She's never cried before, not once on the job. She's never felt the need to. She's never been so overwhelmed by a case that it tears into her physically, emotionally and mentally, until now.
In less than a week, Dr. Melinda Warner went from a woman who cared about and always tried her hardest at her job and a loving and caring wife to a broken and cold woman.
This year was her year on call for the holidays, so on Christmas and New Year's Day she had to be ready to suddenly run to the morgue and on both days, she had to rush in to the morgue and perform an autopsy.
It was Christmas day; she lay there in bed cuddled up next to her husband without a care in the world, until her pager went off. Checking it she found that she was needed at the morgue. Reluctantly she got up, dressed kissed her husband goodbye and headed to the morgue, ready for the body that she would have to examine.
But when Dr. Melinda Warner got there, she wasn't ready for what and who she saw lying on the cold metal slab in the morgue. After she had changed into her scrubs and as she was putting on a pair of latex gloves, the morgue assistant who was at the scene with the body came in and handed her a police badge, he told her it was found with the body.
'Damn,' she thought, autopsy's of cops were always harder and then pulled back the sheet covering the body and stared in absolute shock and horror. "No, Oh my God!" With eyes wide open and staring up with deadly cold, Detective Olivia Benson lay on Dr. Warner's table, pulling the sheet all the way back and saw something that made her stomach churn.
The flesh of her stomach had a message cut into it, one that told Dr. Warner she wouldn't be the only SVU detective on slab in the morgue soon. The message read, 'Ladies before gentlemen'.
Holding back her tears, Dr. Warner and the morgue assistant began the autopsy; they found she had been raped, sodomized and tortured. On her body there was a total of one hundred and eleven cigarette burns, and what sickened Dr. Warner the most was the position of two of them, directly on Olivia's nipples, this made her skin crawl with disgust.
In her entire career as a forensic pathologist it was the hardest autopsy she ever had to perform except maybe one.
New Years Day, still not over the shock of what had happened to Olivia, Dr. Warner didn't know how she had talked her boss out of not giving her time off, but she did and now she was on call, sitting quietly in her living she stared at her pager, horrified at what might happen, from the message on Olivia's stomach, she was in fear, she didn't want to have to perform another autopsy on a colleague and friend. So she stared at the pager, daring it to go off, and she was almost out of the woods, twenty minutes before she was no longer on call, the pager let out an evil shriek as it came to life.
Picking it up, she told her husband she had to go and she drove to the morgue, each picture of what she would fine in her mind was more disturbing than the last until finally she pulled up and walked into the morgue. 'No,' she thought to herself. 'Elliot will be fine, he's staying in a hotel room, with a protective detail, it won't be him. She changed into her scrubs and stepped into the autopsy sweet, as soon as she did the morgue assistant gave her badge she said was found with the body and Dr. Warner closed her eyes and inhaled deeply praying she would be ready for what she saw.
She walked up to the table and stood there, praying it wasn't him, hoping her thoughts were right, but in reality she already knew who it was. She pulled back the sheet and despite her efforts of not wanting to believe it, she was right. It was him. She had performed an autopsy on his partner a week ago today and now it was his turn, again she found herself counting cigarette burns, found him to be sodomized to the point of having a hole ripped in the wall of his colon and his genitals being cut to the point of where they were almost completely detached from the body.
Now Dr. Warner sits outside the office of the New York State Governor. In short, he's her boss. After what she's had to do, she can't do it anymore not here. Dr. Warner was like Olivia in the way that she didn't like to show weakness, but she couldn't work here anymore, not after what happened to her colleagues Detectives Stabler and Benson on some strange level she could understand why someone did that to them, but what happened to her friends Elliot and Olivia.
After she had completed his autopsy, she took a long hot shower and she was in there so long that her skin started appear with slight red marks from the constant pounding of the hot water. After that she changed, locked herself in her office, curled up on the floor leaning against her door. And for the first time in her entire career, she cried. She didn't just cry for the loss of her colleague's, but for the loss of her friends, Elliot and Olivia.
Walking into the Governor's office, she hands him her letter and he looks at it for a moment before saying, "Nothing I'm going to say is going to get you to stay is it?" Looking up at her face.
She shakes her head, slowly, before turning and walking out, no longer the woman she used to be, her last two autopsies hit too close to home; she is no longer able to the work that she has done for years and now Dr. Melinda Warner walks out of the governor's office a forever strong but broken woman.