Disclaimer: I don't own Goren or Eames, or Deakins. They belong to Dick Wolf and NBC.
A/n: I hope Vincent D'Onofrio, aka Bobby Goren, gets better really soon. He passed out multiple times last week, and hopefully the cause of it was just the exhaustion of the excellent work he does. Thanks to all who reviewed.
Chapter six: TheNext Victim
How, how? He wondered.
How had she seen him?
He felt the burning sensation of a million eyes boring into his skull. The cold whisper of breath on his neck.
A bead of sweat trickled down his nose, ending in a salty pool on his top lip.
It's okay.
He thought about the plan he made so diligently at his desk, night after night. A life plan, a day plan. Black books shrouding his desk, yellow post-it notes sticking out of the crisp pages like tongues.
The black books, he thought. Like dictators to my life.
But he liked it that way. That way nothing could go wrong.
When you had a plan, you followed the plan.
But when you did something wrong, something you hadn't planned on doing...things became very bad.
And this, he reflected, he hadn't planned. The old lady and her cats.
Oh, no, they weren't part of his plan at all.
She knew who he was, what he looked like...it was...it was...
What was it? Oh yes, like his therapist said. Inconvenient.
That's all they are. Little things.
But how do I stop them?
Well, you find out what it is that's bothering you, and then you get rid of it.
Get rid of it?
Yeah, get it out of your system. Get it out of your life forever.
The old lady and her cats...
Leonie Roberts had put up a fight.
But nothing could save her from the fate that the killer had planned out for her.
Same M.O., Goren reflected. How many more bodies would he have to see like this?
Three slashes across the abdomen, blue-purple asphyxiation marks like an eccentric necklace across her throat. And the words inscribed into her back.
Guess who...
And, now that he looked for it, the small puncture mark in her thigh.
"Eames," he croaked, "There's definitely a drug connection."
She nodded and turned back to the policeman she was talking to.
The mood was different, he assessed. It reminded him of a case five years ago.
A drive-by shooter had killed three people dining at an out-door restaurant in Queens. One woman, and her two children, Lucy and Tommy.
The mood surrounding that case – the arduous hours of searching the crime scene, of cleaning up the blood that ran down the gutters, of hearing people's frightened gasps, of realising that the world we live in is vile and shameful – was one of sorrow.
Not the usual hurried buzz of searching for clues so we can catch the perp, we just gotta catch him, guys, gotta get him...
Not the revered silence of mourners, feeling guilty about disturbing the last place someone ever saw...
This case felt like a huge rock had landed in his heart and each breath came as a sigh. They just didn't have enough on this guy so they could get him. One fibre, Goren prayed, one hair, one bullet shaped drop of blood that would be his. Please.
And so he slowly began to gather the information from the scene.
Half an hour later he returned to the corpse of Leonie Roberts, disappointed and wholly disheartened. Usually he felt the surge of thoughts through his brain and one of them would stick, one would be the hunch that brought the killer down.
But all he could think of was that case...
The blood running down the gutters...
He mentally shook himself and forced himself to concentrate. And he realised that he had been staring at a spot on Leonie's clothing that was speckled with dust.
Red dust.
Brick.
"Eames!" He shouted, "Eames, come here, quick, and bring a CS officer!"
Eames, the officer, and the rest of the crime scene crew came running into the room half of them holding their service weapons uncertainty in their latex-encased hands.
"Look what I found!" said Bobby, encouraged once again that maybe they'd catch this bad guy. "Brick dust. This house isn't brick. You know what that means?"
Eames looked up slowly, as if she didn't dare believe it. "The perp...his safe house."
The lab was filled with anxious and excited faces.
Cate Turner felt like she was the first person walking on the moon; everyone watching her slow, precise movents but she was oblivious, lost in the scientific task that would answer a thousand questions.
The keeper of the keys...
After running a brush over Leonie Roberts' clothes, she had collected various trinkets of trace material. However the only pieces that were useable – they hadn't come from Leonie, her husband, or the house itself – were the brick dust, and a tiny little brown fibre.
Now she felt the pounding of blood is her ears as though she herself was in the take-down team storming the perp's house...but before that happened they had to find it, and she held the only lead they had.
She loaded the tiny fragments of brick dust into several test tubes, each containing a different solution for determining a hundred different things about the subject. She put them into the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, the device for separating materials and identifying their chemical components. It gave a whir and a sharp beep as it started up, and in less than five minutes the screen showed the results.
"It's old," she said to her watchers, most particularly Detective Goren who sat in a chair by the corner, reading the case file. He glanced up at her, and Cate could see the excitement flare in his eyes. "And it's expensive – cheap brick was very porous because they mixed in filler. I'd guess this place is either institutional or built by someone wealthy. At least a hundred years old. Maybe older."
She walked back to the examination trays where she had scraped the trace material from Roberts' clothing. She held the brown fibre victoriously in the tweezers.
"What's that?" Said a voice by her side. It seemed the excitement of the chase had brought Bobby Goren over to be part of it. "A bit of a jacket? Suede?" He asked, making the same deduction she had.
Placing the fibre in the micro-spectrophotometer, a large microscope which measured the light radiation coming from a subject to determine its type, she said to him "I think so. But if it is, it won't help us find him. It's winter – think about how many jackets the stores have sold this week."
His reply was to sigh and gesture to the photometer, meaning 'we'll find out'.
She examined the screen which showed a huge blow-up of the fibre. "It's leather," she said with surprise. "Not buffed for clothing." Performing numerous comparisons to data bases around the country in seconds, she smiled. "Car seats. They're extremely rare nowadays. You should be able to get him."
She handed Bobby the DMV phone number, whispering "God speed, Detective, God speed."
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Next couple of chapters: They're narrowing the noose around the killer. But as the fatalities rise and the minutes tick down, the killer reveals his final, horrific trick.
- Tash