Hi Everyone - This is my first attempt at this, so all feedback is welcome!
five…. six….. seven. Teresa Lisbon slowly continued her counting, scanning the pages before her with a look of pure determination, occasionally digging for yet another file. She had been there for over 10 hours.….fifteen. A pause. fifteen total. fifteen cases since 1990, all linked to each other, connected by such a small detail. All of the victims were women, aged 19-45, all racial backgrounds, with cause of death ranging from shootings to stabbings to strangulations. The one commonality in all of them? Lipstick applied posthumously, at least two hours after death. Lisbon looked over the cases she had stacked over her desk. Fifteen. And those were the cases where the medical examiner had paid enough attention to detail to notice. She silently cursed herself for all the times she rushed the crew down at the morgue for immediate results. Who knows how many cases had been missed already? Lisbon had followed her hunch and, with the evidence before her, lay convinced that she was dealing with a serial killer. It was as obvious to her now as the blue of the sky.
She felt the rush she was expecting: the cop's high, knowing a case is about to erupt in any minute. It was a feeling that kept her in this job when she could have succeeded in so many safer, better paid options. The sensation kept her from becoming bored with the usual series of crimes of passion or greed. A husband shooting his cheating wife, a businessman double crossed and killed. Those cases left her memory shortly after they were closed. What lay before her, the thing she was about to chase down, was something different, something more dangerous and engaging. Lisbon took an unsteady breath and once more surveyed the files in front of her, her green eyes glinting with a look most would mistake to be hunger.
Patrick Jane watched the raven-haired women furiously at work in her office. He had gone home for a few hours and wasn't surprised to find her still rumaging around when he came back the next morning. She was completely on a mission, that much was obvious. Any questions or interruptions from him or the other team members had been greeted with not-so-veiled threats of violence and a slammed door. Watching her now was almost like watching an opened clock, each piece of her mind was slowly rotating, pushing the others into place. And now she had
reached the bottom of yet another pile on her desk, haphazardly pulling pages from files in an ever-multiplying mess and then…. she stopped. Jane watched her green eyes focus and then widen as they surveyed the paperwork around her. Her face became flushed, almost in an expression of arousal, very unlike Lisbon, who usually took great care to cover all but the most superficial emotions in her face. Jane pushed the thought from his mind and turned back to watching the petite agent. Her coloring had paled back to its normal white, but her eyes still shone a brilliant, fiery green. A pause and then Jane found himself staring into those very eyes, their emerald pull powerful against the puzzled energy of his own blue. Lisbon, startled, had run up to the window of her office and drawn the blinds, clearly unsettled by being watched. Jane suppressed a grin at the thought of startling her once again and waited a moment, giving her a chance to compose herself, before bursting into the office.
Jane's eyes had pulled Lisbon from her own thoughts. Closing the blinds she leaned against the door, a new shade of red touching her cheeks. She was immediately embarrassed by the nakedness that she had displayed. That shaming reaction of pleasure that she always had at cases like this. She couldn't let herself forget that this rush, this high, was dependent on the suffering of others, on the pain of strangers. For that she hated herself, hated that she could become so engaged by these things. The part of herself that had just come to the surface was something that scared her. She couldn't let it take over, despite how good it felt. Lisbon took a deep breath and prepared herself for the inevitable interruption that would follow.
Once I get some feedback I will post part II