Title: Curiosity Killed

Characters: Lennie Briscoe, Ed Green, Anita Van Buren, Elizabeth Rodgers, Arthur Branch, Jack McCoy, OFC, and assorted guest stars and extras.

Summary: Two joggers discover a body in Central Park. Briscoe and Green investigate. They initially suspect a corrupt city councillor, but after an earlier crime comes to light, they arrest another suspect. McCoy must make a deal to secure a conviction.

Rating: M for sexual content, off-screen sexual violence, and profanity.

Disclaimer: I do not own "Law and Order", nor any of the characters therein. I am making no profit from this.

Author's note: I am not NY native or indeed an American, as my woefully inadequate knowledge of NY geography and the American legal system makes perfectly clear! I do, however, love Law and Order. Down here in Oz, we get the episodes years late and often out of order, which has led to my long-standing confusion between who is in the show when and why and how old they are. My fannish imagination therefore has its own chronology, which differs from the show's canon in only three substantial ways: Lennie Briscoe didn't retire; Jack McCoy was snap-frozen ten years ago (since that's the age he is in the credits, I choose to believe he is simply photographed unflatteringly in the later series) ; and this story kicks off at the beginning of series seventeen, so it is substantially AU to everything from then on.

Reviews welcome, constructive criticism especially welcome. Flames ignored.

A Regular Lois Lane

Central Park

6.30 am 6 September 2006

"So I said to her, I said, you can't be expecting me to sit up all night waiting for you." The two female joggers – one tall and burly, the other shorter and whippet thin - were muffled up against the early morning fall chill. The speaker was the larger of the two, and her words came in spurts on the steaming puffs of her breath as she laboured up a long slow rise.

"Good for you, Kaylee. And what did she say?" Her companion, fitter, spoke easily.

"She said – oh, Jesus, oh my god, oh Jesus Christ." Kaylee stopped short, and her friend's momentary confusion – it seemed an excessive response to a minor domestic disagreement – cleared when she followed Kaylee's horrified gaze. Half-hidden in the bushes, a woman's right arm and shoulder stuck out of a pile of newspaper – the improbable angle of the elbow and the purple colour letting both joggers know something was seriously wrong with the owner of that arm.

"Get help!" Kaylee ordered her companion. As her friend bolted off up the hill, Kaylee took a few steps forward. Kneeling down, she gingerly brushed the newspaper away from the prone form. "Hello, can you hear me, hello?"

Her fingers touched flesh as cold as the ground she knelt on, and she recoiled. The movement dislodged more of the newspaper over the body, and she found herself staring at the woman's face. The bluish tint to the skin, the fixed and wide-open eyes, were shocking enough, but Kaylee hardly noticed them. Her attention was fixed and held by the corpse's mouth, bulging and distorted with pages and pages of newspaper crammed deep behind her teeth.

By the time Briscoe and Green made it to the park the ME had fished the dead woman's wallet out of her pocket and the uniforms had discovered her driver's licence.

"Jennifer Walker," Briscoe read. "Thirty four years old. Five foot six, a hundred and forty five pounds."

"Here's a press-card," Green said. "She was a journalist – with the Daily News."

Briscoe stooped over the corpse as the ME used tweezers to tug a piece of newspaper from Jennifer Walker's gaping mouth. "Daily News." he said, reading the banner. "Looks like somebody made her eat her words."