Title: The Vault
Author: Greywolf
Couple: All CC mainly M/L
Rating: Mature due to subject matter, violence
Disclaimer: I don't own Roswell or any of the characters. But if I did, I'd have done a better job on Jim Valenti. Melinda Metz made him a monster. Jason Katims did a much better job with him. Most cops aren't all that bad, and even the worst generally better than those they protect us from. But please don't sue me, i'm just having a little fun here.
Summary: This takes place about a month after Max heals Liz in the Crashdown when fate takes their love in a whole different direction.
Saturday Morning 10:00 AM Roswell Sheriff’s Office
Sheriff Jim Valenti was sitting at his desk. Being a Sheriff was not a 40 hour a week job, and he had gotten to his office this Saturday before 8:00 AM on this, a supposed “day off.”
He had first reviewed the duty log from last night. It had been a fairly unremarkable Friday night in Chaves County. One bar fight with no one seriously injured, one perpetrator already had been bailed by his family, the other was on the phone now trying to find a bail bondsman on a Saturday morning. There were two DWI arrests, with one having an outstanding warrant on him from Dona Ana County for domestic violence. They’d work out transporting him on Monday, if the extradition paperwork was complete by then. Altogether a not particularly exciting night. That was good, the lack of excitement. In law enforcement, exciting nights tended to be bad news.
He then had reviewed the law enforcement message traffic. There were the usual missing person’s reports, generally teenage runaways who had fights with their parents. Their pictures and descriptions would be distributed, but he doubted that any of these kids would show up in Roswell. They tended to head for the bright lights of Phoenix, or other big towns. Two level-three sex offenders had apparently cut off their tracking anklets and somehow walked away from the Albuquerque sex offender treatment halfway house, but these people were believed headed in the other direction, toward Gallup, on the road to Las Vegas. A drug ring had been broken up in Taos, but several members were not caught. Their descriptions would be distributed to the deputies. No imminent problems, based on the message traffic. It was a quiet morning.
Putting aside his routine work, he dug back into the file he had kept in his desk for the last three weeks, the Max Evans file, and began to review it once again. Reading the witness reports from the Crashdown shooting incident, he again felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Something was absolutely wrong here, but he couldn’t quite understand, or couldn’t quite convince himself, of just what that something was.
He’d known Liz Parker for years, heck, his son Kyle had even dated her a few times. Exactly what had happened he didn’t know, but whatever it was had involved Max Evans, and it had terrified the girl.
She was unskilled at lying, and on the initial interview she had given, she had lied a number of times. At the time he’d written her nervousness off as a reaction to the discharge of a gun that could have killed her, but she had specifically denied that the teenagers that the tourist couple had described being present were local teenagers, and Max Evans had later confessed at the Crash celebration that he had indeed been there. Even shaken up by the gunplay, it seemed unlikely that Liz Parker could have failed to recognize him. She’d known him since the third grade and, he found out from Kyle, was her current Biology lab partner.
Clearly, she had been terrified by whatever Max Evans had done with her on the day of the shooting, and when she’d subsequently been interviewed again, she again seemed to be frightened to death. She had made some clumsy evasions there as well. He would have liked to pursue it further, but being an innocent bystander being shot at by unruly customers really wasn’t much of a crime, and no one was going to take action against a 16 year old waitress for making false statements in the half-hour after she’d just been shot at either. He’d tried to get further information obliquely, leaning on the other waitress and Liz’s best friend, Maria DeLuca, but all that interview told him was that whatever Liz feared was apparently contagious, Maria was just as scared, though perhaps a somewhat more experienced liar.
He didn’t know what hold Max Evans had over these two young ladies, but whatever that hold was it clearly terrified them both. Despite Max’s reputation as a shy introvert honor student, there was something going on here.
He thought of Philip and Diane Evans, remembering that terrible night when he, as a rookie deputy had come upon the accident. A trucker who’d been using amphetamines to stay awake, to make up time through the desert had lost control of his rig and crossed the centerline. Philip had tried to turn, but their car had still been struck a grazing blow that nearly demolished it. Philip had been badly bruised but not seriously hurt. The blunt trauma to Diane had cost the couple not just the baby she was carrying, but the capability to ever have children. He remembered bitterly that the truck driver had gotten off with six months in jail, with four months of that suspended. Sixty days, for the loss of a life, and the devastation of two others.
He’d also been on duty the night, almost ten years ago, that they’d come across the two foundlings walking in the desert, walking naked hand in hand. It had seemed like a godsend to the Evans' at the time, although Valenti privately thought the kids were probably from some weird religious cult. How else to explain 6 year olds that couldn’t talk, and weren’t even potty-trained. But nonetheless, these kids had turned around the devastated couple. And the girl, at least, had seemed to be a really good kid. He’d worked with her on the Christmas Toys for Tots drive. A little intense, perhaps, someone had once called her “the Christmas Nazi,” but a hard worker with her heart in the right place.
Her brother, however, had always been somewhat of an enigma, a loner, cordial but never really warming to anyone. The Sheriff found himself wondering what the Unabomber had been like as a kid, what a young Jeffrey Daumer had been like, or a young David Koresh? For somehow, something about this introvert kid was scaring the Hell out of Liz Parker and Maria DeLuca and while the Sheriff didn’t know what, he would find out. And whatever it was, he’d find a way to protect the girls and the people of Chaves county from this kid. That too was his job.
