A/N, part one: Oh hi. Sorry 'bout that. A bit longer chapter this time, to make up for the absence. Thanks to everyone who said 'Hi!' while i was away, and thanks to the beta people (Thank You, Beta People.)
This is utter fiction (especially everything about real agencies like the CDC and NYPD, and everything about DNA evidence) though there really is a Women's Health Clinic in White Plains.
I snarl at the fanfiction format daemons. (snarl!)
"What's this 'Greek Tragedy' business, Lennie?" the trusted companion asked him.
He put his fork down at the edge of his plate and touched his napkin to his mouth. Then he reached for his water glass and drank slowly, all the while his eyes soft on the muted yellow flame in the center of the table. After a long moment, he drew his gaze up to hers and said,
"Maybe … twenty years ago now? There were these two cops … "
/
/
Never. Not once did she feel anger about it. Not when there was no money for milk for breakfast, and not when she went without new shoes for a few months longer than she should. Not even on those nights when her dad didn't come until late (or not at all) and she'd be the one to steer Mom up the stairs, guide her to her bed. Then drift back down herself and hit the kitchen mess. Scrape leftover spaghetti or tuna noodle casserole into the trash and stack the plates in a sink of hot sudsy water. Lug an overflowing hamper to the basement and get a load of socks and underwear going. Clean the dishes quickly, then study while waiting to put everything in the dryer before going to bed herself. Sometimes she'd still be at it when her dad got home and he'd smile his fatigued to the edge of collapse smile at her where she sat at the table working through algebra, calculus, trigonometry, and Punnett squares, and transitive verbs.
"Ally-Oop," he'd greet her.
And bend and kiss the top of her head, the story of his day coming off him in the whiff of yeasty beer or whiskey-hot breath, stale perspiration, cigarette smoke and sex. Sometimes he'd lower himself into one of the kitchen chairs with a low sigh and Alex would know that there is a special reward for the one who stays up latest, the one who works the hardest. Her father's good graces would remind her.
Though mostly he'd just ask,
"Mom gone to bed?"
Then head that way himself.
/
"Little pitchers have big ears," her mom would say whenever she and her own sister would sit at their aquamarine Formica and chrome kitchen table to drink hot, sweet Sankas lightened with powdered creamer, roll loose-tobacco cigarettes with their little paper tubes, and Auntie Betty would rest her delicate self on the edge of her chair and droop prettily, twist her handkerchief or the ends of her curls into knots and talk, and talk, and talk about Uncle Donald and …
Mom would look directly at her younger sister and Auntie Betty would look at Alex and frown and press her lips together in a firm line.
"Ally, why don't you go play?"
But this was how Alex came to know something that wasn't for her to know.
/
Sometimes her mom would pull herself up out of her stupor while Alex was tugging a pillow or a blanket into a semblance of comfortable order around her on the bed, would look right at her daughter and her eyes - hazel-gold - would fill with worry, with unshed (never shed) tears and she'd reach, touch her hand to Alex's hand.
"You're a bright penny, my daughter," she'd say. "Whatever would I do without you?"
"Ally-girl," she'd whisper, slipping back into forgetfulness. "Alexandra. My daughter. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
/
"John how could you?"
When Laurie Manotti demanded to know this of her special, precious, adored husband, Eames looked down at 'Mr. Practice Wife, Mr. Better Than All of You - Saviour of Humanity - Mr. Genius-Boy' and felt nothing at all. Just wondered idly how many wives across the span of time had uttered those same four words in that exact tone of voice.
/
Perhaps because she could recall her mom being the initiator of every single road-trip 'eye-spy' game they ever played on the long drive to Boston, or because she knew each and every year that it was her mom who had stayed up all night Christmas Eve getting everything perfect for the kids when they all got up - 'the kids' being how she thought of her brothers, her sister. Because she had absolutely no doubt that it had been Mom who had crept into bedrooms and replaced baby teeth with coins, and saw with her own eyes that it was Mom who applied calamine lotion to sunburns and windburns and bug bites. And it was Mom who'd taken the boys to their pre-dawn hockey practices and their afternoon baseball practices and Mom who'd supplied paper valentines and bake sale cookies for all five of her children.
Maybe that was why she was the only one who wasn't humiliated and angry when Mom passed out at her kid brother's seventh grade school play. Or why she never even got angry any of the times Mom passed out with a lit cigarette.
But it might have been because she knew something that wasn't for her to know.
/
/
Eames hated how jumpy she was, but she couldn't stop. Twisting her head at every corner, hummingbird eyes flicking from the rearview to the side mirror to the road ahead. He noticed, but was quiet.
Had been quiet since meeting her at the ferry terminal. And she could tell that he was watching her, that he had noticed, but even so, she couldn't seem to stop it. Couldn't seem to get her ears to stop the ringing that somehow amplified the pounding of blood that had started up the instant she saw him there, waiting for her. ( o god ) When he should have been somewhere else. ( what … ? ) Or stop the simultaneous urges to run to him and away from him.
Well, you look great.
/
At the crime scene, the hair on the back of her neck and on her arms kept rising, and she'd whip her head around and find nothing there but air. And try to relax the creased-in spot between her eyes, and try to relax shoulders that were pulling up toward her ears, just before she'd get that someone's watching sense and whip around again. Had to force herself not inspect each patrolman. Had to not slide sidelong glances around the room. Had to try not to try to catch anybody watching her, or watching him. Gooseflesh would rise, she'd whip around.
Third time it happened, Bobby was standing behind her. Fourth time, Bobby was standing there. Fifth time, she started to relax.
/
A little later on in their unmarked department-issue sport utility vehicle, she had (staring hard at her hands) at last found courage enough to ask him,
"Is this supposed to mean something? You coming back early?"
He was a little startling, moving like that from his earlier display of bashful awkwardness to his hallmark restless, edgy intensity, his boldest gaze. And something else.
But the time apart had left her unsure. Not even a phone call. Since she had told him to go (no, ordered him to go), she wondered. Truthfully, she feared. Truthfully, she expected him to say to her again,
"Why not ask me to cut off my arm?" Say to her again, "Ask something else, Alex. Anything else. Because I can't do this thing you are asking me to do."
And that would be that.
But he didn't. He nodded - just once.
"I get it. Okay? And you're right," he told her with his eyes holding hers firmly. "About the way I am, and everything else. All of it. You're right."
She turned her face away from him - a quick, jerky motion, one meant to keep him from seeing and knowing her weakness. But the something else brought a sound from his throat. In a breath, a cough, a bark.
"Don't."
Instinctively obedient, she jerked her face back to him, and saw with some surprise how it was just the same for him, that he needed to see it all, no matter what. He needed to see how this admission would make her feel. Needed to know how his confession and his vulnerability were going to affect her. Needed to be an equal partner in her Moment of Truth.
She almost didn't notice him reaching for her and after, she had no idea how, in her skirt and boots, he managed to pull her across but she was in his lap again with her feet in the driver's seat.
And he was saying,
"No, shhh … it's okay. It's okay to be right. It's okay. I love you."
/
/
Nice tidy endings. Nice happy endings. Aren't they nice? Everybody loves nice happy endings. The kind where the flawed-but-still-worthy hero confronts the villain and is redeemed. Everything comes out right. The damsel is saved. Justice is served. All the little loose ends are tied up and maybe there's a Wonderful Surprise - a ring, a promise, a child. Fade to black.
Wouldn't that be nice?
How about the 'gritty realism' approach - it seems fairly popular still. Those ones where 'The Truth' is revealed, where the perfect, utterly-blameless victim at long last tells someone what happened, is believed, and supported, gets to confront the tormentor, and (most importantly) doesn't have to live in fear and shame and guilt and … doesn't have to feel like that anymore?
Nice and simple.
Eames didn't expect anything like that.
Because she's a cop, she knows - nobody is a perfect victim. Not even her. She didn't expect anything like justice, or even satisfaction. She didn't expect a happy ending, or a nice ending. At most, she hoped she'd make it through. And if Bobby hadn't stopped loving her at the other end? Well, that'd be a bonus.
(But oh, if she could have just forgotten about it all. Forgotten, and just gloried in wing-soft accidentally-on-purpose touches, and secret glances that felt like exactly like slanting golden sunbeams through leafy green canopies, if she could have drifted on the candy-sweet space, the 'after I told him' space. The 'before he finally thought to ask that next most obvious question' space. Before.)
And if she had known what was going on downstairs, if she'd had even the smallest inkling, she would have stopped it. She would have said to him and to Rodgers,
You have no idea what you're doing.
/
/
It would have been nice if they could have conducted a formal interview at the one-six the way they'd planned. Invited him to talk "off the record." Let a few of his own fine detectives have a little chat with him about the way things were shaping up. Ask him a few key questions, like; was aware that bacteria has DNA? Or that the NYPD keeps all (yes, all) those annual-general physical blood samples in storage? Ask him if he realized that - even in the lobby, the elevator, the parking garage, even in the stairwells and the bathrooms - that someone is always watching?
It would have been nice if they could have had a chance to show him the evidence and maybe even provoke a confession out of him.
But there was that other problem - the one Kathy Jarrow had pointed out to them just before they'd provoked a confession out of her.
Major Case leaked like a sieve.
/
/
And for the record, it wasn't Liz Rodger's fault. Even though Bobby very nearly lost his mind after Ross let him know that he knew about his paternity test, she never said a word to Danny about the rest of it.
She was not the leak.
And to be honest, she was a little bit miffed at Goren, considering.
But she got over it.
/
She even got over Danny. It hurt to hurt him like that, but it was the truth. That day, after Goren's outburst. She had to tell him something.
But regardless of how foolishly he'd been behaving, regardless of how much a fool some people in the department seemed to think he was, Liz knew that Danny Ross was no fool. Naïve? Yes, absolutely. And maybe even foolishly loyal to the wrong people. But not worthy of her contempt, no. Not deserving of the utterly ridiculous place in the unfolding events that he now inhabited and not deserving of the role he'd been set up to play.
So she planned all day what she'd say to him when he came - because she knew he'd be back - back to confront her about all this. About how long she'd known, and about how involved she'd become.
She felt terrible about it, she really did. She had feelings for Danny. She thought, given time, they could have had something … nice. But she just couldn't lie to him, not while he was searching her face with those lovely green eyes, looking at her so hopefully for something like a sign that she could put if not him, then at least the job ahead of this.
And in the end, it turned out that she didn't have to say a word. Her arms (crossed) and her jaw (stubborn) said it all. He slumped in slo-mo.
"Fine," he said. And headed for the door.
Then she couldn't let him go like that.
"Danny,"
He paused at her use of his first name at work, stayed at the door with his back to her, but turned his head to show he was listening.
"I like you. A lot." She paused, wanting him to understand. "But what wouldn't you do?"
He stayed like that for most of a minute, absorbing the layers of significance or perhaps considering his boys. Who knew what? It was a surprising vulnerability he let her see, but Danny Ross stayed with his hand resting on the doorframe for almost one whole minute. Softness that kept him from looking at her again. He simply said,
"I understand."
And then he was gone.
Rodgers allowed herself the luxury of staring at the empty space where he'd just been for a few more seconds before she gathered herself up and got back to the body on her slab.
/
/
She'd had to call in many professional favours. Had placed another call - someone else to watch her back, and she wasn't going to over-think that, because who the hell else would she have called, anyway?
If she hadn't started with her contacts at the Department of Health and the CDC and worked her way backwards, she probably never would have found these things. But a colleague at the Health Department told her, "This way will work."
And she was right.
There were only so many cases matching the specifics or at least what she figured were the specifics - and Rodgers was working on a set of educated hunches at best - she knew the season, for example. And the most probable kind of infection.
The Department of Health files weren't personalized.
Unsub. Female. Approximate age - sixteen.
Chlamydia Trachomatis bacterium ... Infection source unknown.
Patient treated with appropriate antibiotics.
Information forwarded by White Plains Women's Health Services Clinic, July 1984.
That was all.
And she had lied to get the file from White Plains. She, Liz Rodgers, had told a couple of bald-faced lies over there in White Plains. Being a doctor and an employee of the NYPD helped. Still. She had the photocopied pages of that medical file in her possession, with the hand-written notations in the margins that were perhaps too personalized.
'ID - fake. Guess her age (patient is very small, so … ?) ? Reported? NO ** patient emphatic - NO possibility / reporting. (Other trauma? Won't talk. N/I counselor ) - T/A by stand. D & C / vac. - positive for chlamydia - tetracycline? Fwd. report / sample(s) to DoH / CDC - Cash. - No follow-up.'
She has opened up more people than she can remember. But seeing inside the terribly-horribly-awfully secret life of Alex Eames filled her with an ominous sense of her own power to cut.
She kept those pages hidden even from her own eyes for two days, sat at her desk with her head in her hands and stared at the manila envelope a half dozen times before she made another move.
And then she located two biological samples. One was with the CDC.
One was from the NYPD's very own biostorage.
She ran all the tests herself, discreetly. Which wasn't easy.
Tests like that are expensive. The bean counters tend to notice random, not-officially-requested DNA testing. Especially when it involved biological samples from some of their own cops, their own brass.
So, some more bald-faced lies, but she was getting better at it. And she had discovered that she kind-of liked this sneaking, lying, laying false paper trails and so forth, all to get to the truth. It gave her a twisted kind-of satisfaction. She hoped she'd have a chance to do more of it soon.
Of course, the DNA was a positive match.
Infection source confirmed.
Science can be a wonderful thing.
She sat at her desk that day tingling with the thrill of her own private victory. She raised her thermos cup of ginger tea in silent salute to her dear friend.
"Now somebody else knows," she told his memory, then sipped her solo toast. "And now there's proof."
Now, Dr. Liz Rodgers was unsure how to proceed.
/
She had been known to tell the living there's a reason she would rather work with the dead. Lennie was on a short list of the best people she ever knew. Not perfect, but real. Unashamedly real. Courageous, moral, a true gentleman.
Though it had eaten at him for years he had hesitated, and his sound, rational, sane reasoning naturally made her pause.
Actually, scared the living shit out of her.
This was crazy.
Wasn't it?
But, maybe timing really is everything?
Because she was staring at her cream cheese, sprouts and cucumber on rye thinking about it, wondering what in hell she was going to do when she heard a soft sound, and looked up, and with a wholly-unexpected flood of relief saw (finally!) Goren standing in her office doorway looking for all the world like a reluctant schoolboy. And then he asked her if she could do him a favour.
A/N part two: Many women's health centres around the world have reported this sad fact - young women who have been victims of abuse often only learn that they have been infected with an STI (sexually transmitted infection) when they seek medical help for an unplanned pregnancy.
The leading cause female infertility in America is the effects of undiagnosed, untreated STIs.