Endless Sleep

This one was a real sicko. They'd discovered 4 new works of art in parks around the city, only nobody had commissioned the art. And then someone noticed the smell, and called the police and it turned out the guy was entombing his victims in plaster, making sculptures out of them.

If it weren't for the decomp smell, he might have gotten away with it, at least until a good hard rain dissolved the medium. He must have used some kind of sprayer for the faces. The plaster was even there, and preserved their features.

Bobby had been meeting with Rodgers almost three times a day. As he thought it over, he would come up with more questions about the guy's process.

The chromatography results indicated that all of the victims had some degree of carbon monoxide poisoning, though that wasn't their COD. They all died from a lethal injection to the carotid.

"But, but rigor would set in and he wouldn't be able to, you know, position them like he wants to…"

"He kept them alive while he was plastering them?" Rodgers asked.

Bobby stared at her, and nodded slowly. "I think so, yes."

Rodgers sighed. "Well, it could be done. I'll go back through the blood tests, see if I can find anything else. Maybe he chemically restrained them and then killed them once he had the pose he wanted."

"Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm thinking," Goren said. "Could the, uh, CO poisoning have done that?"

"No. The victim would have been disoriented and nauseated, but I don't think they would willingly let him pose them and plaster them. And if they were poisoned to the point of losing consciousness, then he was taking a big risk that they would die before he finished. And he himself, could have CO poisoning as well."

"He couldn't have… protected himself from it?"

She shrugged. "It's odd that all the victims have this in common, but there are a million ways we are exposed to carbon monoxide every day. I'm not willing to say it's directly related to their murders."

"Thank you, Doctor."

"I'll call you after I go through the reports again."

"Thanks."

This last victim was a child, a 12 year old boy from the Bronx. The body was posed in a reclined position, with a hand on his groin and a porn magazine lying open against his chest. The kids' parents were horrified. They were good people, and they didn't look at porn, and their son had never said or done anything of a sexual nature. Even the kid's best friend said he wouldn't have done something like that.

Alex was very disturbed by the whole thing. As they left the neighborhood, they quietly discussed the interviews. She shook her head and looked over at Bobby.

He shrugged. "It's uh, you know, a work of art…" he was going to stop his sentence there, but he saw the horrified look on her face. "…to him," he continued. "The bodies are just a medium. You know, the paint itself doesn't tell you what to paint. That comes from the mind of the artist."

"So you think this kid was pure like they say?"

Bobby nodded. "Probably."

In the car, Bobby reviewed his notes about the last movements of the young man. They spent the rest of the day retracing his steps, gathering more and more and more information about his final moments on earth.

They met back at 1PP to brief the Captain before calling it a night.

"He was seen in and out of this building at least 5 times in the last week. We talked to the Super. He gave us the name of a tenant who mysteriously vanished about 3 o'clock yesterday." Alex was very matter of fact.

"You run him down?"

"We put the word out that he's a person of interest," Bobby explained.

"Get a search warrant for his apartment. Go back there tomorrow, see what you can find. And get some rest while you can. I have a feeling you're gonna need it," Ross said.

They discussed who they'd ask to sign the warrant, and agreed it should be in the morning. Judges liked to get their sleep, too.

"You gonna be all right?" Eames asked him. She knew how he got consumed with cases, and she'd already seen it taking hold of him today.

"Yeah, you know, I'll… I'll put on a movie or something… distract myself." Bobby ran his hand through his hair. "You?"

"I'm so tired I don't think I'll need a distraction."

"Good night, Eames."

"Good night, Bobby."

They arrived at the judge's house just as the man finished his first cup of coffee. Judge McKinto had a son almost the same age as the last victim. He was easily convinced to sign the warrant.

They headed back out to the apartment, warrant in hand, and a team of officers met them there. The Super, Brad Hagen, was as nice as ever. The old man was on oxygen today, and explained that he had COPD after years of working in a forge in his youth.

"There's good days and bad days," he told him, and he seemed short of breath, even with the oxygen. The officers knocked on the apartment door, and receiving no answer, the Super unlocked the door and they went in.

It took about an hour, but they had evidence that the man, Aaron Pait, had been dating someone, and had bought tickets to a broadway show for a couple of nights before.

"That was before the last victim was killed," Bobby said, and Alex nodded.

"Well, I guess now we track down the girlfriend," Alex announced as they headed back to the car. Bobby stopped to let Hagen know they were leaving. He left his card and asked to be called if Aaron should return.

"I haven't seen him in three days! He asked me out for Thursday night, but he never showed. I call him, and he doesn't answer!" She cursed him under her breath in Greek.

The detectives shared a look before heading out again. They briefed the Captain and spent the rest of the day trying to find Pait. Rodgers came upstairs to discuss the blood tests with them.

Alex invited her into an interview room, and Bobby shut the door behind them.

"I found droperidol, a sedative, in their systems. And… I went back over the bodies, found another injection point, in the genitalia."

Bobby was soaking the information in, but this last revelation made his face screw up in confusion. "What? Like, a hasty needle strike, or…?"

"I would have seen it the first time if it had gone down that way. There would have been bruising, tearing… These were very carefully administered injections, Detective."

"Nobody is going to sit still while somebody sticks a needle in your—" Bobby began.

Alex interrupted him. "They were unconscious already when he sedated them?" She looked at the Doctor, and then at her partner. "Why sedate them if they're already unconscious?"

"Droperidol is a highly effective chemical restraint. Maybe whatever he attacked them with first wasn't. Maybe they were simply sleeping when he injected them."

"Thanks, Rodgers." Bobby spoke quietly, scratching his head, and still cross with the new information.

He still hadn't made sense of it when Hagen called them back. "I forgot to tell you he had access to this workshop in the basement," the old man explained, huffing as he walked. "Excuse me," he said to them. They waited while he exchanged his cannula for a face mask. He moved it aside to speak to them. "I'm sorry," the old man said. "It's been a really bad day for this."

"You don't have to take us," Alex said, feeling for the man.

"No, I'll take you down and let you in. After that, you're on your own." He replaced the mask over his face and walked them to the basement, where he turned on the light. He hung back by the light switch, removed the mask a moment and announced. "Last summer he asked if he could paint his bike down here. That's why I gave him the key. You see the workshop over there. It's ideal for that sort of thing." He put the mask back on and adjusted the flow of oxygen.

They milled around, searching carefully for any evidence they could find. The old man pulled up a chair and sat watching them, staying out of their way. They didn't notice that he had slipped something into the pellet stove.

Alex's head was pounding, but she stayed focused as best she could. She opened a cabinet and found a bucket of dry plaster of paris. "Look, Bobby," she said. "I'm gonna call CSU."

He nodded and continued rummaging in the old barrels of rags in the corner. "Eames," he called, and held up a young boy's shirt, emblazoned with a Christian life logo.

"No service down here," she told him. She put her phone away and walked closer to inspect the shirt. Alex sighed. "Something a good boy might wear," she remarked. Then she raised her hand to rub her temples.

Bobby looked at her with concern. "Eames?"

She shook it off. "Just a headache. Probably coming down with something."

They postponed calling in CSU as they were now finding more and more items of interest. Before long, Alex held one hand over her stomach and stumbled back to sit on a bench.

"Alex?"

"Sick."

"Well, g-go ahead. You can call CSU and I'll stay down here." Before they had a chance to act on that, the old man shut the doors on them.

They were old bifold doors, metal with louvres at the top and the bottom. Bobby turned and tried to open them, but the man had secured them somehow.

"Mr. Hagen?" Bobby called, as he realized he wasn't feeling so well, either. "Mr. Hagen, let us out!"

He heard nothing in response. Bobby tried the doors again, but they didn't budge. He looked around frantically. In the workshop room, there was one window, but it was boarded over and the latch was rusted shut.

Alex fell off the bench, unconscious.

He stumbled over to her, checking her pulse, which was thankfully, still there. His mind put the facts together. Carbon monoxide. The oxygen mask. Mr. Hagen was their killer.

"Carbon monoxide, carbon monoxide," Bobby thought. "Gotta get some oxygen, some air in here," he told himself. He looked at the boarded window again and gave up on it. Then he turned his attention to the bifold doors. He stepped back, then ran full speed and rammed them with his shoulder, bending the metal and knocking them right out of their tracks. He landed on top of the twisted metal in a heap. The old man was nowhere to be seen. Bobby looked up and saw a window ahead of him. He reached up, opened it, sucked in a breath of fresh air, and then raced back to Alex.

In the inner confines of the room, the air was very bad. He tried to drag her out, but his movements were drunken and sloppy. He backed up as well as he could, dragging her with him, until he tripped on the twisted metal doors on the floor and fell hard. Bobby tried to get up, but he was overcome. The last thing he saw was the still burning pellet stove.