Hancock didn’t bother to look up from his terminal when he heard a knock at his door. He knew it was one of two people. It had only been those two people over and over for two days. Fahrenheit got up from the couch to answer it, she stood back and let MacCready into the office for the sixth time since Nick and Marian left Goodneighbor for Bunker Hill. Hancock gave him a cursory glance and looked back at his monitor.
“Still no word from them,” he told the former gunner.
MacCready’s footsteps were heavy as he moved to the couch, but there was no sound of him sitting down on it. He started moving around the room. The kid was fucking pacing.
“It’s been two days, I thought they were just going to Bunker Hill,” MacCready whined.
“They said they were just going to Bunker Hill,” Hancock corrected. “That doesn’t mean they didn’t find a clue that would take them somewhere else.”
“For two days without checking in? I should go look for them.”
Hancock turned to look at MacCready. “I don’t know Nick’s methods, I never cared enough to learn them, and I doubt you have much more of and idea than I do. Throw in Marian, and neither of us knows how she operates when she has a mystery to solve, and we have no idea where they are. Do you really think you would be able to find them? It’s more likely I’ll have to hire Nick to find you after they are done with this case. And I will insist that you pay me back if I do have hire him to find you.”
MacCready was quiet for a moment. He was probably thinking about his possibilities. All Hancock could think of was his hangover.
“I’m worried about them,” MacCready admitted.
“That's very obvious,” Hancock pointed out. He started rubbing his forehead and temple with one hand, trying to bring the throbbing in his head down to a manageable level, “I wouldn’t worry too much; I don’t think she really would shoot him and run back home. That’s just something she says to make her feel like she’s on his level. Even though she is without threating him.”
“But she would still go back,” MacCready answered, giving voice to his main worry once again.
Hancock turned back to stare at the notes he had been making on his terminal. Wishing he could take a hit to ease his own fears and his headache. But Cait had been in and out of his office as often as MacCready. Even though she was more anxious for a chance to fight than anyone’s personal safety, Hancock still took it upon himself to hide all his chems for her comfort.
She had been sober for over a year, the only high she allowed herself anymore was adrenaline. Hancock wasn’t interested in sobriety himself, but he saw the looks of nervous anticipation on her face when she looked at the syringe of psycho-jet on his coffee table. He tried sneaking the occasional hit when she was out of his office, but he felt that if she returned at the wrong moment, his actions would be too reminiscent of when she slipped hits behind Nate’s back. It didn’t matter, he preferred taking his chems to help him relax, and doing such things in a cloak-and-dagger style took away a lot of the pleasure. So he had the chems locked away for her comfort, and was going cold turkey himself until the problem with the missing caravans was over.
The hangover he was experiencing made everything annoying. The fact that MacCready and Cait were both restlessly entering and leaving his office every few hours did not make anything less annoying. Now he was dealing with the same argument he had to have with MacCready every time the kid entered his office. Hancock almost wished the younger man would at least have a new point in his argument.
“Why did you do that to her?” MacCready asked.
Here we go again.
“We went over this, Mac,” Hancock stated. “It was the only way to get her to work with Nick. I know the next thing you’re going to say is that I betrayed her trust and that it will be enough for her to go back to the Capital Wasteland. And you’d be as right as you were the last ten times we’ve had this argument, and I will point out once again that we still have an ace in the hole that will keep her safely in the Commonwealth.”
“But you won’t tell me what that is,” MacCready whined. Will this kid never stop whining?
Hancock turned back to MacCready. “I won’t tell you, because then you will know what it is. I know you won’t go blabbing to Marian about what we are doing to her behind her back, but she can read you like a poorly hidden hand. If you have a secret to keep from her, she would be able to tell, and then she would get it out of you. This is a case of the less you know, the less you can tell her.”
“She hasn’t figured out our secret yet.”
“I wouldn’t sell your sister so short,” Hancock said. “She knows you want her to stay in the Commonwealth. She knows that returning to the Capital Wasteland would be a death sentence for her at best. And she knows you’re finding every excuse you can imagine not to give her that letter she keeps asking you for. She knows that we are friends, and that I tend to pull strings she isn’t experienced enough to conceive. She also knows that I care about her, though she may be questioning that fact right now. She may not keep notes and records like Nick and me, but she can add up the facts to come to a pretty good conclusion, even if it may be a few inches off the bullseye.”
“So, you’re saying?” MacCready asked, wanting Hancock to spell it out for him.
“I’m saying she knows that you want to keep her here where she is safe, and that I am helping you with that,” Hancock explained. “That is probably all she knows, and the longer it takes her to figure out more, the longer she’s going to focus on outwitting you and believing my part is lip service to you.”
MacCready looked straight at Hancock. He thought about the facts for a moment. He really was a good kid, but abstract thought was not his strong suit. Hancock was willing to take up the challenge of matching his own skills to Marian’s, but he was as worried as MacCready about what will happen if she proves better than him. Hancock wouldn’t tell MacCready that he was playing the long game, hoping that a forced partnership with Nick will lead to a more voluntary one. One that would keep her too busy helping the synth-detective solve cases to give her time to consider moving back home. After the way Nick yelled at her, he was ashamed to admit to even himself that he also paired them up because he thought it was funny. Hoping for a long-term partnership sounded like a better excuse.
“I still can’t believe I had to agree to writing that letter,” MacCready complained, kicking himself figuratively, and the couch literally. Like he did every time he had visited Hancock’s office in the past two days.
“Don’t worry about it,” Hancock comforted again. “You can still find excuses to drag that out. Make her provide the pen and paper. That may buy you a few days.”
Before MacCready could come up with another problem that he had mentioned at least five times since his sister was last seen, there came a knock at the door. Fahrenheit went to answer it while Hancock prepared himself to deal with MacCready and Cait at the same time. An event that he luckily only had to deal with two times.
Two sets of footsteps entered the room. Before Hancock could turn to confirm his promising suspicion, MacCready did the confirmation for him.
“You’re back!” He announced, causing Hancock to flinch in pain. He saw the kid hurrying over to his sister and pulling her into a bear hug.
“It’s not that big of a deal, RJ,” Marian told him as she patted his back. She looked mildly embarrassed.
“I was worried,” MacCready insisted on telling her as he pulled away, releasing his hold on her.
“You know you’re supposed to assume I’m dead at any moment. You really shouldn’t care enough to worry,” Marian told him with more pep than Hancock was comfortable hearing with those words.
Hancock saw the look of concerned horror cross Nick’s face as he looked down at her. The look lasted only a few seconds before the synth could hide it, but it was enough for Hancock to find promising. Something must have happened between the two of them that would cause Marian’s comment to have such a response from him.
“Where were you?” MacCready asked, not bothering to hide his concern from her.
“You know how I am. I see a white rabbit and I have to go chasing it,” she said. Hancock was impressed, he would have to use a lie like that some time.
“That sounds familiar,” MacCready told her.
“It should, it was the first book you let me read to you when we were on the caravan circuit together,” she reminded him. “Don’t worry about it.”
Marian walked past MacCready and made her way to the couch. She unloaded her backpack near the couch before sitting down at it herself, her gun resting across her lap.
“Good to see you both returned,” Hancock said standing up to show the team some respect. He walked over to join Nick. “Did you two find anything.”
“Nothing,” Marian announced.
“We aren’t sure yet,” Nick corrected her.
“A longer way to say, nothing,” Marian pointed out.
Nick gave her the look of wanting to strangle her that he often gave Marian, but this one looked more playful than usual. Hancock wondered if the look was as promising as he hoped it would be.
“We found out that the missing caravans that were supposed to go through Bunker Hill all made their way into and out of the city safely,” Nick told Hancock. “After that, we don’t know what happened.”
“And then I decided to waste time trying my hand at cartography,” Marian announced pulling out her file. She took a sheet of tracing paper covered in circles and showed it to MacCready who had sat down next to her. “Isn’t it beautiful? Maybe I should send it to an art gallery. Do you guys have one?”
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“Art is a very niche thing around here,” Hancock told her. “Trust me, you don’t want to be part of it.”
Marian shrugged her shoulders and pulled out her map, letting the conversation flow back to where it was.
“The point is,” Nick continued, “is that we don’t know where the caravans are being attacked.”
“Aren’t there any patterns to the attacks?” MacCready asked.
“If you can find one, let me know,” Marian told MacCready as she straightened the circles over the map. “Trust me, I spent sixteen hours trying to think of any possible pattern. I’m out of ideas.”
As soon as Marian finished talking, she flushed. She shifted her eyes towards Nick and then shifted them too intently at the map. It only took half a second before she hid her discomfort, but Hancock caught it.
“I’m not doing any better myself,” Nick informed the room. “We are running out of time and out of ideas. The only thing I can think of is interviewing every settlement in the Commonwealth, but I doubt we are going to get any information that we didn’t get from Kessler.”
Nick pulled out a cigarette and put it in his mouth. He pulled out his lighter, looked at it, and put it back into his pocket. His unlit cigarette soon followed.
Marian seemed to be doing little more than trading out sketches of paper on top of her map. She seemed to be looking for something in all her sketches that she wasn’t finding. One sketch even had a brief description of what each caravan had; each description fit into a circle. Another one had random numbers under ten that fit into the circles; the right-hand corner of that sheet had “# people” written on it.
Another knock at the door made Hancock wince again while Fahrenheit answered it. He was not surprised to see Cait enter. He was more surprised that she came back so soon. The frequency of her visits had been decreasing while MacCready’s were increasing. Hopefully, everyone will be satisfied soon so Hancock could go back to hitting the jet again and ending this damned hangover.
“Cait!” Marian called out too loudly. “Come sit with me. I’m hoping you’ll be a good luck charm.”
Cait made her way to the couch the siblings were sitting at while Marian moved her gun to the floor beneath her. As Cait started sitting down, Marian placed her hands on the cage fighter’s hips and moved Cait onto her lap.
“The closer you are to me, the more luck I can get from you,” she told Cait as she wrapped her arms around the other woman’s waist.
“That may be the corniest line I ever heard to get me on someone’s lap,” Cait said.
“Did it work?”
Cait leaned in and kissed Marian. Marian, for her part, seemed very receptive and even pulled Cait closer to her. As the women made out on Hancock’s couch, he smiled at MacCready and then moved to his other couch. He didn’t know how MacCready convinced Cait to help them, but he was glad it was working. He sat down, hoping that sitting would help his headache.
Nick broke up the scene with a cough. “Can we get back to the case?”
The women broke from their kiss and Marian turned her head towards Nick, watching him make his way to the couch Hancock was sitting on.
“We have been banging our heads against the wall because of this case,” Marian pointed out, still holding Cait on her lap. “At times, we were even doing it literally.”
“Really,” MacCready asked. “You were literally banging your heads against a wall?”
“More like he would hold his hand against the back of my head, making sure the heel of his hand was where the skull meets the spine-”
“Stop,” Nick insisted drily.
Marian turned her smiling open face to Nick before turning serious again. “What is there left for us to do other than wait for a Eureka moment?”
“We sit and we look at what we do know,” Nick explained. “Sometimes looking at what you know without the clutter of assumptions or over information can help with figuring out the next question to ask.”
“Clearing out the clutter, like what you have in your office?” Cait asked.
Marian smiled and buried her face in Cait’s neck, as her body shook with laughter. Hancock hid his smile behind his own hand trying not to laugh too.
“The physical state of my office has nothing to do with the figurative state of this case,” Nick growled. “And if you will not be quiet, I will ask you to leave.”
“I will support him on that,” Hancock said.
“I know how to get her to shut up,” Marian said as she licked Cait’s neck before pulling back and sitting straight.
“Aww, you’re so sweet,” Cait purred. She wrapped an arm around Marian’s neck, stabilizing herself on the other woman’s lap. She looked into Marian’s eyes; Hancock could feel the heat of anticipation radiate between them. “Are ya sure you don’t want to ditch stuffy old Nick and run over to my room at the Combat Zone for a while.”
Marian kissed Cait passionately for a moment. “Very tempting, but I did make a promise. Besides, I figured I can help with the boring stuff and you’d enjoy helping with the more exciting stuff.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to take a break from the boring stuff for some exciting stuff?” Cait asked, moving her hand under Marian’s open jacket and rubbing her clothed chest beneath.
“Tempting, but in the books, the girl the detective sleeps with during the case is usually out to kill him. It’s the one he sleeps with after the case is closed who is safe.”
“Can we get back to the case so you can be sure she’s safe to sleep with then?” Nick snapped raising his voice enough to fill the room.
Marian sat back on the couch, looking content with Cait leaning against her. “What do we know about this case?” She finally asked.
“We know that several caravans have gone missing,” Nick began.
“More than normal,” Hancock added.
“Including one with the twins in it,” MacCready said.
“Let’s leave that fact for later,” Nick said. “It may be the caravan we started looking for, but now it’s part of a bigger issue.”
Marian had a thoughtful look on her face as she took all the details in. Hancock got used to her looking like that when she analyzed anything on his request, but this was not an issue that caused her to stare into the middle distance.
“That seems to be the long and short of it,” Marian finally said. “It seems like we have a lot more of what we don’t know.”
“That’s normally how cases work until they are closed,” Nick assured her. “Why these caravans? What’s the pattern behind each of the attacks? Why are we just now hearing about them?”
“What if it’s a thing that’s been slowly growing?” Marian asked.
“Can you elaborate?” Nick replied.
“Say it’s a new raider gang,” Marian explained. “So, it starts out with about five or six members. You can’t take a big caravan out with that, but you can take out a caravan of one person who may or may not have a brahmin and no patron to miss them. This happens for a while, one or two caravans are taken out in a week, just enough to keep your gang going. Any more get ignored. But as you become more successful, more people want to join. This means you can start taking out bigger caravans, and more caravans. Success brings in more people, which brings in success. One or two people can go missing in the wasteland without anyone noticing, but now the group may be so big that they can’t hide what they are doing anymore.”
“How would people hear about these gangs in order to join them?” Cait asked.
“I don’t know, I never did figure out how people are able to join groups that tend to shoot on sight,” Marian said.
“It does make sense,” Nick said scratching his chin. The synth kept touching his pocket through the whole conversation, the one he kept his cigarettes in. Hancock knew he wanted to smoke, a cigarette while working through such problems was normal for Nick. The ghoul was happy to see that Nick was following his no smoking orders.
“I need to get to my notes,” Marian whispered to Cait, helping move her onto the couch between her and MacCready. Marian then laid two sheets of paper on top of the circles and the map. She pulled out a list that she seemed to have made. She moved the top sheet down, showing two sets of numbers at once. “Maybe that’s why we haven’t seen a pattern. A shift like that would be slow over several months, I only have one month’s worth of data.”
“I can get you more if you’d like,” Hancock offered.
Marian’s eyes grew big for a second and then went back to their normal size. “I don’t think I have the endurance for more months of this stuff right now.”
“We shouldn’t need that right now, but we may take you up on that offer later,” Nick said. “We aren’t sure if that idea is right, but it does work. Still, it doesn’t get us any closer to solving this case.”
Hancock got up from his couch and started walking towards Fahrenheit.
“So, that’s all we are sure about?” Marian asked.
“Apparently,” Nick agreed. “And we are no closer to a pattern of behavior that can help us figure out where they are.”
“Can you get some meals sent up here?” Hancock requested from Fahrenheit.
“Sure, thing boss,” she said and walked out the room.
Hancock turned around and returned to his seat across from Marian.
“So, what do we do now?” Marian asked.
“We look at what we don’t know,” Nick told her.
Marian started laughing a little manically. “I will be dead before we get through that list.”
“It’s not so bad,” he reassured her. “We just look at the questions we want answered. And think of any possible answers. We can start with your patterns.”
“We don’t have one,” Marian pointed out.
“Exactly. All the caravans came from different locations. Some even came from outside the Commonwealth. Was there a pattern to what they were carrying?”
Marian looked down at her notes. Hancock was finding himself fascinated by the exchange between Nick and Marian. MacCready and Cait seemed just as interested, staring quietly at the two detectives. “No, they had everything from tatos to circuitry. If there was a pattern, it was just as likely that it was reflective of buying behavior as anything else.”
“What about the number of people who were in the caravans?”
“Anywhere from one to a dozen. And that seems to be as random as what the caravans were carrying at the time. It seems strange that there’s no signs of their bodies either.”
“Are you saying they clean up after themselves?” Nick asked.
“Maybe? It would probably make them more effective at staying hidden. But it doesn’t help us find them.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
Marian continued to look down at her sketches. She switched out the top two with one that looked like wiggly lines until she placed it on top of the map. Suddenly, Hancock could see she traced some of the roads in the Commonwealth. She stared at the sketches for a moment, and slowly her face started to contort in a strange way.
“Marian?” Nick asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Shut up,” she said waving in his general direction but not bothering to look away from the map, “I’m chasing an idea.”
Hancock watched her as her eyes moved rapidly, almost randomly, around the map with the circles and the squiggly lines on top of it. Marian was getting visibly more excited in her silence and had even stopped breathing.
“Holy shit,” she finally whispered. “It works, it fucking works!”
She turned towards Cait and pulled her in for an excited kiss before turning her attention back to the map.
Hancock watched Nick sit back in the couch, a look of a proud teacher watching his pupil figure out her lesson was on his face.
“Would you care to tell us what works?” Nick asked.
“We’ve been looking at this backwards!” She said holding up the road lines as if that explained everything.
Nick stared at the tracing paper for a moment before he got excited along with her. “I think I see what you mean,” he agreed. “So, you’re saying you forgot a pattern?”
“It was in every pattern, that’s why I didn’t see it!” she pointed out.
Hancock was starting to figure out what Marian was saying, but he was gladder that they were getting closer to solving this mystery and helping make Goodneighbor safe. Well, safe from outside problems.
“What the Hell are you two talking about?” Cait asked.
“You get used to her talking like that after a while,” MacCready told her. “Just nod your head and ask for explanations when she finally takes a breath.”
Marian stuck her tongue out at MacCready. She looked like she was about to talk, but stopped, she took that breath he referenced, and then started again, this time more composed. “I was saying that we were looking at where the caravans came from. That’s why we couldn’t find a pattern. The real question is where they are all going.”
“I thought they were all going to Goodneighbor,” Cait said.
“They are,” Nick agreed. “That’s the common element.”
“None of the caravans were going missing on their way to Bunker Hill,” Marian continued her speech was faster than normal. “So, what if we have a gang that is targeting this city specifically? Say, they have an ambush set up with a predetermined caravan size every day. They attack the first caravan that is that size and let the rest move on.”
“Wouldn’t the neighborhood watch see them?” MacCready asked.
“Not if they were more than a block away from the city,” Nick pointed out.
“They could also change their ambush site every time,” Marian said, her eyes taking a middle-distance look, but the usual pain was missing. She was focused on strategy. “They mix it up, one day they attack at one location, the next day another, the third day they take a break. The fact they take the time to clean up is ingenious. No bodies means that no one is alerted to danger when they approach. This group could attack in the same location indefinitely and no one would notice.”
“But they are getting too big, their attacks are starting to get noticed by the sheer number of them,” Nick put in. “This doesn’t get us any closer to finding them.”
Marian stayed in her strategy look. She moved her head back and forth a bit as if she was watching people fight in front of her. The longer she focused on that, the bigger her smile became. Her eyes came into focus and she looked straight at Nick.
“I have an idea on how we will find them. I think you’re going to love it, Valentine.”