Chapter 2.3 - Cops and Robbers

“Doe!”

“Yes?”

“You aren’t working on anything right now, are you?”

“Well, I have some paperwork here…”

“So nothing important, good. We need you on a case.”

Dylan sprang out of his chair immediately. He hadn’t been put on many cases yet (he and Miraj were still the rookies), but he had acquitted himself excellently on the few he had been assigned to.

When he entered the conference room, he was surprised to find Officers Keaton and Wainwright already there. The Sunset Valley police force was extremely short-staffed, so it was unusual for more than one or two officers to handle a single case. This must be big.

“Doe, you’re here, good. We have a serious problem.”

Dylan grew more and more concerned as she explained. Crime was on the rise in Sunset Valley. It had been since shortly before he joined the force. Usually, the criminals of Sunset Valley mostly committed petty theft, plotted to conquer the world, and occasionally flooded their “secret base” by accident. In short, they were pretty harmless, which was why it wasn’t a huge problem that the police force was so short-staffed. Lately, though, bad things had been happening. Priceless antiques were stolen from the museum. Houses were set on fire and left to burn. There had even been one kidnapping case, and though the child had been returned, the force was on high alert in case it happened again.

These crimes weren’t the work of the usual set. No, there was a new crime lord in town, and it was their job to track him down. The trouble was, they were so used to the usual type of crime that they had no idea how to approach this.

“So you see our dilemma.”

 “Yes, but I don’t see what you expect me to do about it.”

Officer Keaton sighed. “Not much. We want you on this because we thought a pair of fresh eyes might help you see what the rest of us had missed. We just caught a burglar, one of the usual suspects. We’re going to ask him some questions about the new folks in town. We want you to sit quietly and watch.”

Dylan nodded. He could do that.

--------

“It’s nice to see you again, Officer.”

“I wish I could say the same, Mr. Bland. Can you not stay out of trouble for more than a week?”

The man shrugged. “What can I say? It’s in my nature to be bad.”

“We both know you don’t really believe that.”

“So why’d you call me down here, anyway? I would’ve thought you had wrung all the information you could out of me.”

“What do you know of the recent crime spree in town?”

 The burglar suddenly turned serious. “Well, we’re not the ones doing it, I can tell you that.”

“We know that. We want to know who is.”

“Look, I swear I don’t know. All I can tell you is that a man came down to the warehouse one day and offered a king’s ransom to anyone who came and joined him and his boss. Not a lot of folks defected, but a few of the newbies took him up on his offer.”

“What did the man look like?”

“Big guy. Older, but still pretty big. Looked like he was good-looking once upon a time, but those days are past. Longer hair than you usually see on a career crook. Nose had been broken at least once.”

Dylan leaned over to Officer Keaton, who sat next to him. “How do we know he’s not feeding us lies?”

“It’s always a possibility, but this guy isn’t his colleague. There’s no rule against ratting out the competition.”

After the interrogation was over, Dylan was released. He doubted he would be able to contribute much to the investigation, but he was going to try.

--------

In the meantime, his personal life was going remarkably well.

“Tara, come on!”

“Not all of us are in as good shape as you are, Dylan. If anything, you should wait for me!”

Finally, they reached the top of the hill. Well, Dylan called it a hill. Tara was of the opinion that it drew a marked resemblance to a mountain.

“But now that we’re here, isn’t this nice?”

“I'll give you that much. How did you find this place?”

“Honestly? I asked my brother where the most romantic place in town was.”

Tara burst out laughing. “That's so Dylan of you. I didn't even know you had a brother.”

“Half-brother, technically. Sam's a lot older than me. He and his wife just had a baby.”

“You'll have to introduce me to them sometime.”

Dylan smiled at her, a warm fuzzy feeling filling his chest. “Yeah. I will.”

Author's Note: So if you're on the Random Legacy thread on MTS, you might know that my game broke. The save file just stopped working. I had a full on attack of the clones going on, the relationships in town were all screwed up, the save file wouldn't open - it was crazy. I managed to get all of the people absolutely necessary for the story saved, then I moved them all to a brand-new clean version of Sunset Valley. The problem I have now is that before I moved anyone in, I deleted all the original Sunset Valley pre-mades, because I don't want any weird time paradoxes happening in my legacy neighborhood. I then moved in all of my saved households, all of the households in the family bin, a couple of households that I made for different things - and I still only have about fifteen households, and four of those are made of Does. The neighborhood is empty. So I thought I'd ask: if any of you have any sims you wouldn't mind donating to help me populate my neighborhood, that would be amazing. I can make some more sims if you don't have any, but I personally think that all of my sims that I made in CAS kind of look the same. I'd rather have some genetic diversity scattered around my neighborhood.

On a different note, Sam and Kaylynn's baby isn't actually born yet (I wrote this chapter before my game broke), but I'll try to have a picture for you next chapter. Join us next time for more attempts at plot and a surprise!