Bishop and Adrienne - on the hunt for clues in Boston (backdated)

[x-adrienne.livejournal.com]

Backdated to Friday

Bishop and Adrienne sniff out clues at the motel where Vanessa was abducted from, to no success.



Bishop sat at the reception desk, facing the door as he waited for Adrienne. A small, black bag sat on the desk as he flipped through a few files at the last moment to make sure he hadn't neglected to transfer any important information to a small notebook. Upon Meemaw's insistence, he had come to terms with the fact he wasn't going to solve the case from the office and that he didn't have police, local, or any other resources. It was time to embrace a new and more proactive paradigm that involved him presenting himself as a mutant in a way he never had before, outside of mutant friendly conditions and anything that could resemble residual 'jurisdiction' from his time with the NYPD. It was a lot for him to take in and it made him even more concerned he was forgetting something important.

It felt odd for Adrienne to be bringing a bag for a weekend in Boston, after so many years of having a house there- it made Boston seem like an almost foreign city to her. How times had changed, she thought to herself ruefully as she came up from Vanessa's suite below the office, not sure if Bishop knew she'd stayed there last night to help perpetuate their early start. He was facing the front door, but that didn't mean he wasn't just lost in thought in that particular direction. "Is there coffee?" she mumbled sleepily.

"In the pot." Bishop motioned as he turned to face Adrienne, he managed his surprise as she came from an interior entrance. "I'd have been more quiet if I'd have known you stayed here."

Adrienne eyed the coffeepot with a calculating look, wondering if the benefits of drinking straight out of the pot outweighed possible burns. Nah, couldn't risk it. Luckily she'd made herself familiar with the office very quickly and knew where the cups were kept. She pulled out a mug and filled it while raising an eyebrow at the graphic on the side. "Don't worry about it," she told Bishop with a shrug. "I haven't been sleeping very well lately, anyway. I can't get the images of what happened to Garrison and Dani and Jay being kidnapped out of my mind lately, wondering... if Vanessa's..." She sipped at her coffee to disguise the fact that she couldn't even finish that sentence.

"We're going to find her. I get shit done." Bishop echoed the mug for the joke, trying to break her worry up while hiding his own. "It has been a while but she's tough and knows what to do more than anyone else."

Having just woken from the nightmares about torture that had been plaguing her, Adrienne's defense mechanisms were down and Bishop's comment had her hiccupping a sob even as she tried to smile at his reference to the mug. "We don't know what to do... and she could be up against anything... how can she know what to do?" she asked in a tiny voice.

"You have a choice between assuming things are the worst or the best. If you get distracted by grief you won't be able to work." Bishop stood up. "I'm taking my bag to the car, where are yours?"

Adrienne tossed her bag at Bishop just a little bit harder than necessary, but it was his own fault for making sense and reminding her to keep herself together. "Oh wait, were you just asking where my bags are as a way of getting me to pick it up and follow you out to the car, or am I supposed to be doing something in here while you put the bags in the car?" She sort of regretted throwing her bag at him now.

Bishop caught the bag despite the surprise and force, offering a smile to counter her mood. "I was going to get everything ready while you enjoyed your coffee. We have over four hours of driving coming up."

"Thanks," she replied with a smile, "that's thoughtful of you. But I can drink my coffee in the car. Like you said, we have over four hours of driving coming up. Better to just get it over with? What else do you have to get ready?" she inquired.

"Just the bags." Bishop held them both up for a second before making his way to the door. "You can leave that mug here, I'll stop by a coffee shop on our way out so we can get something less... bitter."

Adrienne was unsure as to how much preparation it took to get two bags into a car, but she let the subject go. Setting the coffee mug down, she followed Bishop out to the car. "Sounds like a plan. I suppose I should call out 'shotgun' as it seems to be the thing to do when going on a road trip, even though there are only two of us. Shotgun!"

Bishop's car chirped, the trunk popped, and he dropped the bags in. "As long as you don't think you're driving." He joked.

~~

The drive up to Boston had been pleasant and uneventful, but when they pulled into the motel where Vanessa had disappeared from Adrienne felt her easygoing mood evaporate. Nerves and anxiety returned as she glanced over at Bishop. "This is where she said she was staying?" It looked so innocent to see it in the daylight. "We're staying in her room, right? Did you clear it with the manager?"

"I rented the room, told her it would be for a few nights. We have another room in a nearby hotel to stay in." Bishop looked over the motel Vanessa had been staying in from the curb, staying behind the tinted windows of his car for the time being. "I don't think either of us want to stay in the room she might have been abducted from."

"Definitely not," Adrienne answered, making a face. "Good call." She jumped out of the car, eager to stretch her legs after the long drive. The motel was standard fare, a long building with ugly-curtained windows and numbered doors, parking spaces in front. "How come we couldn't be here to reenact one of those odd-couple travel comedies where we pull up and the car's all destroyed from our antics and there's only one bed and I wash my underwear in the sink and you find it?" she mused, heading into the manager's office at the end of the row of rooms to check into the room Vanessa had been taken from.

Bishop walked with Adrienne to the office, the car running but locked courtesy of his remote. "Couldn't be a movie about my car being destroyed and a comedy." He observed on his approach to the desk, offering his driver's license as he spoke to the clerk. "I'm Lucas Bishop, reserved a room for the next few days."

When the clerk got Bishop checked in and forked over the keycard, Adrienne led the way back to the room and read the door while Bishop put the card in.

~Scenes streamed by in rewind. Cleaning ladies going in, tidying, changing linens, cleaning, followed by a pair of drunken teenagers giggling and otherwise attached at the mouth. More cleaning ladies, a man and a woman with a suspicious amount of Adam's apple in her throat, cleaning ladies. It cycled through, alternating between cleaning staff and guests. The reading paused on the image of a man in a chicken suit before the door swung shut and the image was cut off. The audio, however, wasn't and Adrienne could hear him pleading, "Pluck me, oh God, pluck me!" ~

"What do they call that fetish where you like having sex with people dressed in those... mascot costumes, or large animal costumes?" Adrienne inquired casually, then went back to reading the door, this time spotting Vanessa coming and going, then moving forward on the timeline until she spotted the same thugs from her reading of the phone coming in. "Ah hah! This is definitely her room. They took her from here." Not that they didn't know that already from what they got off the phones, but at least it was confirmed that they were in the right place.

"They're furries." Bishop offered as he pushed the door open looking across the room as it came into view. He was certainly being overly cautious, the room would have been cleaned several times by now and no one would be hanging around even if she had been abducted from this location. He stayed firmly planted outside the room for a moment. "Lets hope they don't move too many items between rooms."

Adrienne moved into the room but continued reading the door, her range covering the rooms on either side of Vanessa's so she could see the thugs coming from the room on the left. "They came from that room," she mentioned to Bishop when she stopped the reading, gesturing with a hand, "that's where the thugs were staying when they grabbed her, so if it's free we should check it out later?"


"The way their reserved the room will probably be more interesting. Or walk in and cash." Bishop tried to offer a bit of hope but with realism on it's heels.


She went in through the open door as Bishop stayed outside and strode to the bed where she'd seen the thugs put the unconscious Vee. "Ugh, I'm gonna have to watch the furries again, aren't I?" she muttered to herself, making a face. "And Christ knows what other assorted sexual horrors that happened in this bed." But in case the bed held some new information that the phone hadn't, she huffed out an annoyed breath and stuck her hand on the headboard.

Scenes flipped by in fast forward again in a seeming neverending cycle of cleaning, sleeping and sex. The sex varied from standard, vanilla missionary style to the man in the chicken costume wanting to lay his "eggs." The reading sped past that scene and moved further back to a BDSM scene complete with a man tied up and begging his mistress for release as she used a wand to shock his balls. Further back another vanilla scene of an affair. Then there was the men in black combing through Vanessa's room. The reading slowed as she rewound past Vanessa's abduction, past the entrance of the black-clad men and paused when Vanessa entered the room. Whole and well and walking along as if nothing important was going on. She looked a little tired and maybe a little sweaty but that was it. The bed revealed nothing more than the phones had. And pushing forward just revealed the same thing the phones had, that the men had brought her out of the bathroom unconscious. The phone had been close enough to the bed that the bed held no new information.

"Well, other than the unfortunate circumstance of never being able to un-see some of the crazy fetishes people have, I didn't glean anything new," she relayed to Bishop with a sigh, and because she'd seen herself sitting on the bed and then jumping up as if something had bitten her when she'd gone a little bit into the future by accident, Adrienne moved clear of the bed altogether. "The bathroom was where they actually nabbed her," she told her companion, nodding towards it. "I guess in case they said something to her in there, I should check it out."

"You can go from place to place, I'll keep up and take notes. We'll sift through it later." Bishop offered, pulling a pen and pad from his pocket to follow.

***


After reading what felt like every damn inch of Vanessa's motel room, and the thugs' room next door, Adrienne felt like collapsing on the disgusting bed. She even eyed the floor longingly. It wasn't the readings themselves that had exhausted her, though she did have a splitting headache, but moreso the fact that the lack of any new information had leeched her of all energy. She felt like a failure to Vanessa, and after a long, mopey silence lashed out and kicked one of the walls. "Fucking useless!" she extolled angrily, though she didn't say if she felt the trip had been useless or that she was useless. "Let's get the hell out of here," she muttered to Bishop darkly. "It's fucking depressing."

Noticing the wobble Adrienne's gait held, Bishop offered a broad arm as he opened the door. "It's not a load bearing wall but useless was harsh." He offered the quip in an attempt to break her understandably sour mood, if only for a moment.

Adrienne let out a watery laugh and leaned gratefully on Bishop. "I'm useless. I'm not the responsibility champion. I don't get shit done. We didn't learn anything new."

"Being a Detective is more about learning where there isn't any new information than what the TV will have you believe." Bishop supported Adrienne all the way to the car. "Not finding anything makes the few pieces of evidence more clear."

"Doesn't that only work if you have some evidence to start with?" she questioned, still mopey. "We have nothing. We didn't find anything and we have nothing to make more clear." As she let herself believe that, she started to despair more and more. "And no one outside of X-Factor even seems to be doing a damn thing and where are the damn X-Men cuz I put my faith in them, Jean's the only one who's actually trying, and the damn Trenchcoats, I believed in them too but clearly I was just being stupid cuz no one's been able to do shit, especially me!" To keep herself from bursting into tears, she kicked one of the tires on Bishop's car.


"Is it time for a juice box and a nap?" Bishop confronted Adrienne with as he poured her into the seat. "Sometimes things aren't easy. A tantrum isn't any more productive than sitting in the office because you're afraid no one will take the 'Mutant Police' seriously when they go outside 'Mutant Town.' We're not here to pick up a lead, we're here to find one."

Accepting he was possibly a little harsh, Bishop offered an old detective's joke. "The break is always in the last place you look."

Biting back her 'go fuck yourself' retort to the juice box and nap comment, Adrienne settled for glowering at Bishop. "Fine. We're finding a lead. A break. That presumes that one exists to begin with, which we have no evidence of so far." Still, he was right, she told herself, they had to keep looking if they wanted to get anywhere. It was what they were all doing; X-Force and the X-Men. They just had to keep looking and not stop until something actually started to fall into place.

"What do you want me to do?" she asked Bishop, looking for some guidance. "Read every inch of the parking lot? Follow the car they brought back to wherever they came from? My range is only twelve feet so I'd be like a cartoon animal chasing a trail of candy, but I'll do it if it's gonna find us a lead. I'll do anything at this point," she said with a wry laugh. "I want her home. It wasn't supposed to work like this, me being back without her. So tell me how to find the damn break, please."

"Every criminal leaves evidence." Bishop offered factually after stepping around to the driver's side and dropping into the seat. "You're not a walking crime lab so just relax. I didn't bring you to do everything, I brought you to help. Now that we know they were in the room next door, we see how they paid, get video surveillance to see what they were driving, check with people who were in adjacent rooms... we're not running out of options."

"Okay," Adrienne sighed, trying to keep herself optimistic. "You're right. I'm relaxed. We have options. We're gonna get shit done. But first I need a juice box and maybe a nap."