Surgeon – Chapter Twenty-Three

NOT EDITED

Chapter Twenty-Three

Monday: January 13, 2020

8:00 AM; CLINSTONE POLICE DEPARTMENT, MAIN FLOOR

“Hey, Bo?” Jacob asked, standing up from his desk as Bo walked into his sight. Bo turned slightly, gaze focusing on Jacob. “Come here. Please?” Bo crossed the room, stopping a foot in front of Jacob’s desk, hands locked behind his back. “How are you doing?”

“I’m…” Bo trailed off, his mind searching for a word that wouldn’t make the detective worried. He wasn’t sure there was an excellent choice. “Recovering. I’m recovering, Jake. Thank you. H–how are you?”

Jacob smiled softly. “I’m good. Thanks. Did you sleep last night?”

“For a little while.”

“Do you have nightmares?” Jacob asked. “I don’t mean to pry or anything, but you startled yourself awake a few times the other night.”

“If you’d like to call them that,” Bo said softly.

“They’re about Kathy, aren’t they?” Jacob asked, his voice quiet. “About her and Dallas?”

Bo’s smile was faint. “Yes, mostly. But I’m good. Stable. I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Jacob said. Bo nodded once, clearing his throat. “Oh, you, umm… You’re dismissed.”

“Thank you. I’ll be in the morgue for the start of the day. Filling out some paperwork.”

“For what?” Jacob asked.

Bo lifted his shoulders. “Just something nice I want to do, that’s all.”

Jacob smiled. “All right, Austen. Don’t have too much fun.”

“I’ll do my best, Jake.”

5:00 PM; CLINSTONE POLICE DEPARTMENT, LAB

“What do you think it means? That there was nothing today,” Jacob said, arms crossed over his chest. 

“I’m… not sure,” Bo said as he shrugged on his coat. “Let’s say he’s performed surgery on both victims: Natalie Lambert and Cleo Marshall. He doesn’t want them in too much pain, so he’s giving them time to rest. In general terms, after a mastectomy—double breast removal, typically because of cancer—the patient is in ICU and the hospital for three to four days, I do believe. He’s probably giving them three to four days to rest between surgeries. 

“If he’s reconstructing their faces too, he’ll do that before we see any more victims killed for spare parts,” Bo said. “Natalie’s second surgical endeavor was probably two nights ago, maybe last night. I’m leaning more toward Sunday night. Four days of healing, less pain by that point, and he does not want to hurt them. I’d say Cleo Marshall’s second surgery will happen sometime around this Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. After that, we’ll probably see another O-negative blood type victim missing something around Wednesday or Thursday morning.”

“You know, it’s totally going to blow my mind if you got any of those days correct,” Jacob said.

Bo smiled faintly as he lifted his satchel over his head, tugging on the strap to get it to rest evenly over his shoulder. “It’s all about patterns, Jake. Once you find one, you kind of just have to… roll with it. I try not to assume they’ll be absolutely and completely correct or adhered to, but the chances that they’ll follow somewhere along the line are pretty high.” He tilted his head to the side. “May I ask you something?”

“You betcha.”

“Let’s say I want to pretend I’m normal. Let’s say my abnormalities around Kathy and Dallas are the center of many of my nightmares. I can’t shut off my brain. There’s no changing that. Outwardly, though, I can change. Tips?” Bo asked.

“That’s… not what I was expecting,” Jacob said.

“I only ask in the assumption we’re friends. And I want you to be as honest as you can. You don’t have to worry about hurting my feelings, I assure you.”

Jacob cleared his throat. “You know how you stand with your hands behind your back?”

“Yes?”

“It comes off as… unnatural,” Jacob said. “Tuck them into your pockets when you’re standing. Like, the pockets on your pants. That, or cross your arms over your chest. That’s how a lot of people stand.”

Noted. Thank you, Jake. The advice is appreciated.”

“No problem,” Jacob said quietly.

“Well, I’ll be heading to my house, now,” Bo said. It wasn’t lost on Jacob that Bo refused to refer to it as ‘home’. “Enjoy your family tonight, Jake. You have a beautiful setup in that home of yours.”

Jacob grinned. “Thanks, Bo.”

Bo nodded. “See you tomorrow morning, Jake.”

“You betcha. Goodnight,” Jacob said as Bo walked past him.

Without turning around, Bo lifted a hand in departure. “Night, Jake.”

7:00 PM; BO AUSTEN’S HOUSE, DINING ROOM

Bo set a bowl of food on the floor for Acamas, a little smile tugging at either corner of his mouth as he scritched the top of her head. She purred and loved up against his shin before settling in for her supper. Bo headed back into the kitchen for his own supper, stilling when his phone rang on the counter. He leaned over to look at the screen, heart skipping a beat. Dallas. Bo couldn’t remember the last time Dallas had tried to call him. A month or two after the trial? Jamal had told Bo that a stipulation of getting his job back at the station was discontinuing his visits and phone calls to Dallas. Eventually, Dallas had apparently gotten the message and stopped calling.

Until now.

Well, he didn’t work at the LAPD anymore, and Jamal didn’t have control over his job at the CPD. So… surely he could accept the call. It was likely about Kathy anyway, but it would still be nice to hear Dallas’s voice, even if it was just to talk about Kathy.

Bo pulled his phone off the charger, accepted the call, and pressed his phone to his ear. “Hello?”

“Hey, shorty. I wasn’t sure you were going to answer.”

“I… needed to weigh my options first.”

“Of course,” Dallas said, his voice soft and understanding, like Bo always remembered it to be. “You won’t believe this, but Jamal was sitting in my cell when I got off work today. Just sitting there.”

“What did he want?”

“He wanted me to call you. He said he came by to tell you about Regina and Kathy. I, uh, also heard you’re out in Minnesota now?”

“I am,” Bo said after a moment. “He asked you call me?”

“Told me to, actually. Ordered.” Dallas chuckled, but it didn’t quite sound like Dallas. “He says you’re not doing well, Bo. How are you doing?”

“I’m fine. You don’t need to worry about me, Dallas.”

“That’s definitely not what Jamal said. The man wouldn’t come to prison to visit me if it weren’t serious, Bo. He fuckin’ hates my guts. For him to worry about you and talk to me? Bo, he’s gotta think you’re half a step over the edge.”

Bo leaned back against the counter, crossing his free arm over his chest. “Jamal doesn’t know me as well as he thinks he does. I’m fine.”

“It’s me, Bo. Behind bars or not, I’m still me. I care about you, and I’m always gonna worry about you. Just tell me what’s going on.”

Bo closed his eyes. “You’re allowed fifteen-minute phone calls. Fifteen minutes is not nearly enough time to dive into the depths of my depression, Dallas, even if I wanted to. But truly, I’m… safe. I’m working a case, and I have a commitment to the victims of it.”

“Can you make a commitment to me too? That… that after this case is over, you come back to Los Angeles and visit me here at the prison for a face-to-face talk?”

“Yes,” Bo said after a long silence. “I can… I’ll commit to that.”

“Good. I’m holding you to that, Bo. I’ll see you after the case is over. Okay?”

“Okay.”

A little over a thousand, three hundred miles away in Los Angeles, Dallas put the phone back on the hook and turned in his chair to face Jamal. He was leaned back against the wall, arms crossed over his chest. “He’s not well,” Dallas said after a moment.

“No shit.”

Dallas ran both hands over his short hair, fingers locked together. “You need to leave him alone, Jamal. You aren’t helping him.”

“Do you really think I flew all the way to Clinstone because I thought my presence would drastically increase the value he sees in his own life?”

“God, Jamal, I wish like hell I knew what you thought about anything.” Dallas dropped his hands back to his lap. “He’s… okay until the end of this case. He follows through on commitments and promises, and he has a commitment to this case and to visiting me afterward. He won’t put a stop to either of those things.”

“And afterward, then what? I hire someone to kill someone in Clinstone to give him another damn case to investigate? I can do a lot of things, but supplying Clinstone with a consistent stream of homicides to keep him too occupied to end his life isn’t one of them.”

“First of all, it is one of them. You aren’t exactly above murder. Or torture.”

Jamal rolled his eyes, but he didn’t respond.

“Second of all, I… I don’t know, Jamal. I wish I knew what the right answer was, but I don’t.”

Jamal let out a slow breath, and for the briefest of moments, the hard mask he wore over his face fell. He looked like hell. Tired and worn down and worried. But the mask was back up so quickly that Dallas may have imagined it just to see the humanity buried so deeply inside the man he had once seen as a father. “I considered putting one of my men on him. A bodyguard in the shadows type of thing. But I… I don’t know. It’s like hiring a spy, and I don’t assign spies to people I…” He ran his tongue over his top row of teeth. “To people like Bo. People that aren’t marks or targets or rats. Civilians. I don’t assign spies to civilians.”

Dallas pushed himself to his feet. “For what it’s worth, it’s not spying if the spy doesn’t tell you everything Bo does and says. Then it’s just a… guardian angel that works on cash instead of prayers. Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Jamal whispered. Once Dallas had made it to the doorway, Jamal cleared his throat. “Thank you, Silver.”

“Yeah.” Dallas tapped his hand on the doorframe. “If I’m ever a free man again, I want Bo to be the one who picks me up the day I’m released. So your spy that’s not a spy? Benefits everyone.”

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