Geometry

Chapter 1

Ray's cell phone shrilled, jerking him from sleep. Groaning an instinctive protest, Ray dragged the pillow over his head with one hand even as the other fumbled for the phone on the nightstand.

"Vecchio," Ray mumbled through the pillow folds, holding the open phone upside-down. Lieutenant Welsh's early morning bellow made Ray glad for the insulating foam between the phone and his ear. "What's up?"

Part of Welsh's bellow made it through and Ray sat up abruptly, the pillow falling to the floor. "Say what? No kidding?" Ray flinched and held the phone away from his ear. "No, sir, of course I know you would never kid about... jeez, Lieu, I ain't even had coffee yet. Gimme a break! Yeah, yeah, I'll be right over..."

Ray dropped the phone, flopped back on the bed and moaned, staring up at the ceiling. "I got headless corpses before coffee. Fuck, I hate this job sometimes..."

* * *

"Well, shit, where the heck are we gonna find an expert on antique swords willing to help a criminal homicide investigation? Overnight?" Ray demanded of the bullpen at large, aggravated anew by the twists his newest homicide case presented. He'd been on it less than six hours and he was already frustrated as hell.

Bad enough when anonymous corpses turned up in the 27th's precinct, stinking to high hell in the blistering late summer Chicago heat, but when they turned up headless, hacked to pieces with freaky, jewel-encrusted swords left embedded in their mostly-missing chests, it ratcheted difficult up to near-impossible. To make matters worse, the press arrived on-scene before the PD, and a slow news day combined with a particularly lurid crime scene resulted in a front-page splash story in the morning editions that even got picked up by the national networks. As a result, everyone from the Governor's office on down was howling like a banshee for the crime to be solved -and quickly- before they ended up with a "Summer of Sam" debacle.

Lieutenant Welsh ducked most of the flack by pulling Ray off all his other cases and assigning him exclusively to this one, and bent the rules enough to call Inspector Thatcher and wrangle Fraser detached duty for the duration of the investigation. Even so, the pressure on Ray to push the investigation forward as fast as possible had him in a general snit and snapping at anyone who even asked about the case's progress.

"There must be one in Chicago, Ray. We merely have to find him. Or her," Fraser added, always mindful of gender-neutral language.

"Right." Ray glared over his desk at the Mountie, for once not wearing his red woolen uniform in the scorching, late-August heat. Still, Fraser managed to keep his tan uniform crisp and fresh when Ray felt like he might melt into a puddle on the stationhouse floor. "And he or she will be thrilled to stick their noses into a messy murder investigation. Sure. Right. Whatever, Frase!"

Sprawled full-length under Ray's desk on the relatively cooler linoleum floor, Diefenbaker lifted his head and yipped sharply.

Fraser's eyebrows shot up and he fixed the wolf with a surprised look. "Indeed? That would certainly be providential, Diefenbaker. Do you think your friend would be willing to help?"

Ray swiveled around in his desk chair and stared down at the wolf. Dief rolled over onto his chest and licked his chops thoughtfully before yipping again in a distinctly noncommittal way.

"What, the wolf knows one?" Ray asked; disbelief tempered with a tinge of hope.

"Apparently so," Fraser said, his finger slicking over his eyebrow as he stared hard at Dief. "You know he's got a new lady friend he's been sneaking off to visit at night?"

"Yeah, you keep bitching about it."

"I do no such thing," Fraser said almost primly. "I'm merely concerned about him running the streets after dark."