Disclaimer: I don't own these people, though God only knows I wish I did. Please don't sue me. The poetry found in this story is written by a close friend of mine who wishes to remain anonymous. It is used with kind permission.

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Furious

by

Fashionably Stupid

Chapter One: Something in Her Eyes

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It would be best for you to consider me

in a state of reconstruction.

Is there a devastation at the very center of me?

A jagged, gaping hole?

Is there a blackness in me?

Are my foundations unsteady?

I am shaky and scarred,

I may be shaky and scarred,

but I am disappointing these days,

a woman disowned.

I was rejected by my country just after I had learned its language.

So I moved to a new country with a far more complicated language

and found myself learning from necessity.

Now I stumble in sentences and in conversation.

There are times when I do not know the required word

And I cannot default to my native tongue because I have been so far for so long –

"Whatcha reading?"

Her voice could get on his nerves sometimes. It had a Midwestern quality that could be so endearing yet so deathly irritating.

"...Poems. Poetry."

Eames looked over his shoulder and read the poem on the page, scanning a little further than her partner had gotten. She nodded.

"Good poem," she shrugged, "but it's a little...high school, don't you think?"

Goren tried to subdue himself. High school? What, like dead roses ad self-harm? Like kill your health and kill yourself and kill everything you love? Hardly. This was sophisticated, with neatly placed words and provocative imagery. However, he was in no mood to argue.

"Yeah, a little...She could have done without the... 'shaky and scarred,' I guess."

There was a pause as they both thought, each about very different things.

"Aren't you going to ask me who it's by?" He was edgy today, but he couldn't really put his finger on why.

"You'll only tell me she's dead."

"...Um, yes. She is dead. Clare Bergen."

"Right. Clare. Well, where do we start? Poetry?"

"No...No, I just like to know everything about someone. Haven't you ever wanted to know everything about someone?"

He watched her think. She was very nice to look at, especially when she was pensive, but then, what woman wasn't? Goren had never really thought of Eames in any kind of sexual manner, though he was grateful for her good looks when it came to the interrogations. He knew it wasn't just his ranting or quiet seduction that made these monsters crack; who couldn't look at Eames' face and not want to tell the truth? Everyone wants to tell the truth to a beautiful woman.

"You know, I don't think everyone can know everything about anyone, Bobby, it's just not possible."

"A...I have a box, here -"

"I see that."

"Of everything Clare wrote. It...There may be some kind of clue in here, maybe she wrote about an enemy...we always have more to say about the things we hate...it could be our greatest resource."

"You know what would be my greatest resource, Bobby?"

"Hmm? What's that?"

She smiled slightly, "The case file."

"Ah. Right." He handed the slim folder to her and she sat down. As she examined the various pictures and reports, he described everything, his voice steady, though his breathing was erratic.

"She was...first stabbed in the femoral artery and was bled to death that way. All of the other wounds were post-mortem."

Eames briefly covered her mouth with the back of her hand and made a small sound when she came across the morgue shot of poor Clare. Even the hardest of cops would gasp. Even Goren had gasped. Eames remembered the crime scene, Clare's bedroom, room five in an eight room mansion, the carpets and walls soaked in blood, but it was nothing compared to Clare's body. There were stabs everywhere, on the legs, the arms, even the face, all of her hair (and, subsequently, some of her scalp) had been hacked off, and her fingernails had been torn out. Neither the hair nor the fingernails had been found at the crime scene.

"It looks..." Goren continued as Eames herself moved on, "like someone tried to cut her face off, but settled for her hair and nails. Just the fingernails, though, not...not the toenails."

"Yes, I see that."

"You know what's odd, though..." His questions never had an upward inflection at the end; all of his statements were flat, but full of meaning.

"The eyes."

"That's right...The eyes weren't touched at all. It's not even like there was any special...attention at all paid to the eyes."

Goren watched at Eames ran her finger over the picture. They were back in sync, working together as well as they always had.

"She had pretty eyes."

"Hmm?" He was sure he hadn't heard her right.

"I said she had pretty eyes."

"...Yeah. I suppose she did."

Did Clare have pretty eyes? All Goren had noticed was that they hadn't been torn out or slashed or...

"Have you found anything in the poetry?"

"Not...yet. It's in the box in chronological order, she...dated and signed everything she wrote."

"D'you want to divide it up? I'll take the bottom half or something."

"Yeah, there's a lot of stuff here."

As they read, they discussed details of the case, almost conversationally, almost, Goren thought, as if they knew this Clare, and they were chatting about hearing the news of her death from a friend of a friend.

"Do you remember what the neighbor said?" Eames asked offhandedly.

"About the screaming?"

"Yeah. That's pretty..." she shuffled to choose her words wisely, "That's pretty fucked up."

Goren let out a soft bark of laughter. It was so rare that Eames cursed, it was funny every time she did. He filed the moment away and then considered her statement: it was true, of course. Mrs. Barbara Mehan, the next door neighbor of the Faye, Donald and Clare Bergen, had said that there was always some kind of screaming in that house.

"There were some weeks when it never stopped. We had to call the police once. She just wouldn't stop screaming! She wasn't even saying anything, I don't think, just screaming her head off like someone was trying to kill her. Who knew someone was?"

Who knew, indeed, Goren thought as he scanned the pages before him. Nothing was popping out at him; they already knew that she had been taking medication (lithium), which was the subject of much of the poetry, and they had interviewed her longsuffering boyfriend, Adam, who had proved to be verging on sainthood.

"I took Clare for what she was," Adam had told Eames, "and, yeah, she was a little loony, a little difficult, but when you really love someone..."

No threat there. Even her parents had loved their screaming, "loony" child, very dearly, in fact. Clare's father, Donald, had been completely useless upon questioning and Faye had to field the conversation. She had been weepy, but substantially less-so than her husband.

"Clare was, she was difficult," she had told Eames tearfully, "yes, she was a challenge. But her mind was so...she thought on a different level. She just wanted to be like the other kids at school, you know? She wore their clothes, even though she didn't really like those, you know those short shirts? She looked stunning in them, but she always preferred loose-fitting clothes. Looks never mattered to her, and they really shouldn't have."

"She was such a beautiful girl!" her father wailed before excusing himself from the room.

Eames was always so sensitive to the victims of tragedy. Goren hated talking to people at the scene of a crime, especially family members. It was just too much for him, the tears, the denial.

"I have to ask you," Eames had said carefully, "if Clare had any enemies. Can you think of anyone, anyone at all, who would have done this?"

"No one. There was no one. She wasn't popular, you know, but she certainly didn't have any enemies. None that she told us about. And she told us everything. She told us everything."

This wasn't going to be easy.