Title: All Relevant Evidence
Summary: When Briscoe and Green investigate a dead Jane Doe, they'll have to discover who she was to find out who killed her. But a positive ID only leads to more mysteries about a woman who kept a lot of secrets. Jack McCoy will need every legal trick in the book to find out the truth, but the case is complicated by an old antagonist, whose ruthless tactics in defense of his client will put more than the prosecution at risk. McCoy will have to pull out all the stops to make sure that all relevant evidence comes to light.
Rating: M for coarse language, suggestive themes, sexual situations and smut.
Disclaimer: I do not own "Law and Order", nor any of the characters therein. I am making no profit from this.
Characters: Jack McCoy, Arthur Branch, OFC, Mike Logan, Megan Wheeler, Robert Goren, Alexandra Eames, Ron Carver, Daniel Ross, Lennie Briscoe, Ed Green, Abbie Carmichael, Anita Van Buren. Also featuring Emil Skoda, Danielle Melnick, Liz Rodgers, Jamie Ross, extras and surprise guest stars.
A/N: This story follows "Fruit of the Poison Tree" and is another installment in the same series. It references events in the earlier stories but if you haven't read them I hope you can pick up here.
If ff net would let me add as many genres as I want, this story would be angst, drama, crime, hurt/comfort, romance, suspense and friendship.
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. Here, 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 reruns that are all our free-to-air channels see fit to give us); and my series kicks off at the beginning of series seventeen, so it is substantially AU to everything from then on.
Marty's Marvelous Machines
191 48th Street West
8.15 am Monday 9 July 2007
"Jesus fucking Christ!" Sal Marcono slammed his fist down on the hood of the car. "Marty, I don't got time for this! I have to pick Lisa up at nine sharp."
Marty Licardo shrugged. "So tell her your car was in the shop."
Sal put his head in his hands. "Lisa is not exactly the kind of woman who listens to excuses. This is my last chance. I had to beg and plead and promise her a new stair-master to even persuade her to get on the plane!"
"How are going to afford a new stair-master?"
"That's tomorrow's problem. Today's problem is picking her up from the airport on time and I need my car! You said you'd have it ready!"
Marty fished around in his pocket and found a packet of cigarettes. "I said I'd have it ready if the parts got here. The parts didn't get here. What do you want me to do?"
"Can't you, I don't know, McGyver it? Chewing gum and string?"
Marty snorted. "Yeah, if you want the engine to blow up on the Parkway while you're taking her home."
"I don't care if the engine blows up ten seconds after she gets in the car. The only thing that matters is that I'm there to meet that plane." Sal thumped the hood of the car again. "C'mon, man, you know what Lisa's like."
Marty lit his cigarette. "I know what she's like since she caught you balls-deep in her sister, yeah."
"Oh, come on, man. It was a moment of weakness. Lisa's the love of my life, you know that. And I gotta pick her up from the airport or that's it, man! Game over."
"Okay, look." Marty dragged on his cigarette and squinted against the smoke. "You can borrow mine, okay."
"Thank you, Marty. You are — you're a prince among men, that's what you are. A prince among men."
"Yeah, yeah." The mechanic led the way to the rear of the lot. "But I tell you, one scratch, Sal — if someone even breathes on my baby wrong at a red light …"
"I promise, I'll take care of it as if it was my own."
"Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of." Marty tossed the keys to Sal. "If anything happens to her, you won't have any reason to care whether or not Lisa agrees to come home again. Let's leave it at that."
Sal winced, and unlocked the door. "I really owe you big time," he said, sliding behind the wheel.
Given he was driving Marty's wheels, and Marty was standing right there watching him, Sal was extra careful as he slid the key into the ignition and turned it. He made a big show of adjusting the mirrors, managed to avoid crunching the gears as he shifted into first, and started to pull out.
The wheels bumped over something, hard. Sal heard Marty yell. Jesus, like it's my fault he left a jack or something under his car. If he stopped to apologize, he ran the risk of Marty taking back the loaner, and he really couldn't be late. Not for Lisa, not on the first day of the rest of their lives.
He didn't look in the rear-view mirror in case Marty was waving for him to come back.
If he had, he might have seen the body.
Marty's Marvelous Machines
191 48th Street West
9 am Monday 9 July 2007
"If it's any consolation," the young man from the Crime Scene Unit said, looking up from the body, "she was well and truly dead when the car went over her. I'd say since ten or eleven last night."
Lennie Briscoe studied the battered form. "You got a cause for me?"
"I count four bullet holes, one in the leg, three in the torso. And that's just to start. Hard to say if one of them would have been fatal by itself but judging from the size of the blood pool, cause of death was exsanguination."
"So she died here?"
"My best guess, detective, is yes. Under the parked car. Either she or someone else lost enough blood to be fatal right about here. And at first glance, those look like tracks from one set of tires, not two. But you know —"
"Yeah, yeah, wait for the prelim. Thanks, kid." Briscoe clapped him on the shoulder and straightened. "You're positive she's not carrying any ID."
"If we find her social tattooed on her ass when we get her back to the lab, I'll be sure and let you know."
Everybody's a comedian. Briscoe didn't mind a little crime-scene humor but he objected to twenty-year olds who still had acne stepping on his schtick.
He looked around. It wasn't the worse crime scene he'd seen, from a detecting perspective, but it wasn't the best, either. The best had been an upscale Manhattan loft, white walls, white carpet, white everything against which every drop of blood, stray hair and speck of dirt had stood out as if outlined in neon.
This was a concrete lot that had seen hundreds of cars dripping oil, brake-fluid, and rust, and which was currently filled with a dozen clunkers whose grazes could be the result of bullet ricochets or of just the normal day-to-day on New York's streets.
Still, once you knew they were there, the bloodstains were easy to find. A smeared trail led to where the body had been found. Briscoe backtracked and found where it started, next to an '88 Buick with a crumpled rear end. There was blood on the Buick, and a thick trail of drops leading up to it. So this was where she fell down. Fell down, and crawled the rest of the way to where she'd tried to hide under the car. Maybe she fell down because she got shot for the second and third and fourth times here. Briscoe signaled to one of the CSU techs to check the area.
The trail of droplets took him all the way to the front of the lot. There was a bloody hand-print there, on the bumper of one of the cars. Good odds that this was where their victim had taken her first bullet. Leg or body, she'd grabbed at the place and then caught her balance against the car.
Which meant she'd been standing right by the pavement when whoever it was had opened up on her.
So why, Briscoe wondered, had she run into the lot?
"Hey, Lennie!" Ed Green had been walking the car-lot's perimeter, looking in trash cans and under the trash that hadn't quite made it to the can, and now he was crouching down and using a pencil to hook something towards him.
"Found a bloody hand-print on a bumper back there," Briscoe said when he reached his partner. "Most likely our victim's, but you never know. We might get lucky."
Green swiveled on his heels and held up the object he'd fished out of the pile of trash: a revolver, delicately held between finger and thumb. "I feel lucky," he said.
Briscoe opened an evidence bag and held it for Green to drop the gun inside. "If your luck is really running, they'll find fingerprints on this back at the lab."
"We could have this wrapped up by —"
"Don't say it!" Briscoe interrupted, but not quite fast enough.
"Lunchtime," Green finished, and raised his eyebrows at Briscoe's groan. "What?"
"You just had to go and jinx us, didn't you?" Briscoe shook his head resignedly. "Haven't I taught you anything?"
27th Precinct
Detectives Squadroom
10:15 am Monday 9 July 2007
The detectives' bull-pen at the 2-7 was nearly empty. Like every year, the summer heat had ushered in the associated summer murder season. Most of the detectives got to sit down at their desks and enjoy the air-conditioning for ten minutes at most before another name was being written up on the murder board in red.
Briscoe paused and wrote Jane Doe in the column that belonged to him and Ed Green.
At least at this time of year they don't stay red for long. He capped the marker and put it back on the ledge. Temperature related homicides generally don't involve a lot of planning.
"Jane Doe," Lieutenant Van Buren read past his shoulder. "Something tells me I'm not going to like what you have to tell me on this one."
Green dropped into his chair, put his feet on his desk and flipped open his notebook. "Female, 20s or 30s, probably Caucasian —"
Van Buren raised her eyebrows. "Probably? How badly was she beaten?"
"She was run over by a car, postmortem. Tire went over her head. Skin tone was light and her hair looked blondish, under the blood, but it'll take the M.E. to be more precise."
"Run over postmortem. So what was the cause of death?"
"Gunshot. Four." Briscoe said, and stepped out into the hall to get a soda from the machine.
"Get me one of those too, Lennie," Van Buren said. "Shot four times and run over, that sort of overkill makes me think about husbands and boyfriends."
As usual, the vending machine ate three sets of coins before Briscoe managed to kick the side and thump the front at just the right moment to shake the can loose. On the plus side, when he tried to get a second can for the Lieutenant, the machine dropped an extra.
"Not saying you're wrong, but the running over was an accident." Briscoe handed one can to Van Buren and put the spare on Green's desk. He opened his own. "I'm thinking she was trying to get away from the shooter and crawled under the car to hide."
"And then died there," Van Buren said.
"No wallet, no handbag, no purse, no cell phone. Not even a house key."
Van Buren popped the top of her drink. "So someone shot this woman, took her wallet and her purse —"
"If she had one," Green interjected.
"She had something, detective, she didn't even have her house-key on her. I'd buy that she left home without her driver's license. I'd even buy that she left without her wallet if she was stepping out to the bodega with a ten in her pocket. But nobody leaves home without a key. So the shooter took her wallet or her purse or both, and then let her crawl away, still alive, for all the shooter knew going to stay alive to identify him. Then he dropped the gun and did a runner."
Briscoe nodded. "About the size of it, from how it looks for now, anyway."
Van Buren shook her head. "Maybe we're looking at a robbery gone wrong."
"Yeah, but I'd guess she ran into the car lot after the first shot, not away down the street," Briscoe said. He shrugged. "Forensics will give us a clearer picture."
"So maybe the shooter was on the street," Van Buren said. "She ran away from him, into the lot, and maybe she dropped her purse. That's what he was after, so he grabbed it and took off. She was too scared and maybe too weak to crawl out and get help, so she bled to death under the car."
"It's a working theory," Green said.
"Why shoot her four times?" Briscoe asked. "Three times in the torso, that's definitely someone trying to kill her. Except he didn't take the time to make sure of her."
Van Buren nodded. "And how that makes sense, I do not know."
"Maybe he couldn't find her," Green suggested. "She was hiding, he knew the longer he spent looking for her the more likely someone might come along …"
"Hey, I used to know a guy down in Baltimore who had a theory," Briscoe said. "Crime makes you stupid."
"It's as good an explanation as any," Van Buren said, turning to go back to her office. "Keep me posted," she tossed back over her shoulder. "And try to find out who she was."
.oOo.
A/N "Crime makes you stupid" was a theory proposed by Detective Frank Pembleton in "Homicide: Life On The Streets", who worked with Rey Curtis and Lennie Briscoe in the season 6 cross-over episode "Charm City".
