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telarynTitle: In a Previous Life
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
telaryn
Word Count: 2381
Fandom: Leverage/BTVS/Rizzoli & Isles
Characters: Nate, Sophie, Eliot, Faith, Jane, Frankie, Dubenich, Korsak, Frost
Rating: R
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: No ownership implied, no profit obtained.
Summary: Victor Dubenich steps up his game, using a charge of murder to remove Faith from play.
Author's Note: Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
angst_bingo's Round 3, for the prompt "captivity".
The file lay open on the battered wood table between them. Surveillance photos, personal histories, a DNA test, an arrest record, my my! Victor Dubenich ran his fingertips across the surface of the top photo, memorizing everything he could about the subject. He had to give Ford credit – this was an ace in the hole he’d never seen coming.
Now for the best way to take it from him. “Give these instructions directly to Mr. Latimer,” he told the tweedy little man sitting across from him. The pen was a cheap ballpoint that even with his favored prisoner status he wouldn’t be able to keep once this meeting was over. It did the job, allowing Dubenich to detail his plans for his man on the outside to follow; Victor supposed that was the best he could hope for.
When he reached the bottom of the paper, he tore it from the pad and folded in thirds. “No one but Mr. Latimer sees this,” he repeated, locking eyes with his attorney.
The man calmly took the paper and slipped it into his briefcase. “Don’t worry, Mr. Dubenich,” he said. “I am supposed to meet with Mr. Latimer in the morning, and this is the first matter on the agenda.”
Back in his cell, Dubenich lay back on his cot and stared at the empty bunk overhead. He still had the trappings of being an ordinary prisoner, but it had been a long time since he’d been forced to share his six by ten living space. And pretty soon I’ll be rid of all of this, he thought. They were entering the endgame now, circling closer to the moment when Ford would be able to see behind the curtain and know exactly who was pulling the strings.
And then things get really interesting. “You have a daughter,” he muttered, seeing again in his mind the dark-haired beauty who’d been photographed laughing with Eliot Spencer. “How on earth did I miss that?”
***************
“Freeze! Police!”
It was taking every ounce of self-control Faith didn’t have to spare to keep her from running. Her fight or flight reflex was in overdrive, but you didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure that when she was found crouched over a dead human corpse the police had a pretty good reason for wanting her full attention.
Plus it’s not just you at risk if you run anymore.
“I’m unarmed!” she called, raising her hands and making a show of lacing her fingers behind her head. “All friends here!”
The barrel of a service revolver brushed the knobs of her spine at the base of her neck. Trembling hands patted her down. “Don’t move.”
“Not moving,” she muttered. Statistics were running uncontrolled through her mind – the officer was on the short side, only a little bit taller than she was. Compact build, nervous, likely inexperienced – in another lifetime Faith would have knocked the gun aside and put the man on the ground without breaking a sweat.
Somebody remind me why the conscience was a good thing? She rolled her eyes skyward and waited for the search to finish.
“We all good here?” She heard the man’s partner come closer. “Suits are on the way.” He circled Faith, coming into view as the officer who’d searched her jerked her arms down one at a time and cuffed her wrists together behind her back. “’Course we can always go ahead and take your confession if you want.” He grinned at her – a smile she would have called charming if it hadn’t belonged on a face overseeing her arrest.
“Don’t you have some rights to read me or something?” she asked. “I am under arrest, right?” It wasn’t a direction she necessarily wanted to encourage them to go, but Faith knew she also couldn’t reasonably stand around making small talk with two of Boston’s finest. There was too much at stake, and a long buried arrest warrant in California that she couldn’t help feeling was about to come back and bite her in a very real, very painful way.
****************
“You can’t tell me something doesn’t feel off about this.” Detective Jane Rizzoli gestured at the one way mirror looking into the interrogation room. On the other side of the glass, the woman they’d arrested at the murder scene was pacing back and forth. “Frankie gets an anonymous tip, and shows up just in time to see this one crouching over the body?”
“We got lucky!” Frankie protested. “Why do you have to poke holes in everything all the time?”
Frost ducked his head to hide a grin. “It’s called being a detective,” Jane said, squaring off with her brother. “First thing you learn is not to take things at face value.”
She could feel herself gearing up to get into it with Frankie, but pulled up short when she caught sight of Korsak. “What is it?” she asked, spinning to track where her former partner was staring.
Nathan Ford. Son of a bitch. He was flanked by a professional looking woman with a briefcase, and a man in a flannel shirt and jeans who couldn’t have screamed “muscle” more clearly if he was carrying a neon sign. “What can we do for you Mr. Ford?” she asked, stepping forward.
“Yeah,” Korsak added, “here to confess to anything?”
Ford’s expression hardened. “Detective Korsak,” he said coldly – and Jane could swear the sudden hint of Irish in his voice was deliberate. “How fine to see you again.”
“I’m Beth Shreeves,” the woman accompanying Ford said sharply. “I am Ms. Ford’s attorney, and I would like to speak to my client.”
Jane turned to Frost, looking for some sort of indication that at least one of them had seen this coming. Ms?
“Like ‘em young, eh Ford?” Korsak asked. Jane barely refrained from rolling her eyes. When it came to somebody like Nathan Ford, Korsak couldn’t leave well enough alone any more than it seemed Ford could keep from winding him up.
“Faith is Mr. Ford’s daughter,” the attorney said, her voice dripping with acid. “And I would like to speak to my client now.”
**********************
“Behave,” Sophie muttered, giving Nate’s hand a quick squeeze before following a uniformed officer to the interrogation room. He thought he heard a quiet snort from Eliot at his back, but Nate didn’t dare confront his hitter. The fight they’d had before leaving the loft had been one for the record books – neither Sophie nor Eliot had wanted him to put himself in danger by coming down to the station himself. “You’re already a known quantity,” Sophie had argued. “You go down there on your own, without a plan, you're going to end up in a cell right next to Faith!”
“She’s my daughter, Sophie – and you know what she’s risking staying in a cell. We don’t know for certain what’s going to happen when they run her prints – what kind of flags they’re going to send up!”
“Excuse me,” Hardison had taken the opportunity to interject. “Am I not the king of keeping y’all off the grid?”
When he was satisfied that his hacker would be able to keep an eye on anything the police tried, Nate finally agreed to let Eliot accompany them to the precinct. Sophie would act as Faith’s attorney, doing whatever she could to gather intel and see about getting her released.
It would be Nate’s job to work the detectives on the case – see what information he could get from them. The fact that he had prior experience with these particular detectives was why Eliot was at his back. “Faith’s got resources if she gets sent up,” Eliot had pointed out. “You don’t.”
Murder. It was almost impossible for Nate to wrap his brain around, but Faith had been very clear about the circumstances of her arrest when she’d called him. ”I heard a fight, I went to check it out. The guy was dead when I got there. I can’t tell you anything more than that.”
It screamed set-up, but none of them could figure out who might be targeting Faith for this kind of attention, or why?
“It’s been a while,” Detective Rizzoli said, drawing his attention back to the here and now. Her gaze ticked past him, resting on Eliot. “You’ve obviously recovered.”
Eliot shrugged. “Like you said, it’s been a while.” Nate had met the Boston homicide detective during a job gone wrong a year earlier. Eliot had been shot that time, barely surviving a trip into Boston Harbor.
“Detective, why have you arrested my daughter?”
Dark eyes studied him for a long moment before she answered him. “She was found with the body, officers were acting on a tip…”
“How’d he die?” Eliot asked.
Eyebrows immediately went up. “And I’m going to tell you that why?”
“Detective, please,” Nate interjected. “We’ve got our reasons for asking.” He put as much pleading and paternal concern into his voice as he dared. Jane Rizzoli was smart – smart enough to know when she was being played.
The dark-haired woman was quiet for a long moment. Nate could almost hear her weighing the pros and cons of telling them what she knew. “His neck was broken,” she admitted finally. “Preliminary examination indicates the murderer was somebody about your daughter’s height, who knew exactly what they were doing.”
Broken neck. Not shot or stabbed, no sign of a robbery. Nate glanced at his hitter, and wasn’t reassured to see his expression.
Whoever had staged this had done their homework. If Eliot was acknowledging that this was something Faith was capable of doing, it was going to take a miracle to get her out of it.
************
Faith could honestly say she’d never been happier to see Sophie Devereaux in her life. “Beth Shreeves, Ms. Ford,” the grifter announced, her accent Boston and authoritative this time. She glanced at the officer tasked with “guarding” Faith. “I’ll be needing a few moments alone with my client.”
She managed to keep her expression blank until they were alone, then Faith felt her eyes go wide. “Sophie, what the hell?”
“That’s what we’re hoping you can shed some light on,” Sophie countered. She made a show of sitting at the table in the center of the room and opening her briefcase. Faith joined her a moment later, giving Sophie the chance to slip her an ear bud using the case as a shield. As much as she craved the reassurance of her father’s voice or Eliot’s, Faith slipped the tiny comm unit into a pocket. It would go in her ear later, when they weren’t being watched by who knew how many detectives on the other side of the glass.
“Was Nate smart at least?” she asked. “Please tell me he stayed home. I didn’t want to call, but the only ways I know how to get out of something like this attract way too much attention.”
The grifter’s elegantly raised eyebrow was all the answer she needed – Faith swore under her breath. “He and Eliot are talking with the detectives on the case. Obviously we’re claiming your family connection – the feeling is that your Slayer ties are going to be less helpful getting you out of this.”
Faith hadn’t missed Sophie addressing her as “Ford”. “Don’t let Nate’s stubbornness keep you from calling Giles if you have to,” she said. “I have a deal with them and they’re good about holding their end up.”
Sophie looked troubled. “Under the circumstances, do you think they’ll believe you’re innocent?”
Faith started to laugh the question off, but she forced herself to look at the situation realistically. The setting had been staged very much like the first murder she had committed – and she didn’t know if any of her Slayer contacts would be able to overlook that. “Somebody set me up, Sophie,” she said at last.
“I agree,” the older woman replied, “which is why we need to be careful who we trust going forward. Your father and Eliot filled me in on the drive over, and I definitely think someone is targeting you for a reason. We need to figure out who, and we need to figure out why.”
All of which is going to take time, Faith realized, her insides twisting nervously. “We’re going to have to let them book me for this.” She saw Sophie’s expression begin to soften, and shook her head – gathering her resolve. “No. Been there, done that, Soph. I can handle myself.”
Sophie’s hand twitched, and Faith knew that her first instinct had been to try and offer physical comfort. “Faith, you know we’ll pay whatever it takes to bail you out.”
Faith shook her head again, fighting back tears. Family had made her soft – in a previous life she could have dealt with whatever the system decided to throw at her. “Focus on finding out who’s behind this, Sophie. Have Hardison do whatever it takes to keep me from getting shipped back to California. I can wait.”
She knew the grifter didn’t believe her, but right now it was more important that she focus on convincing herself.
******************
“She didn’t do it.” Nate watched, heart breaking, as realization flooded Faith’s expression only to be tamped down a moment later behind her tough, street-wise façade. They’d worked so hard to make it safe for her to let that part of herself go, and now it was all coming undone.
“I’m not going to just take your word for it.”
Nate turned to face the dark-haired detective. “I’m not asking you to. I will get you the proof.” He sighed. “All I’m asking, Detective Rizzoli, is that no matter what happens you keep an open mind. Allow for the possibility that things aren’t as straightforward as they seem.”
*******************
The cell phone he wasn’t supposed to have vibrated. Sitting on the edge of his bunk, Victor Dubenich answered it – and immediately broke into a smile. The voice on the other hand was reporting another success. Ford’s daughter had been arrested, and Boston PD was about to be in possession of some key pieces of long-lost information regarding the mysterious Faith Lehane.
“Check, Ford,” he said, once he’d thanked the caller and hung up.
Soon – very soon – it would be mate.
Author:
telarynWord Count: 2381
Fandom: Leverage/BTVS/Rizzoli & Isles
Characters: Nate, Sophie, Eliot, Faith, Jane, Frankie, Dubenich, Korsak, Frost
Rating: R
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: No ownership implied, no profit obtained.
Summary: Victor Dubenich steps up his game, using a charge of murder to remove Faith from play.
Author's Note: Written for
angst_bingo's Round 3, for the prompt "captivity".The file lay open on the battered wood table between them. Surveillance photos, personal histories, a DNA test, an arrest record, my my! Victor Dubenich ran his fingertips across the surface of the top photo, memorizing everything he could about the subject. He had to give Ford credit – this was an ace in the hole he’d never seen coming.
Now for the best way to take it from him. “Give these instructions directly to Mr. Latimer,” he told the tweedy little man sitting across from him. The pen was a cheap ballpoint that even with his favored prisoner status he wouldn’t be able to keep once this meeting was over. It did the job, allowing Dubenich to detail his plans for his man on the outside to follow; Victor supposed that was the best he could hope for.
When he reached the bottom of the paper, he tore it from the pad and folded in thirds. “No one but Mr. Latimer sees this,” he repeated, locking eyes with his attorney.
The man calmly took the paper and slipped it into his briefcase. “Don’t worry, Mr. Dubenich,” he said. “I am supposed to meet with Mr. Latimer in the morning, and this is the first matter on the agenda.”
Back in his cell, Dubenich lay back on his cot and stared at the empty bunk overhead. He still had the trappings of being an ordinary prisoner, but it had been a long time since he’d been forced to share his six by ten living space. And pretty soon I’ll be rid of all of this, he thought. They were entering the endgame now, circling closer to the moment when Ford would be able to see behind the curtain and know exactly who was pulling the strings.
And then things get really interesting. “You have a daughter,” he muttered, seeing again in his mind the dark-haired beauty who’d been photographed laughing with Eliot Spencer. “How on earth did I miss that?”
***************
“Freeze! Police!”
It was taking every ounce of self-control Faith didn’t have to spare to keep her from running. Her fight or flight reflex was in overdrive, but you didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure that when she was found crouched over a dead human corpse the police had a pretty good reason for wanting her full attention.
Plus it’s not just you at risk if you run anymore.
“I’m unarmed!” she called, raising her hands and making a show of lacing her fingers behind her head. “All friends here!”
The barrel of a service revolver brushed the knobs of her spine at the base of her neck. Trembling hands patted her down. “Don’t move.”
“Not moving,” she muttered. Statistics were running uncontrolled through her mind – the officer was on the short side, only a little bit taller than she was. Compact build, nervous, likely inexperienced – in another lifetime Faith would have knocked the gun aside and put the man on the ground without breaking a sweat.
Somebody remind me why the conscience was a good thing? She rolled her eyes skyward and waited for the search to finish.
“We all good here?” She heard the man’s partner come closer. “Suits are on the way.” He circled Faith, coming into view as the officer who’d searched her jerked her arms down one at a time and cuffed her wrists together behind her back. “’Course we can always go ahead and take your confession if you want.” He grinned at her – a smile she would have called charming if it hadn’t belonged on a face overseeing her arrest.
“Don’t you have some rights to read me or something?” she asked. “I am under arrest, right?” It wasn’t a direction she necessarily wanted to encourage them to go, but Faith knew she also couldn’t reasonably stand around making small talk with two of Boston’s finest. There was too much at stake, and a long buried arrest warrant in California that she couldn’t help feeling was about to come back and bite her in a very real, very painful way.
****************
“You can’t tell me something doesn’t feel off about this.” Detective Jane Rizzoli gestured at the one way mirror looking into the interrogation room. On the other side of the glass, the woman they’d arrested at the murder scene was pacing back and forth. “Frankie gets an anonymous tip, and shows up just in time to see this one crouching over the body?”
“We got lucky!” Frankie protested. “Why do you have to poke holes in everything all the time?”
Frost ducked his head to hide a grin. “It’s called being a detective,” Jane said, squaring off with her brother. “First thing you learn is not to take things at face value.”
She could feel herself gearing up to get into it with Frankie, but pulled up short when she caught sight of Korsak. “What is it?” she asked, spinning to track where her former partner was staring.
Nathan Ford. Son of a bitch. He was flanked by a professional looking woman with a briefcase, and a man in a flannel shirt and jeans who couldn’t have screamed “muscle” more clearly if he was carrying a neon sign. “What can we do for you Mr. Ford?” she asked, stepping forward.
“Yeah,” Korsak added, “here to confess to anything?”
Ford’s expression hardened. “Detective Korsak,” he said coldly – and Jane could swear the sudden hint of Irish in his voice was deliberate. “How fine to see you again.”
“I’m Beth Shreeves,” the woman accompanying Ford said sharply. “I am Ms. Ford’s attorney, and I would like to speak to my client.”
Jane turned to Frost, looking for some sort of indication that at least one of them had seen this coming. Ms?
“Like ‘em young, eh Ford?” Korsak asked. Jane barely refrained from rolling her eyes. When it came to somebody like Nathan Ford, Korsak couldn’t leave well enough alone any more than it seemed Ford could keep from winding him up.
“Faith is Mr. Ford’s daughter,” the attorney said, her voice dripping with acid. “And I would like to speak to my client now.”
**********************
“Behave,” Sophie muttered, giving Nate’s hand a quick squeeze before following a uniformed officer to the interrogation room. He thought he heard a quiet snort from Eliot at his back, but Nate didn’t dare confront his hitter. The fight they’d had before leaving the loft had been one for the record books – neither Sophie nor Eliot had wanted him to put himself in danger by coming down to the station himself. “You’re already a known quantity,” Sophie had argued. “You go down there on your own, without a plan, you're going to end up in a cell right next to Faith!”
“She’s my daughter, Sophie – and you know what she’s risking staying in a cell. We don’t know for certain what’s going to happen when they run her prints – what kind of flags they’re going to send up!”
“Excuse me,” Hardison had taken the opportunity to interject. “Am I not the king of keeping y’all off the grid?”
When he was satisfied that his hacker would be able to keep an eye on anything the police tried, Nate finally agreed to let Eliot accompany them to the precinct. Sophie would act as Faith’s attorney, doing whatever she could to gather intel and see about getting her released.
It would be Nate’s job to work the detectives on the case – see what information he could get from them. The fact that he had prior experience with these particular detectives was why Eliot was at his back. “Faith’s got resources if she gets sent up,” Eliot had pointed out. “You don’t.”
Murder. It was almost impossible for Nate to wrap his brain around, but Faith had been very clear about the circumstances of her arrest when she’d called him. ”I heard a fight, I went to check it out. The guy was dead when I got there. I can’t tell you anything more than that.”
It screamed set-up, but none of them could figure out who might be targeting Faith for this kind of attention, or why?
“It’s been a while,” Detective Rizzoli said, drawing his attention back to the here and now. Her gaze ticked past him, resting on Eliot. “You’ve obviously recovered.”
Eliot shrugged. “Like you said, it’s been a while.” Nate had met the Boston homicide detective during a job gone wrong a year earlier. Eliot had been shot that time, barely surviving a trip into Boston Harbor.
“Detective, why have you arrested my daughter?”
Dark eyes studied him for a long moment before she answered him. “She was found with the body, officers were acting on a tip…”
“How’d he die?” Eliot asked.
Eyebrows immediately went up. “And I’m going to tell you that why?”
“Detective, please,” Nate interjected. “We’ve got our reasons for asking.” He put as much pleading and paternal concern into his voice as he dared. Jane Rizzoli was smart – smart enough to know when she was being played.
The dark-haired woman was quiet for a long moment. Nate could almost hear her weighing the pros and cons of telling them what she knew. “His neck was broken,” she admitted finally. “Preliminary examination indicates the murderer was somebody about your daughter’s height, who knew exactly what they were doing.”
Broken neck. Not shot or stabbed, no sign of a robbery. Nate glanced at his hitter, and wasn’t reassured to see his expression.
Whoever had staged this had done their homework. If Eliot was acknowledging that this was something Faith was capable of doing, it was going to take a miracle to get her out of it.
************
Faith could honestly say she’d never been happier to see Sophie Devereaux in her life. “Beth Shreeves, Ms. Ford,” the grifter announced, her accent Boston and authoritative this time. She glanced at the officer tasked with “guarding” Faith. “I’ll be needing a few moments alone with my client.”
She managed to keep her expression blank until they were alone, then Faith felt her eyes go wide. “Sophie, what the hell?”
“That’s what we’re hoping you can shed some light on,” Sophie countered. She made a show of sitting at the table in the center of the room and opening her briefcase. Faith joined her a moment later, giving Sophie the chance to slip her an ear bud using the case as a shield. As much as she craved the reassurance of her father’s voice or Eliot’s, Faith slipped the tiny comm unit into a pocket. It would go in her ear later, when they weren’t being watched by who knew how many detectives on the other side of the glass.
“Was Nate smart at least?” she asked. “Please tell me he stayed home. I didn’t want to call, but the only ways I know how to get out of something like this attract way too much attention.”
The grifter’s elegantly raised eyebrow was all the answer she needed – Faith swore under her breath. “He and Eliot are talking with the detectives on the case. Obviously we’re claiming your family connection – the feeling is that your Slayer ties are going to be less helpful getting you out of this.”
Faith hadn’t missed Sophie addressing her as “Ford”. “Don’t let Nate’s stubbornness keep you from calling Giles if you have to,” she said. “I have a deal with them and they’re good about holding their end up.”
Sophie looked troubled. “Under the circumstances, do you think they’ll believe you’re innocent?”
Faith started to laugh the question off, but she forced herself to look at the situation realistically. The setting had been staged very much like the first murder she had committed – and she didn’t know if any of her Slayer contacts would be able to overlook that. “Somebody set me up, Sophie,” she said at last.
“I agree,” the older woman replied, “which is why we need to be careful who we trust going forward. Your father and Eliot filled me in on the drive over, and I definitely think someone is targeting you for a reason. We need to figure out who, and we need to figure out why.”
All of which is going to take time, Faith realized, her insides twisting nervously. “We’re going to have to let them book me for this.” She saw Sophie’s expression begin to soften, and shook her head – gathering her resolve. “No. Been there, done that, Soph. I can handle myself.”
Sophie’s hand twitched, and Faith knew that her first instinct had been to try and offer physical comfort. “Faith, you know we’ll pay whatever it takes to bail you out.”
Faith shook her head again, fighting back tears. Family had made her soft – in a previous life she could have dealt with whatever the system decided to throw at her. “Focus on finding out who’s behind this, Sophie. Have Hardison do whatever it takes to keep me from getting shipped back to California. I can wait.”
She knew the grifter didn’t believe her, but right now it was more important that she focus on convincing herself.
******************
“She didn’t do it.” Nate watched, heart breaking, as realization flooded Faith’s expression only to be tamped down a moment later behind her tough, street-wise façade. They’d worked so hard to make it safe for her to let that part of herself go, and now it was all coming undone.
“I’m not going to just take your word for it.”
Nate turned to face the dark-haired detective. “I’m not asking you to. I will get you the proof.” He sighed. “All I’m asking, Detective Rizzoli, is that no matter what happens you keep an open mind. Allow for the possibility that things aren’t as straightforward as they seem.”
*******************
The cell phone he wasn’t supposed to have vibrated. Sitting on the edge of his bunk, Victor Dubenich answered it – and immediately broke into a smile. The voice on the other hand was reporting another success. Ford’s daughter had been arrested, and Boston PD was about to be in possession of some key pieces of long-lost information regarding the mysterious Faith Lehane.
“Check, Ford,” he said, once he’d thanked the caller and hung up.
Soon – very soon – it would be mate.
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11/2/12 19:02 (UTC)