Chapter Text
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(3:37 AM) - Missed Call
DOUCHE OF THE CENTURY
(3:38 AM) - Missed Call
DOUCHE OF THE CENTURY
Gavin frowns at his phone screen, squinting against the brightness. It’s a quarter to seven, which means he’s officially exhausted all of his available snoozes. If he doesn’t drag his ass out of bed in the next five minutes, he’ll have to scramble to get to work before Lieutenant Jagoff and the Robo Twink get there. Long gone are the days when Gavin could shit on Anderson for rolling into the office at noon, but no way in hell will he let them get a leg up on him now.
Still. Something itches in his mind as he stares at the notifications sitting accusingly in his inbox.
One call is too much whiskey, clumsy fingers. But two...
Blaming the last tendrils of sleep which haven’t let go of his mind yet, Gavin hits redial and holds the phone up to his ear. He waits and waits. He’s about to hang up, when the dial tone clicks over and his heart skips a beat.
Then: “ Hi. You’ve reached the personal number of Elijah Kamski. I’m probably in my workshop right now, so leave a message, and I’ll get back to you when I can.”
Gavin rolls his eyes, swallowing the lump of something in his throat, and hangs up before the message reaches the beep.
“Prick,” he mutters, hauling himself out of bed at last.
Gavin scans into the bullpen at five past eight, coffee clutched like a lifeline in both hands. Nines is already at his desk. He’s wearing his old CyberLife jacket today, the one with the white sleeves and high collar, making Gavin feel momentarily nostalgic for the early days of their partnership.
It’s almost two years to the month of Markus’s revolution, and things have, for the most part, stabilized. The initial hurdles were the big pieces of legislation—Android suffrage, property rights, marriage equality, etc, etc. Crime spiked for awhile. Lots of hate crimes. Lots of ugliness. Gavin had spent most of the months following the final March and Connor’s liberation of the CyberLife Androids attempting to lie low and avoid any more confrontations with the puppy-eyed little prick. Anderson, for his part, stepped up and commanded the office in a way that he hadn’t for years before Connor. The Captain had probably got the first full night’s sleep he’d had in ages.
Then Fowler, with a little side action from CyberLife, chose to dick Gavin over, hard. No ‘here’s a little bit of warning’, no ‘we know you have a history with androids’, just ‘here’s your new partner, figure it out.’ And that’s how he met Nines.
“Good morning, Detective,” says the Android in question, greeting him with a thin smile. Sure, they hadn’t gotten along at first (understatement) but Gavin has wondered more than once since their partnership began how he used to do this hellish job alone.
He sets down his bag, eyeing the RK900 and noting the stiffer than usual set to his shoulders. It sets alarm bells ringing in his head.
“Morning,” he says suspiciously. “What’s with you?”
“The Captain wishes to see you in his office,” Nines replies. “He also made it abundantly clear that I’m not invited.”
Uh oh. “The hell?” Wracking his brain for anything in the past week that could justify a reprimand, it takes him a second to notice Connor and Anderson standing a few yards away, visibly listening to their conversation. “You know something about this?” Gavin barks.
“My guess is it’s got something to do with the station’s celebrity guest,” Hank says, sounding like less of an antagonistic asshole than usual. Not that Gavin can talk.
“The hell you going on about, old man?”
Connor, smaller and softer around the edges than Nines has ever been, cocks his head curiously. “I believe Hank is referring to what happened at Elijah Kamski’s residence this morning. Were you not aware?”
There’s some sort of buzzing in his ears, drowning out whatever Nines says next. Elijah Kamski’s residence.
Two missed calls.
Two.
It takes him all of five seconds to turn and book it up the stairs to Fowler’s office. The Captain is sitting in his chair, and looks entirely unsurprised at Gavin’s rushed entrance. He doesn’t say anything for a long moment, instead fixing Gavin with a look that chills him deeply.
“Captain,” he manages, moving forward on autopilot to sit in the nearest empty chair. “What’s going on?”
“Let me ask you something,” Fowler says instead, leaning forward to steeple his fingers on his desk. “You respect me, don’t you, Reed?”
Gavin blinks, taken aback. He waits for the other shoe to drop, but this morning is throwing him nothing but curveballs. “Yes, sir,” he says helplessly.
Fowler continues. “And as someone you respect, you do your utmost to keep me informed on the things I need to know to run this precinct, correct?”
Gavin has no idea what’s going on, but he hasn’t breathed normally since Anderson opened his fat mouth, and this line of questioning is fucking with his head.
“Yes, sir.”
Fowler scowls. “Then why is it, Detective Reed, that when the beat-to-hell billionaire I’ve got bleeding all over my interview room says he won’t talk until his brother gets here, I don’t know who to call?”
The instant the words register, Gavin lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.
He’s not dead. He’s not lying face down in his stupid fucking crimson swimming pool or suffocating in the back of some perp’s trunk because Gavin didn’t pick up the phone.
“He’s here?”
Goddamnit.
That jackass.
“We’ll get to that in a second,” Fowler says. “First I’ve got to decide what to do with a Detective who purposely withholds pertinent information from his personnel file.”
All the adrenaline of the last five minutes seems to evaporate from his system at once, leaving Gavin irritated and wishing he hadn’t dropped his coffee back on his desk. “I hardly see how a fuckin’ half-brother is pertinent information, Captain.”
Especially a living one.
“It is when he’s one of the richest men in the world! When he literally designed two of my best officers.”
Gavin scoffs. “Oh, barely. They don’t let him do jack since he told them where to shove their marketing plans.”
Goddamn asshole threw away a career that made him richer than God to go live in a glass cage on Lake St. Clair with a bunch of Androids. Gavin may have had his views radically shifted in the last few years, but even he knows that isn’t healthy. God damn it. He doesn’t want to talk about this. Doesn’t want the two halves of his life colliding. Too fucking messy.
“To be honest, Captain,” he says, scrubbing a hand over his face, “when you called me in here, I kinda expected you to tell me he was dead. Now that I know he isn’t, I think it’s best if I just get back to work.” He pushes his chair back and stands.
“Not so fast, Reed. I’m not going to pretend to understand your relationship with—with Kamski.” It sounds like the very thought is still bewildering to Fowler. Join the club. “But he’s asking for you, and he’s been sitting in the interview room for near on four hours now. Won’t let anyone else talk to him.”
“Oh, fucking hell. He’s just being dramatic, okay?” Gavin spits. “That’s how he is. He’ll bitch and he’ll moan cause no one's ever told him no, and then when that doesn’t work he’ll throw money at you until it does. Just leave him sitting in there. Do him some fucking good.” He’s half way to the door when Fowler’s next words reach him, quieter than before.
“They beat him, Gavin. Smashed his face up, tore his hair out.”
When Gavin turns, most of the anger has drained off Fowler’s face, to be replaced with something a little unfocused. He quickly wakes up the touchscreen on his desk, and taps a sequence of folders until a new array of photos spreads across the surface. Gavin hesitates for a moment, before reaching out a hand and swiping through the files.
The first is the exterior of Kamski’s house. It’s just as much of a fortress of solitude as he remembers. For all his ability to charm the public in short bursts, his brother has always needed to retreat into silence to bring himself back together. Gavin is assaulted by the memory of peeking through Kamski’s doorway when they were decades younger, watching as his brother screwed something together, noise cancelling headphones keeping him in his own little world.
Gavin swipes to the next photo. This one is the entry way he’s always fucking hated. Full of statues and trees and that huge portrait of Kamski himself, it’s the picture of pretentiousness. Outdone only by the den, probably. In this snapshot, one of the statues that normally stands in the corner is toppled over and shattered against the dark tile flooring. Kamski’s portrait has been defaced, a crude, anatomical heart sprayed onto the surface with red paint instead of a hologram stamp. A Chloe Android lies flat on her back by the door, as if she had tipped directly over backwards. There’s a gunshot in her forehead.
“Jesus,” Gavin mumbles, moving on to the next one. The pool room is bizarre. Another Chloe lies face down in the pool, much like the phantom Kamski had in Gavin’s horrible vision. The red of the pool is incongruous with the blue of the thirium leaking out of her multiple bullet wounds and spreading through the water. The rest of the room looks almost untouched.
It’s as if the assailant had rang the doorbell, shot the Chloe who answered, and then waltzed through the rest of the house killing as they went.
The last photo is his brother’s bedroom. It’s a lot of red and white, like everything else in the house. Gavin isn’t sure exactly when Kamski’s tastes shifted from graphic tees and movie posters to his decidedly Bond Villain™️ current aesthetic. Probably the first million dollars.
It all looks sickly and odd in the harsh light of the camera flash, like a bad film set. There’s a third and final Chloe lying beside Kamski’s bed. She’s much worse for wear than her counterparts. Her blue dress is torn and stained with thirium, hands and upper arms showing smears of human blood. Her face is clear, except for the thirium which has leaked out of the bullet hole where her left eye used to be. There’s another body a few feet away, fucked to hell and with a rather large kitchen knife sticking out of its chest. Everywhere are splashes of blood and thirium.
“That’s where they got him,” Fowler says, voice low. “That Chloe was trying to defend him, we think. There’s evidence of multiple intruders, but the rest of them probably fled after she got a knife into their guy there. We’re running DNA on him now.”
“I haven’t really talked to him in four years.” The words just seem to fall out. Their last conversation had been at Kamski’s thirty-fourth birthday party, a veritable hemorrhage of money that had ended with Kamski making some snide pointed comment about Gavin’s mediocre life, and the latter throwing a martini glass against the wall (earning some satisfying shrieks from the upper crust in attendance). It wasn’t the worst thing either of them had ever said to the other, but for some reason it was the last.
“Now’s as good a time to start as any,” Fowler says.
Gavin takes a slow breath. “Yeah.”