A New Reality

Disclaimer: If you recognize it, it's not mine. This story is on an AU track.

This story is rated T for mention of violence and child abuse. Don't like it, don't read it.

This story takes place within the series beginning with Close to Home, on a roughly parallel track with Unreasonable Doubt. You don't need to have read the earlier stories to understand this one, but I recommend it, as I may very well be merging those tracks in future stories.

Chapter 1: No Leads

"No witnesses this time."

"Well, thank God for that, anyway."

Under any other circumstances, Zach Nichols thought, his partner's reaction to the officer's statement would have been puzzling at least. But here, he understood. Because with this killer, witnesses weren't live people who could tell the detectives what happened. With this killer, witnesses became victims.

They'd caught the first case in this string two months earlier. A woman in her thirties, strangled to death, stripped naked and posed face-up in an isolated area of a city park, a ribbon tied around her neck over the mark from the cord used to strangle her, and a single red rose laid across her breasts. There had been talk of calling in Special Victims, but it had been deemed a Major Case instead when the ME had determined that, as unlikely as it was considering the way the body had been displayed, the victim hadn't been raped.

Two weeks later, as they were still spinning their wheels on that one, the second body had turned up in another park. Everything about that one had been identical, except that the second victim hadn't been alone. Next to her were two other bodies, an older woman and a man also in his thirties, each killed by a blow to the back of the head, still clothed, apparently lying where they had fallen, their eyes mutilated after death.

It had, rather predictably, been Zach who'd figured it out. The old woman and the man had never been the killer's intended targets. They were witnesses, random people unlucky enough to stumble upon the crime scene, killed just to give the killer a clean getaway.

The woman lying in front of him was the fifteenth victim; this was the eighth scene. And they were still spinning their wheels. The killer's habit of murdering witnesses was sickening, but it was also, apparently, effective. Every lead was a dead end, and it didn't help that the parents of the youngest victim, a teenage boy killed for being a witness, had offered a substantial reward for information leading to the arrest of their son's killer. Any cop could have told them that such an offer would produce a hundred false leads for every genuine one, and the detectives had been forced to spend an inordinate amount of time screening out false witnesses, and they had yet to get a single genuine tip.

Zach finished his investigation of the body - no useful information, same as all the previous bodies - and stood up, slowly walking the perimeter of the scene in case there was anything to notice.

And then he noticed something.

It was something most people would have missed, but Zach Nichols was not most people. He reached his gloved hand out, capturing that which had caught his eye.

"What is it?" His partner had come up behind him while he was distracted. "You have something?"

"Maybe. Take a look at this." He opened his hand, showing her a few long strands of black hair. "What do you think, Serena? It doesn't seem like this has been here long."

She carefully lifted the strands from his palm. "No, you're right. They're not weather-beaten at all, and the weather hasn't exactly been kind the last few weeks." She pulled a small bag from her pocket and carefully bagged the strands. "You thinking the killer could've left them?"

"Maybe. Or maybe it's a coincidence. My first thought was a witness, but assuming the witness was sitting somewhere like here -" without further warning, he swung up into the tree, settling himself at a point about four feet off the ground where the branches split into a V.

"No way the killer wouldn't have seen them," Serena finished. "You planning to come down from there?"

He jumped down easily, landing smoothly on the ground beside her. "It's probably unrelated," he agreed, "but it could be something."

"I hope it is," Serena replied. "If it is, it's the biggest something we've gotten so far."

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Serena slammed the desk phone down so hard it was a wonder she didn't break the unit. Her partner looked up in interest. "What is it now?"

"Even kids are getting in on this false tip business," she grumbled. "You saw there was an elementary school a couple blocks from the park where the murder took place? That was a teacher claiming one of her students came to her and said she'd witnessed it."

"Wow." Zach raised an eyebrow. "I'm surprised you stayed that calm."

She shrugged. "Well, it's not the teacher's fault. I believe that it happened the way she says it did - a student told her they saw a woman murdered in the park, and she felt like she had to report it. Now, that student, on the other hand...he or she is getting a nice long lecture on wasting the police's time with bogus reports."

He smiled. "Of that I have no doubt."

"Come on," she urged. "If I'm stuck dealing with this mess, so are you."

This chapter is mostly setup, so if you have no idea how this is connected to the story summary, that's okay, you're not supposed to just yet.

Regarding Nichols and Stevens still being in Major Case, I know it's fairly common in fan communities to assume that they both left after Season 9. However, I really like Nichols' character, so I fall into the camp that says they stayed but we just didn't see the cases they worked, kind of like how when they were alternating between pairs we didn't see one team in the alternating team's episode (believable as Season 10 contained less than half as many episodes as the others).

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