I know that all of my excuses are school-related, but it is all school's fault. I had to put all of my energy into my final exams, two of which Chapter title: 'La Stella Mancante' means 'The Missing Star.' Stella. Get it? I don't speak Italian, so if I'm wrong... don't judge me please. XD I got it off of an online translator.
were state tests. I also know that it's mid-July. I've had to go to numerous job interviews and complete my summer homework. -_- I hope to focus more on writing and not procrastinate. XP
Disclaimer: Yeah, I'm not even going to say it.
Thanks to lily moonlight, Hcainefan123, afrozenheart412, and peonywinx for reviewing!
Time setting: Hm... let's see... I dunno, actually. How about one to three hours after the previous chapter, around 15.30-18.00? I don't know.
A/N: You know how they have those mirrors in interrogation rooms? The ones where the suspect can't see the people behind them, but the detectives and whoever can see the suspect? Are those one-way or two-way mirrors? I'm going to go with one way. Please correct me in a review. XD
Also, I realized that I never did an autopsy scene for Serena McLaughlin's body. I'll do that here. Sorry about that. I've been feeling off since the last time I posted, and it's really affecting my writing.
Hawkes looked around him. He saw a chair next to his bed. He looked around the room and noticed the pastel green of the walls. He looked down and saw that he was in a hospital gown.
'Hospital...' he thought. 'How did I get here?' He leaned forward a little bit to make himself more comfortable and winced. A sharp pain pulsed in his abdomen.
He remembered now. Danny and he were in a shooting outside the Jackson crime scene. But it seemed so distant...
Why did it seem so far away? Hawkes shook his head. What day was it? He didn't know. How long had he been here? A day? A week? A month?
And the case.... what was going on with that? How far had they gotten with it? Did they catch the guy yet?
Hawkes pushed a button that called for a nurse. Maybe the nurse could tell him what was going on.
"So Vocter," Flack began, circling the interrogation table. Danny sat in a chair opposite the suspect. "Why were you hiding in your house with a loaded gun?"
Michael Vocter just stared straight ahead at nothing in particular and replied, "Because he was coming after me."
Danny raised an eyebrow. "He? Who was comin' after you?"
Vocter continued to stare straight ahead. His grey eyes seemed to pass through Danny. Flack took the seat next to the CSI and looked at the suspect. "He doesn't reveal his name. He follows me everywhere."
"Are any of these people 'him'?" Flack asked, pulling out pictures of every male person related to the three cases.
Vocter studied each person carefully and shook his head. "N-no. I don't know any of those people."
"Can you give us a hint on what 'he' looks like? Eye color, hair color, height? Anything we can go on?" Danny questioned, looking their suspect straight in the eye. Vocter's eyes didn't meet anything except for his own reflection on the one-way mirror.
"I-I can't tell you anything. He'll kill you too." Vocter replied shakily. His whole body shook slightly.
"Yeah? Try us," Flack retorted.
"He's gonna kill me, he's gonna kill me," Vocter murmured to himself.
"Tell us something about the guy!" Flack yelled impatiently. If he could, he would've already arrested Vocter for irritating an officer.
Vocter's grey eyes got wider as he uttered two small words in the form of a whisper. "He's here."
Flack and Danny looked at each other, confused. The only people in the room were the two detectives, Vocter, and the uniformed officer at the door. No one else was there.
"Where is he?" Danny inquired, trying to keep his voice calm even though Vocter had irritated him.
Their suspect's wide eyes came to rest on the metal table in front of him. He tried to stare at his blurred reflection on the interrogation table. "He's behind the mirror."
That confused the CSI. As far as he knew, no one was behind the mirror watching their interrogation. When he looked at Flack, he could tell that his friend was thinking the same thing.
"I'll go check it out," the homicide detective told them, standing up and leaving the room. Danny looked at the guy, trying to figure out if he was insane or not.
Moments later, Flack came back. "There was no one behind the mirror." he reported.
"He's there. He hasn't left. He's g-gonna kill me, he's coming for me..." Vocter said as he trailed off.
"Flack, I think this guy's showing signs of schizophrenia," Danny informed him of his observations.
"Why do you think so?" Flack inquired.
"Well, no one can see through those mirrors, so how did he know that 'he' was there?" Danny replied. "He's hallucinating, that's one of the signs of schizophrenia."
"His record never showed anything about schizophrenia, though," Flack pointed out.
"Maybe he developed it after Serena left him. Let's see if we can get that out of him." Danny said. He looked at Vocter, who was still murmuring to himself.
"Michael," Danny began. "When did you and Serena break up?"
"Two weeks ago." he stated, not looking up from the interrogation table.
"And when was the last time you went to the doctor's or the hospital?" the CSI continued.
"A month ago." he replied.
"Schizophrenia can be triggered by disturbing experiences. Maybe, he was so connected to Serena that when she left him, he found that traumatic. I don't know why, but maybe in his world, that break-up was a disturbing experience." Danny said.
"All right. He says that he never saw any of the people that we showed him, except for Serena, who was his ex. Let's just ask him where he was at the time of the three victims' times of death and then we can call a psych doctor in to see if Mr Stalker here is a schizophrenic."
"Mr Vocter," Flack began calmly. "Where were you between the hours of two to four PM yesterday?"
"I-I was in Albany with my brother. I didn't get back until really late, two o'clock in the morning." Vocter replied, still looking down at the table. Flack wrote that down. He was away for both Chris Jackson's and Abu Galib's times of death.
"What about nine o'clock this morning?" asked Flack.
"I left early went to a gun store in Brooklyn to buy a gun and protect me from him. Didn't get back until noon." Vocter said. Then his eyes widened once more. "He's going to kill me..."
Flack sighed. "The more we talk to this guy, the more convinced I get that he's not the killer. Look at him. His hands are shaking and he thinks someone's following him all the time. I don't think he'd have enough patience to clean up an entire crime scene." he told Danny.
"I think you're right, Flack," Danny said. "I don't think this guy did it either."
"I'm going to call a psych doctor from Bellevue and see if he or she can evaluate our patient's status. Otherwise, I think we're done here." Flack said, whipping out his phone and walking back to his desk.
Danny nodded and walked in the direction of the exit.
He needed a coffee.
Stella Bonasera awoke to the sound of a car's engine turning off. She was in the back seat of a car, tied up with her mouth taped shut.
She was lying on her back, so she was able to see out of the window. From the lack of many skyscrapers, Stella was able to deduce that she wasn't in Manhattan anymore. Also, from what she could see, her surroundings looked more like an oceanfront commuter town than a city.
Stella heard a subway train brake nearby. The sound was so crisp and clear that it could've been right next to her location.
'Elevated subway rails', she mused to herself. That fact meant she was most likely not in Manhattan. She could be in the Bronx, Brooklyn, or Queens.
Her captor left the driver's seat and opened the left side backseat door. He put his right hand on the door frame and spoke to her quietly.
"I'm going to untie your hands and feet and take the tape off of your mouth. We're going to walk to that building over there," he told her, motioning to a brick building behind him. "You try any funny business and it'll be the last business you do. Got it?"
Stella nodded. She didn't bother to argue with him. It was possible that he had a firearm in the car.
Her captor reached for her ankles and untied them, doing the same with her wrists after. He motioned for her to pull the tape off by herself, which she did. Even though she pulled it off gingerly, it still hurt to pull the sticky adhesive off of her tender lips.
After she got out of the car, he shut the door and pointed to a brick building. You didn't need to be a genius to figure out what that meant. That building was where they were going. To her left she noticed a subway sign that read 'Far Rockaway–Mott Avenue'. The letter 'A' in a blue circle told readers that you could take the A train from that particular station. The sign verified her assumption of being out of the city. She was in Far Rockaway, Queens, a far way from Manhattan. It was so far from Manhattan that it bordered Long Island.
As she and her captor walked into the building, Stella could see that it was abandoned. There were construction tools discarded around the floor and hardened plaster scattered in grey circles on the newspaper-covered floor. Ladders still stood around the room, and random plastic was falling off of the walls.
Her captor shut the door behind them. He walked right past her and went to sit on an old wooden chair.
"Just go sit anywhere. There's a bathroom in the back. The back or the bathroom have no windows, so don't bother escaping." he said, pulling out a cell phone and dialling a number.
As she sat down, Stella hoped that Mac and the others could find a piece of evidence leading them to her. She hoped that the evidence didn't fail them.
"Adam," Mac said as he walked into the room. "Please tell me you found something useful out of our evidence. Flack just confirmed Michael Vocter's alibi, leaving us suspectless."
Adam shook his head. "I'm sorry, Mac. I'm not getting anything from any of the evidence yet. I still have to process the stuff from the McLaughlin house, so we might get something from there. Hopefully."
Mac sighed heavily. This case was taking a toll on everyone. "Okay, as soon as you're done, call me." he said.
As he walked through the hallway, his phone rang. The detective checked the caller ID. It was Sid.
"Yeah, Sid. What do you have?" he asked.
"I finished the autopsy of Serena McLaughlin," replied Sid.
"All right, I'll be right down.," Mac said. He turned around and went in the direction of the elevator. Hopefully the autopsy showed something.
"Let me guess," Mac said as he walked into the morgue. "Exsanguination due to the transection of the carotid artery."
"Correct! You have just won the million-dollar prize," Sid joked as they made their way to the slab that Serena McLaughlin was lying on.
"Why'd it take so long for an autopsy?" Mac inquired.
"After I did the Galib autopsy, we had an influx of bodies from a drug bust downtown. There were four bodies, so it took a while. Well, better late than never." Sid replied. Mac nodded.
"Anything strange about the body?" he asked.
Sid shook his head. "The cut had the same jaggedness and wound pattern as the other victims. She also recently had her appendix removed."
"Anything else, Sid?" Mac asked.
"Ah," Sid said as he remembered something. "I remembered seeing some small grey flecks in her hair before I washed the body." The medical examiner handed Mac a petri dish filled with some grey flecks.
Mac held the dish up to the light and scrutinized it. "Any idea what they are?"
"Well, that's your job." Sid said, cracking a small smile. Mac chuckled and brought the evidence back upstairs.
Lindsay caught up with Mac as he got off the elevator. "Mac," she said. "I went to the layout room to find Stella, but she wasn't there. She left the pictures from the cases there, and guess what picture was on top." She handed Mac a picture or a garbage can.
Mac looked at her, missing what she was showing him. "Am I missing the point?"
"Look closer," Lindsay urged him. Mac analyzed the picture. He saw a bloody knife hidden within the garbage can.
"It's a bloody knife," Mac observed. "Its edges are serrated. Is this the murder weapon?'
Lindsay nodded. "It's a possibility."
"This must be what Stella went up to check for," Mac mused. "Come to think of it, she went up a while ago. She hasn't come back yet. I wonder what's taking her so long?"
"I'll call her and ask what's keeping her," the Montana native offered, pulling out her cell phone and dialling Stella's number.
"Hi, you've reached Stella Bonasera. Please leave your name and number after the tone." Lindsay flipped her phone shut.
"Straight to voicemail," she informed her boss.
Mac's expression turned dark. "This isn't like her. She wouldn't have stayed this long without calling. Lindsay, let's give this to Adam and head uptown. I think something's happened to her."
So they found out she's missing! Read and review please! Oh, and please criticise me. I really need the criticism for this chapter. Please&Thank you!
Oh, as an apology for not updating in the longest time (please don't make me feel guiltier than I already do. XP), I'm gonna give you an angsty Adam one-shot soon.
Aly x3