’s small, but the chairs are more comfortable. She calls the nonemergency line on speaker phone, and together they report the incident. It’s not her first rodeo, unfortunately–though she wishes her line of work did not mean so many calls to the authorities.
Will’s brief description of the initial altercation spurs their call to a top priority. A maniac willing to stab a dog in broad daylight could very easily turn their aggression to a human. A cruiser heads down, takes their full accounts, and the owner information from the chip.
“He has priors, a warrant is out for his arrest,” the deputy is young, his stunted answers and awkward pauses tell Adeline he’s green. He tells them he’s called it in and he’ll be heading to the man’s residence, only a 20 minute ride from the office. She feels a little cocky–if this is who would be coming across late Mr. DeFranco, then–
“I’ll be coming with,” Will tells the deputy. Before the young man can argue, Will pulls out a badge.
“Special agent with the FBI,” her face remains neutral, but Adeline feels her heart skip in her chest. FBI–had he lied on all his forms?
“Uh,” the deputy flounders, clearly confused by the new information, uncertain if he had to listen to Will at all. “Yea–I mean...”
He looks at the badge, then Will’s stern expression. Gone is the quiet teacher, in his place a deceptively calm ‘special agent’. The deputy’s complexion turns ashen, clearly terrified of denying someone from the FBI and getting in trouble.
“Just uh–follow behind me,” the deputy settles on.
Will turns to Adeline, this time placing a comforting hand on her shoulder.
“Thank you again, Dr. Black.”
“Just Adeline,” she corrects on autopilot, every part of her mind occupied with retaining the outer appearance of calm, and not the meltdown she feels building inside her.
“Adeline,” he corrects, and it sends a weird, warm pulse up her spine when he says it. “I'll keep you updated on this case if you keep me updated on Lady Bug.”
“Of course.”
Will gives her one of his small, closed-lip smiles, before following after the deputy.
Once they’re gone, Adeline collapses into her office chair, boneless from the sudden rush of adrenaline. Christ, she was gonna have a damn heart attack at thirty-two.
Special Agent Will Graham.
Cold rushes through her veins, she replays her kill over and over trying to think of any way she’d given herself away. Was it obvious she was the killer, or was it only obvious to herself? Her hands were shaking with anxiety. There was nothing she could do now.
Stop, she tries to silence the internal turmoil. There’s no point in panicking.
If she had been sloppy in her arrogance, it was too late to correct. She didn’t really know what a Special Agent was for the FBI anyway, didn’t know what that meant as far as investigative or forensic know-how. For all she knew he was a pencil pusher using his badge to see to the end of a personal matter–of the monster being arrested.
Of finding his cold, rotting corpse.
She wills her hands to stop shaking, for her heart to calm. This wasn’t her first kill. It wouldn’t even be the first one investigated, though she did tend to make them look like accidents. Bitterly, though she knows this thought is moot, she wonders if they’d even waste resources looking into his death. What was the point when the world was a better place without him?
A childish thought, comforting in a childish way.
Adeline calls in her office manager–Judith–letting her know she will be unavailable for the rest of the day, she’s going home to rest.
She checks on Lady Bug one last time–stable, in and out of sleep, but not quite out of hot water. Then on impulse–
“Hey Judith,” her office manager gives her an exasperated look, quite done with all the updates and extra tasks. “If Will Graham calls in asking for an update on the dog, or asks for me, go ahead and give him my cell.”
Judith furrows her brow, opens her mouth to comment, then appears to decide she doesn’t care and just nods in agreement.
Better whatever questions he may have come straight to her. Whatever level of damage control that might afford her…
Adeline makes it home just as the last of the adrenaline rush completely leaves her body. She kicks off her shoes, doesn’t have the energy for much else, and crawls into bed to pass out. She’d either wake up tomorrow for a brief Saturday shift as usual, or she’d be arrested. She couldn’t bring herself to regret killing Robert, and she was simply too exhausted to think about what the consequences might be if she were discovered.
Across town, in a run down trailer, a golden pendulum swings.