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kathierif_ficTitle: Bridge Over Frozen Water
Author: Kathie
Fandom: CSI:NY
Pairing: Sheldon Hawkes/Don Flack
Rating: FRM
Content: AU, slash
chapter 1 | chapter 2
“Hey,” Sheldon Hawkes called out quietly as he stepped into Don’s apartment and dropped his keys onto the small table by the door. “Are you home? I got your call…”
“Yeah, I’m here,” Don’s voice came from the kitchen. Sheldon smiled softly as he entered the room and leaned against the counter.
“Bad day, huh?” he asked.
Don looked up from where he was sitting on the cold floor. He had an ice pack placed on his left knee and was holding a spoon and a bowl of ice cream in his hands. The phone was on the ground next to him.
“You have no idea,” he replied glumly and dropped his spoon into his bowl. “Shooting at the rink, I’m sure you heard about it at work.”
“I didn’t,” Sheldon said, shock coloring his voice. “I was out of the lab all morning long. Are you okay?” Instinct made him step up to Don and kneel down next to him, his fingers reaching for the ice pack on the other man’s knee.
“I’m fine. I wasn’t even on the ice.” Don sighed and dropped his head back, against the cupboard he was leaning against. “Hank got hit. Bullet went straight through his padding, grazed his arm, went off the crossbar of the goal and into the ice. He was damn lucky.”
“Sounds like it,” Sheldon muttered and sat back on his heels. “Why did you call me?”
Bright blue eyes turned toward him, and Don shrugged slightly before looking down, at the remnants of his ice cream, again. “Guess I didn’t want to be all alone right now,” he mumbled.
Sheldon tilted his head slightly to the side as he contemplated that for a moment. “Okay,” he finally said and shifted, to sit down next to Don. “I have about an hour before I have to go back to the lab. Want to talk about it?”
Don leaned against him with an almost inaudible sigh. “I don’t know, is there anything to tell?” he asked softly. “I talked to a lot of cops today.” He chuckled briefly. “I think I met your boss today.”
“Mac?” Sheldon asked and lifted an arm, to put it around Don’s tense shoulders.
“Yeah. Intense guy.” Don sighed and put the bowl down, next to the phone. “I just don’t understand this. Why would anyone try to kill Hank?”
Sheldon shrugged. “I don’t have an answer for that,” he said and pulled Don in a one-armed hug. “But I can tell you that Mac Taylor is the best at what he does. He will not stop until he finds whoever tried to kill Hank.”
“I hope so,” Don muttered. “For a while, it looked like he suspected half the team.” He grimaced and straightened again. Sheldon’s arm slipped off his shoulder as he did. “Everyone who wasn’t on the ice when the shot was fired.”
Sheldon tensed.
“Everyone not on the ice?” he repeated while turning, so he faced Don. “You mean you’re actually a suspect in an attempted murder case?”
“I didn’t try to kill Hank!” Don said sharply. His eyes were narrowed now, and Sheldon could see muscles shift under his shirt as he balled his hands to fists. He caught himself staring at those hands – hands, he knew, that could cause a lot of harm. He’d watched enough games in which Don was involved in some kind of fight to know how much damage Don could do with his hands while balancing on skates on the slippery surface of ice.
He didn’t want to know how much damage Don could do to him, here, in Don’s kitchen.
“Relax,” he said sharply. “I never said that, okay? I never implied that you had anything to do with this!”
Relief filled him when Don’s hands slowly relaxed, and Don raised his left arm to rub at his eyes tiredly. “Sorry,” he muttered. “This had us all on the edge, you know?”
“I understand that,” Sheldon said. He reached out and carefully put his hand on Don’s shoulder. “I definitely understand that.”
“We’ve known each other for so long now,” Don said, his voice muffled by his hand. “Do you really think I could do something like that?”
He sounded lost, Sheldon thought. Dealing with murder and attempted murder was something Sheldon did almost every day, to the point where he sometimes almost forgot that other people, people like Don, didn’t. In Don’s world, people checked each other into boards, fought and injured themselves while trying to keep a little frozen rubber disk out of their goal and getting it into the other team’s goal, but there weren’t dead bodies at every turn.
“You know what Danny always says?” he asked. “First thing on the job you learn – everyone can do anything to anyone. But no, I don’t think you have anything to do with this.”
“Great,” Don sighed and reached for the bowl again. The remaining ice cream had started to melt, and he poked at it with his spoon listlessly. “Now how do I tell that to your boss?”
“You don’t,” Sheldon pointed out. “Mac will follow the evidence, and if you didn’t have anything to do with this, he will clear you without you having to do anything. Trust the evidence.”
~*+*~
“I didn’t know you liked hockey,” Stella said with a glance at the screen.
Mac chuckled as he leaned back in his chair. “I don’t,” he admitted. “This is footage from the last game. There’s our vic.” He pointed his pen at the screen.
“I heard about that,” Stella said and crossed her arms across her chest. “How’s he doing?”
“He’s not in the morgue,” Mac pointed out before sighing. “He’s going to be fine, with some rest.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?” Stella said, her attention still focused on the game. “We don’t have cases like that nearly enough.”
“We don’t.” Mac turned around to face her. “But still, someone tried to kill a man today. We need find out why, and who, and stop him before he tries again.”
Stella nodded. “I’ll start on the evidence,” she said before turning on her heels and leaving Mac’s office, just as the goalie on the screen made another spectacular save.
Mac turned his attention back to the game. He caught a brief glimpse of the player with the name “Flack” written in big capital letters across his back as he skated hard over the ice, the puck on his stick, but his attention was quickly drawn back to the goaltender.
~*+*~
“This can’t be right,” Stella muttered quietly as she tapped the sheet in her hand with a fingernail. “That has to be wrong.”
“What is it?” Mac asked from behind her as he stepped up to her. Stella flinched slightly; she hadn’t heard Mac enter the lab. It surprised her again and again how he could move so silently without even trying to.
Mac gave her a curious glance, and Stella shrugged slightly. “This,” she explained and handed him the sheet. “I found DNA from Hawkes on this shirt.” She pointed to the grey t-shirt she’d spread out on the lighted table, but before she could add anything else, the computer behind her beeped softly and she turned toward it. “Prints we found…match Hawkes, too,” she read out with a frown. “I don’t understand, did our evidence get contaminated?”
“Hawkes?” Mac repeated. “He hasn’t even been at that scene.” His eyes flew over the test results again. “Lindsay and I were at the scene. I haven’t seen Hawkes at all today.”
“He was at the lab this morning, but then he got a call and left,” Stella said thoughtfully. “You think he has anything to do with this case?”
“Hawkes?” Mac shrugged slightly. “I don’t know, Stella. But maybe we need to have a little talk with the good doctor.”
“I don’t know, Mac,” Stella said, doubt and hesitation filling her voice. “There has to be another explanation for this.”
“Yes,” Mac agreed, a deep line appearing on his forehead. “There is. If he didn’t tamper with the evidence, it means that Hawkes was at our scene. He’s somehow involved in this.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” Stella tried to point out. “Maybe there is another explanation for the whole thing. I mean, this is Sheldon Hawkes we’re talking about.”
Mac sighed softly. “Let’s talk to him and see what he has to say about this,” he finally decided. He just hoped that there was something that he’d missed, even if he couldn’t see it right now.
~*+*~
When he returned to his office, later that day, Mac had developed a headache that had grown stronger the longer the day had gone on. He wanted to believe that his CSI wasn’t involved into this case, but there had been almost no trace at all from the shooter, indicating someone who knew what they were doing.
By the time of the shooting, Hawkes had been in the lab, he reminded himself firmly. Stella had talked to him. No matter what the results of this investigation were, he knew for a fact that Hawkes wasn’t the shooter.
However, this wasn’t the first time the other man had kept information from him.
Mac sighed and rubbed his hand over his face before dropping the case file onto his desk and taking off his coat. It took him a moment to realize that he wasn’t alone in his office. On the couch sat Sheldon Hawkes, his elbows on his knees and his head bowed low. He was practically vibrating with tension, Mac thought as he sat down next to him and patiently waited until Sheldon was sitting up, a worried expression on his face.
“Sheldon,” Mac said and stopped, not sure what to say.
A part of him wanted to rip into the other man and demand an explanation for the presence of his fingerprints and DNA at Mac’s scene. The other part told him to be patient and wait for Sheldon to tell his side of the story at his own pace, and without rushing him.
Both sides demanded his attention, and Mac sat in silence while he tried to decide on the best course of action.
“Mac,” Sheldon replied and looked down again, at his folded hands. An uncomfortable silence fell between them, until Sheldon shifted subtly and coughed. “I need to talk to you,” he said quietly. “It’s about the case.”
Mac nodded and leaned back while gesturing for the other man to continue.
Sheldon nodded and paused again, unsure how to begin, and Mac decided to act. He stood and grabbed the case file from the desk behind them, where he’d put it just a few short moments ago. Pulling out the results of the DNA analysis, he handed them over to Hawkes.
“We found your DNA on our crime scene,” he said quietly. “Maybe you can explain to me how it ended up there.”
Sheldon stared at the single sheet of paper without really seeing it. “It’s a long story,” he said quietly. “Long and complicated and with a few crazy coincidences that almost sound too good to be true.”
Mac shrugged slightly. “I’ve got time,” he pointed out. “Tell me.”
~*+*~
“I don’t even know what I’m doing here,” Sheldon muttered into the thick black scarf he’d wrapped around his neck. It was icy cold, and Sheldon felt as if he was slowly but surely turning into a popsicle.
Sid Hammerback laughed and took a sip of his coffee. He was wearing a grey hat that appeared to be as eccentric as Sid himself, and his glasses were balanced precariously on the tip of his nose.
“Sid,” Sheldon finally asked, his patience running out. “What are we doing here?”
It wasn’t that he didn’t like Sid, Hawkes told himself while wrapping his arms tightly around himself. He really did. Sid was quirky and had a good sense of humor, and he was a really good ME. Sheldon enjoyed working with him, and, he had to admit, when Sid had given him that look over the rim of his glasses and had informed him that he, Sheldon, need to learn how to relax and would have to come with Sid voluntarily, or Sid would knock him out and drag him here, to the rink in Central Park, to have some fun, Sheldon could have said no. He still needed to finish a report for Mac from the Crime Lab Unit, and there were two bodies from a car accident that waited for him. Besides, Sheldon really doubted that Sid would be able to knock him out like that, and he doubted even more that Sid could drag him anywhere.
But no, he had given in and had come out here voluntarily, even when he’d known that it would be cold. It was winter, after all. He’d protested, sure, but he hadn’t put up too much of a fight when Sid had insisted.
Sid took another sip of the coffee he’d bought. Sheldon didn’t know if he was buying time, trying to figure out what to say, or if the coffee really was that good – somehow he doubted that.
“A little birdie told me you like watching hockey,” Sid finally said.
For a split second, Sheldon forgot about the coldness that seeped through his clothes and stiffened up his joints and muscles.
“A little birdie?” he asked back, an amused twinkle appearing in his eyes. “Who?”
Sid only grinned. His eyes sparkled amusedly. “One of the techs,” he admitted with a wave of a gloved hand. “He caught you listening to the game while working nightshift. Your secret passion isn’t secret anymore, Sheldon.”
Sheldon chuckled. “That still doesn’t explain what we’re doing here,” he pointed out dryly. “And why Pino has to do the autopsies of the car crash victims all by himself now just so we could sneak away.”
Sid laughed and leaned his elbows back on the boards that surrounded the sheet of ice. “Marty is a big boy,” he said confidently. “He can handle it. You need to learn how to relax, Sheldon. You’re too tense.”
“I know how to relax,” Sheldon protested as he watched people skate in aimless circles.
“Really.” Skepticism filled Sid’s voice. “When was the last time you did something relaxing?”
Sheldon opened his mouth to answer, but closed it again when he realized that it had, indeed, been a while since he’d done anything else than work, or sleep, or watch TV.
“See?” Sid said gleefully.
Sheldon didn’t reply. His eyes were following one of the skaters on the ice. He was tall and lanky, and a gaggle of younger skaters, boys and girls alike, with smiling faces and gleaming eyes, their cheeks reddened by the cold and excitement, followed him around. The man was taller than his entourage, and he was gliding over the ice with the smooth effortlessness of somebody who spent a lot of time on skates.
Dressed in a long, dark grey coat, a woolen hat pulled deep into his face, he looked like any other yuppie in New York, until he stopped next to a kid who held a sharpie clutched tightly in a gloved hand, offering it to the man, who took it with a wide grin and scribbled something on the Rangers jersey the kid was wearing over his winter coat.
Sid followed his line of sight. “Ah,” he said, sounding, for some reason Sheldon didn’t even care to think too much about, deeply satisfied. He had sounded like that when he’d introduced Marty to Annabel, Sheldon thought distractedly.
“What?” he asked, despite his disinterest in what Sid was actually plotting, but Sid only grinned while Hawkes watched the guy skate by, stop, a spray of ice chips flying up as he did, and slowly approach them.
“Doctor Hawkes?” he asked, disbelief and surprise in his voice, and Sheldon straightened unconsciously.
These bright blue eyes.
He’d never forgotten them.
The man laughed now, the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkling, his teeth pearly white. “How’re you doing, Doc? You’re the last one I expected to see out here.”
Sid glanced from Hawkes to the skater and back. “You know each other?” he asked, curiosity etched onto his face.
“Yeah,” Sheldon said. “We met once or twice.”
“Best stitches of my life,” the other one added before offering his hand to Sid. “Don Flack.”
“I didn’t think you’d remember me,” Sheldon blurted out before glancing nervously at his hands. They were stiff with the coldness, and Sheldon started to regret that he hadn’t brought gloves and that he hadn’t taken Sid up on his offer of buying him a cup of hot coffee.
“I’m pretty good with remembering faces,” Flack grinned. “And if I forget one, I blame it on too many pucks to the head.” He tilted his head to the side curiously. “How have you been? Are you still stitching up hockey players?”
Sheldon grimaced. “Only when they’re dead,” he replied calmly. “I see you reached your goal of becoming a successful NHL player.” He nodded toward the kids still staring at Don in awe.
If possible, the smile on Don’s face widened even more as he interrupted their conversation briefly to write another autograph for a young fan.
“So…should I call you Doc Frankenstein?” Don asked as soon as the kid had skated off.
Sheldon chuckled softly. “Sheldon,” he replied. “I’d rather have you call me by my name.”
“Sheldon,” Don repeated with a soft smile, and Sheldon found himself captivated by those blue eyes and the look in them once again.
Don was the first to look away. “I better get going,” he said, a faint blush covering his cheeks. Maybe, Sheldon thought numbly, it was just the cold affecting Flack and had nothing to do with him, but part of him clung to the hope that he had managed to leave an impression on Don Flack.
“I’m supposed to do some publicity work here, after all,” Don added.
Sheldon nodded. “Yeah, of course,” he heard himself say. “I need to go back to work, too.” He licked his dry lips briefly before offering, “It was nice meeting you again.”
Don gave him another one of his wide grins. “Likewise,” he replied before pushing off and gliding back to the center of the ice, the kids, when they realized that their idol wasn’t talking to Sheldon anymore, soon following him.
Sid laughed and patted Sheldon’s shoulder, but he didn’t say anything. He just let Hawkes figure out what he’d realized the second he’d laid eyes on the two men:
Sheldon Hawkes had a crush on Don Flack.
And, he wasn’t quite sure, but he was almost convinced that Flack had one on Sheldon, as well.
~*+*~
Sheldon was silent for a long moment. “I met Don Flack when he was a rookie and playing for the Wolfpack, in Hartford,” he said. “We bumped into each other a few times, and went out for drinks, and, you know how it is.”
Mac frowned. “How is it?” he wanted to know. He didn’t want to assume anything, especially in a delicate situation like the one they were in right now.
“We…became friends. Good friends.” Sheldon sighed. “We meet up more or less regularly, hang out, have dinner and drinks. I crashed at his place yesterday, because I was too beat to go home. He must’ve swiped my shirt accidentally. When we got up and got dressed, it was still dark.”
Mac frowned as he lifted a hand. “Hold on,” he said slowly. “You’re talking about Don Flack, the only player that doesn’t have an alibi that checks out for the time of the shooting.”
Sheldon exhaled slowly. “Yeah,” he said, his voice quiet and subdued. “I am.”
TBC in chapter 4.
Author: Kathie
Fandom: CSI:NY
Pairing: Sheldon Hawkes/Don Flack
Rating: FRM
Content: AU, slash
chapter 1 | chapter 2
“Hey,” Sheldon Hawkes called out quietly as he stepped into Don’s apartment and dropped his keys onto the small table by the door. “Are you home? I got your call…”
“Yeah, I’m here,” Don’s voice came from the kitchen. Sheldon smiled softly as he entered the room and leaned against the counter.
“Bad day, huh?” he asked.
Don looked up from where he was sitting on the cold floor. He had an ice pack placed on his left knee and was holding a spoon and a bowl of ice cream in his hands. The phone was on the ground next to him.
“You have no idea,” he replied glumly and dropped his spoon into his bowl. “Shooting at the rink, I’m sure you heard about it at work.”
“I didn’t,” Sheldon said, shock coloring his voice. “I was out of the lab all morning long. Are you okay?” Instinct made him step up to Don and kneel down next to him, his fingers reaching for the ice pack on the other man’s knee.
“I’m fine. I wasn’t even on the ice.” Don sighed and dropped his head back, against the cupboard he was leaning against. “Hank got hit. Bullet went straight through his padding, grazed his arm, went off the crossbar of the goal and into the ice. He was damn lucky.”
“Sounds like it,” Sheldon muttered and sat back on his heels. “Why did you call me?”
Bright blue eyes turned toward him, and Don shrugged slightly before looking down, at the remnants of his ice cream, again. “Guess I didn’t want to be all alone right now,” he mumbled.
Sheldon tilted his head slightly to the side as he contemplated that for a moment. “Okay,” he finally said and shifted, to sit down next to Don. “I have about an hour before I have to go back to the lab. Want to talk about it?”
Don leaned against him with an almost inaudible sigh. “I don’t know, is there anything to tell?” he asked softly. “I talked to a lot of cops today.” He chuckled briefly. “I think I met your boss today.”
“Mac?” Sheldon asked and lifted an arm, to put it around Don’s tense shoulders.
“Yeah. Intense guy.” Don sighed and put the bowl down, next to the phone. “I just don’t understand this. Why would anyone try to kill Hank?”
Sheldon shrugged. “I don’t have an answer for that,” he said and pulled Don in a one-armed hug. “But I can tell you that Mac Taylor is the best at what he does. He will not stop until he finds whoever tried to kill Hank.”
“I hope so,” Don muttered. “For a while, it looked like he suspected half the team.” He grimaced and straightened again. Sheldon’s arm slipped off his shoulder as he did. “Everyone who wasn’t on the ice when the shot was fired.”
Sheldon tensed.
“Everyone not on the ice?” he repeated while turning, so he faced Don. “You mean you’re actually a suspect in an attempted murder case?”
“I didn’t try to kill Hank!” Don said sharply. His eyes were narrowed now, and Sheldon could see muscles shift under his shirt as he balled his hands to fists. He caught himself staring at those hands – hands, he knew, that could cause a lot of harm. He’d watched enough games in which Don was involved in some kind of fight to know how much damage Don could do with his hands while balancing on skates on the slippery surface of ice.
He didn’t want to know how much damage Don could do to him, here, in Don’s kitchen.
“Relax,” he said sharply. “I never said that, okay? I never implied that you had anything to do with this!”
Relief filled him when Don’s hands slowly relaxed, and Don raised his left arm to rub at his eyes tiredly. “Sorry,” he muttered. “This had us all on the edge, you know?”
“I understand that,” Sheldon said. He reached out and carefully put his hand on Don’s shoulder. “I definitely understand that.”
“We’ve known each other for so long now,” Don said, his voice muffled by his hand. “Do you really think I could do something like that?”
He sounded lost, Sheldon thought. Dealing with murder and attempted murder was something Sheldon did almost every day, to the point where he sometimes almost forgot that other people, people like Don, didn’t. In Don’s world, people checked each other into boards, fought and injured themselves while trying to keep a little frozen rubber disk out of their goal and getting it into the other team’s goal, but there weren’t dead bodies at every turn.
“You know what Danny always says?” he asked. “First thing on the job you learn – everyone can do anything to anyone. But no, I don’t think you have anything to do with this.”
“Great,” Don sighed and reached for the bowl again. The remaining ice cream had started to melt, and he poked at it with his spoon listlessly. “Now how do I tell that to your boss?”
“You don’t,” Sheldon pointed out. “Mac will follow the evidence, and if you didn’t have anything to do with this, he will clear you without you having to do anything. Trust the evidence.”
~*+*~
“I didn’t know you liked hockey,” Stella said with a glance at the screen.
Mac chuckled as he leaned back in his chair. “I don’t,” he admitted. “This is footage from the last game. There’s our vic.” He pointed his pen at the screen.
“I heard about that,” Stella said and crossed her arms across her chest. “How’s he doing?”
“He’s not in the morgue,” Mac pointed out before sighing. “He’s going to be fine, with some rest.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?” Stella said, her attention still focused on the game. “We don’t have cases like that nearly enough.”
“We don’t.” Mac turned around to face her. “But still, someone tried to kill a man today. We need find out why, and who, and stop him before he tries again.”
Stella nodded. “I’ll start on the evidence,” she said before turning on her heels and leaving Mac’s office, just as the goalie on the screen made another spectacular save.
Mac turned his attention back to the game. He caught a brief glimpse of the player with the name “Flack” written in big capital letters across his back as he skated hard over the ice, the puck on his stick, but his attention was quickly drawn back to the goaltender.
~*+*~
“This can’t be right,” Stella muttered quietly as she tapped the sheet in her hand with a fingernail. “That has to be wrong.”
“What is it?” Mac asked from behind her as he stepped up to her. Stella flinched slightly; she hadn’t heard Mac enter the lab. It surprised her again and again how he could move so silently without even trying to.
Mac gave her a curious glance, and Stella shrugged slightly. “This,” she explained and handed him the sheet. “I found DNA from Hawkes on this shirt.” She pointed to the grey t-shirt she’d spread out on the lighted table, but before she could add anything else, the computer behind her beeped softly and she turned toward it. “Prints we found…match Hawkes, too,” she read out with a frown. “I don’t understand, did our evidence get contaminated?”
“Hawkes?” Mac repeated. “He hasn’t even been at that scene.” His eyes flew over the test results again. “Lindsay and I were at the scene. I haven’t seen Hawkes at all today.”
“He was at the lab this morning, but then he got a call and left,” Stella said thoughtfully. “You think he has anything to do with this case?”
“Hawkes?” Mac shrugged slightly. “I don’t know, Stella. But maybe we need to have a little talk with the good doctor.”
“I don’t know, Mac,” Stella said, doubt and hesitation filling her voice. “There has to be another explanation for this.”
“Yes,” Mac agreed, a deep line appearing on his forehead. “There is. If he didn’t tamper with the evidence, it means that Hawkes was at our scene. He’s somehow involved in this.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” Stella tried to point out. “Maybe there is another explanation for the whole thing. I mean, this is Sheldon Hawkes we’re talking about.”
Mac sighed softly. “Let’s talk to him and see what he has to say about this,” he finally decided. He just hoped that there was something that he’d missed, even if he couldn’t see it right now.
~*+*~
When he returned to his office, later that day, Mac had developed a headache that had grown stronger the longer the day had gone on. He wanted to believe that his CSI wasn’t involved into this case, but there had been almost no trace at all from the shooter, indicating someone who knew what they were doing.
By the time of the shooting, Hawkes had been in the lab, he reminded himself firmly. Stella had talked to him. No matter what the results of this investigation were, he knew for a fact that Hawkes wasn’t the shooter.
However, this wasn’t the first time the other man had kept information from him.
Mac sighed and rubbed his hand over his face before dropping the case file onto his desk and taking off his coat. It took him a moment to realize that he wasn’t alone in his office. On the couch sat Sheldon Hawkes, his elbows on his knees and his head bowed low. He was practically vibrating with tension, Mac thought as he sat down next to him and patiently waited until Sheldon was sitting up, a worried expression on his face.
“Sheldon,” Mac said and stopped, not sure what to say.
A part of him wanted to rip into the other man and demand an explanation for the presence of his fingerprints and DNA at Mac’s scene. The other part told him to be patient and wait for Sheldon to tell his side of the story at his own pace, and without rushing him.
Both sides demanded his attention, and Mac sat in silence while he tried to decide on the best course of action.
“Mac,” Sheldon replied and looked down again, at his folded hands. An uncomfortable silence fell between them, until Sheldon shifted subtly and coughed. “I need to talk to you,” he said quietly. “It’s about the case.”
Mac nodded and leaned back while gesturing for the other man to continue.
Sheldon nodded and paused again, unsure how to begin, and Mac decided to act. He stood and grabbed the case file from the desk behind them, where he’d put it just a few short moments ago. Pulling out the results of the DNA analysis, he handed them over to Hawkes.
“We found your DNA on our crime scene,” he said quietly. “Maybe you can explain to me how it ended up there.”
Sheldon stared at the single sheet of paper without really seeing it. “It’s a long story,” he said quietly. “Long and complicated and with a few crazy coincidences that almost sound too good to be true.”
Mac shrugged slightly. “I’ve got time,” he pointed out. “Tell me.”
~*+*~
“I don’t even know what I’m doing here,” Sheldon muttered into the thick black scarf he’d wrapped around his neck. It was icy cold, and Sheldon felt as if he was slowly but surely turning into a popsicle.
Sid Hammerback laughed and took a sip of his coffee. He was wearing a grey hat that appeared to be as eccentric as Sid himself, and his glasses were balanced precariously on the tip of his nose.
“Sid,” Sheldon finally asked, his patience running out. “What are we doing here?”
It wasn’t that he didn’t like Sid, Hawkes told himself while wrapping his arms tightly around himself. He really did. Sid was quirky and had a good sense of humor, and he was a really good ME. Sheldon enjoyed working with him, and, he had to admit, when Sid had given him that look over the rim of his glasses and had informed him that he, Sheldon, need to learn how to relax and would have to come with Sid voluntarily, or Sid would knock him out and drag him here, to the rink in Central Park, to have some fun, Sheldon could have said no. He still needed to finish a report for Mac from the Crime Lab Unit, and there were two bodies from a car accident that waited for him. Besides, Sheldon really doubted that Sid would be able to knock him out like that, and he doubted even more that Sid could drag him anywhere.
But no, he had given in and had come out here voluntarily, even when he’d known that it would be cold. It was winter, after all. He’d protested, sure, but he hadn’t put up too much of a fight when Sid had insisted.
Sid took another sip of the coffee he’d bought. Sheldon didn’t know if he was buying time, trying to figure out what to say, or if the coffee really was that good – somehow he doubted that.
“A little birdie told me you like watching hockey,” Sid finally said.
For a split second, Sheldon forgot about the coldness that seeped through his clothes and stiffened up his joints and muscles.
“A little birdie?” he asked back, an amused twinkle appearing in his eyes. “Who?”
Sid only grinned. His eyes sparkled amusedly. “One of the techs,” he admitted with a wave of a gloved hand. “He caught you listening to the game while working nightshift. Your secret passion isn’t secret anymore, Sheldon.”
Sheldon chuckled. “That still doesn’t explain what we’re doing here,” he pointed out dryly. “And why Pino has to do the autopsies of the car crash victims all by himself now just so we could sneak away.”
Sid laughed and leaned his elbows back on the boards that surrounded the sheet of ice. “Marty is a big boy,” he said confidently. “He can handle it. You need to learn how to relax, Sheldon. You’re too tense.”
“I know how to relax,” Sheldon protested as he watched people skate in aimless circles.
“Really.” Skepticism filled Sid’s voice. “When was the last time you did something relaxing?”
Sheldon opened his mouth to answer, but closed it again when he realized that it had, indeed, been a while since he’d done anything else than work, or sleep, or watch TV.
“See?” Sid said gleefully.
Sheldon didn’t reply. His eyes were following one of the skaters on the ice. He was tall and lanky, and a gaggle of younger skaters, boys and girls alike, with smiling faces and gleaming eyes, their cheeks reddened by the cold and excitement, followed him around. The man was taller than his entourage, and he was gliding over the ice with the smooth effortlessness of somebody who spent a lot of time on skates.
Dressed in a long, dark grey coat, a woolen hat pulled deep into his face, he looked like any other yuppie in New York, until he stopped next to a kid who held a sharpie clutched tightly in a gloved hand, offering it to the man, who took it with a wide grin and scribbled something on the Rangers jersey the kid was wearing over his winter coat.
Sid followed his line of sight. “Ah,” he said, sounding, for some reason Sheldon didn’t even care to think too much about, deeply satisfied. He had sounded like that when he’d introduced Marty to Annabel, Sheldon thought distractedly.
“What?” he asked, despite his disinterest in what Sid was actually plotting, but Sid only grinned while Hawkes watched the guy skate by, stop, a spray of ice chips flying up as he did, and slowly approach them.
“Doctor Hawkes?” he asked, disbelief and surprise in his voice, and Sheldon straightened unconsciously.
These bright blue eyes.
He’d never forgotten them.
The man laughed now, the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkling, his teeth pearly white. “How’re you doing, Doc? You’re the last one I expected to see out here.”
Sid glanced from Hawkes to the skater and back. “You know each other?” he asked, curiosity etched onto his face.
“Yeah,” Sheldon said. “We met once or twice.”
“Best stitches of my life,” the other one added before offering his hand to Sid. “Don Flack.”
“I didn’t think you’d remember me,” Sheldon blurted out before glancing nervously at his hands. They were stiff with the coldness, and Sheldon started to regret that he hadn’t brought gloves and that he hadn’t taken Sid up on his offer of buying him a cup of hot coffee.
“I’m pretty good with remembering faces,” Flack grinned. “And if I forget one, I blame it on too many pucks to the head.” He tilted his head to the side curiously. “How have you been? Are you still stitching up hockey players?”
Sheldon grimaced. “Only when they’re dead,” he replied calmly. “I see you reached your goal of becoming a successful NHL player.” He nodded toward the kids still staring at Don in awe.
If possible, the smile on Don’s face widened even more as he interrupted their conversation briefly to write another autograph for a young fan.
“So…should I call you Doc Frankenstein?” Don asked as soon as the kid had skated off.
Sheldon chuckled softly. “Sheldon,” he replied. “I’d rather have you call me by my name.”
“Sheldon,” Don repeated with a soft smile, and Sheldon found himself captivated by those blue eyes and the look in them once again.
Don was the first to look away. “I better get going,” he said, a faint blush covering his cheeks. Maybe, Sheldon thought numbly, it was just the cold affecting Flack and had nothing to do with him, but part of him clung to the hope that he had managed to leave an impression on Don Flack.
“I’m supposed to do some publicity work here, after all,” Don added.
Sheldon nodded. “Yeah, of course,” he heard himself say. “I need to go back to work, too.” He licked his dry lips briefly before offering, “It was nice meeting you again.”
Don gave him another one of his wide grins. “Likewise,” he replied before pushing off and gliding back to the center of the ice, the kids, when they realized that their idol wasn’t talking to Sheldon anymore, soon following him.
Sid laughed and patted Sheldon’s shoulder, but he didn’t say anything. He just let Hawkes figure out what he’d realized the second he’d laid eyes on the two men:
Sheldon Hawkes had a crush on Don Flack.
And, he wasn’t quite sure, but he was almost convinced that Flack had one on Sheldon, as well.
~*+*~
Sheldon was silent for a long moment. “I met Don Flack when he was a rookie and playing for the Wolfpack, in Hartford,” he said. “We bumped into each other a few times, and went out for drinks, and, you know how it is.”
Mac frowned. “How is it?” he wanted to know. He didn’t want to assume anything, especially in a delicate situation like the one they were in right now.
“We…became friends. Good friends.” Sheldon sighed. “We meet up more or less regularly, hang out, have dinner and drinks. I crashed at his place yesterday, because I was too beat to go home. He must’ve swiped my shirt accidentally. When we got up and got dressed, it was still dark.”
Mac frowned as he lifted a hand. “Hold on,” he said slowly. “You’re talking about Don Flack, the only player that doesn’t have an alibi that checks out for the time of the shooting.”
Sheldon exhaled slowly. “Yeah,” he said, his voice quiet and subdued. “I am.”
TBC in chapter 4.