Title: DOA, part 1: Accusation
Disclaimer: These characters aren't mine, no matter how much I wish they were.
Rating: R, for violence and language.
Summary: One doctor is dead, and the County staff can only point fingers at each other as one by one they too become victims of a serial killer's game...
Notes: I wrote this a while ago, but I'm a recent addition to ff.net, and since I'm planning on finishing the series soon, I may as well have it up here . . .
---------------------------------------
"Do you want a cup of coffee?"
He looked up. "Huh?"
The secretary gave him an irritated glare. "Coffee. While you wait."
He contemplated this. "Uh, no. No thanks." Like he needed coffee to keep his mind going. He had all the thoughts in the world to do that for him.
Relative silence penetrated the room. Besides the ringing phones, the constant hollers of officers and inmates, and the ongoing police sirens outside the dirty window, he couldn't hear a thing.
'Why do they want to question me?' he thought fretfully. 'I haven't done anything wrong. I don't know about anything illegal.'
Another voice in his head gleefully answered the first: 'They found out. You know they found out.'
'They couldn't have found out,' the young doctor quickly convinced himself. 'There is no way that anyone could know about this. I hid it so well . . .'
Suddenly the piercing "Beep beep" of a pager caught his attention. He reached down to check the message; plucking the pager from his belt, he squinted at the tiny screen. "Excuse me," he called out to the secretary, "but is this going to take much longer? I'm on call at County today and I've just been paged."
The secretary narrowed her eyes at the young man. "The sergeant will see you any minute now," she told him.
He groaned loudly and leaned back in the hard leather chair. "Someone could be dying in the ER, and I'm sitting here, waiting to be questioned about something I don't even know about!" he hollered, growing increasingly louder with each proclamation. "Something is wrong with this system-"
Just then the big wooden door opened; the battered blinds on the small window rattled against the glass as the door swung open. A burly man took a step through the doorway and surveyed the room. His eyes settled on the young man: "You the doctor?"
The young man swallowed hard and nodded quickly.
The burly man pointed a thumb into the dark room. "This won't take long," he told the doctor, who clutched his coat and nervously stepped into the room. The door banged shut behind him.
All noise from the office outside was hushed inside this box of a room. It was the typical interrogation scene; it could have been taken from any police movie. The walls were made of gray cement, and a huge (presumably two-way) mirror captured his frightened expression. A long table was adorned with only a desk lamp, which shone bright light straight across the room. Two chairs were placed on opposite ends of the table, and as he stepped across the room and sat down in the farthest, the intense heat of the lamp already made him sweat.
The burly man sat at the opposite side of the table. "I'm Sergeant Peterson," he informed the doctor. "I know you've gotta get back to your hospital so I won't take too much more of your time."
He nodded. The room was silent for a moment. "So, do you mind telling me what this is all about?" the doctor asked bluntly. Act dumb.
The sergeant took out a file folder and set it on the table. "I think you know what this is about."
The doctor was silent. Shit. They did know.
"Mind telling me where you were at about 9:00 last night?" Peterson suddenly asked.
'They definitely know,' he thought glumly. "I was . . . on a date." His voice was squeaky.
"Really." Peterson raised an eyebrow skeptically.
The sergeant wasn't buying it. But why shouldn't he? It was the truth! "Yeah, really," came the annoyed response.
The sergeant studied him. "I only ask because according to a Dr.-" Peterson flipped through the chart - "Weaver, you were working at Cook County General until 10 last night. Which either means that you ditched the last hour of your shift, or you're lying to me." Peterson glared menacingly.
'These are my choices?!' the doctor thought, feeling trapped. 'Either way, I'm screwed. If I tell him the truth, that I skipped out on an hour of my shift to go on a date, Weaver will be on my ass.'
"How well did you know her?" the sergeant suddenly asked.
Oh, yes. They knew all right. "Not . . . not well. I'd really barely talked to her before." No reason to tell them that he'd met Deborah West, his 17 year old patient, only 20 minutes before their date. It seemed inconsequential. Plus, if they were going to nail him on sleeping with a minor, any additional details wouldn't help him at all.
Just then the big door opened; noise from the office leaked into the small, cement cell. "Peterson, a word," an officer said briefly.
Peterson stood up and walked across the room. "I'll be right back," he grumbled as he slammed the door shut.
The young doctor let out the breath he'd been holding and ran his fingers through his hair. This was becoming a huge deal, and it really shouldn't have. Since when did sleeping with a minor involve a massive interrogation? Especially since he hadn't known how old she was until early this morning, when she had wanted a ride to her homeroom class.
He'd blown up at her; the shock he had felt when she'd admitted her age could have sent him into V-fib. They had fought for a few minutes after that. Their night of drunken ecstasy had ended with a sobbing 17 year old and a silent ride to John F. Kennedy High School.
The doctor had dutifully dropped the girl off in front of her homeroom, praying that no one saw him. He had watched as she had sauntered over to the football game and immediately began flirting with them - and he had driven off, satisfied that he would never see Deborah West ever again.
But they would want to know why he hadn't checked Deborah's age on her ER chart. They wouldn't care that she had lied to him and said she was twenty two. They wouldn't care that *she* had gotten *him* drunk enough to wake up naked this morning in some sleazy motel room. Oh, no. All they would care about was that he was an adult, and she wasn't.
"Not for 7 months, anyway," he thought dismally, quoting Deborah's stupid reply to the doctor's question: "What do you mean, you're not 18 yet??"
The doctor's thoughts tapered off as he stared at the door. This guy made him nervous. He had an air of knowing everything around him. It wasn't like the doctor to falter in front of authority . . . but then again, this was the first time he'd done something wrong like this.
"But come on," he rationalized. "How serious could this really be?"
**********************************************
A cloud of smoke hung over the room. "So, does it look like he's gonna confess?" an overweight officer asked, taking another puff of his cigarette.
"Not sure yet," Peterson asked. He stared at the young doctor in the other room through the two-way mirror. "But there's no doubt in my mind that he did it. I've got a sixth sense about this kind of thing. I can smell the guilt on him. He got real nervous when I brought up where he was yesterday."
"That's nothing," another officer scoffed. "So he ditched his shift. So what. It doesn't make him a murderer."
Peterson glared at the officer. "He didn't ditch his shift, I know it. This guy wasn't on a date, he was killing the woman at 9:00 last night, in a Trauma room at Cook County General. He was still on his shift. I'm sure I've explained this to you before, O'Malley."
The officer rolled his eyes. "Face it. You've got no case against this guy unless you prove his alibi is false - and you get a confession."
Peterson narrowed his eyes as he made his way to the door. "I'll prove he killed that other doctor," he growled. "The evidence is stacked against him. His fingerprints are all around the room and the murder weapon, and his badge was found in a pool of blood near the victim." Peterson opened the door to leave, adding "Just give me 10 minutes with him. You'll have your damn confession."
************************************************
The old door opened, and the doctor tensed as the burly sergeant walked back in. "So where were we," Peterson grumbled as he took his seat once again.
The doctor hoped the question was rhetorical - he had no idea where they'd left off. "I'll take European History for $300," he joked nervously.
The sergeant's eyes raged. "Do you think this is some joke?" he suddenly shouted. "Are you that arrogant to think that last night was no big deal?!"
The doctor was shocked. "I . . . I . . ."
"Just shut the hell up!" Peterson snapped. "Get this through your thick damn skull: we know exactly where you were and what you did last night. There's no point in hiding it or in making stupid jokes to cover it up. It's only a matter of time between this moment and your trial. The sooner you tell me what I already know, the easier your sentence might be."
Trial? Sentence?! Stunned, the doctor whispered, "I . . . I didn't know . . . I didn't know, I swear . . ."
"Shut your damn face unless you're gonna say something useful," the sergeant growled. "Tell me why you did it."
Tears were welling in the young doctor's eyes. "I . . . don't know . . . I didn't plan it or anything . . . it was just a spur of the moment thing . . ." What was going on? Since when was did sleeping with a minor grounds for the third degree?
The sergeant shook his head and noted "No pre-meditation" on his chart. "How did you get along with her?" he asked, his tone significantly less belligerent than a few seconds ago.
The young man blinked; his eyes were burning. "Who, Deb?" he asked, frightened. "We got along fine, I guess. Well, not really when I found out she lied to me. We sorta had a fight about that."
The sergeant's eyes widened. "Really. You fought?"
"Yeah . . . I've never, you know, done something like this before," the doctor added hastily. At least they would know he wasn't ordinarily a cradle-robbing pervert.
"Mmm hmmm . . ." the sergeant responded, marking the word "Malice" on his chart. The confession was nearly complete. "You call her 'Deb?' "
"Uh, yeah," he said quickly. "I know that's not her formal name or anything, just a nickname -"
"So let's cut the crap. Tell me where you really were last night."
The doctor was confused. "I told you, on a date. You even said that you knew where I was last night."
"I do know where you were," Peterson snapped, slamming his chart onto the table. "So tell me the truth!"
"Huh?"
"Let me put it this way," the sergeant growled through gritted teeth. "Do you confess to what you did last night?"
The doctor was sweating bullets under the hot light. "Well, yeah-"
"So you were at Cook County General last night at 9 o'clock last night, in Trauma Room 1?" There was a gleam in the sergeant's eye.
"No! I was on a date!" the young man yelled.
"We have an eyewitness placing you at the hospital at 9 o'clock," the sergeant lied. "Now answer me again: is it possible that you were at the hospital at that time?!"
The doctor considered this. They had an eyewitness placing him at County at 9 last night? Now that he thought about, he might not have actually left the hospital before 9, although he was sure he had . . . and what did this have to do with sleeping with a minor? Shouldn't they be trying to place him with her at that time? "Uh, it might be possible-"
"David Malucci, you are under arrest for the murder of Dr. Jing-Mei Chen!"
Malucci choked on his tongue. "What the hell-"
Several officers tore into the room and slammed Malucci onto the table. "You have the right to remain silent!"
Oh, God. This wasn't right. Jing-Mei? What?! "I don't know what you're talking about!" Malucci cried as his face was slammed into the table. His arms were wrenched painfully as the handcuffs snapped onto his wrists too tightly, cutting off his circulation. These cops were pissed.
"Anything you say or do-"
"No!" Malucci shouted, suddenly swinging around. "You're making a mistake!"
The cops held onto him and tackled him to the hard cement floor. A definite "clunk" resounded through Dave's head as his skull hit the pavement with full force. "Please . . . no . . ." he mumbled as he was dragged out of the room.
"-will be held against you in a court of law . . ."
"Please . . . you're making a mistake . . ."
Disclaimer: These characters aren't mine, no matter how much I wish they were.
Rating: R, for violence and language.
Summary: One doctor is dead, and the County staff can only point fingers at each other as one by one they too become victims of a serial killer's game...
Notes: I wrote this a while ago, but I'm a recent addition to ff.net, and since I'm planning on finishing the series soon, I may as well have it up here . . .
---------------------------------------
"Do you want a cup of coffee?"
He looked up. "Huh?"
The secretary gave him an irritated glare. "Coffee. While you wait."
He contemplated this. "Uh, no. No thanks." Like he needed coffee to keep his mind going. He had all the thoughts in the world to do that for him.
Relative silence penetrated the room. Besides the ringing phones, the constant hollers of officers and inmates, and the ongoing police sirens outside the dirty window, he couldn't hear a thing.
'Why do they want to question me?' he thought fretfully. 'I haven't done anything wrong. I don't know about anything illegal.'
Another voice in his head gleefully answered the first: 'They found out. You know they found out.'
'They couldn't have found out,' the young doctor quickly convinced himself. 'There is no way that anyone could know about this. I hid it so well . . .'
Suddenly the piercing "Beep beep" of a pager caught his attention. He reached down to check the message; plucking the pager from his belt, he squinted at the tiny screen. "Excuse me," he called out to the secretary, "but is this going to take much longer? I'm on call at County today and I've just been paged."
The secretary narrowed her eyes at the young man. "The sergeant will see you any minute now," she told him.
He groaned loudly and leaned back in the hard leather chair. "Someone could be dying in the ER, and I'm sitting here, waiting to be questioned about something I don't even know about!" he hollered, growing increasingly louder with each proclamation. "Something is wrong with this system-"
Just then the big wooden door opened; the battered blinds on the small window rattled against the glass as the door swung open. A burly man took a step through the doorway and surveyed the room. His eyes settled on the young man: "You the doctor?"
The young man swallowed hard and nodded quickly.
The burly man pointed a thumb into the dark room. "This won't take long," he told the doctor, who clutched his coat and nervously stepped into the room. The door banged shut behind him.
All noise from the office outside was hushed inside this box of a room. It was the typical interrogation scene; it could have been taken from any police movie. The walls were made of gray cement, and a huge (presumably two-way) mirror captured his frightened expression. A long table was adorned with only a desk lamp, which shone bright light straight across the room. Two chairs were placed on opposite ends of the table, and as he stepped across the room and sat down in the farthest, the intense heat of the lamp already made him sweat.
The burly man sat at the opposite side of the table. "I'm Sergeant Peterson," he informed the doctor. "I know you've gotta get back to your hospital so I won't take too much more of your time."
He nodded. The room was silent for a moment. "So, do you mind telling me what this is all about?" the doctor asked bluntly. Act dumb.
The sergeant took out a file folder and set it on the table. "I think you know what this is about."
The doctor was silent. Shit. They did know.
"Mind telling me where you were at about 9:00 last night?" Peterson suddenly asked.
'They definitely know,' he thought glumly. "I was . . . on a date." His voice was squeaky.
"Really." Peterson raised an eyebrow skeptically.
The sergeant wasn't buying it. But why shouldn't he? It was the truth! "Yeah, really," came the annoyed response.
The sergeant studied him. "I only ask because according to a Dr.-" Peterson flipped through the chart - "Weaver, you were working at Cook County General until 10 last night. Which either means that you ditched the last hour of your shift, or you're lying to me." Peterson glared menacingly.
'These are my choices?!' the doctor thought, feeling trapped. 'Either way, I'm screwed. If I tell him the truth, that I skipped out on an hour of my shift to go on a date, Weaver will be on my ass.'
"How well did you know her?" the sergeant suddenly asked.
Oh, yes. They knew all right. "Not . . . not well. I'd really barely talked to her before." No reason to tell them that he'd met Deborah West, his 17 year old patient, only 20 minutes before their date. It seemed inconsequential. Plus, if they were going to nail him on sleeping with a minor, any additional details wouldn't help him at all.
Just then the big door opened; noise from the office leaked into the small, cement cell. "Peterson, a word," an officer said briefly.
Peterson stood up and walked across the room. "I'll be right back," he grumbled as he slammed the door shut.
The young doctor let out the breath he'd been holding and ran his fingers through his hair. This was becoming a huge deal, and it really shouldn't have. Since when did sleeping with a minor involve a massive interrogation? Especially since he hadn't known how old she was until early this morning, when she had wanted a ride to her homeroom class.
He'd blown up at her; the shock he had felt when she'd admitted her age could have sent him into V-fib. They had fought for a few minutes after that. Their night of drunken ecstasy had ended with a sobbing 17 year old and a silent ride to John F. Kennedy High School.
The doctor had dutifully dropped the girl off in front of her homeroom, praying that no one saw him. He had watched as she had sauntered over to the football game and immediately began flirting with them - and he had driven off, satisfied that he would never see Deborah West ever again.
But they would want to know why he hadn't checked Deborah's age on her ER chart. They wouldn't care that she had lied to him and said she was twenty two. They wouldn't care that *she* had gotten *him* drunk enough to wake up naked this morning in some sleazy motel room. Oh, no. All they would care about was that he was an adult, and she wasn't.
"Not for 7 months, anyway," he thought dismally, quoting Deborah's stupid reply to the doctor's question: "What do you mean, you're not 18 yet??"
The doctor's thoughts tapered off as he stared at the door. This guy made him nervous. He had an air of knowing everything around him. It wasn't like the doctor to falter in front of authority . . . but then again, this was the first time he'd done something wrong like this.
"But come on," he rationalized. "How serious could this really be?"
**********************************************
A cloud of smoke hung over the room. "So, does it look like he's gonna confess?" an overweight officer asked, taking another puff of his cigarette.
"Not sure yet," Peterson asked. He stared at the young doctor in the other room through the two-way mirror. "But there's no doubt in my mind that he did it. I've got a sixth sense about this kind of thing. I can smell the guilt on him. He got real nervous when I brought up where he was yesterday."
"That's nothing," another officer scoffed. "So he ditched his shift. So what. It doesn't make him a murderer."
Peterson glared at the officer. "He didn't ditch his shift, I know it. This guy wasn't on a date, he was killing the woman at 9:00 last night, in a Trauma room at Cook County General. He was still on his shift. I'm sure I've explained this to you before, O'Malley."
The officer rolled his eyes. "Face it. You've got no case against this guy unless you prove his alibi is false - and you get a confession."
Peterson narrowed his eyes as he made his way to the door. "I'll prove he killed that other doctor," he growled. "The evidence is stacked against him. His fingerprints are all around the room and the murder weapon, and his badge was found in a pool of blood near the victim." Peterson opened the door to leave, adding "Just give me 10 minutes with him. You'll have your damn confession."
************************************************
The old door opened, and the doctor tensed as the burly sergeant walked back in. "So where were we," Peterson grumbled as he took his seat once again.
The doctor hoped the question was rhetorical - he had no idea where they'd left off. "I'll take European History for $300," he joked nervously.
The sergeant's eyes raged. "Do you think this is some joke?" he suddenly shouted. "Are you that arrogant to think that last night was no big deal?!"
The doctor was shocked. "I . . . I . . ."
"Just shut the hell up!" Peterson snapped. "Get this through your thick damn skull: we know exactly where you were and what you did last night. There's no point in hiding it or in making stupid jokes to cover it up. It's only a matter of time between this moment and your trial. The sooner you tell me what I already know, the easier your sentence might be."
Trial? Sentence?! Stunned, the doctor whispered, "I . . . I didn't know . . . I didn't know, I swear . . ."
"Shut your damn face unless you're gonna say something useful," the sergeant growled. "Tell me why you did it."
Tears were welling in the young doctor's eyes. "I . . . don't know . . . I didn't plan it or anything . . . it was just a spur of the moment thing . . ." What was going on? Since when was did sleeping with a minor grounds for the third degree?
The sergeant shook his head and noted "No pre-meditation" on his chart. "How did you get along with her?" he asked, his tone significantly less belligerent than a few seconds ago.
The young man blinked; his eyes were burning. "Who, Deb?" he asked, frightened. "We got along fine, I guess. Well, not really when I found out she lied to me. We sorta had a fight about that."
The sergeant's eyes widened. "Really. You fought?"
"Yeah . . . I've never, you know, done something like this before," the doctor added hastily. At least they would know he wasn't ordinarily a cradle-robbing pervert.
"Mmm hmmm . . ." the sergeant responded, marking the word "Malice" on his chart. The confession was nearly complete. "You call her 'Deb?' "
"Uh, yeah," he said quickly. "I know that's not her formal name or anything, just a nickname -"
"So let's cut the crap. Tell me where you really were last night."
The doctor was confused. "I told you, on a date. You even said that you knew where I was last night."
"I do know where you were," Peterson snapped, slamming his chart onto the table. "So tell me the truth!"
"Huh?"
"Let me put it this way," the sergeant growled through gritted teeth. "Do you confess to what you did last night?"
The doctor was sweating bullets under the hot light. "Well, yeah-"
"So you were at Cook County General last night at 9 o'clock last night, in Trauma Room 1?" There was a gleam in the sergeant's eye.
"No! I was on a date!" the young man yelled.
"We have an eyewitness placing you at the hospital at 9 o'clock," the sergeant lied. "Now answer me again: is it possible that you were at the hospital at that time?!"
The doctor considered this. They had an eyewitness placing him at County at 9 last night? Now that he thought about, he might not have actually left the hospital before 9, although he was sure he had . . . and what did this have to do with sleeping with a minor? Shouldn't they be trying to place him with her at that time? "Uh, it might be possible-"
"David Malucci, you are under arrest for the murder of Dr. Jing-Mei Chen!"
Malucci choked on his tongue. "What the hell-"
Several officers tore into the room and slammed Malucci onto the table. "You have the right to remain silent!"
Oh, God. This wasn't right. Jing-Mei? What?! "I don't know what you're talking about!" Malucci cried as his face was slammed into the table. His arms were wrenched painfully as the handcuffs snapped onto his wrists too tightly, cutting off his circulation. These cops were pissed.
"Anything you say or do-"
"No!" Malucci shouted, suddenly swinging around. "You're making a mistake!"
The cops held onto him and tackled him to the hard cement floor. A definite "clunk" resounded through Dave's head as his skull hit the pavement with full force. "Please . . . no . . ." he mumbled as he was dragged out of the room.
"-will be held against you in a court of law . . ."
"Please . . . you're making a mistake . . ."
