Chapter Text
Chloe walked back into the precinct, glancing around to see what the bullpen looked like. It looked like business as usual. Dan was still sitting at his desk, behind a pile of what looked like personnel files… and looking harassed as he fidgeted with a pen in one hand, desk phone jammed between his right ear and shoulder.
Three other cops… two detectives and the uniformed officer Markowitz… were huddled around a computer monitor. Markowitz was sitting in the middle as the two detectives leaned in from either side, intently watching whatever was on screen… though Markowitz winced at one moment… and the two detectives guffawed and gave each other high-fives. She frowned in their direction, feeling pretty sure that whatever it was they were looking at, it wasn’t connected with police work… given how embarrassed Markowitz looked.
Then her phone buzzed, and she glanced down at it. On the screen, she saw Ella had sent her a text message. Not even bothering to look at it, Chloe walked over and knocked on the forensic lab door and then opened it, stepping inside and closing the door again. The shades were drawn and tilted so no one could look into the lab and see what was going on. What was going on, was that Ella was dancing a little jig on the other side of the table that sat in the center of the room. “Who da man!” she was chanting “Who da… well… woMAN! Who da WOMAN!”
“I don’t know,” Chloe said, amused, “who is da woman?”
“Chloe!” Ella exclaimed, rushing around the table to throw her arms around Chloe. “You da woman!”
Chloe laughed and tried to untangle herself from Ella’s hug. “Okay, I’m the woman… why am I the woman?”
“Because you cracked the case!” Ella exclaimed. “You found out it was Tony Rublos out in that desert grave and not Steve Banales!”
“Uh, okay, I found out that the, uh, victim wasn’t the victim, it was somebody else… that doesn’t solve the case,” Chloe protested.
“Oh yes it did!” Ella enthusiastically corrected her. “Oh yes it did! Once we knew who the real victim was, it all fell into place!”
“How?” Chloe asked, taken aback. “I mean, okay, we know that it was Rublos’ driver… but how does that tell us who did it, or why?”
“Because when we went back to check ID’s, we realized that one of the cops on the scene wasn’t a real cop from the Lancaster PD!” Ella said excitedly. “He was a fake, infiltrated onto the scene to try to recover something… they thought he was with us, we thought he was with them… and voila!”
“Did he find something?” Chloe asked. “I mean, how would we even know what was missing if he did?”
“I don’t know if he found something, but he lost something!” Ella said. “This!” She held up a business card. “This is for a bespoke, uh, kidnapping service!”
“What?!” Chloe exclaimed.
“It’s mostly a gag service,” Ella explained. “Not like, for real kidnapping… pranks and… and maybe sometimes training services.”
“Pranks,” Chloe said grimly. “Like… old friends with too much money and too much time on their hands deciding to play pranks on each other… like… putting a tiger in someone’s back yard and maybe having them kidnapped and dumped in the desert-kind of pranks.”
“Uh, yeah,” Ella said, looking at Chloe’s stormy face. “You, uh, know somebody like that?”
“Yeah,” Chloe said, “Josh Hamid and Steve Banales,” she said grimly.
“Oh, wow, you think this was a prank gone wrong?” Ella said, putting the pieces together.
“Well, if Hamid hired these guys to kidnap Banales… they could’ve gotten his driver by mistake… and… and something went wrong, and Rublos wound-up dead.”
“That’s still murder,” Ella said in a low voice, “even if he didn’t mean for it to happen…”
“Involuntary manslaughter at least,” Chloe said, narrowing her eyes. “Could be murder if there was reckless disregard… if you could reasonably see death as a result of the prank. Dropping someone in the desert? That could be grounds for special circumstances. I’m going to have some unis pick up Hamid. Dammit! I could’ve brought him in myself!”
“What?!” Ella exclaimed. “You were with Hamid?”
“Uh, what?” Chloe blanched for a moment before trying to recover.” Oh, uh, yeah, I, uh, was, uh, questioning him… that’s how I figured out it was Banales’ driver. I gotta go,” she said, and threw the lab door open… and came to a stop.
“What is it?” Ella asked.
“Josh Hamid,” Chloe said blankly, looking out into the bullpen, to see Hamid and Banales standing by her otherwise abandoned desk.
“Whoa,” Ella said, following Chloe out of the lab as she stalked over to the pair by her desk.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Chloe said, overriding their smiles when she added, “saves me time having them put out a BOLO on you for the death of Tony Rublos.”
“What?!” Banales said.
“Josh here hired a company to kidnap you, and they grabbed your driver by mistake. He’s the reason that Tony Rublos was found dead out there,” Chloe said in a brittle voice.
Josh Hamid’s mouth opened and closed several times without a word escaping his lips. “It… it… it isn’t what… what you think… it wasn’t like that!” he said desperately.
“What was it then?” Chloe asked acidly.
“I… I did hire these guys to kidnap you,” Hamid confessed as Steve Banales’ lips tightened as he listened to Hamid’s confession. “But they called me and cancelled! They said that they’d gotten another deal and couldn’t complete the contract! They were going for somebody who was a really big fish that would pay triple what I was going to pay… no matter what I offered! I didn’t even have a chance to offer them more! So… so I thought the whole thing was cancelled! I have no idea who kidnapped Tony or how he wound-up in the desert! I didn’t even get a refund!”
Chloe and Ella (who was standing beside her) both frowned at this.
“You think maybe somebody decided to moonlight?” Ella said, sotto voce to Chloe.
“Maybe,” Chloe said slowly. “But who the hell was the ‘big fish’?” Just as she said this, she heard the familiar loud laugh of Lucifer Morningstar coming from just across the hallway. Turning her eyes towards the sound, she saw Lucifer standing outside the new lieutenant’s open door, as he and the lieutenant… Marcus Pierce… shook hands, grinning at each other.
“Lucifer!” she said sharply, “what’s going on? You… you said earlier that you’d been kidnapped…”
“Yes, detective,” he said, straightening up, “and you… you dismissed it as a… a fable. You know I never lie…”
“But you’re never very clear, either,” she snapped. “Your… metaphors… bewilder me.”
Lucifer sighed, looking less… put together… for a moment. “My… metaphors,” he said in a lower voice.
“You know that I… I need more than your unbelievable stories!” Chloe snapped. “I…”
“Need proof,” Lucifer said wryly. “The only proofs that I could offer you would break you… or mislead you,” he said.
Chloe put her hands on her hips. “I don’t know what you mean!” she said in exasperation.
“My… face… would terrify you,” Lucifer said somberly. “And… and my wings would mislead you. I’m no angel… but my wings would make you think I was one… I won’t have you think more of me than I am!”
Chloe was taken aback. Lucifer was, by turns, boastful… and self-deprecating… why did he call himself ‘Lucifer’? why did he damn himself? Or was it his father… and family? He’d raged against them often enough for her to think that he really had been… thrown out… thrown away… and then she remembered those terrible scars that had so shocked her in the penthouse… “Your scars,” she said, unconscious that she was speaking aloud.
“You haven’t seen the half of them,” he muttered, her eyes flying to his face.
“I don’t….”
“No, you haven’t,” he said. “And… and I… I dread how you might react if… if you saw me as I really am!”
Chloe shook her head in frustration. “I don’t know what you mean! Show me! Show me!”
Lucifer’s eyes snapped to meet her own. “All right!” he said, his voice grim and reluctant, too. “All right! Come with me!” He grabbed her by one hand and almost dragged her across the bullpen to interrogation room two. Chloe pulled her hand out of his grip after he’d flung the door closed.
“Why are you doing this?” Chloe burst out.
“You demanded proof,” Lucifer said, turning to face her again. “I… I don’t want them to see…”
“You don’t want them to see what?” she asked frowning at him. “You don’t want them to see what you have to show me?”
“I don’t want them to see you… afraid of me,” he said, his voice falling lower. “It… it will be hard enough for me to see you… turn away from me. But… but I don’t want them to see you afraid of me…”
Chloe’s face softened, her anger fading. “Do you really think I’m afraid of you?” she asked.
“Not now,” Lucifer. “But… but after I show you… you will be.”
Chloe looked at his face. He was looking down, not meeting her eyes.
“Lucifer,” she said, her voice even gentler. “I won’t be afraid… how could I be afraid of you?”
Lucifer looked up at her, his eyes meeting her own… eyes full of regret. “You will be,” he almost whispered, closing his eyes and grimacing.
Chloe waited… and waited. “Well,” she said. “When are you going to show me… whatever it is?”
He opened his eyes again, looking at her with a confused expression. “You don’t see it?”
“What?” Chloe asked, irritation rising in her. “Is this some kind of joke? Is this something you and Pierce cooked up while I was out of the office?”
Lucifer shook his head, putting his hands up to his face and running his fingers over his cheeks, feeling the scruff that grew there. “No! No, detective, I swear… I… I was trying to show you my face!”
Chloe’s lips thinned in anger. “I can’t trust you! I can’t… I can’t believe you! You say you never lie but you’re lying right now! We’re… we’re just done here!” she shouted.
“No! Please! Detective, don’t go!” Lucifer cried out, throwing his hands out towards her… and there was a sudden blinding flash of light.
Chloe staggered, throwing her hands up to cover her eyes. She was dazzled. All she could see were a patchwork of irregular blotchy light and dark patches… dark around the edges… and in the middle… almost like the shape of a man… and there were bright… oh so very bright… swooshy shapes… that framed the dark central blotch. She rubbed her fingertips against the orbs of her eyes… not her eyes themselves, but the sockets around them and her forehead. “What the hell was that!” she exclaimed, her eyes closed behind her palms.
“I’m sorry, detective,” she heard Lucifer say in a shaking voice. “I’m sorry…”
“Yeah, well, don’t do it again,” she snapped, lowering her hands… and then she stared at him, speechless.
The blotches were fading from her eyesight now. And now… now she saw the dark central blotch resolve itself into the figure of Lucifer Morningstar… and the bright swooshy shapes that flanked him on either side were two very bright, very white… wings… that quivered as they extended to either side behind and above his shoulders. She stared at him, open-mouthed. The shapes… were like the wings she’d seen at the auction of religious artifacts… but… but brighter, more… real seeming… than the cosplay wings she’d seen Lucifer scorn.
“Wha…” she began to say.
“I’m sorry,” Lucifer said again. “I… I didn’t mean to show them to you… it was an accident. I… I was trying to show you my face, but I couldn’t… I couldn’t… dad must’ve taken it away and… and I was upset and my… my wings popped out when you were going to leave…”
Lucifer’s voice was shaky and small for him. Hesitant… fearful, Chloe thought, as she stared at him. His very posture… in spite of those enormous glowing… things… was hunched, as it he was trying to make himself… smaller… less threatening.
“Be not afraid,” he muttered. “That’s what my brothers and sisters used to say, back in the day, before they were told to stay away from humans… to stay in the Silver City.”
Chloe was standing in interrogation room two, staring at her partner. Her hands still paused in front of her… halfway down her chest as she stared at him open-mouthed.
“You don’t have to be afraid of me, detective,” he said. “I… I would never hurt you. I just…”
“You. Never. Lie,” Chloe said slowly.
Lucifer shook his head, still almost quailing in front of her.
“You… really are… an angel…” she said still staring at him, dumbfounded.
“Devil,” he corrected her. “Fallen angel, if you want to think of me as… as representative of a… a species, but I’m,” he sighed, “the devil… Satan… the Adversary… Old Scratch…”
“My partner,” she murmured, which brought his eyes up to look at her, surprised and somewhat hopeful all at once.
“Your partner,” he said, in agreement, clearing his throat. “As… as I said, I would never hurt you or… your daughter. I would do anything for you… to protect you both!” Then his face fell. “But these aren’t really me,” he said, his voice bitter. “They’re just… just fooling you… enthralling you!”
“Lucifer,” Chloe said, her eyes fixed on his face. “I’m looking at you… not your wings.”
His eyes came back up, and he saw this was the truth. She was looking at his face, not at the wings on either side of him.
“Lucifer,” Chloe repeated. “I’m not afraid of you… you… you’ve protected me, haven’t you?” Her face paled. “You died for me!” she said, remembering when Lucifer had distracted Malcolm Graham from shooting her… and being shot himself. She remembered him falling to the floor of the hangar, the vast pool of blood that had surrounded him as he bled out… how still he was and… and then him getting up and punching Malcolm. “How did… did you come back?”
Lucifer opened and closed his mouth for a moment. “I made a deal with my father,” he said in a low voice.
“You asked him to let you come back?” Chloe asked, astonished that Lucifer would make such a deal.
Lucifer shook his head. “I didn’t think I was going to,” he said, “I just… just asked him to make sure you were safe… he decided to send me back…”
“To protect me?” Chloe asked, surprised that God… God!... would care enough to make that kind of deal. Her mind resolutely pushed away the memory of her father… though for a moment she wondered why He hadn’t saved Jonathan Decker.
Lucifer grimaced and shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know if that was his sole intent or… or not… or if it was his side of the deal, in exchange for my… my keeping an eye on mum… my mother, who’d escaped from hell…”
Chloe had weathered the eruption of wings from Lucifer’s back, but the idea of Lucifer having a mother that he was supposed to ‘keep an eye on’ was… mind-boggling. But… “Charlotte’s really your mother?”
“She was,” Lucifer said. “Well, mum took over her body after she was killed in that hotel room by her associate… when… when that whole thing at the beach went down, mum… mum left for another universe and Charlotte… the real Charlotte Richards was drawn back into her body. She’s just… just Charlotte Richards now. She doesn’t remember anything that mum did when she was using her body…”
Chloe shook her head as she worked out the pronouns and who they referred to. “Wow,” was all she said.
“Um, yes,” Lucifer said. “Detective…” he said, his voice going up a little bit.
“Yes?” she said in reply.
“Can I put my wings away now?” he asked humbly.
“Oh, uh, yeah, I guess you can,” she said, a little numbly.
“Thank you,” he said with a sigh, and then there was a faint ‘fwump’ and his wings disappeared, and he was just her partner again, a man in a bespoke suit, standing in the middle of an interrogation room at the precinct.
They were both silent for a moment, then Chloe gave herself a little shake. “You… you were kidnapped, you said, and… and that’s how you wound up in the desert.”
“That’s so,” Lucifer said quietly.
“Do you remember anything about the kidnapping?” Chloe asked.
Lucifer shook his head. “I was talking to you on the phone, as I stood in the parking lot, and someone struck me over the head… the next thing I knew was when I woke up in the desert. I never saw anyone. Why?”
“Because the dead man was Steve Banales limo driver… Banales partner Josh Hamid hired this company to kidnap Banales as a prank… but they said they were cancelling the job because they had been hired to kidnap someone else… a ‘big fish’… at a higher price… I’m assuming you… but somehow things went wrong, the limo driver, Tony Rublos was kidnapped, too, and wound up dying in the desert. Maybe they tried to do a ‘two-fer’… kidnapping you and Rublos… and somehow while you survived, Rublos died.”
Lucifer was frowning at this. “Maybe they were scared off by the sight of my wings… great, thanks a lot dad,” he said, casting an angry look upward. “Your bloody wings are responsible for another innocent’s death!”
“Lucifer!” Chloe said in alarm, stepping closer to him and putting one hand on his chest. “Lucifer! Please calm down!”
Lucifer goggled at her for a moment. She’d seen his wings… knew he was the devil… and still dared to stand close to him and actually touch him!
“It’s a tragedy,” Chloe said quietly. “But it’s not your fault… if anyone, it’s Josh Hamid’s for trying to have his partner kidnapped in the first place!”
Lucifer hesitated then reluctantly nodded.
Chloe sighed. “Now… who wanted you kidnapped?”
“My father,” Lucifer muttered.
“Really?” Chloe said, raising an eyebrow. “Your… father… God… would use a prank kidnapping company… and would have someone hit you over the head? I mean, doesn’t he have, uh, angels to do that kind of thing?”
Lucifer opened his mouth. “Uh, Amenadiel used to do that but… he fell, so, he’s not available for that anymore. And, uh, we, uh, are… getting along better these days, so, dad might not have felt he could rely on him.”
Chloe looked skeptically at Lucifer and let the silence drag on.
“I mean,” Lucifer said, “it’s possible that it was someone else… but why do I have my wings back? Why can’t I summon up my devil face?”
Chloe frowned at him. “Your… devil face?”
“It… it shows what a monster I am… I became… in hell,” Lucifer muttered.
“Does… does it look… red?” Chloe asked, her brows furrowed now in concentration. “Like… scalded?”
Lucifer blanched, staring at her with wide eyes. “You… you know?”
“I saw it at the factory,” Chloe said. “When Lindsay Jolson was, uh, asking you not to hurt her…”
Lucifer stared at her.
“That was just before I shot you,” Chloe said. “I believed for a moment… but then you bled. Why did you bleed?”
“Because I’m vulnerable around you, detective,” Lucifer said. “That’s why they were able to kidnap me, too, because I was near enough to you for a human to be able to knock me out. And I wasn’t expecting it, because I was so glad we were able to save Linda…”
“Because you helped save her… and you felt better about yourself,” Chloe mused.
“I suppose so,” Lucifer admitted, “but…”
“And maybe you thought you weren’t a monster… and you deserved your wings back,” Chloe said, speaking over him.
Lucifer’s lips kept moving but no words escaped from his mouth.
“That’s what I think, anyway,” Chloe said. “It still doesn’t answer the question of why you were kidnapped, though. Unless it was to get you out of the way for some other reason…”
“Or you, detective,” Lucifer mused. “I mean, if I hadn’t been kidnapped, well, except you didn’t come looking for me…”
“You weren’t gone that long,” Chloe said dryly. “You’ve gone on benders longer than that, after all.”
“But if I had…”
“I would’ve come looking for you,” she said, her voice a promise.
“But what did happen?” he asked, frustrated.
“I wound-up looking for the people who kidnapped the guy we thought was Steve Banales,” Chloe admitted, “and, uh, interviewing Josh Hamid. Um, things happened… and Steve Banales showed up and said his driver was missing. That led me to ask Ella to check into it. Then, I came back here and then found out that Josh really had hired some guys to kidnap his partner as a joke… and, well, here we are.” After a moment, Chloe said, “oh, and Ella figured out one of the cops at the crime scene in the desert was an imposter, probably back to look for something they’d lost. Maybe the business card that she found out there… a card for ‘Snatched’… the kidnapping company.
Lucifer frowned. He could tell the detective was leaving something out, but everything she’d said was the truth. He could tell. He shook his head. “So, are we going to chase down the perps? Call the kidnappers?”
“Yes,” Chloe said with a sigh. “We are.”
“And… and we will continue to work together?” Lucifer asked in a small voice.
“Yes,” Chloe said, smiling at him. “I’m going to keep working with my… partner.”
Lucifer sighed. “That’s a great relief. Thank you… detective.”
“You’re welcome,” Chloe said. “Now let’s go look for some bad guys.”
As they exited the interrogation room, Chloe said back over her shoulder, “what did Pierce want with you, anyway?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Lucifer said. “I think he’s working himself up to ask for a favor.”
“Huh, well, that makes sense,” Chloe said. “That is your reputation… as a dealmaker.”
"The dealmaker, detective," Lucifer corrected her, as they headed back towards her desk.