Thank you for the wonderful reviews. They've encouraged me to get this next chapter up and running faster than I thought possible. As always, there are going to be spoilers for Episode 6- Young Blood, and several missing moments that are my own creation.

I do not own CSI-NY, but I still wish I worked with these people.

Danny and Lindsay- From the Beginning

Chapter 2- Young Blood- Season 2.6

Danny Messer left his office and walked down the hall towards the main labs. He'd just started his shift and Mac had assigned him to the Kinsey Shooting Case with Lindsay. He hadn't worked with her in a while, not since they had finished the Zoo case a few weeks back. She'd mostly been working with Mac and Stella while they showed her the ropes. Apparently she had passed Mac's test with flying colors. Last week after Lindsay had cracked a case where the victim's widow had orchestrated her husband's death, Mac had bought a round at Sullivan's and congratulated her on joining the team. Both Mac and Stella were impressed with her and thought she was pretty tough. The jury was still out on his opinion. He spotted her in a room, already going through evidence. The last time they had worked together he had riled her up pretty good. He still thought it was funny when he called her Montana, but apparently she was pretty touchy about it. "She's no Aidan." He muttered to himself then walked into the lab to join her for what he was sure would be a long day.

She glanced up as he joined her.

"Mac said to find you, what do we have?" he asked her.

"Did you read the field report?" she inquired.

"A missing weapon- low projectile penetration, high residue potion, missing second party, an ipod, chop sticks, glove... did I miss anything?" he said as he recited from memory.

"The missing second party was wearing size 6 shoes, 7 tops." She clarified. "We're looking for a small woman."

"Or a young one." he corrected.

"And the report said there was a likely sexual connection. DOA was in his fifties."

She turned to him with the chopsticks she had been holding in her hands. Around the top they were held together with an elastic band and a small folded slip of paper. "Do you want the elastic or the paper?" She asked him smiling.

"I should probably handle the paper because there might be something on it."

Lindsay made a face of annoyance at him and got to work on the elastic. While looking at it under her microscope she noticed a piece of hair trapped between the elastic thread. She extracted it and then put it in an envelope for DNA. She looked up to see what Messer had found. He was still searching the piece of paper he had unfolded.

He looked up at her and noticed her watching at him. She couldn't already be..."You're done?" he asked incredulously.

"Waiting on you." She smiled.

She heard him sigh loudly as he went back to work on the paper. She couldn't tell if it was out of frustration or annoyance. She studied him for another minute out of the corner of her eye, and then walked out of the lab to take her evidence down to trace. He confused her. Both Mac and Stella spoke highly of Danny. Stella admitted that he was a bit of a hot head sometimes, but she said it was because he was just really passionate about his work. Mac had told her just last week at Sullivan's that there was a lot he could teach her, and he told her that he's be assigning them to several cases together. Up until now they had shared an office together, but rarely had she even seen him. She'd been working the same shifts as Mac and Stella and Danny had been working with Sheldon Hawkes. Stella had also told her that the desk she sat in now had been occupied by a Detective named Adian who had left the department, but Stella didn't say why. Adian and Danny had been partners and very close. She hadn't had a partner up in Montana. In Bozeman she had been 1 of 3 investigators for the entire county, and they worked rotating shifts. She wondered how she would have felt about her partner's replacement. As she was walking back she spotted Sid, the coroner striding towards her.

"Lindsay, I found something interesting inside our Mr. Kinsey during Autopsy." Sid intoned.

Lindsay looked back towards the lab where Danny was working. "Messer's working the case with me. He's still processing evidence. We'll come down as soon as he's finished."

Sid nodded and went back the way he came.

Lindsay returned to the lab where Danny was finishing up with the paper. "Anything?" she asked him.

He shook his head. "No viable prints, no DNA, just some notes about an audition."

"Sid has something for us." Lindsay said. "He wants us down in Autopsy." and she turned and walked back towards the elevator.

"Wait up!" Danny shouted after her, and he scrambled to grab the evidence and the envelope he'd been working on.

Danny caught up to Lindsay in Autopsy. Sid was standing over their vic- A John Kinsey who was on the table and part of his skull was exposed.

"Sid," Danny started, "what do you got?"

Sid motioned them closer and moved a large magnifying glass over the vic's exposed skull and leaned down to look closer.

Lindsay looks through the glass. Magnified in the vic's skull were several indentations in the bone.

"Your vic suffered from Paget's disease, a hereditary bone softening disease. You see these particular indentations's here?" he pointed out several small holes grouped together.

"They look like- letters?" said Danny.

"That's what I thought to." said Sid. "I'd estimate that this happened 2-3 days before your 'time of death'."

"Sid," asked Lindsay, "can you clean this up and get us an image of this?"

"I'm already on it." Sid told her.

Lindsay and Danny matched the partial image that Sid had lifted off their vic's skull with the plaque that they stood in front of.

"The historical society can help you track down just about anything in this town." Danny told her.

"History never left that great of an impression on me." she quipped back at him.

Danny smirked at her lame attempt at a pun. "At least it made an impression on our vic."

Lindsay noticed the address and it stirred something in her memory. "Doesn't the vic live around here?" she asked him.

Danny looked around at the street and noticed something interesting. "And isn't the vic's name- Kinsey." he said to her, pointing out a sign that said 'Kinsey parking'.

Danny and Lindsay exchanged a look and walked towards the parking lot.

Danny could see a parking attendant sitting in a booth on the lot and walked towards him. "Hey man, you work here?" he asked the guy.

The attendant just smirked at him and looked over at Lindsay. She smiled back at him.

"Nah- this is my day off." the guy retorted sarcastically. "So I thought, go fishing down at the pier or sit in this hot box all day long."

Smartass punk, Danny thought. He knew what I meant. Just answer the question and then we get to move on.

The attendant answered Lindsay's questions as Danny looked on. The attendant seemed much more inclined to answer her questions, probably because he thought she was flirting with him. She really needs to stop smiling when she was interviewing people. Guys see that smile and they're going to get the wrong idea, he thought.

Danny and Lindsay headed back to the lab to review the Security Tape footage that had been delivered. As they watched the film they isolated people that passed through the frame. Danny was looking for any sign of Oscar Bowers, a guy that Kinsey had a beef with. It seems they had a fight over some girl that Oscar was hitting on at a bar. It was their fight that had led to the impression on Kinsey's skull.

"The doorman said he's identified everyone in the tape as residents of the building except for this girl" Lindsay said pointing to a young girl walking across the lobby. In the tape the girl walked to the elevator and a minute later Kinsey walked up to wait for the same elevator.

Danny watched as the girl fiddling with her bracelets and kept looking over her shoulder back at Kinsey. Kinsey seemed not to notice her. "She looks nervous." Danny said growing suspicious.

"No," Lindsay disagreed, "it looks more like flirting to me. You see how she keeps looking at him? She wants him to look at her." she finished as she turned to look at Danny.

Danny looked back at her and their eyes met for a second before Lindsay turned to look back at the screen.

"We need to find this girl." Lindsay concluded.

Danny stood up to look at the evidence from the elevator spread out on the table.

Lindsay continued to watch the tape and her attention was caught by a guy wearing a hat leaving the building. "This guy came in just before the vic and this mystery girl but his head is down," she said turning to look at Danny. "I don't think we can ID him. What did you find on the ipod?" she asked standing to join him at the table.

Danny picked up the ipod. "The start up ID has the initials MSD, but no name. Her playlist has three songs in it that she listened to over and over for days." He rattled off the names of the three songs that were unfamiliar to him.

"Wicked." Lindsay exclaimed.

"Excuse me?" Danny asked.

Lindsay smirked at him, unsurprised that he didn't know the songs. "They're from the Broadway play- Wicked. She was learning the songs."

"Wait a minute," Danny mused as he remembered something. "That piece of paper from the chopsticks had the words audition at 3pm and Delmore on it."

"Delmore Prep." Lindsay responds.

"Looks like we're going to school." Danny says to her.

Lindsay walked down the hallway heading for the lab where Danny was working. So far they weren't having much luck. They had gone to Delmore Prep and found Ms. MSD- Melanie Dobson. It turns out that she was Kinsey's girlfriend, even though she was only 17. While she was arrogant and annoying, Lindsay didn't think she pulled the trigger.

"Danny," she said as soon as she got close, "we got the results on the blood spatter that Mac found in the apartment. It's from an unknown male, but the interesting thing is that the blood and Melanie's hair from the elastic share common alleles."

"So the blood is from her father?" Danny asks.

"I guessed it, from the way her father looked at her when he came into interrogation." said Lindsay.

"Well, let's go ask him about it." Danny said and they headed towards interrogation.

Lindsay watched as Danny worked over Dobson in interrogation. He liked to play bad cop, so Lindsay leaned back against the wall and watched him work.

Danny threw down a picture of the unknown man from the security footage in front of Mr. Dobson, Melanie's father.

"You see this guy here." He tapped at the picture with his finger. "This is the guy who killed Kinsey."

"That's not me." said Dobson firmly.

"Looks close." Danny tells him. "Maybe you knew about him and your daughter having a relationship. See I think you went to see Kinsey before. We found your blood in Kinsey's apartment. So I'm thinking you and he got into it."

Dobson leaned back in his chair. "I've tried to set a good example, tried to do the right thing for Melanie, but there's too much temptation for her. She's been nothing but trouble since she was 12 years old. Kinsey was a pig, and we had words." Dobson slid the picture of the security footage back to Danny. "But I didn't kill him. I was with my wife last night." he says nodding towards a young girl standing outside the room.

"That's your wife?" Danny asks with disdain.

Dobson grins smugly at him, the sarcasm lost on him.

We're going to need to do a GSR test on your hands, Danny finishes.

Dobson just holds his hands up palm out and smiles as Lindsay comes over to swab his hands.

We'll talk more later." Danny says and he leaves the room with Lindsay following him.

As they passed 'Mrs. Dobson, Danny looked at her and shook his head and muttered. "She's young enough to be his daughter and he thinks that's a good example."

"Some guys are into younger women." Lindsay shrugged, but stumbled to a halt as Danny stopped dead in the hallway and turned to her.

"You know a lot of guys like that Monroe?" he asked as he jerked his head back towards interrogation. "Not all guys think like that. Don't put us all in the same boat because there are a couple of morons out there." he said over his shoulder as he stormed away.

Lindsay watched him walk away. She hadn't been insinuating anything about him, but he seemed to take most things personally. She shook her head ruefully and walked towards the nearest lab to test Mr. Dobson's swab for GSR.

A little while later she found Danny sitting at the TV monitor watching the security tapes again.

"Dobson was negative for GSR, and his wife is backing up his alibi.

Danny nodded curtly as he watched the screen. "I'm looking again at our mystery guy here. You see him come in here a few minutes before Kinsey and then fast forward to him leaving the building a short while later." He pointed to the figure on the screen. "You see how he switches his arm as the woman passes?"

"He's got something in his sleeve." Lindsay says. She sits down and runs a program that analyzes the pattern under his arm and gives a round estimate for the object. "It looks like a steering lock she says confused.

Danny rewinds the image to show the guy walking in the building. "He doesn't care who see's him walking into the building with it, but he doesn't want them to notice him carrying it out again. That has to be our murder weapon."

"We need to show this to Mac." Lindsay says and they both get up and head down to reconstruction.

Danny found Lindsay in the lab examining some evidence from a new scene. She looked up from her work as he walked towards her.

"Looks like your admirer the parking attendant was our guy all along." he says by way of greeting.

Lindsay raises her eyebrows up at him in surprise. "My admirer?" she asks with a grin.

"Yeah, the guy you were flirting with before. Turns out he made a shotgun out of a steering lock he used at work. He just had to load in a shell, pull back the handle, and slide it in with some force and 'boom'- homemade shot gun. Mac's interviewing him now."

"I wasn't flirting with him, I was merely being friendly. Playing good cop to your surly cop."

"Friendly, Flirting same thing." Danny said convinced.

"So everyone who's friendly, you think they're flirting with you? She asked bewildered?

"This is New York," he explained. "No one's friendly here. If they act friendly they're flirting."

"Not always. Trust me Messer if I was flirting, you'd know it." and with that final thought she turned back to her work.

Danny looked at her and banged the file he held against his hand thoughtfully for a second then turned and walked out of the lab.

Lindsay turned her head slightly and watched him walk down the hall, and then turned her head back to her work. She didn't see him look back over his shoulder at her a few seconds later before he rounded a corner and walked away.