AfterNet 01 - Good Cop Dead Cop

department.
    He quickly replayed her rant and was pleased to see it contained little new and that the entire conversation had been one sided. That’s just one of the things I like about her, he thought. She knows I’m interested in her life but doesn’t require me to keep telling her “uh huh” and “is that so.”
    She parked the car in the garage and said, “OK, that’s enough for me tonight. I’ll do my report in the morning.”
    “If you want, I’ll write yours and you can just sign it,” he offered.
    “Oh, would you? Maybe after that we can plant some evidence.” She was a stickler for following the book.
    “Hey, it’s not like we shot anyone. You didn’t see anything I didn’t see.”
    “Thank you but no, I’ll write it myself.”
    She pulled the portable terminal out of the charger and slipped it into its armband and replaced her ear buds. She opened her door and for once was a little too quick for Munroe, who was slammed back into the car by the door. Yamaguchi instantly knew what she had done and quickly opened the door. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said.
    “Wow, when you get pissed off … ” he said, after getting out of the car. She laughed and said, “I said I’m sorry.”
    They walked inside the department and entered the secure area. She signed herself out and set her radio into the charging rack. She said goodnight to the front desk officer and walked to the door and waited for him.
    “Goodnight, Alex.”
    “Goodnight, Linda. Hey, I forgot to ask, did you find something for tomorrow night?”
    “I’ll say I did, and it’s a killer, and no, I’m telling you nothing about it, you’ll just have to wait.” She paused with her hand on the door handle and said, “I still feel bad about you having to hang around the department all night.”
    “Oh, it’s not so bad. I have the whole Internet to wander around and I can get out if I want to.”
    “You know, the offer still stands.”
    “Thanks, maybe I’ll take you up on it someday.”
    “I am serious. Think about it,” Yamaguchi tried to look where she imagined Munroe to be and was a few inches high. She eventually put on a lopsided grin, shrugged her shoulders, waved bye and left.
    The field disappeared as she walked away. Munroe observed how the swing of her hips translated to her thick, black ponytail and to the various items of cop equipment she wore on her belt. He felt like a lecherous old man and then remembered that’s what he was. Sixty-two when he died, crapping through a tube, two ex-wives who hated him and thank God no kids. What a shitty way to die, he thought. And Linda thinks of me as a cute puppy, or maybe a gay friend. That’s probably what kept him from taking up her offer of letting him stay in her apartment. He was a harmless, sexless creature to her, and although he could still remember what the tightening of his groin felt like, he knew he was a harmless, sexless creature.
    Heavy sigh , he said to himself and moved toward CID.
    The Criminal Investigations Division was a large open room with a sea of desks where the detectives worked. Although Yamaguchi and Munroe weren’t detectives, they were assigned a desk in the room. At this time of night, the whole floor was empty except for a handful of cops in the adjacent break room. They were watching TV in the corner of the room. Barney Miller , he noted. He’d always liked Barney Miller . He wished they’d turn on the captions.
    Munroe settled in before the terminal at his desk. Unusually his chair was there, which made it easier for him. He saw that Yamaguchi had put his picture back on his desk and so once again he confronted his physical self. It was the picture taken when he hit the 15-year mark with the Seattle PD. He’d been a homicide detective for five years then and had cleared a high-profile murder investigation that year, so his career was flying high. He was accepting a plaque from the chief, but Linda had blown it up and cropped it so that only he was in the picture. There he was, still feeling young at 50, with thick, dark hair only hinting of gray, big boned and clumsy looking even in this pose. He was smiling and he thought he looked good. Hard to reconcile with the last memory he had of his face. It was in the hospice and it was the last time he was still able to wash his own hair and comb it in the mirror afterward. He had lost fifty pounds, his face was pale and he’d given up shaving. He’d recognized a dead man’s