A/N- Just thought I'd clear up a thing or two. First, my beta reader is papiliondae (there seems to be some confusion when I use her first name. LOL!). Second, the characters of Tony Hill, Carol Jordan et al are from the book/tv series "The Wire in the Blood". Not "The Wire". Two very different shows! *grin* (And if you get BBCAmerica, they are showing the three eps of the first series of "Wire in the Blood" right now! Starting January 19th, they will show the new four eps of the second series. Check that out if you can.)
*
Hearing the door open, the pathologist spoke before turning. "I am a knight in shining armour!" The first face he saw when he did turn was Sara's. "Oh, beg your pardon, miss." He looked at the other three, waiting for some kind of explanation.
Carol smirked. "Sara, this is the newly knighted James Danforth who moonlights as our pathologist. James, this is Sara Sidle, a criminalist from the States, doing some professional research here in England."
"Ah, right. Cheers," he said by way of greeting.
"Hey," Sara returned.
"So, what have you got for us, Sir Danforth?" Don asked.
"Quite a few things in fact," Danforth answered, ignoring Don's jibe. Drawing them over to the metal table where Lynn George lay he continued. "First of all, cause of death isn't like the rest. She wasn't strangled to death, though the attempt was certainly made."
Don nodded knowingly. "She got her hand up and prevented the strangulation." The pathologist didn't hide his look of surprise. Shrugging, Don went on. "There's a void in the strangulation line across the throat. Like she got a hand between her throat and the cord."
Both Carol and Sara raised a hand to their mouths, covering their smile. Tony looked on, slack-jawed.
"Very good, Don," the pathologist praised in amazement. "So how did she die?"
"Well, that's more your job to find out than mine, innit?"
Danforth raised an eyebrow, but carried on. "Right. Severe bruising on the shoulder blades, like the others. As if she had been held face down."
"How long has she been dead?" Carol asked.
"The onset of rigor looks to put the time of death around two days ago."
Sara gently laid her fingertips on the exposed forearm of Lynn George, and brushed back and forth gently. When she caught Tony watching her, she began to pull back until she saw his expression warm to her gesture.
"Sexually assaulted as well?" Don growled.
Danforth nodded. "I did a complete work up on her, but I don't suspect anything will come back. Chloroform residue in her throat and nasal cavity; same as the others. No apparent bruising on the wrists or ankles, so she wasn't tied up. Same again. But this is interesting." He pointed to two large dark bruises on her chest, on other side of the sternum. "The others might have had indiscriminant cuts and bruises, but nothing of this magnitude."
Sara bent closer and the realization struck her. "Burked."
The pathologist nodded appreciatively at Sara, then turned to the other three. "She's right."
"Burked?" Don asked. "As in William Burke? The serial killer?"
When Tony saw Carol's silent question, he answered, "William Burke, late 18th century grave robber provided cadavers for Edinburgh anatomy classes by pressing down on their chests and suffocating them."
"Yeah, I knew that, I was just wondering how Don knew."
Don made scowled at Carol's smirk. "Ha, ha, very funny. I read books too, you know."
"Anyway," Danforth interrupted. "Positional suffocation. The evidence of bruising shows the damage occurring before death. My guess? He started by straddling her waist, but ended up shifting so that his knees were against her chest. Probably held her arms down with his hands. There's some pressure point bruising on the forearms. But here's the most important thing. I found more than traces of chloroform in her nose. I also found dried blood. At first I thought it was just hers; that she had been struck at some point, but there's no indication of a facial injury of any kind, let alone around the nasal cavity. I've sent a sample to the lab. Should come back sometime tomorrow with the results."
"You think it could be the killer's blood?" Tony asked.
"Couldn't say for sure, but you might get lucky."
Don frowned. "The killer's blood in the victim's nose? How the hell would it get there?"
Danforth shrugged. "Not my job, is it?"
"Thanks, James. Let me know when you hear back on those results," Carol said.
"Will do. Nice to meet you, Miss Sidle."
"You, too, Sir Danforth," Sara smiled.
*
The group walked down the hall and tossed out ideas and questions about what they had just learned.
"He's killed all the rest from behind, after assaulting them," Don began. "So what was different about this one? I thought he didn't like looking at the faces?"
"Maybe nothing in the killer changed. Maybe there was something different about the victim that led to the change in pattern," Tony mused.
Carol pondered this. "Well, there's been no apparent pattern in the victims as of yet, so it's hard to determine what was different about this one. They've all been different."
"This victim was younger than the rest," Sara offered. "Maybe she put up more of a struggle?"
"Wasn't she on the athletics team?" Don asked no one in particular. "But why not just strangle her with his bare hands or knock her round the head with a heavy object?"
"Part of it is the difficulty he would have in committing the deed while looking at her," Tony answered. "But you're right, Don. Knowing you had to kill her, being at risk of her getting away and you getting caught, panic would set in and you would do whatever was necessary to prevent that from happening. Why not just a quick bash? Get it over with?" He saw both Sara and Carol flinch at his words. "Sorry."
Sara waved it off. "What you need to do is re-enact the crime."
"What?" Don asked incredulously.
"We need to go back to the station and walk through the crime."
"Oh, that sounds like fun," the cop retorted dryly.
*
"Here, help me move this table, Don," Sara instructed, the group now back in the large conference room at the police station. Tony and Carol carefully slid the bulletin board out of the way. Sara looked around. "Do you have any string or cord?"
Tony yanked at his collar. "Here, use my tie."
"Thanks." The space now cleared, she began. "Okay, how tall was Lynn George?"
"Five foot eight," Carol answered.
"Then that's me," Sara said. "Now, we don't know the height of the killer, but we can assume he's taller than the victims in order to use the chloroform properly. Easier to reach down and press the cloth or whatever over the mouth than it is to reach up. How tall was the tallest victim?"
Don glanced at the board. "Jane Morris was a tall one; five foot eleven."
"Well, that leaves you out as the lead in this re-enactment, Tony," Sara smiled. "So…" she turned to Don.
"Oh, that's great. I get to play a killer."
Kevin walked in and stopped in his tracks. "What's going on here then?"
"Don's got the lead in the school play," Carol quipped.
"Ah, right. I came in just in time." He poked his head out the door. "Oi! Come see this," he called out to the office.
"Great," Don muttered.
"You'll be fine," Sara soothed. "Okay, so say you've already knocked me out and… the rest. I'm face down and you've got the cord around my neck." She handed Don the tie and laid face down on the floor. When nothing happened, she craned her neck back. "You've got to get on top of me, Don."
"How come I didn't get offered this part?" Kevin asked.
Don glowered. "Not funny, you." He looked down at Sara, who was still half-twisted around to look at him. "I don't know how comfortable I am with this," but he straddled her waist and did as she had instructed.
"Okay, so you've got the cord around my neck, but somehow I manage to get one of my hands up between the cord and my neck," said Sara, her words describing her movements.
"But how do you end up going from this to facing me?"
In a flash, Sara twisted her lean frame around and flipped over underneath him. Although Don was still on top, they were now facing each other.
"Jesus Christ!" Don exclaimed, caught completely off-guard. In his momentary confusion, he let go of the tie, and now Sara's hands were completely free.
"Now you're in trouble, mate," someone commented from the door.
"I've got ten quid on the pretty brunette," another said.
"I might try to push you off or toss you somehow," Sara suggested, "but my first instinct is to go for your eyes. So I reach up." She mimed scratching his eyes. "What's your first instinct?"
He saw her hand come up again and he pulled his head back. "I'm getting the hell out of the way of those hands."
"What else?"
Don paused above her. "I… I don't know."
Sara began lightly slapping his face with her fingertips. People at the door began to laugh. Carol and Tony looked on in fascination. Don leaned back a bit to avoid one slap, but Sara was relentless. For every slap he missed, he got two in return.
"Stop that," he commanded. When she continued, he repeated, "Stop that, I mean it."
"Make me," she taunted. He tried to grab her hands, but she was struggling for all she was worth. "I'm fighting for my life here, Don. I want to get away by any means necessary. So I'm going to keep fighting until you stop me."
She started bucking underneath him in an attempt to throw him off of her. This action, along with her relentless hand flailing was becoming more than something Don could keep up with, so he shifted position until she stopped moving.
"Don," Tony said quietly.
The older man looked over. "What?"
Tony gave directions with his eyes. Don looked down and saw where he was. He had Sara's forearms pressed down into the floor. More importantly, he had his knees pressing down into her shoulders.
"Damn! Sorry, sorry!" he apologized and quickly rolled off.
Sara relieved his anxiety. "It's okay. You didn't hurt me. But I could see how a prolonged stay in that position could do a lot of damage to someone. And that was only with your knees on my shoulders. I can only imagine the pressure of a large man's knees pushing down onto my chest."
He helped her stand up and rubbed her arms. "Sorry," he said again.
"Ah, listen to the gentle giant," Kevin said.
"Shut it," Don warned.
Tony came to Don's aid. "Take comfort in knowing you feel remorse over something considerably smaller in comparison to what happened to these women, Don."
"I bet she could have taken him if she really tried," the bettor at the door lamented.
"All right, all right, the show's over. Don't you all have work to do?" Carol queried.
As the group broke up, and those remaining played out the events in their head, Don spoke up. "Right. Okay, I get that now. She's a bit more athletic than the others, manages to turn around underneath him then starts for the face. He tries to grab her arms, but she won't stop struggling. He's losing the battle, so uses his knees to try and pin her down as well. Goes too far and the pressure on her chest suffocates her. But if it ends up being this bloke's blood, it doesn't explain how it got there."
"Blood?" Kevin asked, bewildered.
"The pathologist found dried blood in the victim's nose. He thinks it could actually belong to our killer," Carol filled him in.
"Really? Well, how did it get there?"
"Did I not just ask that?" Don replied tersely.
They lapsed into silence once more until Kevin spoke again. "Well, Sara caught you by surprise, Don. So we can guess that she," he gestured to Lynn George's photo on the board, "scratched her attacker's face at least once. Who's to say she didn't scratch it even more? Make a real mess of it? And don't forget you were throwing yourself about a bit there, during the struggle, Don."
"So it was force and gravity that caused the blood to drop onto her face," Sara offered.
Tony nodded as he picked up their line of thinking. "He cleans her up before returning her, so the blood in her nose seems out of context to us. But for all we know, he could have bled quite profusely. We're only getting the bit he didn't get around to cleaning up."
"Did you come up with anything on the car, Kevin?" Carol asked the younger man.
He shook his head apologetically. "Too hard to tell on the tapes I got. Lynn George was abducted at night; hard to differentiate between black and dark blue cars. And there's no intersection near enough to her house to cross-reference anything on the tapes with the blue car seen in the area of the other crimes.
"So now what?" Sara asked no one in particular.
Don took this as his cue to speak. "I don't know about the rest of you, but I could use a pint."
*
The pub was only just beginning to fill with the lunch hour crowd, so they were able to find a table easily. The five had just sat down when a boy of no more than thirteen appeared and wiped the surface.
" 'Allo. Haven't seen you lot round here for a while." He turned to Carol and gave a sly wink. "You're looking lovely today, Inspector Jordan. Though when aren't you, eh?"
"Thank you, Kieran," Carol answered with a smile.
"Aren't you supposed to be in school?" Tony muttered.
"Ah, I come in for lunch to help me dad." Sara, who was still laughing at Tony's reaction, caught the boy's attention. He gave her the same appreciative eye. "I got to become a copper when I get older. You boys pull the prettiest girls."
Don rolled his eyes. "Are you here to take our order or to line up a chaperone for the next school dance?"
"All right, all right. Bloody hell." He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a pad of paper. Removing the pencil from its home behind his ear, he looked around the table. "Go on, then."
It was apparent that they all had been here a number of times, a fact made obvious by the ease with which they ordered their food. Kieran scribbled furiously until he got to Sara.
"So what will it be for you then, my brunette angel?"
"Good lord," Tony groaned.
She nudged Tony good-naturedly before answering the young man. "I'll tell you what- I'll have whatever you choose. And a beer."
Kieran's eyes widened when he heard her speak. "Are you American?"
"Gee, you'll make a great cop," Kevin wryly noted.
"I am," Sara answered the boy.
"What the bloody hell are you doing in Bradfield, then?"
The table laughed at his honesty. "Well," Sara said, "I'm on holidays. I thought I'd visit my friend here." She put her arm around Tony.
"A friend of Dr. Hill's?" Kieran marveled. He turned to the psychologist. "Maybe I chose the wrong profession. Inspector Jordan and this American goddess? Good on you, mate!"
Tony sighed. "The order, Kieran?"
"Hmmm? Oh, right." Recalling Sara's instruction, he said, "You'll let me choose?"
"Sure," she nodded. "But I'm a vegetarian."
"Is that for vegetables or against them?"
The group laughed again.
"I'm pro-vegetables. Against meat."
"Is fish meat?"
"I can eat fish," she answered.
"Perfect." He scribbled down his idea. "Drinks are on the way."
*
Drinks arrived as promised (a "Nookie Broon" for Sara, as Kieran cheerfully announced; a Newcastle Brown Ale, as Tony translated) and they all sat back in well worn chairs to nurse their drinks and take in their surroundings.
"Off-side, off-side!" Don bellowed at the nearby television. The three men at the table groaned as the ball went past the keeper.
Carol leaned across Tony and asked Sara, "Do you have this in the States?"
"You mean soccer?"
Without breaking attention from the game, Tony corrected, "Football."
Carol rolled her eyes and spoke to Sara again. "No, I mean this level of fanaticism. The idea that a simple game can turn grown men into six-year old boys."
"I am the last person to ask about sports," Sara laughed. "We had one case where the victim had traces of body paint on the inside of his T-shirt. I had to have the concept of grown men painting numbers and letters on their chests to show support for their team explained to me."
Tony turned his head, curiosity piqued. "So how did he die?"
"Well, it was a tough one. We found him in his bathtub and first thought he had slipped while running a bath and hit his head. Once we scooped him out, we found a mark on the back of his head. Cut to the chase, we tracked it all back to a fight in a sports bar. The punch didn't kill him instantly, but set a chain of events in motion that caused him to collapse in the tub and die."
As Sara spoke, it caught the attention of the other two men. Kevin frowned as he played back what she had just told them.
"What do you mean by 'scooped him out'?" he asked.
"Ah, how do I put this delicately?" She pressed her lips together to hide a smile. "Let's just say the affects of hot water on a human body not found for days isn't pretty."
Kevin frowned again until it came to him. "You mean like man soup?"
Sara nodded. "Like man soup."
A collective groan went around the table.
"Are all your cases like that?" Don asked.
"I wouldn't say all of them, no. But there have been some weird ones."
"As someone who works in the most minute of evidence, what would you say has been the most unusual key piece of evidence?" Tony queried.
"You mean like what was the least expected thing that broke the case?"
"Yeah."
"We tracked down a suspect through flour."
Carol smiled in amazement. "You mean the stuff you bake with?"
"Yep. But better than that; we narrowed it down to a very specific kind of flour, used only in pizzerias."
"So you caught the bastard," Don surmised.
She shook her head. "Unfortunately, as things played out, we knew he did it, but other things came into play and the cops had to let him go."
Tony nodded ruefully. "It's not always a happy ending, I'm afraid."
"No, it's not," she agreed. In an attempt to lighten the mood, she looked at the group and asked, "So how about you guys? What's the weirdest, most unusual thing that's happened to you?"
Carol and Kevin both looked at Don and simultaneously burst into laughter.
"The pigeon story, hands down," Carol chuckled.
"No, not the pigeon story," Don glared. "I mean it."
Tony looked at a curious Sara and said, "I have no idea what this is about."
"This was before you came along, Tony," Carol explained.
"So anyway," Kevin began, "me and Don get a call about a Peeping Tom."
"I'm off to the loo," Don grumbled. He made a motion to stand up, but Sara gently held his arm. "Fine. Carry on."
Kevin smirked. "Right. So we arrive at the scene. Talk to the woman who called it in, ask the neighbours, all that bit. We were really frustrated up to that point, because it had been the seventh such incident in the area and we hadn't yet caught him. Eyewitness accounts didn't quite match up, so it seemed as if we were at a real loss." He took a gulp of his beer before continuing. "So me and Don are really canvassing the surrounding area where this guy might have staked a claim to watch this girl. Bushes, adjacent buildings, that sort of thing. Then," Kevin started laughing, "Don breaks the case wide open. He's standing at the base of a nearby tree and looks up. The first branch is a perfect seat to look across into the victim's bedroom. Then Don looks down and sees, what we find out later to be, shells of sunflower seeds. And two pigeons going about eating them."
"Eating the evidence," Don emphasized.
"But you didn't know that at the time, did you?" Kevin ribbed.
"It didn't take a rocket scientist to put two and two together," the older man declared defensively. "Guy perched in the tree, shells on the ground. He was obviously eating the seeds and tossing the shells on the ground. Leaving traces of DNA, I might add."
"Good thinking, Don," Tony said.
Don nodded his thanks. "There, you hear that? Good thinking."
"So I hear this loud yelling and cursing," Kevin carried on. "Sounds like Don, so I rush out of the building across the street to see what's going on."
"And I chose that moment to arrive on the scene," Carol joined in. "Only to find Don holding some kind of bird in one hand…"
"…and the other in the bird's mouth," Kevin concluded with a grin.
"The damn bird just would not give it up," Don replied meekly.
Sara narrowed her eyes in playful confusion. "So let me get this straight. The birds were eating what you perceived to be evidence, so you took matters into your own hands…"
"…literally," Kevin added.
"And pried the evidence out of the mouth of the bird," she finished.
"Throw in four stitches on my index finger, and that's about how it happened, yeah."
"But," Carol admitted, coming to his defense, "they were able to get enough DNA off the shells to identify a guy we already had on file and the case was solved."
"I defy anyone to accuse me of not giving 110 percent," Don challenged.
Not for the first time that day, everyone laughed.
*