3:17 PM
North Brother Island, NYC

"I'm not gonna make it," the M.E. panted, pausing in her ascent with her head drooping toward her chest. She sucked down a few breaths and glanced back at Kate. "You've gotta go on without me, honey. Tell my family I love them, okay?"

The detective used the delay to remove her helmet and swipe a palm backward from her brow, combing away errant tendrils of damp hair. "Lady, if you're gonna keel over, don't you dare do it in front of me. Your body would be blocking the stairs and dooming me, too."

"Going out together. That's so romantic."

"I mean, if I gotta go, and the last thing I see simply must be someone else's booty? I'm glad it's yours." She reached up and goosed the medical examiner, adding throatily, "Baby got back."

The woman above swatted blindly backward at the offending pincher without effect. "You filthy beast. Why you gotta ruin our special moments?"

"Oh, I'd ruin that alright."

A silvery, solo blip of laughter escaped the woman above, a thing gasped to freedom past exhaustion and tempered to brevity by recent horrors but shining and genuine nonetheless. The chime of humor spiraled above and below. It echoed swiftly back by strange acoustics that morphed the note of play into something more akin to an outcry of pain or alarm.

The pair locked gazes even while their expressions froze and sank back toward the grimness which pervaded around them. Lanie turned to front and continued up the shifting, groaning staircase. They reached the first floor without incident and stepped off to one side past the others already accumulated there. Continuing squeals signaled Joseph and Logan beginning their ascent.

A handful of upward-spiraling turns was all it had taken to go from pitch black to muted daylight. There weren't enough steps to escape above the sense of exploring a nightmare. Odorous tinges of filth still clung to the detective's pant legs and boots after sloshing through the pool. Everyone bore some taint of decay. Welcome relief moaned through the halls, scattering loose detritus and ushering in scents of rain-soaked flora. Even Sergeant Bielsa, who stood nearby with her brow still furrowed and her lips compressed with impatience, looked a little more at ease amidst the gusts of cleaner atmosphere.

Following a few uninterrupted moments to settle them both, Beckett regarded her besty, waited for the lasting connection of her focus, and asked, "You wanna take me through it?"

Lanie didn't need clarification. The two had spent years employing their ritual. The doctor knew how hotly the 'whys' of any homicide scenario burned within the NYPD officer—that need to know the story. Likewise, the investigator was aware that her friend sought moments like the one upon the stairs to smile or otherwise celebrate the living before delving into death. "We didn't get much," she cautioned.

"We knew it was a cursory inspection before leaving the twelfth. No time. No lab or personnel. I'm not asking for what you can't give, only for your impressions based on what you saw."

The other's dark eyes shifted downward as if peering through architectural layers. "DC Alvarez was correct during our meeting earlier; we're looking at a series of mass murders. My preliminary hypothesis is that the killings included somewhere between ten and twenty victims per series and that each series occurred several months apart. It could be a wide enough gap to make them annual events. If that's the case, the grave represents somewhere between four and six years of...effort."

The overabundance of evidence furnished zero ease when it came to reconciling the scenario to its location. The bustle and din of New York City surrounded NoBro, hardly more than a stone's throw away in every direction. It was the most populous urban sprawl in the country with the largest police presence and one of the busiest ports. Multiple branches of armed forces and intelligence agencies maintained offices or bases nearby. The Big Apple was a sieve in many respects too, of course, but there was a huge difference between the usual crimes that went unnoticed and multiple mass murders.

"H-how—" Beckett stopped to reorient and tried again. "Think about where we are."

"Believe me, I have been."

They went silent and shuffled farther into an interior corner of the room as the current pair left the staircase. Joseph glanced their way but kept his distance when the M.E. shook her head once in mute forbiddance. Ulan and Eamon, the final pairing below, began noisily making their way up.

"Immigrant smugglers," Kate ventured aloud at length and repeated herself more audibly when the words were swallowed up beneath the driving rain. "I've heard a few horror stories about this kind of thing with coyotes, mugalari, and snakeheads. Someone can't pay or they almost get caught mid-transport. They drop cargo and don't leave any witnesses."

"It's possible, honey, but it seems unlikely. For one thing, this is a very out-of-the-way place to get rid of evidence. More importantly, there are a lot of ethnicities present down there."

"There's no racial bias?"

Lanie hesitated, shrugged. "There were more Caucasians than anything else, but that doesn't mean much. They still could've come from anywhere in the world. The quality of dental work and few old surgical sites seem to confirm as much. That line of thinking does bring up one odd detail: there's a marked disparagement regarding gender. Twenty, maybe even thirty-to-one in favor of females."

"Oh, damn. That sounds like the nonconsensual side of the same coin: human trafficking."

"I'd agree if it weren't for the way most of them suffered before they died."

"Tortured," the detective recalled aloud with a wince.

"Extensively, yeah. I've seen stuff like this before." The M.E. paused as if dragged to a halt by the referenced memories and cleared her throat. "Wound patterns and their prevalence at especially sensitive areas of the body reveal the hand of an experienced practitioner. It's strange because while I did see the kind of carefully considered damage I'd expect from a professional, I also noticed amateurish attempts of the same on other bodies. It's contradictory data. If I didn't know better, I'd think we were looking at victims that had been used to teach a classroom of extreme interrogators their trade."

"I agree that sounds far-fetched, but why do you consider it unlikely?"

"Interrogation specialists are trained on cadavers in safe, laboratory conditions."

"Oh. Wait, how the heck do you know that?"

"When I was still in medical school, a company that provides those services attempted to headhunt me and a couple of other candidates. They explained some of what was involved in the craft at the time."

"Are you serious? Jeez." Beckett shook her head with a grimace. "Sometimes I forget there's an actual industry built around that shit."

Her companion arched an eyebrow in turn. "I can appreciate your disdain towards the medieval concept of torture, honey, but don't fall into the mental trap others do. Modern intelligence gathering saves lives. Medical interrogations performed by a capable staff can yield positive results with minimal patient suffering, often without serious or lasting damage. The real thing isn't the same as what you read about in sensationalized news or history books. It's not like what we saw downstairs. In fact, getting physical is the first thing they teach you not to do. Psychological destabilization and chemical stimulation are safer and far more reliable barrier breakers. Pain is admittedly effective at eliciting a response, but it's also dangerous for everyone involved and notoriously unwieldy."

"I'm sorry, hold up. Did you just lecture me about the fucking merits of torture?"

"No," the medical examiner fired crisply back at her, "I attempted to explain how real, everyday people with compassion and genuinely decent intentions go about an ugly task versus mindless adversarialism and still manage to sleep at night. But let's cut to the quick and spare ourselves an argument, okay? My point is the various applications of torture I observed downstairs don't imply a common or long-lasting goal in terms of information gathering. Do you understand?"

"I get it. But, no, I sure as shit don't understand."

Lanie sighed and rubbed at the bridge of her nose.

"What does it suggest to you?" Beckett asked with less bite in her tone.

The other's hand arose from her brow in a weary, aimless gesture. "I don't know. Something else. People break under that kind of stress. It isn't a question of 'if but 'when'. That being the case, we should have seen injuries that taper off in intensity or frequency. That's not what happened. There's also no apparent commonality to our victims beyond the scope of gender, and even that much is an imperfect value. If they were all part of the same nationalized military or terrorist group, we could define them geographically and surmise that this was indeed a crude means of intelligence gathering. One that's methodically spanned the past several years. But they don't. Victimology is all over the place."

"Maybe they all worked for the same company or lived in the same area."

"Maybe, but wouldn't you expect to have heard about a company or community that lost dozens of people at a time? That'd be a big story—international news maybe. And would they still be in business or living together if the same mass disappearance occurred again and again?"

"Damn it," Beckett issued softly. "That makes me wanna lean back toward immigration. That's where you see big numbers of people like this minus a lot of chatter. I can't think of another victim pool that would allow such large subtractions to be made without creating a buzz or making headlines. It still wouldn't jive, I guess. Any smuggler who served up this many victims wouldn't be able to have done the same deed more than one or two times. No one would trust their services."

Lanie was silent, frowning pensively.

"There's the missing persons element."

"Huh?"

Beckett glanced to one side, lured by an especially deep groan from the stairs as the structure swayed and shuddered beneath the burden of the towering twins. It held. "We average over ten-thousand missing person cases a year. That's in New York City. The surrounding metropolitan area offers up even more in terms of a victim pool. Most of those cases are resolved within the first few hours, but plenty aren't."

"That number probably only accounts for documented citizens and reported cases, huh?"

"Mostly. It could be higher still, sure."

"I don't understand," the medical examiner said with a shake of her head. "Why the torture? Why dump them here of all places? Think about what that entails. You'd need a boat big enough to do the job, but subtle enough that it wouldn't stand out to the security patrols around Riker's Island."

"Shit," Beckett hissed in interruption. "Fuckin' Rikers."

"What?"

"Ah, I had the boys poking around there following another thread," Kate explained with some exasperation. "They were looking for traces of Finch's goddamn boat."

"So?"

"So, which seems more likely? That a group of suspects managed to sneak downriver and offload a boat full of corpses without being seen, or that they bribed their way through the security measures?"

"Beating the bushes on behalf of one lead might've startled a different kind of quarry," Lanie replied, catching on swiftly. "That'd be a helluva thing for someone to get involved in."

"They wouldn't necessarily have to be involved. If I gave you five-hundred bucks to turn your head and look the other way, are you going to ask me why? You wouldn't need the correct answer even if you did ask. I'd tell you—what? Drugs. Weapons. Something like that. That'd probably seem like a reasonable enough answer for someone willing to take the cash."

Lanie pursed her lips into a line of mute concession.

Beckett reached into her vest pocket for her cell phone but jolted to a halt when a blur of movement lurched at her right peripheral. It was only a tree bough, laden with dripping leaves, bending sharply in the wind beyond the shattered panes of a hallway window.

That single reminder of the island waiting beyond the hospital walls summoned the memory of pale grey, violet-flecked eyes, and deep crimson hair. She thought of the unknown youth they encountered in the woods earlier and saw again the arctic absence of fear or any other emotion staring back. Her skin prickled with fresh sensitivity. "This couldn't be the work of one person. That's impossible, right?"

Dr. Parrish studied her for a silent beat. "There are too many contradictory implications within each series of deaths for one suspect, let alone the mass grave in its entirety. Different wound patterns indicate various implements. Angling and depth speak to left and right-hand dominant perpetrators and also to contrasting sizes and strengths, or at least ferocity. Then there's the expertise we discussed regarding the torture itself, with familiarity showcased as well as its opposite. No. We're definitely looking at multiple killers. I don't wanna guess at a number. Just thinking about the potential sum makes me—

"Hey. Is everyone set?"

Kate turned along with Lanie to regard Sergeant Bielsa, who had moved to occupy the hallway entrance from the stairwell and was scowling expectantly back at the team. The slanted fall of daylight which bisected her figure was dispersed by a glaring splash of brightness. Distant thunder boomed across the tumultuous sky seconds later.

"Let's move," she stated without waiting for a negative answer.

Beckett's cell phone rang.

Everyone turned toward the chime in surprise. The detective winced and answered the call. "Go ahead," she instructed the others. "I'll bring up the rear with Ulan and Eamon." As they began filing out into the hallway she spoke into the phone, "Hello?"

"Beckett," an exasperated Esposito answered, "finally. What the hell's going on out there?"

"We were downstairs. Way down, I mean. No reception."

"Why isn't anyone on your team answering their radios?"

"Comms are down."

"Down? I'm in the war room looking at your live feeds as we speak."

"Then you oughta know it's down on our goddamn end. The storm, I guess."

"The storm? Nah. We're only a couple miles apart, max. Attenuation doesn't wreak that kinda havoc at this range on these frequencies."

"Javi, whadda ya want me to tell you? Better yet, why don't you tell me why you ca—

"What?"

"I said—

"Hold up, Beckett." She grit her teeth in annoyance but obliged. On the other end of the line, a woman's voice became audible raised in unintelligible agitation. "Beckett, tell Officer—which one? Tell Greene to turn ninety degrees right," he passed along by way of halting instruction.

"Greene," she called through the doorway. "Turn right. Your feed is showing them something—

"Oh shit!" Esposito cried. "Down! Get—

The warning was drowned out by an eruption of automatic gunfire from multiple sources beyond the team's location. It shattered everything. The nearness of Harbinger's mindless wrath, all considerations of mass murder, any concerns for the brooding island itself: everything else was washed away.

A/N: Once again, I wanna give a quick shout out to Stratan for his continued support as this story's beta. I also wanna thank everyone for their comments and PMs. It's pretty rad to hear from y'all and to be sharing the same creative space again. Lastly, for anyone who missed my warning and stumbled off of that cliff at the end, sorry!