AN1: TW for graphic violence, adultery mention, violent sexual imagery, and Monnie bonding (I know, boo hoo. Remember who my OTP is).
They each receive the message through their browsers at the same time: Crime scene, Dispatch 421.
Matt heaves a breath. "Duty calls," he murmurs. He waves his keys. "I can drive."
Bonnie is secretly grateful to be called out for a crime scene - the guilt at stirring up horrible memories for Matt eats at her, coupling with the guilt of being the reason behind the memories in the first place. Looking at a dead body seems almost therapeutic in comparison to dealing with her culpability.
After slipping into the car, Bonnie quietly observes the tense way Matt holds the wheel before casting her gaze out the window. Her fault. His scarring, Vicki's death, Meredith's death, even Kai's death - all because of her. Inhaling deeply, Bonnie closes her eyes and renews her vow to herself about catching the copycat. No longer would the ghost of the Gemini Reaper haunt her. She won't let Parker have that sort of power.
When they arrive at the strip mall, CSI has already cordoned off the parking area behind the stores with yellow caution tape and a few mean-looking beat cops. Bonnie can see one of MFPD's other detectives, Aaron Whitmore, questioning a distraught woman. Opening her comm-link with Matt, she requests to bridge Detective Whitmore in. When he accepts her request, she and Matt rifle through the record he sends them back.
The woman he's talking to is Vanessa Wilkinson. Like most people who discover dead bodies, she was a jogger, out for a mid-morning run with her dog, Pixie, when the dog suddenly took off - unusually disobedient behavior for the canine. Wilkinson followed after her and Pixie lead her behind the furniture boutique where they found the body of a young African American woman that had been mutilated. CSI had ID'ed the body as a woman named Tessa Garza, the owner of the strip mall they were standing behind.
Bonnie grimaces at Whitmore's record of Garza's body.
"Jesus," Matt mutters and Bonnie has to agree. She sighs.
"Let's go look at her," she murmurs and leads the way over to Tessa's resting place.
In the United States, archive accessibility laws were incredibly strict. The number of investigators with the authority to access other people's archives - even dead people's - without a warrant or autonomous permission is limited to senior police department officers and ranking federal agents. The limitation was a means of protecting personal privacy and record sharing was often controlled by what a person wanted to share. Complete access wasn't even granted to a child's parents or guardians while the child was alive; parent-guardians only had complete access to their minors' archive if, god forbid, the child passed away before the age of sixteen. Laws concerning incontinent adults were even more complex, but all laws regarding third party access to an individual's archives boiled down to this: access was limited. And because archives are hard to tamper with and are stored in the Ethernet forever, a person's will can be rendered somewhat immortal. Most individuals over the age of sixteen had active wills that granted a few family members and close friends access to their archives if they died. Anyone not on that will or with the right authorization was blocked.
It was why hackers were highly detested - why people like Kai Parker were so dangerous. Kai had the ability to tear down the walls protecting archives, to see the constantly changing algorithms and manipulate them to his liking. He could lay everyone around him bare without batting an eyelash or breaking a sweat when he had unlimited Ethernet access.
As an investigator, Bonnie had some exemptions concerning archive access. When Bonnie first started as an SSA, her accessibility had been capped by Meredith's seniority. Now that she was the ranking officer and lead investigator, everyone else's access was capped by her and a few other chief officers.
Meaning she was the only person at the crime scene who could harvest Tessa's record archive.
Approaching the body with Matt in tow, Bonnie grimaces at the state the copycat left poor Tessa in. Kai had never been afraid of getting hands-on and messy with the twins he murdered and his copycat was the same way with their victims.
Tessa Garza had been disgustingly mutilated: her jaw hung unnaturally low in a permanent scream. Her tongue was missing, but her empty, gaping mouth wasn't nearly so disturbing as the empty gaping holes of her eye sockets. Tessa's eyes had been gouged out, leaving behind red-rimmed holes that flies buzzed in and out off. Her ears, like her tongue and eyes, were also missing, as was the skin on both of her hands, from fingertips up to her elbows. It exposed the bone and tissue beneath like some sort of macabre fashion statement. Her neck has heavily bloodied, and even though Bonnie couldn't see a wound through all the gore, she'd place money that the woman's neck had some sort of slice through it
She was positioned so that her skinned hands framed her cheeks. She reminded Bonnie of something and the agent does a quick image search. A few images pop up like an accordion and she rifles through them quickly.
The Scream, Edvard Munch her search tells her and she selects the image of the painting, layering it over the sight of Tessa's body. It matches almost comically well, sending a shiver down Bonnie's spine.
"Do you like art, Agent Bennett?"
"Monk?" Matt's voice interrupts her reverie, causing Bonnie's eyes to dart up to him in surprise. The tall detective is crouched next to her, closer than Bonnie expected. "What about a monk?"
"Wha -? Oh, Munch. Edvard Munch. He was -"
"A turn-of-the-century Expressionist artist. Right," Matt's browser lit eyes look fearsome as he frowns down at the body. "His most famous series was The Scream." He looks at her in awe as the glow flicks off.
"That was a quick connection. Parker was an art nerd, wasn't he?" he grimaces at Tessa. "I was just thinking about Home Alone."
"He was just a nerd in general," Bonnie mutters, half her mind far away from this particular crime scene. "Psychopathic, but brilliant. When I was interrogating him, he'd always drop some random tidbit of information that I had to look up." She smiles at Matt.
"Home Alone was my favorite Christmas moving growing up. That and Santa Claus."
"Tim Allen or Dudley Moore?"
"Allen, of course. I'm not that old."
Matt grins at her and stands. His smile fades as he looks over their victim.
"You ready?" he asks. Bonnie sighs and rises as well.
"Yeah," squaring her shoulders, she links up to Tessa's browser, harvesting the woman's archive and then opens the comm-link with Matt and Detective Whitmore. "Let's dive."
It was late. So late it was actually early, with the sun creeping up over the horizon. In any case, it was way later than she intended to stay, but her other option was returning home to her fiance, Silas, and the toxic mess their once loving relationship had become. She bites back the fury and humiliation she feels whenever she thinks of her unfaithful paramour.
He was the cheater and she was the crazy bitch for being upset at him.
No, it was best she stayed away for now, otherwise, she'll end up on the local evening news.
Tessa sighs heavily, shuffling through the financial reports for the strip. All of the shops were doing well, but that was expected: Mystic Falls was a small town with a big city complex. The strip had two clothing stores (one of which, Shona Boutique, was the store she owned first that enabled her to buy up the rest of the strip - the place would forever be her baby), a Chinese restaurant, a home interior store, and tattoo parlour, all of which easily made rent and profits for Tessa. She had enough to buy up the strip mall across the street that she had been eyeing for a while. It had a popular nail salon, a cafe, and The Mystic Grill, plus the owner was some old lady named Ms. Flowers who had no next of kin for inheritance - the other shopping strip was ripe for the taking.
Glancing at the clock once more, Tessa decides that financial domination is a task for tomorrow, when Shona was open and she actually had to be here. She was tired, and she would be damned if Silas' idiotic ass was keeping her away from her silk-sheeted Serta. Turning the light off in her office in Shona, Tessa decides to take out the trash before closing up for the night. She's fumbling to prop open the back door when she hears a noise and pauses, turning around to survey the parking lot. It was empty aside from her car. Even though the sun was starting to brighten the sky, the lot was still well-lit by bright and evenly spaced street lamps.
A large opossum scurries across the back of the lot and Tessa pulls a face, making a mental note to call animal control after her nap. Wild rodents meant diseases, and she'd be damned if some ugly oversized rat passed on its rabies to her customers. With this in mind, she heads to the dumpster, making sure the pepper spray on her keychain is ready at hand, just in case. She's eager to leave now, already imagining her head falling onto cool silk and plush down pillows. When the echo of the trash hitting the bottom of the empty bin fades, Tessa hears another sound and does another quick scan, her rate picking up as she opts to hurry towards the ajar door.
ERROR: Record Corrupted.
Duck and lock, she thinks when something snarls in her long hair and she desperately raises her pepper spray again. It gets knocked out of her hand. There's a sickening crunch and she lets out another cry, this one made of pain, and stumbles, her knee bent at an awkward angle. The hand in hair tightens, yanking her head back. She sees a glint of flashing metal. Fueled by fear, Tessa yanks her head forward at an angle, ripping hair from her scalp, and sinks her teeth into soft flesh. There's another curse in a deep, angry voice. The back of her head hurts from where she now probably has a bald spot and her vanity makes her tear up, because fuck she'll be grateful to ever have another chance to appreciate her own beauty.
A heavy blow lands against her cheek, her attacker striking her face with his now free hand. Another one, and then he's slipping his fingers through the between her lips, curling those fingers over her upper teeth. The other hand, the one she's biting, grips her bottom jaw and Tessa's eyes widen when the man starts pulling. She tightens her bite, but he's too strong. Tears sting her cheeks as he pulls and a whining animalistic sound fills the air, a sound Tessa knows comes from her.
The man grunts and there's a wet crunch and searing pain shooting through her face and Tessa sobs, her mouth hanging slack.
She doesn't understand and tries to ask the man why he's doing this to her? What had she done? Why did she deserve this?
He flips her over onto her back and straddles her. Tessa pushes at his chest weakly, but he bats her hands aside. There's a flash of metal in his.
"Please," Tessa tries to say. It comes out as a strangled gurgle. She tries to find her keychain through her crying, scrambling for something, anything to defend herself. "Please let me go."
Her attacker says something in response, but his voice sounds muffled, like her head is underwater or he's speaking to her from another room. Nevertheless, his words cause panic to ensue in her chest.
She thinks about her asshole fiance, about their twisted games and power plays, how his infidelity was always a cruel measure to get under her skin and pull her attention towards him. She's sure he'll fall apart without her to challenge him and a part of her feels sorry for him. Silas doesn't know who he is without Tessa.
Mostly though, Tessa feels fear. It overwhelms her when her attacker's knife glints closer to her face, pierces her flesh with its jagged edge as he - oh, god not even her corpse will be pretty, she'll have to be a closed casket. Her screams ravage her own ears and Tessa hopes they haunt this man to his fucking grave. She can't see anything anymore, but she doesn't need to see to know her beauty has been ravaged. She doesn't want to.
Her tears sting the open wounds. It surprises her that she can still cry. Her heart pounds wildly and her fists slam against the attacker. She's screaming at him, wordless animal wails. This torture...she'd never done anything to deserve this. She's not the nicest person, but god she knows she didn't deserve this.
His hand pries into her useless mouth, gripping her tongue and holding it out. The fight inside her dies. Things are so distant now - it doesn't even hurt anymore. It's just numb. There's a fleeting moment when she feels outside of herself, as if it isn't even her who is being mutilated, like she's just some spectating ghost. In that moment, she mourns herself.
Record Discontinued.
"Jesus fucking Christ," Whitmore breathes. The detective's already pale skin seems pallid now, ghostly white and clammy. "He did that while she was alive?"
The stern-faced man looks both horrified and apoplectic. Bonnie's sure that he'll be on the copycat like a bloodhound from now on and she braces herself for dealing with the brusque man in the future. Matt is quiet, face downcast and unreadable.
Bonnie sighs. The recording was unnerving, and the corruption of the file even more so - records rarely ever get corrupted. Tessa's record had an intense impression that her attacker was a large male, even though his actual figure and speech was so unnervingly absent from the record and there was a gap in it.
"Bag her," she commands CSI and stands, facing the other two detectives. "Let's recon and regroup. Detective Whitmore, see if you and your partner can find out anything from the other shop owners and Ms. Flowers. Tessa was financially ambitious - maybe she stepped on some toes. Also dig around the area - she was murdered this morning, maybe some early bird saw or heard something that might be a clue. Give me a call if you find anything or get back to the station before we do. Donovan and I are going to check out the fiance and his mistress, see if any foul play was involved."
Whitmore stares at her incredulously. "You don't think it was the copycat?" he questions.
"I just want to check all our boxes instead of jumping to the most obvious solution. That's lazy investigative work and I want to make sure we get the right guy."
Detective Whitmore nods, face solemn, and turns away. Bonnie glances at Matt.
"Still driving?" she inquires. He nods and they go to the car.
Instead of driving, Matt pulls up the coordinates of Silas Davenport's listed address and sets the car on autopilot. Bonnie frowns at him in confusion.
"I could have done that."
"I want to review the record again," he explains. "And some others. Rather not die trying to do work."
Bonnie nods slowly. "Oh-kay," she drawls. "What exactly do you want to review?"
"Malachai Parker." A bad feeling sweeps through Bonnie at his answer.
"Why?"
"It's just...this is weird, right? You knew Kai best and he started to obsess over you because you caught him, but this copycat - and you know this one is the copycat, you're just paranoid. Anyway ...did he have a partner? Or a friend, a lover, a family member he was particularly close to? Someone who would know the depths of his fixation on you?"
"Not...really," Bonnie frowns. "Kai had a lot of 'friends'," she uses her fingers to quote the last word. "But all of his relationships were very shallow. People found him funny, charming, smart - but no one knew stuff like his favorite color, favorite food, what he did for fun," she grimaces at that. She knows what Kai did for fun.
"So basically, no. No friends, no lovers, no jealous exes, nothing?"
"No," Bonnie sighs. A particularly vivid memory pops up, one of Kai describing a rather deviant sexual fantasy about her. He'd been trying to piss her off at the time and Bonnie is ashamed to admit it got under her skin. "Kai didn't have any relationships like that. He once confessed that he never really had sexual urges until… doesn't matter."
"It does," Matt insists. He pulls up three records over their comm-link. "Watch this record again. And the ones from Greta Martin and Sarah Wilson. The twin murders were all very brutal, but non-sexual. The ones with Greta, Sarah, and Tessa - they're all kind of sexual assault-ish."
"What do you mean?"
"They were all stabbed. Stabbings, especially multiple stabbings against female victims, is often sexually driven, right?"
"Right," Bonnie agrees, looking out the window. The side-by-side record playbacks overlay the changing scenery and she feels nauseous. She can't tell if it's motion sickness or disgust. "So you think these murders may be a substitution for sex," she murmurs. It's unnerving to hear her worst fear concluded by someone else.
"Well, I think the 'maybe' should be a 'definitely'. None of the twins were stabbed, not like this. When blades were used, it was shit like chainsaw beheadings or machete chopping. With Greta, she was stabbed multiple times, then had her neck slashed. The copycat hung Sarah Salvatore up in a hall of mirrors and made her watch as her body was used as fucking target practice and looked like a pin cushion. Then Tessa was…" he trails off.
"All very penetrative," Bonnie concludes softly. "So you think our copycat is impotent?"
"Or living out a fantasy. Maybe not his own, but definitely Kai's."
Bonnie blanches. "Kai's murders weren't sexual."
"No, they were narcissistic," Matt agrees. He sighs and turns to stare at her. "You're really going to make me say it?"
"You think Kai wanted to fuck me. He did, everyone knows he did, he didn't exactly hide it," Bonnie snaps. Matt holds up his hands in surrender, a chagrined smile on his face.
"I think this copycat is killing women who look like you, living out a fantasy for Kai," he says softly. "Tessa was staged to look like art and I bet if we review Greta and Sarah's discovery sites, we'll find more creepy art shit Kai was into. It's something to think about, Bonnie."
"Do you like art, Agent Bennett?" The question echoes in her head again. What had she replied?
The car pulls itself to a stop in front of sprawling, gated estate. Matt lets out an irritated sigh as they look at it. Bonnie raises her brow at him.
"I just...really, really hate rich people," he explains. Bonnie snorts in response.
Kai's not looking at her and Bonnie sorely tempted to snap at him. This visit was on his request after all, but it seemed like all he wants to do is waste her time when she could be out - well, not working, but anything other than staring at his stupid side-profile.
"Do you like art, Agent Bennett?" he inquires softly.
It's the first thing he's said in ten minutes and he still doesn't bother to look at her. They're not in an interrogation room or the visiting center today: Kai's been a well-behaved boy and earned himself free time, which he chose to spend in the library. His trial is tomorrow and he requested to see her during his free time. So here they are. In a prison library. Kai spent the first third of his hour flipping through a book rather than addressing her and she's ready to scream.
She shrugs flippantly. "I guess. Graphic design is important and that's a type of art. I don't really spend time thinking about other types of art."
He pulls a face at that and finally looks at her, closing the book in his lap.
"Are you upset with me, Agent Bennett?" he studies her face, which Bonnie tries to keep impassive, but he must read her irritation anyway because he grins. "You are. Is it about Agent Sulez-Fell? That's not my fault."
"You knew about the bunkard," she grits.
"I know I'm smart, Boooon-nee," he drags her name out obnoxiously. "But I'm not omniscient. You can't say I knew that Salvatore would booby trap the entire thing."
Bonnie scoffs and rolls her eyes at him.
"But you did know, didn't you? You knew how he felt about Elena Gilbert and you knew how the bunkard was laid out. Salvatore didn't exactly seem like the type to sit and meticulously think through elaborate traps. He's too...rash."
Kai's answering smirk is fleeting and she almost would have missed it if she wasn't glaring at him.
"You think I had a hand in that mess, Agent Bennett?"
"Doesn't matter," she mutters.
"I guess not," he replies. "We were talking about art, right?"