A/N: Greetings. I was debating with myself over whether or not to start a new story on the first day of Finals Week, but I realized that if I don't have something to do to distract myself things are gonna start getting killed. And by 'things' I mean 'people'. And I'd be doing the killing. So, yeah... If I sound a little loopy right now, that's because it's one a.m. and I'm still awake, so I should probably get to sleep after I post this. And stop rambling inanely in the Author's Note. That might help too. I'm going to shut up now. Enjoy! ^-^

Rebecca slipped easily over the flood barrier and walked along the riverbank, camera poised. The last week's torrential rain had, at least for a brief time, finally simmered down. The site was still too wet to do any digging at, though. She smiled to herself at the continuity of it; it used to be an ocean, and now that it was on dry land it was too wet to do anything with. Well, at least the fresh mud in the bank would give them good reference pictures. And she was getting bored with man-made places, with seeing how much had changed since the last time she'd been there; twelve years ago her dad was restationed, and it was back to Texas with them. Not that she didn't like Texas. She liked it quite a lot, but she didn't like unfinished business, and that was what she'd left behind. She shook her head and told herself she was being stupid; it was twelve years back, over and finished with… nothing to be done about it now.

She cast off the dark feelings and looked at the intricate ripple patterns of the mud. The river couldn't have been flowing more than ten miles an hour here, a lull in the speed it built up passing around the bank's curve. She knelt down, careful not to actually touch the mud with her knees. After years of practice, the patterns of the river were easy to read. Swift here, sluggish there, and a myriad of other details, too many for one person to find. Rebecca closed her eyes and pictured the land as it was; the image came naturally to her. It always had, ever since she was young, which had made it easy in graduate school. It was a whole lot less work for her than it was for the others. She opened her eyes and stood back up. She looked further down the bank, away from the direction she'd come, and spotted something unusual. She gave it a closer look and realized what it was.

"Ah, shit." She ran over. It was a body. She sighed. "Please be alive, dude. It would be so much cooler if you were." She knelt down next to him, careful not to disturb the scene as it was. Just like she would on a dig, except this was no dig. She pressed two fingers to his neck, checking for an unlikely pulse. There was none; the man was dead. She closed her eyes for a brief second, then stood back up straight and pulled out her cell phone. The different emergency number came back to her naturally, another reminder of matters not cleared up.

"Hello? Yeah, I found a dead guy. Down by the river."

The Scotland Yard crew didn't have a whole lot to do on Thursday evenings. Not that they minded. They still got paid and all that, but without the murders and curb crawlers and drunken bar fights. It had become a habit among them in their down time to take a look at who was getting released soon. It was listed in the database and quite honestly some of the things people got themselves locked up for were beyond hilarious. A sergeant was scrolling through the list, calling out some of the more amusing ones.

"Only five this week, I guess we're really holding onto 'em," she reported. "Let's see what we've got…" She snorted. "Here's one who spent the night for peeing in a public fountain. Oh, and this guy got into a drunken bar fight. And hey, here's the one he fought with… Oh, this one's serious. Damn, they should keep him in longer, that's ridiculous. Oh, and last but not least, this fellow got caught vandalizing a tractor. So that's it, then." The sergeant was looking through next week's significantly longer lineup when her phone rang. She looked at it in surprise; anything larger than petty crime was unusual at this time of the week, especially with the weather they'd been having. She picked up the receiver.

"Hello? Where? Okay, I'll tell the inspector." She wrote down a list of facts on a sheet of paper and carried them over to an office.

"Inspector?" She knocked on the door and Lestrade looked up at her. "We've got a suspicious death down on the river bank. Just called in." Lestrade stood up to leave.

"Do we know the name?" he asked.

"Not yet, but it's a male, mid-thirties, and it looks like he might have drowned. Some tourist found him when there was a break in the rain." Lestrade nodded.

"Go get Donovan, tell her to meet me there. Let's hope we can clear this up quick, before the rain starts again."

John stared up at the ceiling from his position on the couch. Good Lord, but he wanted to take a nap. Except he couldn't, he had work in an hour. Plus he was fairly sure that if left to his own devices, Sherlock would have the whole flat down in thirty minutes. He had been even more restless than he usually was when caseless, and John was starting to worry about him. There was something not right about it; something else was getting under the detective's skin, and John couldn't tell what it was, and that was getting under his skin. He sighed to himself, rolled off of the couch, and went to change clothes and shower. Sherlock was in the kitchen meddling with chemicals he probably shouldn't have been able to even purchase, but John wasn't going to ask questions he didn't want to know the answer to.

He was halfway through changing when Sherlock's phone rang. Well, that put a shower out of the question, but then again he could always just go outside and get one naturally. He headed back down the stairs.

"Who was that?"

"Lestrade." No surprises there. "They found a body on the riverbank. It looks like a drowning." John frowned. They didn't usually call Sherlock for natural-causes deaths. Still, he wasn't complaining; the sooner Sherlock got a case, the better. Hopefully this would distract him from whatever was bothering him so much.

"If it's just a drowning what do they want you go there for? Is there something different about this one?" It wouldn't be a huge surprise if the guy had drowned. With the weather like it had been that last week or so and the river flooding, it was only a matter of time before someone tempted fate one too many times.

"They don't know yet." Sherlock grabbed his coat and swept toward the door. John followed him into the wet street and they hailed a cab. There was finally a break in the rain, but no one knew for how long. "Lestrade called me because they need to get finished as fast as possible before the rain picks up again."

The dead man had yet to be identified. He had no wallet, no fingerprints in the system, and his cell battery had been thoroughly fried by the river water. They kept him in exactly the same position as they found him, to avoid contamination until Sherlock got there. Sally wasn't happy about his impending presence, and Rebecca found herself privy to a very unusual conversation.

"Sir, we don't need him!"

"Yes we do, Sergeant, it's my crime scene and I'll decide whether or not to bring him in on it."

"But you know the Freak'll just get here and act like we're wasting his time." Rebecca arched an eyebrow. That seemed a little cold. Whoever this fellow was, the sergeant obviously didn't think very highly of him. She feigned disinterest when Lestrade turned to her; the general rule in her family was that you could pay as much unashamed interest in another person's conversation as you wanted as long as you pretended otherwise when they were looking.

"So what exactly were you doing walking along a flooded riverbank?" he asked her. She shrugged casually.

"Taking pictures." She considered that explanation enough, and didn't bother to elaborate further.

"Taking pictures? Of what?"

"The riverbank; I was looking for patterns in the sediment, for comparisons." Lestrade was wondering why she would need pictures of dirt, but he was distracted by a small bit of commotion up ahead. Sherlock and John had arrived, and as per usual, Sherlock and Sally were snipping at each other. Honestly, it was ridiculous how they deliberately baited each other, but Lestrade could only suppose that they didn't mind if they kept on doing it. Rebecca saw his eye roll and grinned at him.

"What's up, Inspector?" Lestrade shook his head.

"Nothing, really, it's just those two. The tall one and Donovan don't get along very well… or at all, really." Rebecca laughed at his words.

"I presume that's the fellow you two were arguing about earlier?" Lestrade rolled his eyes again.

"I knew you were listening to us." The taller one, finished with his argument, came toward them swiftly, and Rebecca gave him a look-over and frowned. He seemed familiar… She just about felt her heart stop.

"Holy shit…"