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Chapter Text

Raylan was appointed the Eastern District of Kentucky’s representative at the 12th Annual National Law Enforcement Joint Conference in Nashville, Tennessee as a punishment. When he inquired as to what he was being punished for, Art informed him that he had, over the years, committed any number of crimes against common sense. Raylan countered that “over the years” was an unforgivably loose timeline for them to be operating under as officers of the law, and Art further informed him that there was no statute of limitations of crimes against common sense, and that he should put his shabby second suit jacket in his shabby garment bag, if he even owned one, and get it and himself in the damn car.

This was how Raylan lost all of Saturday and Sunday as well as Friday afternoon to the ravages of mandatory symposia. Also, Rachel, who had secretly wanted to go to the conference due to having this disease where she thought it was important to know more people than you already did, was mad at him.

Still, punishment conferences aren’t without their perks, Raylan reflects, stretching out under the stiff white sheets native to the mid-tier Holiday Inn Express-type knockoffs that are, in turn, the unnatural habitat of mid-tier loser government functionaries like himself. Sometimes, the perks have big blue eyes and cheekbones that could slice your fingertip open, even if they spend the night de-crisping the sheets with what Raylan can only assume is nightmare sweat. Will sleeps lying flat on his back like a corpse, which Raylan had forgotten since the last time he leaned up against the bar of whatever mid-verging-on-high-tier hotel law enforcement conferences are actually held in, turned the drawl up to eleven, and said “hey.”

The room phone rings, and Will goes from flat to upright almost faster than Raylan can track, gasping like someone was trying to drown him. Raylan frowns at him as he fumbles for the phone, mutters “Will,” into the receiver, then, “What? Okay. Okay. Say it again? Okay. Sure. Jack—” and then, very sarcastically, “Like the tethered goat being led up the mountain. Yes, same to you. Bye.”

“Good morning,” Raylan says, as Will angrily but gently returns the receiver to its cradle. Raylan rolls over onto his back, propping his head on his hands in a comfortable fashion that also coincidentally does very good things for his musculature. “How are you feeling on this fine Monday?”

“Have you ever left a piece of laundry on the line through a change of season?” Will asks, presumably rhetorically, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. “You wait and wait for the calendar to come back around, and the summer after, the trees might look the same, but try as you might you'll never recognize that shirt.”

From anyone else, Raylan would take this as a declaration of a hangover of truly objectionable proportions, but Will is just sort of like that. “My aunt Helen would have whupped my ass had I neglected one of her frocks that way,” he says, dropping his arms to his sides and letting his head thump back onto the pillow, hopes of being admired in vain. “Not feeling round three?”

“That was work,” Will says, stumbling out of bed and into the bathroom quick enough that Raylan barely has a chance to ogle him. “There’s been a murder.”

“Always is,” Raylan calls over the sound of the shower starting up. “If D.C.’s calling you, I’m assuming it was freaky.”

“Always is,” Will calls back. “Forty-ish-year-old Caucasian male, body mounted on a stag’s head in some old hunting lodge, kidneys, liver missing. The usual song and dance.” He sounds bitter about it.

“Just like your guy from the presentation, what was it, the St. Louis Cardinal?” Raylan asks. He had attended all of Will’s presentation, and even listened to the interesting parts. Will wasn’t the best about eye contact and audience participation, and Raylan had never gotten much from Behavioral Science, given that in his experience most people just behave like idiots and there isn’t any accounting for it, but the photos had been grisly.

“The Minnesota Shrike.” The shower curtain rattles, and Raylan wonders if the neighbors can hear everything they’re saying. Back when he was living in the motel, Raylan had recovered no fewer than two fugitives based on information he overheard through his own wall. “But we caught him, so it’s probably his copycat, or his copycat’s copycat, or God knows what other hellish level of abstraction.”

“Is it the level of abstraction where you need me to give you a ride to the airport?”

“Actually,” Will says, and then Raylan’s phone rings.

“Hold up a second,” Raylan says, and then, “Hey, Art. Are you calling to bestow an additional punishment on me at”—he checks the clock—“six on a Monday morning?”

“A punishment? No, Raylan, I’m calling with an opportunity to serve the good people of the Eastern District of Kentucky.”

“A mandatory opportunity?”

“Is there another kind I’m not aware of?”

“A missed one,” Raylan says, definitely not thinking of Will in the shower while on the phone with Art.

“That’s the spirit,” Art tells him. “Anyway, your own little ancestral hotbed of crime and delinquency’s had another thing go all strange and jurisdiction-y, and long story short they’re bringing in a consultant from the FBI. Guy by the name of Will Graham, you heard of him?”

Will drops what sounds like all of the hygiene products in existence onto the floor of the shower. “You know, I think I went to his talk this weekend,” Raylan tells Art. “Something about sociopathic behavior.”

“Don’t you start any shit with him about psychology,” Art warns. “The way the guys at the FBI talk about him, he’s one of those delicate geniuses. Fragile-like. If he’s broken by the time he gets to Kentucky, you gotta pay for a replacement.”

“I’m driving him to the scene?” Raylan asks. As far as extended punishments go, it’s not the worst—he doubts Will’s too picky about the radio.

“Given that the two of you are at the same conference, the federal government, in a rare example of inter-agency cooperation, has found a way to save the taxpayers the cost of his airfare.”

“Lexington first, or—”

“Straight to Harlan, sounds like his boss resents his happiness almost as much as I resent yours. Got a pen?”

“Sure,” Raylan says, rummaging for one in the drawer with the Gideon Bible, and Art gives him Will’s contact information. They hang up, and Will comes out of the bathroom a minute later, looking damper but significantly less distressed and crazy.

“Strange thing happened,” Raylan tells him. “My boss gave me your phone number.”

“I rarely carry my phone,” Will says, sounding annoyed for no good reason that Raylan can discern.

“Well, that’s because you like to upset me by reinforcing hillbilly stereotypes,” Raylan tells him, and Will sighs.

“Given that we’re all but cogs in the great machine of bureaucracy, I suppose I should be grateful for the efficiency,” he says, toweling his hair. “Harlan near you?”

“Oh, nearer’n you might think,” Raylan says. “Can you be ready to leave in ten?”

***

It’s four and a half hours from Nashville to Harlan, four at fuck-you-I’m-the-law speeds, four-forty-five given that Will keeps needing to piss. Other than that, he’s not the worst company Raylan’s ever had on a road trip, not that that’s saying much. Raylan had picked him out a handful years back, in the immediate aftermath of Winona, mostly on the basis that he didn’t seem the type to do much talking to anyone, and a little bit because Raylan could pull out just a hint of an accent if he leaned hard enough into his own and talked about shit like fishing. Raylan doesn’t do conferences much, but it’s worked out intermittently fine since then, which is some kind of remarkable all by itself.

“So,” Raylan says, most of the way into the drive. “Got any pets?”

“I have seven dogs,” Will says, resting his forehead against the window of the town car to watch the miles of green nothing blur by. “The newest one’s name is Winston.”

“Huh,” says Raylan, and that’s about it for conversation.

Almost before they come to a full and complete stop, Will is out the door, beelining towards some guy Raylan doesn’t recognize. He’s got a face like a skull and looks like he was aiming to dress down, but missed. There’s a collared shirt under the sweater under his jacket, and the overall effect is like when those old pre-war houses get done up in eggshell and taupe by a Gary-type realtor for the sake of palatability. The two of them have a short conversation that looks sharp on Will’s end and tranquil on the other guy’s, and it ends with the guy placing a paternalistic hand on Will’s shoulder and Will leading him back to the car like a dog on a leash.

“Raylan,” Will says, as Raylan swings the driver’s side door shut and settles his hat into place. “I’d like you to meet Dr. Hannibal Lecter. My psychiatrist.”

“A pleasure to meet you,” says Dr. Hannibal Lecter, letting go of Will to shake Raylan’s hand. His hands are more working-man than Raylan would have guessed from the soft job and shiny shoes, but the man is without a doubt the manicure type.

“Your psychiatrist,” Raylan says, sliding Will an amused glance. The Marshals have tried that particular racket on him enough times that he has the applicable escape routes posted on the backs of his eyelids. “Couldn’t get out of it?”

“More like I couldn’t get it out of me,” Will says, bitter again.

“I prefer to think of my therapy as not something to get out of, but something to be taken in,” Dr. Lecter says. His voice isn’t from anywhere Raylan’s ever been—it sounds like he’s holding something carefully in his mouth and talking around it. “However, our relationship has never been an official one.”

Raylan has a brief moment where he thinks damn, I hope Will isn’t fucking his psychiatrist, given that there’s no way Dr. Hannibal Lecter doesn’t walk at least a little bit crooked, before he remembers that it’s none of his business and he does not care. “Nothing wrong with taking things a little ways off the books,” he says. “Some things, at least. Any word on when they’re planning to open up the scene?”

“Hannibal and the rest of the team flew into Blountville, so they beat us by a couple of hours,” Will says, pushing his glasses up his nose in a way that makes Raylan want to shove him into a locker, just to get him to cut that shit out. “Should be finished up soon.”

“Unfortunately, we are having some difficulty convincing the sheriff to give our Will the room he needs to work,” Dr. Lecter says. His hand has migrated casually to the center of Will’s back. Raylan cannot imagine letting a man touch him like that in public. “Napier, I believe is the name is—I have his card, if you would be so kind as to give him a call and speed the process along?”

“Oh, no need, Sheriff Napier and I are old pals,” Raylan says cheerfully, punching in *67. Tillman is smart enough to ignore Raylan’s calls, but not smart enough to screen unknown numbers. “Hey there, Sheriff, it’s Raylan Givens,” he says when the man picks up, quirking a grin at the resulting string of profanities. “I am just so pleased to chat with you as well. Listen, I hear you’re giving my FBI consultant trouble in terms of the access to the crime scene he needs to do his job.” The lightest possible emphasis on my. Just for fun, mostly.

“I get one kid who’s too bright-eyed and industrious not to call the tipline just because he’s seen something that looks a little bit like something he saw on the internet news, and suddenly my woods are swarming with all sorts,” Tillman bitches. “I am sick and tired of you federals coming in here and trying to push me—”

“Who is ‘you federals’?” Raylan interrupts, amused. “We went to the same goddamn high school, Tillman, I got my name on a banner in the gym somewhere to prove it.” It’s a low blow—Tillman never was much of an athlete himself. “Now, from what I hear, someone’s taken a dead body and mounted it up like a teenager’s first run at taxidermy. Why would it be in the interests of your department to have the slightest thing to do with that?”

There’s a short silence on the other end of the line. Tillman never was much in it for the purposes of solving crime. “Let the FBI’s guy do his magic trick and call you an invaluable partner in his report, Tillman, it’s that simple,” Raylan concludes.

“Fine,” Tillman concedes, shifting around a bit. From the sound of it, he didn’t so much as bother getting out of bed for the freaky murder. “When you’re back here in a couple of days annoying the piss out of the citizenry, do not call me,” he says, and hangs up.

Raylan flips his own phone shut with a flourish and cups his hands around his mouth to holler, “Okay, boys, fun’s over. Boss says it’s time to go.” The cops who’ve been loitering around the murder cabin trying to peer through the windows shuffle out, and Raylan slaps a couple of the ones he knows to be real assholes on the shoulder with a “go bother some drunk teenagers for me.”

Once the local boys have pulled out, all that’s left is the big shiny van and some caution tape hanging limply from the trees. Raylan gestures towards the cabin with a flourish. Will does not look adequately impressed, but he does amble off in that direction, and a couple of minutes later the FBI team (including one hot chick) wanders out, stripping off gloves and talking animatedly amongst themselves.

Will’s magic trick turns out to take a while. “Sometimes he has to get in the mood. It’s fugacious, per him,” hot chick Beverley explains, which Raylan knows to be true in more ways than one. As a result, he suffers fifteen minutes of polite conversation, during which he has to turn down Dr. Lecter’s request for his business card on account of not having one, before he hears a truck coming down the drive and goes to stand at the curve in the road just before all the hubbub becomes visible, thumbs hooked into his belt by his gun and his badge, real friendly-like.

Somehow, he’s not surprised to see Boyd Crowder pull up.

Boyd turns the truck off and steps out, looking for all the world delighted to see him. “Howdy, Boyd,” Raylan drawls.

“Raylan Givens,” Boyd says, relishing it in that way of his. “Now, what ill-founded and thus unconstitutional form of police harassment lies in wait for me this morning?”

“What are you doing here, Boyd.”

“I am using a license issued to me by the state of Kentucky to drive a vehicle registered in my name on roads that are a part of private land to which I hold the deed,” Boyd says, not answering the question. “So I might very well ask what you are doing here.”

“I know all the old Crowder holdings, and this ain’t one of ‘em,” Raylan shoots back. It’s annoying as all get-out when Boyd plays him for a big-city idiot. “Furthermore, it’s an active crime, so I ask you again: what are you doing here?”

“Crime scene,” Boyd says, faux-breathy, but maybe a little nervous. “Well, in that case, I was merely checking to see whether an old friend had stopped by. And look, one had.”

“Why don’t you come sit with the nice gentlemen from the FBI until we see whether there’s anything for us to chat about as old friends?” Raylan suggests, not suggesting.

“The FBI,” Boyd says. “Don’t mind if I do. I bet you they have stories.” And then the strangest thing happens—Boyd follows Raylan down the drive, docile as a kitten, and sits himself down on the hood of the town car, watching the cabin like you would a predator. Raylan leans up beside him, and together, they wait to see what’s inside.

Chapter Text

Will blinks, and the present swings back into focus. A tick of the second hand, and there’s the late-morning sun through the windows. The quiet chatter of his team outside. The smell of blood, and below that, the beginning stages of decomp. For a moment, then and now are superimposed, but Will shakes himself out of the former and glances around. It doesn’t look like he touched anything this time, which is what’s known as a small mercy. He takes a last moment with the relative silence of the dead man, then staggers outside to retrieve people.

Raylan is sitting on the hood of his town car, letting himself brush elbows with a stranger: Caucasian male, early forties, all spikes and hollows. Raylan is not as stealth as he thinks he is.

Bev catches Will’s eye without saying words to him, which is half-nice, although the specter of interaction is making his head ache. “You guys can come in now,” he tells her.

“Ripper?” Zeller asks, and Will shakes his head. “Copycat?” Will shakes his head again, then half-shrugs. It’s all a sort-of situation.

“Easier if I show you on him,” he mutters, gesturing for them to follow. Raylan lays hands on the spiky man and maneuvers him to the driver’s side, handcuffing him to the steering wheel through the window like it’s a move they’ve practiced. Given the half-assed nature of the guy’s objections, maybe they have. Zeller gets stuck on babysitting duty, and the rest of them file into the cabin, which is ramshackle in a normal, non-abandoned way, minus the body.

The body is displayed in the middle of the single room without any of the precision or skill that the Shrike or his copycat demonstrated. His feet, pointing towards the door, are dirty. The killer haphazardly hacked out chunks out of his sides just to get him mounted on a piddly rack of antlers, which Will suspects were taken straight off the least-dusty spot on the wall. The places where the victim’s organs were removed aren’t gaping artistically, they’re just gaping.

Hannibal clocks the important details of the scene quickly, almost dismissively. His face is neutral as he turns to Will. There are moments sometimes where Will catches on those dark eyes, like he’s gone over a pothole. But Hannibal’s just focusing on his patient: he’s noticed that Will has started to sweat, probably. Will tunes back in on that thread, and suddenly everything that’s supposed to be there is there: warmth, reservation, professional-bordering-unprofessional concern.

From the doorway, Raylan lets out a whistle. “Ritual sacrifice?” he asks, looking faintly ill.

“No,” Will says. Trying for humor: “Not unless you mean to the oldest god.”

“Called it,” says Price, which doesn’t count for much. He always bets on it being a money thing, except whenever it’s a sex thing. Those he always gets right. Those, to be fair, are pretty obvious. “He get off on it, too?” Maybe not entirely obvious.

Will shakes his head, trying to complete the circuit between feelings and words. “There’s not joy here, there’s just not distaste. There’s a classic redirected insecurity at play. Also a woman. She’s either smarter than him, or she makes more money than him. Or both.” Will tilts his head. Someone in the room disapproves. Not because the scene is ugly: because it’s lazy. “He wanted to be one thing, but he’s something less. Anyone who’s even less than that, they’re nothing. It doesn’t excite or bother him, doing what he does.”

“He’s done it before?” Bev clarifies.

“Yes,” Will says decisively. “The display is atypical, the rest is a Tuesday. But he’s not interested in honing his craft—his method is good enough for government work. This is— Bev, when you read about a new cafe in the paper, and you like to drive by on the way to work. Maybe you stop in, maybe you don’t: it doesn’t matter. You drive by. This is like that. He’s one of Lounds’ crowd, obviously.” Maybe they’ll get a subpoena for her subscription database this time. Probably not: her lawyer’s highly remunerated. “There’s not that much to it. I might be able to help more if you have more, but…” Will trails off, and Hannibal’s hand finds the center of his back. He never tries that shit outside of scenes; at least, not that Will remembers. As is, he lets it tether him, instead of paying attention to the fact that no one else looks like they know what he's talking about.

Price clears his throat: he’s the kind of listener who’s always waiting for his turn. “No ID on the body yet. Local guy who found him—our Tattle Crime buff—didn’t recognize him straight off, but he knew enough to keep everyone else out of the room until we got here. Freddie Lounds had to do us a favor sometime, so I figure this was it.”

“All downhill from here with her,” Bev mutters.

“Anyway, nothing on the body, but we’ve sent photos off—bet you a thousand dollars when we look at his financials, he was deep in the hole with somebody he shouldn’t’ve been. Especially with those tattoos. Around here, that’s what. Oxy guys? Meth guys? Do they still have Pinkertons around here?”

Raylan edges around the room while Price talks, looking green. Doesn’t matter how big you think your dick is, if you’re not used to Will’s kind of thing, you’re not used to it. When he’s about level with the victim’s neck tattoo, he lets out a breath, closes his eyes, opens them, and closes them again.

“God damn it,” he says.

“You know him?” Bev asks, inappropriately delighted. She loves a good plot twist.

Raylan reaches out in an abortive gesture, like he maybe wants to touch the guy’s face. “God damn it,” he repeats, then gathers a huge breath, yells “Boyd!” and storms out of the cabin.

Bev goes after Raylan, and the rest of the team follows her. Will brings up the rear—he’s been achy all day, but the dizziness is rearing its head again. The spiky man is deep in conversation with Zeller, eyes wide and body language like a door-to-door salesman’s. He turns towards Raylan, open and easy, and before the rest of the group can reach them Raylan has presumably-Boyd pinned up against the town car in a way liable to dislocate his elbow.

“What is it this time, Boyd?” Raylan’s shouting. “What’s so important you couldn’t pick on someone your own size?”

Bev gets a hand on Raylan’s shoulder. She’s tough and smart, and Raylan’s more lithe than built, but she’s just not big enough to move a strong man who doesn’t want to be moved. Raylan shrugs her off and leans further into Boyd, who doesn’t look too broken up about the whole police brutality thing that’s happening to him. He’s somehow simultaneously staring off into the distance in a martyred way and insisting he has no idea what Raylan’s talking about.

“I know you already tried racism, and Jesus, and meth, and explosions, so what is it this time, huh?” Raylan is yelling, moderately incoherently. Boyd stammers like people do in cartoons: for effect. “Artifact smuggling? Black market organs? You tell some knife-wielding junkie that one of Grandma Lila’s crazy beasts was gonna get him if he didn’t wring something valuable outta Dewey Crowe?”

“Hey!” Boyd yells, back to articulate in the crack of a whip. “That is below the belt, Raylan, bringin’ Grandma Lila’s good name into this.”

Raylan pulls an expression that Will hasn’t seen on a peer since he was a teenager: full-body sarcastic eye roll. These are extraordinarily loud men, even in their silences. “Like you don’t tread all over that poor woman’s good name every time you spread your arms wide and—”

Kentucky ain’t Louisiana, but it ain’t the Arctic either. Will is hot, tired, disoriented, and the air itself is trying to worm its way into him, pressing up against his eardrums and swamping his lungs. Abruptly, something must give. “Shut up!” he roars, just to get the yelling to stop, and then men both do, looking identically surprised.

“Thank you, Agent,” Boyd pronounces, like this is somehow a favor to him. “Now, before I am hauled off to whatever penitentiary my good friend Raylan unilaterally—and, might I add, temporarily—decides I am best fit to reside in, might I ask: was it Dewey Crowe inside that cabin?”

Price decides he wants to be involved in the conversation. “We haven’t gotten an ID back from the—“

“Yeah, it was Dewey,” Raylan says, smashing past the known principles of interrogation. “And if you don’t have an answer for me in about three seconds as to why he’s dead a cabin you say is yours, instead of in Trumbull where he’s supposed to be—“

“I don’t know,” Boyd claims. Raylan slams him against the car again. “Jesus, Raylan, I don’t know!”

“Then why are you–”

“Because I heard he jumped Trumbull and I came to look for him,” Boyd says, and Raylan brings his body language down about five levels towards calm, just because this man said a sentence to him that sounded true.

“Why here?” Raylan asks. There aren’t really any detectives around, Will realizes—the CSI team is there, obviously, and the local uniforms manning the perimeter, and Hannibal and himself, who should add to rather than detract from the need for additional supervision of the scene. Then there’s Raylan, even less any kind of detective than Will himself is, asking questions and manhandling bystanders to his heart’s content. It’s a strange way to process the strange scene of a strange murder, and Raylan, who’s federal and not a jacked-up state trooper acting like his first murder scene is rush week for a fraternity, should be pinging the radar of any serious officer of the law who shows up behind him.

At least Raylan’s got an alibi, Will thinks, then laughs inappropriately.

“It’s the old Packer place,” Boyd is saying plaintively. “Now, if Dewey jumped Trumbull, is it not safe to assume he has someone—in fact multiple someones—on his tail?”

“I think we both would have presumed that one of those someones would be me. Get to the point, Boyd.”

Boyd shakes his head. “Unlike you, Raylan, I am in the privileged position of knowing that neither of those someones was me. A Crowe doesn’t have much in the way of a room of his own around these parts right now, so Dewey, being a hometown boy all his life, likely found someone else’s property—somewhere nearby, secret, and familiar—on which to hide. Equally likely, he and I are, or rather were, the only ones alive who knew about this place, and potentially as many as several other places like it.” Will has a stray thought that there may be a detective here after all.

“Shorter sentences, Boyd,” Raylan says. “I liked Dewey and I’m not trying to waste his time from beyond the grave.”

“That’s bold-faced,” Boyd says sharply, then sighs. “I was just checking, Raylan,” he says, dropping into an intonation that is simple and easy. “I thought he might be here so I came to look for him. This is one of those times that the world is not complicated.”

“Those times are ever fewer and farther between, with you,” Raylan says meanly, and Bev, the only actual FBI agent present, clears her throat.

“Does anyone here believe on any level that this ends without Mr. Crowder here joining us back in Lexington?” she asks, and no one volunteers an objection.

***

Boyd Crowder, not being under arrest, is permitted to drive his own vehicle back to Lexington. Will gets back into Raylan’s car before he realizes that Hannibal has a separate rental from the CSI team, and could have driven him. He rubs his hand meanly over his own face in frustration. Raylan’s feelings are loud any time sex isn’t involved, and his head already aches.

Kentucky is a properly big state, not crowded up against the Atlantic coast where everything snarls up. Will and Raylan make it halfway to Lexington—a drive of three hours despite Lexington and Harlan being nearly along the same line of longitude—before Will asks the nosy personal question he’s been holding onto.

“Grandma Lila?” he asks.

“Pardon?” Raylan says, sounding surprised and offended that Will has spoken. His head had been somewhere way away, thinking without interruption about Boyd Crowder, who had mentioned a Grandma Lila like it was someone they shared.

“Y’all cousins?” Will asks. He dislikes incest and thinks that he’s a normal person in this sense. Cousins is generally legal but some of the worst days of Will’s life have been because someone kept it in the family, and if Raylan has a history with his relative then Will won’t sleep with him anymore.

“Round here, everyone’s cousins,” Raylan says, after a moment spent contemplating why Will might have asked. “Best not to think too hard about it. But no, Lila weren’t neither of our grandmas in what you’d think of as the proper sense. Scared the shit out of us as kids, though.”

“Childhood friends, then,” Will says, and Raylan hums in response. “First love?”

Raylan drives in silence for a moment, moving both hands to their proper positions on the steering wheel for the first time in hours. “You might be familiar with certain proclivities of mine,” he begins, “and I yours. However—”

“Withdrawn,” Will says, not really caring. He probably won’t sleep with Raylan again anyway, now that Raylan has met Hannibal. That thought pops up from nowhere and then drifts off unpursued. He presses his forehead to the window beside himself. The town car doesn’t judder enough to scramble his brains into soup when he presses his forehead to the window, which is a shame.

Raylan drives for a while longer, switching his right hand to the gear shift. “I never did think love had much to do with it,” he offers, mostly to himself. “But it has been suggested to me that I am not always right about that kind of thing.”

Chapter Text

“Sorry to inflict Raylan on you,” Art says, taking Will’s hand in a friendly way as he pulls him into the conference room. “He’s a bit of a nightmare when you pull him out of some poor dumb girl’s hotel room and make him do work.”

“Hm,” Will says, managing to look uncomfortable with the mere suggestion of sex despite the fact that Raylan knows he’s willing to beg for it. Art raises an eyebrow at Raylan behind Will’s back, the way he does when they’re dealing with a stick in the mud together. Raylan chooses to ignore it in favor of leaning against the conference table, his fingers tented atop a manila folder for effect.

“Is there any particular reason I wasn’t informed that Dewey Crowe had escaped from prison?” he asks.

“Light bulb was out on the Bat-Signal,” Tim says, through a toothpick.

“You, Raylan, are not the Batman to Dewey Crowe’s Joker,” Art says. Raylan frowns, also for effect.

“The deceased had, on numerous occasions, made physical threats against my person. I would think I at least had the right to be informed he might be loose among the general public.”

“Right, because the threat of Dewey Crowe really keeps a man up at night. Kept,” Tim corrects, looking vaguely contrite.

“You were at a conference. Rachel was handling it,” Art says, and something about the blasé air, the same one that Raylan’s worn over however many bodies for however many years, puts Raylan on poor stupid Dewey Crowe’s side for the first and final time.

“Handling it?” he says. “Dewey is dead when he was supposed to be in custody, are we calling that handling it?”

“From the state of the body, dead by the time the guards checked his cell this morning.” Rachel’s got files open on the table in front of her like a shield, nevermind the fact that there’s no way she got around to actually reading them. “Give me a break, you wouldn’t have been his white knight. And besides, Dickie Bennett’s out too.”

“Jesus,” Raylan says. In the bottom of his heart, he really hadn’t thought Boyd would do this. “So it is about Mags’ money.” He lurches without thinking towards the bullpen. Boyd is waiting in the hallway under uniformed supervision, and Raylan thinks he’s like to get his fists on him. Art takes him by the elbow before he gets out the door.

“Let’s talk this through first, cowboy,” he says. “Now that Dewey’s turned up dead, our first priority has got to be to locate and secure custody of Dickie Bennett, not get involved in an impenetrable dialogue with Boyd Crowder.”

“I’m sorry, I’m just catching up,” says a voice over the speakerphone in the middle of the table. It’s not a particularly apologetic voice. “Damn conference system. You need a PhD just to—who’s talking? And who the hell are all these people we’re naming?”

“Special Agent Crawford, this is Chief Deputy Mullen. Let me give you some background. Mags Bennett—” Art begins, but the voice on the other end cuts him off.

“God damn phone!” he says. “Listen, there’s an echo on your end. But what I’m thinking about is, if this case is already being handled by local agencies, then it’s not the best use of FBI resources to come out there and stand around, no? I’m inclined to withdraw my team before my agents get too closely involved in what sounds like a local police matter. If we don’t think there’s a meaningful nexus with the Chesapeake Ripper, unless one of my agents has something immediately actionable—”

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think Boyd Crowder killed your man,” Will says. He’s looking at Raylan like he means the sentence for him, but the whole room pauses to listen.

“Why?” the phone barks.

Will closes his eyes. He looks faintly overwhelmed and massively frustrated, like he’s fighting not to put his head down on the table. On the way in he’d stood facing the wrong way in the elevator to avoid talking to Elmira from the steno pool. Raylan’s been tempted to do the same thing in the past, but still. He’d never really noticed just how odd Will was before, only ever having seen him in his area of expertise, or one on one. In front of other people is different.

“Will?” the phone prompts. “I’ve got three agents and Dr. Lecter on the clock for this.”

“He’s wearing a pocket watch,” Will bites out, frustrated. “Honestly, Jack, I don’t know what you want from me.”

“Elegance? Meticulousness? Authenticity?” Katz—the good-looking lady agent—suggests. At first Raylan thinks she’s laying out Agent Crawford’s impossible ask, but Will opens his eyes and drags them towards her.

“Yes. No,” he says. “Nothing to do with those, but when he puts on the pocket watch he likes how it looks and it feels right to him. This guy would never feel that way.”

“At the scene you said he had disappointed expectations,” Katz says. “Possibly related to his career, or his sex life?”

“Boyd’s had his share of—” Raylan starts, and then stops, realizing with an ugly shock that what’s true of him may not be true of Boyd.

Tim’s tilted his chin up towards the ceiling, pretending to think. “Not many correctional officers wanted to be correctional officers when they grew up,” he offers, still chewing on his toothpick.

“There’s an idea,” Art says. “Thank you, Tim.”

“What about the prison nurse?” Rachel asks, flipping through the file in front of her. Maybe it isn’t just for show—maybe she’s actually read the damn thing. “Crowe’s visited twice in the last week, both times for nonspecific ailments. I noticed it was a man, you usually get more of that with pretty women.”

“From the look of the wounds on the victim, I wouldn’t necessarily count on the perpetrator having medical expertise,” Katz hedges.

“Prison nurses ‘round these parts ain’t exactly transplant surgeons,” Raylan counters.

“From the photos Agent Katz has shared with me, I believe that whoever did this knew they did not know what they were doing,” Dr. Lecter says. It’s his first contribution to the conversation, and for him, the room stops politely. It’s probably due to a collective nervousness of Europeans, and a need to be more polite to them than you would a regular person. Raylan dealt with a lot of Europeans in Miami, and he doesn’t feel that same urge anymore. “In this kind of procedure, you are left with a certain amount of leeway with regards to the arteries. I believe the perpetrator knew where that leeway was necessary for a more skilled surgeon to ”

“Thank you, Hannibal,” Agent Crawford says over the phone—politely, Raylan notes.

“Tim, Rachel, pick up a Harlan County deputy and go interview the nurse,” Art says. “Jack, I don’t want to impinge on your folks’ time any longer—of course, they’re welcome to stay, but we can receive any further insights by phone if that’s your preference.”

“It is,” Jack says. “Will, Beverly, get the rest of the team and get your asses to the airport. I’ve had Sandra put in flights, and you’re already running late.”

“On it, boss,” Katz says, and Raylan belatedly realizes that everyone’s been left with a task but himself.

“I’m coming in on this one, Art,” he warns, and Art looks straight through him.

“It’s your comp day, Raylan,” he says. “Take some well-earned time off. Watch the TV.”

Raylan watches him levelly. Art doesn’t look engaged with Raylan’s existence. He must know what Raylan intends to do—Raylan’s not sure exactly when it happened, but at some point Art stopped acknowledging his extracurriculars, stopped caring. It’s probably a sign of something or other, but Raylan won’t examine it while it’s convenient for him.

“My bag’s in your car,” Will says, and Raylan is surprised to find him at his elbow. They leave with Dr. Lecter, and pass Boyd in the hallway. Boyd and Raylan make eye contact, and there is no need for them to talk.

“He’s free to go,” Raylan tells the uniform. “The U.S. Marshals Service appreciates his time.”

The uniform looks smug—he’s one who considers wasting other people’s time a good use of his own. To be fair, it’s a legitimate police tactic. Raylan’s been known to use it himself.

***

When they get outside, Dr. Lecter says, “I will bring the rental around,” and slips off towards the visitor’s lot. Raylan and Will head towards employee parking to retrieve Will’s bag.

“So,” Raylan says, when they’re standing alone by the towncar. “You met my boss, and I met your psychiatrist. That’s…neat.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Will says. Raylan takes a close look at him, trying to decide whether he wants him anymore.

Will is sweating and he looks unwell. They’d stopped for food on the way from Nashville to Harlan and from Harlan to Lexington, and Raylan is hungry again, but now that he thinks about it Will hadn’t asked for anything either time. Is he hungover? Raylan tries to remember how many drinks Will had the night before—three, four? Not a debilitating number for a grown man. Raylan thinks about Will in the context of his psychiatrist and has a sudden flash of passing insight that something might be truly and deeply wrong with him.

Will shifts uncomfortably under his gaze, looks away. “I’m not—” he begins, and the humor in the situation emerges, like the sun from behind a cloud. Will’s hungover and hungry and embarrassed, and just because they came to work smelling like each other and won’t be sleeping together again, doesn’t mean they have to make it awkward.

“I’m pretty sure that whatever you’re not, I’m not either,” Raylan tells him.

“I was going to say healthy,” Will says.

“Oh, well there is that,” Raylan says, his balance shifting. “In a way I need to go take a test about?”

“Just generally,” Will says.

“Okay then.” Hannibal pulls up in his rental car, gets out, puts Will’s bag in the trunk. He ushers him into the passenger seat, a hand on his lower back. Raylan lifts a hand to them. No goodbye.

Their car pulls out of the lot and Raylan gets into his own. He only has to wait for a couple of minutes before Boyd gets in beside him.

Raylan flips on the radio, a station they’d liked in their younger days. Boyd moves the seat back so he can stretch his legs out straight.

“One way or another, we’ll find Dickie Bennett first,” he says. “Dickie Bennett, and whoever cut up Dewey.”

“Sure will,” Raylan says, and Boyd looks over at him.

“No matter what you might think, Raylan, there are some things I wouldn’t do,” he says, solemn as the grave.

“We’ll see,” Raylan says, turning up the music. “One way or another, we’ll see.”