Disclaimer: I still don't own CSI or it's people. I am sad to say that Mavin is mine. Please feel free to do as you wish to him. (Evil grin)

Ch. 2

Bad Blood All Around

" You're quiet," Stella said, snapping Mac out of his deep contemplation. He had finally maneuvered from heavier traffic onto a more free-flowing street. It was a shortcut to the scene. Mac, long ago, had made it a priority to know New York in terms of the shortest routes to anywhere.

Mac shrugged. " Nothing to talk about."

The corner of Stella's mouth quirked in a slight smile and she leaned her head on her fist with her elbow resting on the car door. " Life really that boring Mac?"

" No. Just not much to talk about."

The scattered clouds above them cast patches of shadows on the streets and the buildings that surrounded them in a forest of glass, concrete, and steel. They passed a plaza with a fountain where a group of teenagers were gathered, blasting their stereo for all of New York to hear. The noise filled the car with a hollow rhythmic thump that penetrated deep into their chest cavities, causing their insides to vibrate. Mac hated it when people cranked their radios. It always felt as though the sound was coming from inside him, expanding against his ribs in an attempt to break free.

" You still upset with Danny for that whole human statue case?"

Mac took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He had actually forgotten about that incident for once, and felt a slight twinge of annoyance at Stella for dredging it back up.

" Maybe," Mac replied. They turned right, and the heavy thump faded behind them into a bad memory.

" Hey, I wouldn't blame you. You told him to pass it off, he didn't."

Mac thought back to that day with unease. " I know. It just surprised me he would do that."

Both of Stella's eyebrows lifted. " Surprised you? Didn't surprise me. The guy's obsessive. He has to know how things happened, why things happened…"

" Don't we all?"

Stella shrugged. " Yeah, but I think Danny has one up on us. He's obviously proven that. I mean, if that is why he stayed with the case. I don't know, just my point of view talking here."

Stella was right, though. Mac had known it of Danny before the incident with the dead statue man. Danny did lean toward the obsessive. Solving a case wasn't enough for him; he had to understand it. He had to know why it came about in the first place. Thus far it had always been an advantage for Danny since he attacked each case with great tenacity. But nothing was perfect. There was bound to be a flaw in the system.

Yet it had still shocked Mac that Danny had gone behind his back. He had never expected it, or perhaps had just ignored the possibility completely. It had seemed so unlike Danny, and yet at the same time very much like him. It had made Mac realize that there were things he had yet to know of concerning Danny Messer. But, then again, people were always full of surprises no matter how well known they were.

A left turn and eight more blocks later they came to their destination. Mac turned onto a narrow, shadowed street in front of a red bricked complex under renovation. It was a building of classic design; most likely something ancient and historical being brought back to life to be used as an apartment complex. Everywhere was cluttered the mess of renovation; scaffolding, tools, old paint cans that had yet to be thrown away, and large garbage bins half-full with torn up walls, flooring, and shattered brick.

Mac and Stella got out of the car, grabbing their kits, and headed toward the art-deco entrance marred by the yellow police tape crossed in front of it. An officer standing guard lifted the tape for them to enter after a flash of IDs.

" Second floor," the officer said. Inside the place smelled of water, paint, and dust. There were no doors on any of the rooms, and half the black and white checkered floor of the hall was stripped away revealing gritty discolored cement.

" This'll be a nice place once they get done," Stella commented. They took the stairs at the end of the hall to the second level. Another officer was there, this one younger with a pale face verging on green. Mac and Stella showed their ID, and the young officer took a deep breath.

" You okay son?" Mac asked the officer.

He nodded stiffly. " Yeah. It's just… this is my first homicide."

Mac nodded in understanding. " That bad?"

" More like weird," said Flack, stepping out from a room four doors down. " But I suppose I should just let you be the judges of that. Two workers found it this morning around eight."

Flack went back inside and Mac and Stella followed with the uniformed cop trailing after to take up his position by the door. The scene was not in the living room but the one next to it. Both slowed as they walked through the entry on their left. The room with a wooden floor and a fireplace was large and illuminated in a misty light pouring from two windows on the right wall. It was completely empty except for an old porcelain bathtub in the center of the room, and a body hanging by a tied sheet from the exposed pipes of the ceiling.

" I stand corrected," Stella said, setting her kit down. " This would be a nice place except for the reputation it's going to have."

" Weird, right?" Flack said. " Bathtub in the middle of the room. But check out the inside of the tub and the body."

Mac and Stella moved closer. The body was of a young woman, perhaps late twenties, with long black hair obscuring most of her face. She was dressed in a knee-length black skirt and a sleeveless black shirt, all decorated in small, silver studs.

" Looks as though she might have been partying before all this," Stella commented.

" And she may have already been dead before she was hung," Mac said as he brushed back the woman's hair. Blood soaked the sheet wrapped around her throat as well as her shirtfront. Mac looked down, expecting to see the tub glazed in human blood. All he saw were flecks and splash puddles most likely from the final drops.

" There should be more than this," Mac said, mostly to himself. " Her throat was cut ear to ear. There should be blood everywhere."

Stella stuck film into her camera and waited as it wound audibly. " Maybe it was collected in something else." She then held the camera to her eye and began flashing pictures of the body and the tub. " Like a bucket, to cut down on evidence."

Flack scratched the side of his neck with one finger. " You know, that sounds kind of familiar, the collecting blood thing. Or is that just me?"

Mac looked away from the body directly to the wall on the left. There was discoloring on the dark wood paneling that would have easily been overlooked had Mac not known to search for it. Mac moved toward it, defining the shape of the discoloration the closer he came.

" Stella, Flack, come see this," he said. The two came over to stand beside him and stare at the wall.

" What is that, blood?" Stella asked. She took a picture, and the light illuminated the shadowy wall, briefly revealing an odd, messily scrawled image.

" What was that, a dragon?" Flack asked with a look of disgust.

" A snake, actually," Mac replied. " A two headed snake." He set down his own kit, opened it, and took out a swab. He gathered some of the red onto the tip. It was still wet, so could not be paint unless recently applied. He handed the swab to Stella to test it; his eyes frozen on the image as though looking away might cause it to vanish.

" It's blood," Stella announced.

Flack grimaced. " That might explain what happened to the blood in the tub."

Mac's jaw tensed. He shook his head, familiarity hitting him like a sledgehammer. " Not if this is what I think this is. This may not be our vic's blood."

" What do you mean?" Stella asked.

" Do you recall a case about three years back, a serial killing that involved hangings? They called the killer the Hangman?"

" Woe!" Flack said, taking two steps back. " This is the guy? I mean - this is his work?"

The snake image was crude, the body coiled once and the two heads looking away in either direction, mouth open in a bearing of dripping fangs. " Looks like it."

" But I thought they caught that guy?" Stella said, taking more pictures of the snake.

" Maybe. This could just be a copycat. Except…."

" Except?" Stella prodded.

" Except it was never made public that the snake was two-headed. But that doesn't rule out the possibility. I helped work that case; though my involvement was minimal. The thing was the guy we caught kept insisting he was innocent. No matter how he was interrogated he never confessed. He was a construction worker, an everyday, blue-collared type. The only mark on his record was a few speeding tickets and one act of disorderly conduct when he was a teenager. Supposedly he got drunk and ran through his school prom naked. But that's beside the point. The real point is that no one believed he did it. He wouldn't even have been noticed had it not been for the fact he lived near one of the victims, and that we found a mountain of evidence held in his hands. Kind of an accident really, he was trying to get rid of it. He claimed it wasn't his and he didn't know how it got there."

Flack started in slight surprise. " And you believed him?"

Mac looked over his shoulder at the younger man. " After a while we started to." He looked back to the image. " Have you ever heard of a serial killer who didn't like to brag?"

Flack snorted out a laugh.

" Even wannabes and copy-cats brag," Stella said. " Even if it's not their work."

" Exactly. The Hangman killings were…" Mac winced slightly at having to use his next words, " perfection. No matter how we searched the scene we couldn't find any evidence leading to our guy. The Hangman was a practical freakin' artist. We couldn't find anything, anywhere. Then all of a sudden there it all was. Tubes of blood, gloves, ropes, knife, all packed in one little cardboard box about to be tossed out. It was too easy, but we didn't have anything to tell us otherwise, so the courts just went with it. The man didn't get the death penalty, just life and a few psyche evaluations. I don't think anyone was convinced. Even the psychologists evaluating the guy swear he's innocent to this day, we just can't find the proof."

" Until now?" Stella asked.

Mac pressed his mouth into a tight line. " Don't jump to conclusions. After the arrest was made the killings stopped. However, I don't know if a copycat will be as thorough as our original guy. Like I said, he was a perfectionist."

" Unless he got some advice from the suspected killer," Stella said, " and your everyday construction worker is a genius who knows how to act."

Mac shook his head uncertainly. " Kind of pointless to keep up the act. He got life. He's never getting out unless he didn't do it after all. I know I said not to jump to any conclusions, but I don't see how this could be a copycat. At least not yet."

Though Mac remained visibly stoic, his insides were squirming. The Hangman had been a troubling case, and as a CSI that was saying a lot.

" These killings, they moved fast," he continued as he thought back. " Two, sometimes three, days after finding one body another would show up, and the deaths were not always alike. One would be hung, the other stabbed and hung, the next gutted and hung. Only the hangings were the same."

" The Hangman's like an urban legend," said Flack as he paced casually about the room in careful observation. " I hear all these stories about it. This one guy told a bunch of us that the Hangman was a ghost."

" I heard someone say it was like a chain letter," Said Stella. She had returned to the body to take more pictures. " It started as a suicide, then the person returned from the grave to kill someone else, and that someone else returns from the grave to do the same, and that's why it happened so fast. We all had a good laugh about it."

" And not all the victims were women," Flack added.

" The rest, I seriously doubt," said Mac. " But the women part is true. Some of the vics were men."

" Wasn't there a cop killed as well?" Flack asked next. Mac nodded.

" She was the last victim."

The room went silent for a moment, though Mac would rather the questions continue. The silence was giving him time to think and he did not like where his thoughts were going. A reopening of this case, whether legit or copycat, would mean a repeat in history for many. He was not worried for himself so much but for the rest of his team. Which suddenly reminded him.

He turned to face the others. " Oh yeah, be careful what you touch."

At this, Flack, who had been standing by the fireplace about to place his hand on the mantle, snatched it away.

" If this is our guy, keep in mind at all times that he liked to set traps."

" Traps?" Stella and Flack asked in unison.

Mac nodded and held up his hand. " We had one guy lose a finger to an animal trap in one of the victim's closet. Another time we had to leave the scene when someone tripped a wire that released propane gas. We didn't even notice until we all started getting dizzy. They're not meant to kill, but they're not cute little pranks either."

Stella and Flack exchanged uneasy looks. Mac looked back at the image and released a slow breath. He knew that once word spread, certain familiar names would come up, followed by familiar faces as those who had worked the case in the beginning crawled out from the shadows to take up their old quest. Among them would be Stan Mavin, and the thought made Mac's insides squirm once more.

NYCSI

Mac stared intently through the windows of his office, leaning back in his chair while twirling and clicking a pen in his hand. There was an itch of desire at the back of his mind to assist Stella in processing the little evidence they had found. He wanted to be there when the blood tests confirmed that the vic's blood and the blood on the wall did not match. He wanted to hear the words for himself to confirm what he already knew.

He forced the desire back another notch. What he was doing now was more important, and Stella, Aiden, and Danny could handle it fine. It wasn't as though there was much to process at any rate.

Mac knew he was jumping the gun on this, but his certainty had become near solid after the lack of prints, fibers, or hairs found anywhere at the scene. The place had been clean as though the body had materialized from someplace else. Word of this would spread fast, and was doing so even as he sat and waited. It would have reached the ears of Stan Mavin by now, and any minute he would come striding into Mac's office demanding information as though the case had never ended. And for Stan it probably hadn't, if the rumors Mac had heard over time were true.

Mac finally spotted Stan weaving through forensics and cops, making his steps wide and fast. Mac settled for clicking the pen rather than turning it about. His gaze never left Stan as the tall, broad shouldered detective moved around to the door and stepped inside.

" What've you got?" he asked immediately.

" What do you think I've got?" Mac replied.

Stan, a little out of breath, placed his hands on his hips and grinned. " A body, blood, a picture, and not much else?"

Mac gave a slight smile in return. " So far."

" Come on, Mac. You finally cave and agree with the courts that that construction guy did it? You honestly believe we got the man?"

Mac shrugged. " I never really decided. And I won't decide until we have all the facts."

" We never had any facts to begin with."

Stan had Mac there. " True."

A brief moment of silence fell between them as they regarded eachother intensely as though caught in a staring contest. The only sound came from the occasional clicking of Mac's pen.

" I've already been asked back on this case," Stan said.

" Why am I not surprised?"

Mavin gave a quiet chuckle. " I always thought nothing could surprise you Taylor. They're getting everyone who was on the case back in and them some."

Mac nodded once. " I already received a call about a profiler being sent in."

" Castle?"

" No, he retired. Farrone, his assistant."

Stan's mouth spread into a smile that was more like a leer. " Oh yeah, I remember her. She was earning a degree. She was pretty hot then, wonder if she still is." He chuckled at this, but stopped when Mac didn't join in.

" Come on, Taylor, lighten up," he said in response to Mac's silence.

" You were never funny back then, Mavin. You're still not funny today."

Mavin shrugged. " Whatever. Listen, Taylor. I need something from you and I don't want any bull about it. I'm not normally one to ask for favors, but seeing as how the situation calls for it…"

" What is it, Mavin?"

" I need a CSI at my disposal."

Mac stopped clicking his pen. " That's kind of a given, Mavin. We're all pretty much at everyone's disposal."

Stan shook his head. " No, I don't mean waiting for one to show up at the scene. I need one on call at all times. You know how I work, Mac. I don't want to stand around for hours waiting for one of you guys to show up. I'd rather just take one along for the ride. You know good and well that of all the cops working this case I found out the most, I questioned the most. I know this case better than anyone and I know what to look for. And it'd be a hll of a lot easier if I had one of your forensics with me."

Mac knit his brow into a slight scowl. " To be clear, is this something I can say no to?"

Stan smirked. " Not really. I already asked my boss and he backs me up on it. In fact, he's planning on having one of yours by the side of every one of ours working this case. The killer moves fast, so we gotta be ready. We gotta be on our toes at all times."

Mac sighed, tossing the pen onto his desk with a loud clatter. " Fine."

" Anyone in particular you're willing to part with… for a time?"

Mac leaned forward resting his elbow on his desk, massaging the area above his eyebrow. " Not really."

" Well, you know, last week when I came in here there was this one chick in the lab…"

" No," Mac stated flatly. Although Aiden could have easily handled Stan's occasional sexists bouts, he'd rather not put her through it to begin with. Stan was more than just sexist. Had Mac his way, no one would be forced to work with him.

Stan lifted one shoulder in a nonchalant shrug. " Okay then. Who else you got?"

" No one I'd be willing to place with you."

Stan chuckled again. " Come on, Mac. I wasn't that bad."

Mac wanted to laugh himself. " You're right, you were worse. You didn't know when to quit, when to be careful. You also don't know when to shut up."

Though Stan's smile remained plastered to his face, his gaze darkened as though a shadow had fallen over his features only. " Getting a little hostile there, Taylor. Look, if it's any consolation, I promise to play nice, all right?"

" No, it's not a consolation."

Stan rolled his eyes to the ceiling and threw his hands up in the air. " Aw, come on Mac, give me a little credit. Maybe I changed."

" I doubt it."

Stan laughed. " You really are a cold SOB, you know that?" Suddenly, Stan's eyes brightened and he snapped his fingers. " I got it. What's the name of that skinny kid with the glasses, the one I thought was my ATM perp?"

Mac straightened, lowering his hand to the desk. " Danny Messer?"

" Yeah, him. How about him?"

Again Mac was hit with the urge to laugh, but instead gave Stan a glare mingled with disbelief. " You two didn't exactly hit it off well if you haven't recalled."

" Hey, it's in the past."

" It was only last week."

" We all deserve a second chance. I'm willing to give Messer one."

Mac wanted to wipe the smug grin off Mavin's face, though it would not have been Mavin without it. The man made an art out of smiling. Mac had never known him without a smirk that always managed to make Mac's flesh crawl. He was not the only one caught in this mindset. Others had confessed of a secret desire to slug the guy. It wasn't so much that he grinned all the time but that he did so at the most inappropriate times. Even with a mangled, bloody body hanging before him the detective still had found some reason to leer. The man had no respect for anything. But there was more to him than that, which was why Mac felt a sudden surge of concern for Danny.

" Look Mac," Mavin continued. " I need a CSI, and I want Messer. That all right with you? I promise to keep all sexist jokes to a minimum," he simpered.

The word 'no' danced on the tip of Mac's tongue, teetering on the edge of coming out. " How about I work with you," he said instead, though those words left a bitter taste in his mouth.

Mavin shook his head. " I want Messer. It might do the kid some good working with me since I know this case so well. Might give him some experience."

" He has experience."

" More experience then. I've made up my mind, Mac. I want Messer. And right now what I say pretty much goes."

Mac stared at Stan for a moment, then past him to the infinite movement beyond the window. He studied the faces of those who walked by; wondering which of them might be more suited to working with Stan. Danny wasn't going to like this, and might reveal another streak of rebellion if asked to work with a man he had despised the moment he met him.

" I want Messer, Mac."

A darker side of Mac hoped that Danny would rebel and refuse to go along with this. But since Mac did not want anyone to have to work with Stan to begin with, and so could not think of anyone else, he was forced to comply.

" Fine. But let me talk to him first."

Stan held up both his hands. " No problem."

" One more thing. I think he would prefer it if you didn't call him 'that skinny kid' or even 'kid' for that matter."

Another smirk spread on Stan's face. " He a little touchy?"

" Maybe," Mac replied, leaving it at that to give Mavin something to ponder.