A/N: Hello lovely wonderful people of the world, I am so so so so sorry for the impromptu hiatus with my story. I've written and rewritten this chapter at least 20 times trying to make it work and I'm not sure how I feel about it even now but I'm posting it anyways.
The last few months have been extremely busy, I've started a new job, moved to a new city, and welcomed a tiny baby nephew into the world.
The updates should start back up weekly from now on.
Thank you for your continued support, I would like to give each and every one of you a hug.
Once Holly arrived back at the lab, she understood why Knight had been nauseous at the storage facility. Erin nearly puked when the body had been pulled from the freezer, in the less favorable lighting of the storage locker and for the fear of contaminating the evidence Holly hadn't spent much time examining the body at the scene.
The extent of the patchwork was grotesque to say the least, dozens if not hundreds, of stitches held every joint on the body in place. The body resembled a prop from and early era horror film with the stitches and its grayish hue, a modern day Frankenstein's Monster,
"What would possess a person to do this?" Erin asked as Holly came out of her office in Gray scrubs, Holly glanced at the intern noticing that her color had returned to a semi normal state and she appeared less queasy.
"That's what we need to find out." Holly muttered, grabbing the plastic apron from the coat hook and tightening it around her waist, her body felt weighted and stiff from exhaustion, she knew that she still had a marathon's worth of work to complete before she would be able to sleep.
Holly dismissed the overeager intern and set up her work station, a box of gloves, a video camera to document the entire autopsy, a tape recorder to document her notes, and a variety of sample collection dishes and bags.
Holly didn't have an issue processing the bodies, the part of her job that battled her where the people who committed the acts against them. She had faced them in court and it worried her how normal they could appear, they were mothers, fathers, and children. They were often upstanding people whose friends, families, and colleagues would offer admirable character reviews.
Holly took pictures of the body and quickly uploaded the drive into her computer before she began disconnecting the miss matched pieces of the cadaver. Her first observation has been the varying stages of decomposition, only the torso appeared to be relatively fresh, the rest of the pieces varied in age varying from a few days to weeks.
After processing the autopsy Holly walked the samples into the processing lab to put into the mass spec. She had collected threads, fibers, hairs, and tissue to both determine the number of cadavers that made up the body and to ID the pieces.
Holly's phone vibrated against the metal table jolting her out of her focused workflow, she glanced down at the picture of Steve from last Halloween dressed as a Zombie.
D. Peck: Just a heads up, Gail's sleeping on the floor in the living room. I just dropped Sophie off at school.
Dr. Stew: Thank you Steve, I'm sure Gail will not have moved by the time I'm home.
D. Peck: {1 image attachment}
D. Peck: You didn't get that from me.
Holly opened the picture and smiled, Gail laid in the middle of their living room rug in Holly's high school track hoodie.
Dr. Stew: I will never tell, thanks : )
D. Nash: Where are you, I brought breakfast.
Holly started typing out her message when her phone rang. "Hey Tracie, I'm in the sample lab, give me a few minutes to lock up and I'll head up to my office, the door should be open." Holly rambled collecting her laptop and tape recorder.
"No need to rush, I'll be here." Tracie laughed before hanging up. Holly locked the lab and made her way back towards her office, only stopping to quickly change out of her scrubs and back into her jeans and t-shirt.
"I figured you may need a break before Knight and Callahan come in, they went to 27 to search cold cases." Tracie held out a large paper coffee cup as Holly walked into her office.
"Have I ever told you that I love you?" Holly grinned sipping the steaming coffee, she had been focused enough during the autopsy to forget her fatigue, the second she read Steve's text it rolled over her with the force of a tsunami.
"Steve took Sophie to school, he mentioned that he nearly checked Gail's pulse when he walked into the house." Tracie shook her head and handed Holly a plate with bacon, eggs, and toast. "Gail cussed him out before he even made it into the living room."
"That's the Gail I love." Holly laughed, moving the chair from her desk to the coffee table in the middle of the room. "She didn't take the pain killers for her back last night before we went to bed. She won't risk waking up Sophie having a nightmare."
"Are those still frequent?" Tracie asked between bites of toast, she didn't ask to pry she only offered Holly the option to vent. Tracie knew that Holly's friends outside of their group didn't fully understand what being with a cop meant, or how the day to day events left scars on their lives.
"Honestly, no. She has problems falling asleep at times, but her nightmares flare up when she's on pain killers." Holly ate a few bites of her eggs shaking her head.
"At least that doesn't happen often." Tracie nodded picking up a piece of bacon. "Have you guys had time to discuss the wedding?"
"Are you asking for Elaine?" Holly laughed, leaning back in her chair, Elaine had been hounding them to set a date so she could build a list of names for wedding announcements.
"No." Tracie shook her head. "But her bugging you seems right. She called Steve three days after he proposed asking for my mother's phone number claiming that they needed to start building a guest list."
"Oh, my mother and Elaine are thick as thieves. I'd bet on them scheming already." Holly sighed. "We've been busy, she proposed and we caught the Harris case, and now this case. We haven't had the time."
"Yeah, the cases have been piling up lately." Tracie nodded, finishing her breakfast, she set the empty plate on the coffee table and leaned back on the couch.
"We will figure it all out, it may not be soon. I won't let Elaine and my mother highjack our wedding though." Holly agreed sipping her coffee.
"I'm happy for you and Gail. It's refreshing to have the happy version of Gail full time." Tracie watched the blush creep across Holly's cheeks.
"Being with Gail have been the best and worst parts of my life." Holly laughed to herself staring down at her now empty plate. "I honestly thought I would never find that person you grow up here stories of, that one person who you instantly click with. I figured I'd never find it and all of a sudden standing at the edge of a crime scene I found Gail."
Tracie watched Holly wondering if she should question how it had been the worst part of her life when she stopped talking.
"Have you heard the analogy that it happened as fast as lightening?" Holly asked glancing up at Tracie who nodded.
"That's Gail, one day I'm walking through my mundane life, putting the pieces back together after leaving a 4 year relationship and suddenly I'm standing in an interrogation room at 15 and she's kissing me. I had found my person and I lost her when I found my dream job, it all happened in what felt like seconds. My heart broke, I agreed to San Francisco and I knew that my heart and my future would always be here in Toronto."
Holly moved the plate from her lap to the coffee table before crossing her legs and meeting Tracie's curious and concerned gaze. "Without a doubt I know that Gail is my soul mate, she's the person I had been waiting for and that sucked when I moved. I'm happiest with her and Sophie, my heart feels whole. Every time they left California to come back here, or when I left back to California, every time I hung up the phone or turned off my computer my heart broke because an entire country separated us."
"Did you ever imagine that you could need a person that much?" Tracie laughed noticing Holly's worried expression. "After Jerry died, I tried to be alone, to avoid the pain of losing someone else. One day I'm standing in Gail's apartment helping her pick out dresses for a blind date discussing my refusal to date Steve. It felt as if days had passed when he got down on one knee, holding a diamond ring and a key proposing to me and asking to be Leo's step dad. I can barely deal with cases that keep us away for a few days, how you and Gail spent two years apart only physically being together a handful of times baffles me."
"Honestly I wonder how we made it here. We fought, we broke up, we loved each other though, and that made us want to work it out." Holly shrugged, watching the shock appear on Tracie's face. "We broke up twice, we thought that it would be easier if we tried to distance ourselves from each other."
"How is it that I didn't know that you broke up?!" Tracie asked as her expression morphed from shocked to pissed off.
"We didn't want to drag everyone into it, to drag Sophie into it." Holly laughed chewing on her lip. "We had a fight 6 months after I moved, Gail had been granted custody of Sophie and our schedules were out of sync. We played phone tag for two weeks and when we finally found time to talk it turned into this yelling match over Skype. I begrudgingly told her that we should just break up now to save the time and she agreed and we both hung up."
"I tried calling her to apologize when I knew she would be awake I knew she wouldn't answer though, we had been through that already, thanks to the night at the penny, I took time off work and flew back to beg for forgiveness." Holly could tell that the puzzle pieces falling into place in Tracie's mind.
"You showed up at the station." Tracie shook her head, remembering Holly stalking into the station and cornering Gail in an interrogation room.
"We have a thing for interrogation rooms." Holly laughed running her teeth over her lower lip. "6 months of stress and fear melted away the second I had her in my arms."
"What other time did you break up?" Tracie asked clearing off the coffee table and throwing their breakfast plates in the trash.
"Right after Sophie's adoption had been finalized." Holly muttered. "Sophie had asked me why I didn't live with Gail, why we weren't a full time family. Gail told her that I lived in the states for work and my job meant the world to me. The night before I flew home Gail told me that she needed to focus on Sophie, that coordinating work, Sophie, and time for me made our relationship to stressful. We spent that night holding each other both trying to not cry before we were separated again."
"And that lasted what, 4 days?" Tracie choked on a laugh noticing Holly's expression fall between scared and heartbroken.
"We didn't talk for 2 months." Holly breathed, those two months had been the worst. Holly had buried herself in her work, taking on extra hours. She stopped calling her friends and family, the only person she needed to talk to had to focus on her new life and Holly didn't know if she had a place in it anymore.
"2 months!?" Tracie just stared at Holly wondering how she was just now learning that they had been broken up for two months.
"My mom told me once that people who are meant to be together find each other like magnets. I came back to Toronto for my parent's anniversary party and I ran into Gail every day. I only went out to the places Gail would never visit, she hates the side of town my brothers live in, but she appeared around every corner." Holly shook her head. "I couldn't wait to be back to work, I knew that I wouldn't run into Gail in San Francisco. I came home from the airport to find her asleep on my couch."
"Sophie wouldn't talk to Gail until she talked to me, Sophie says that Gail's heart isn't whole without both of us in it." Holly smiled to herself. "We spent a day arguing about how the odds were stacked against us and then booked a flight back to Toronto, we were in limbo, nothing had been resolved."
"Wait, we had lunch the week of your parent's anniversary, you bought the house a week after that." Tracie tried to put a timeline together in her head listening to Holly.
"We went with you and Steve to the butterfly show at the park that weekend." Holly nodded, playing with her engagement ring that hung against her locket. "On our way home, we stumbled upon the house just as the realtor put the for sale sign up. We were going through the motions still, tip toeing around each other. We toured the house and put in the offer."
"You guys closed on that house three days later." Tracie's eyebrows furrowed as she stared at Holly.
"My parents call it our last-ditch effort, it forced us to talk lay all on the table, the house became the solid foundation we didn't have, a home, a tangible commitment." Holly nodded, remembering the night before they signed all the paperwork, they had laid everything out, fears, dreams, hopes, and wishes. They had cried and yelled, but they figured out a timeline. "We built a plan, I would complete my contract, and move home, to our home. And once a month we would be together as a family, even it if was for a night."
"That explains why you guys started traveling more." Tracie nodded to herself. "That first year you had only visited each other three times and suddenly you were both building up frequent flyer miles."
"It cured my fear of flying." Holly smiled, attempting to stifle a yawn. "We realized that we couldn't be that long distance couple who only saw each other every six months. We did everything out of order, we started a relationship with a continent between us, we built a family, we bought a house, and a year after that, we moved in together and now we're engaged."
"Gail's never been one for order, she gets it right though." Tracie smiled hearing the printer in Holly's office groan to life.
"Those would be the test results." Holly stood up and walked to the printer watching it spit out the results of the DNA tests. "You should call Callahan and Knight." Holly muttered, reading over the first few pages.
"They just walked in." Tracie laughed motioning towards the window in Holly's office facing the lab.
"We came up empty handed." Callahan huffed as he sulked into the room and dropped next to Tracie on the couch. Knight stood awkwardly in the doorway, staring at Callahan.
"I may have a lead for you." Holly sighed, making sure the printer would print 4 copies. "DNA results from all of the pieces show that 13 different cadavers make up the one pulled from the storage locker."
"So we need to find 13 partial bodies?" Knight asked wide eyed.
"No." Holly shook her head and collected the copies of the results from the printer and passed them out. "All of the samples were in the database, it's a requirement for all Medically Gifted specimens, and all 13 bodies were donated to the University of Toronto's school of medicine."
"How did 13 medically gifted bodies end up stitched together and stuffed into a vintage freezer in a storage locker?" Callahan muttered reading over the list of names attached to the report.
"I have no idea." Holly shrugged glancing at the clock on the wall, she still needed to type of her official report before she left the lab which meant she wouldn't be home until dinnertime.
"Best guess?" Callahan asked, he knew that Holly had a theory by the way she chewed on her lip.
"Each class honors the bodies in a different way, some classes hold memorials, other hold funeral services, and each school has a dedicated funeral home." Holly watched Callahan quickly jot down his notes on the back of the printouts. "UoT uses the funeral home the first bodies were stolen from. I would check out all of the employees."
"We've checked all of them, none of them have ever left Canada much less gone to school in the UK." Knight grunted, not bothering to look up from her phone.
"The person may have been taught by a European doctor, the stitch pattern is a new technique only taught in the UK." Holly rolled her eyes at Knight, Knight was the detective, Holly just dealt with the bodies.
"We will check it out." Tracie glanced and Callahan before standing up. "We should head back to the station and file the warrant to search the morgue and their employment records."
"I'll email you the rest of the test results once they come in." Holly moved the chair she had been sitting in for breakfast back to its rightful place before walking behind her desk. "Thank you for breakfast Tracie."
"Any time!" Tracie called following Callahan and Knight into the hallway. Holly moved to sit down when a man in an expensive suit knocked on her door frame.
"Dr. Stewart?" The man asked quickly glancing over Holly's appearance.
"Um, yes." Holly's brow furrowed watching as the man quickly pulled a black folder from his briefcase and held it out to her.
"These are for you." He politely smiled as Holly took the folder. "My card's inside, please call if you have questions." The man turned on his heel and walked down the hall, leaving Holly confused as she stared down at the folder in her hands.