A/N: Thanks for the error check, Franta. I totally missed that! S'what happens when I write in fits and starts...
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Eames was at work before Goren the next morning - a somewhat unusual occurrence - and so she spent the spare time lecturing herself on the ills caused by getting too personal with one's partner: Of course he's going to form an opinion of you based on what he sees, and if you ask, of course he's going to tell you, she thought, resting her chin in her hand and trying to look like she was thinking about something work-related. Just because your ego wants to hear that he thinks you're brilliant doesn't mean it's true. You know he'd never set out to harm you, so if he was telling the truth, why did you take offense so quickly last night?
"Alex?" a voice said near her ear, shaking her out of her thoughts.
"Huh?" She turned to the source of the voice, expecting it to be her partner. Instead, she found herself staring at her Captain, who was looking back at her with concern.
"Are you ok? You haven't moved for close to ten minutes."
"Oh," she said, giving her head a shake as though to clear it, "I was just daydreaming."
"About Goren?"
"Excuse me?" she managed in a strangled voice.
Deakins's look changed from concern to teasing. "Well, since he's late and you're staring at the wall, it's a logical assumption . . ."
"I was not daydreaming about Goren," she said firmly. "Did you need me for something, or were you just checking up?"
"You owe me a status report," he reminded her. "But that can wait until Goren gets here. Actually, you just caught my attention when I happened to look at you."
"How did I catch your attention?" she asked, feeling off-balance. "I thought you said I wasn't moving."
"Exactly. Well, that and . . ." His voice trailed off. "On second thought, would you come talk to me in my office for a second, please?"
That was a definite danger signal, she thought as she nodded apprehensively. Wondering what she'd done to deserve a lecture, she followed him into his office and took a chair as he closed the door. "Is something wrong, sir?"
Deakins looked down at his desk for a moment, seeming to compose himself, and then returned his gaze to her face. "Did anything happen to you last night that I should know about?"
Alex gaped at him, a thousand different answers to that question running through her mind. Nine hundred ninety-nine of them were definitely not appropriate to share with her superior officer, so she settled for a simple, "No. Why?"
"I, uh, happened to notice your arms."
She looked down at her forearms and noted with alarm that there were distinct finger-shaped bruises around each of her wrists. Damn, as if her morning weren't going badly enough already! "They're nothing -" she began.
"They weren't there yesterday," he told her. "So someone put them on you last night. I want to know who."
"It's not what it looks like, Captain. Honestly." How the hell was she going to get out of this one? Oh, no, Captain, I'm not being abused; I was just exploring the sexual tension between me and my partner. Right, because Deakins wouldn't have a problem with that.
"Alex, you've dealt with enough domestic abuse to know that . . ."
"I'm not being abused!"
"Then how -" Deakins stopped abruptly, a look of chagrin spreading across his face.
Alex didn't need to hear him say it to know that he'd drawn the only other obvious conclusion: rough, maybe kinky, sex. She could feel her face turning red. "No, it's not that either!" she choked out. "I don't . . ." She cut herself off. This conversation could only get more embarrassing. She needed to escape, as quickly as possible.
Fortune had smiled on her, she decided when she looked up and saw Goren standing by their desks. "Thanks for your, uh, concern, sir. I'm fine. I need to go . . . talk to Goren. We'll give you a status in a few minutes!"
Without giving Deakins a chance to respond, she darted out of his office and skidded to a stop at her desk. "You," she said to her partner, who was staring at her curiously, "are in deep shit."
"I, uh, had already figured that out," he said. "Can we save the beating until lunch?"
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"We need to talk," Eames hissed as they left Deakins's office half an hour later.
"Can it wait?" asked Goren, looking down at the vibrating pager on his belt. "The Medical Examiner just beeped me. Autopsy report is ready."
Eames sighed, although she had to admit that she was somewhat relieved for the reprieve. "Yeah, it can wait. Let's go."
They made their way to the M.E.'s office in a tense silence, neither wanting to be the first one to mention the previous night. As they entered the building, Eames forced her expression into a look of pleasant politeness and approached the secretary. "You have a body for us?" she asked, showing her badge. "Li?"
"Oh, yes," the younger woman said, flipping through a pile of forms on her desk. "Table four. Jan's there waiting for you."
Eames knew that "Jan" was Dr. Janet Rapp, an M.E. they weren't well acquainted with. "Figures," she mumbled. "A weird, gruesome case, and our body gets a rookie."
"Be nice," Goren admonished as he held the morgue door for her. "You were a rookie once too, and they wouldn't have given her the case if she wasn't capable."
"Feeling magnanimous today, are we?" she said archly as she brushed past him.
"You could call it that." He looked around for the ME. "Dr. Rapp?"
"Over here," she responded, waving to them from across the room. "You guys are here for James Li?"
"Yep," Eames said as they took up positions on either side of the body. "What can you tell us?"
"Well, first off, someone really didn't like this guy. He's got two layers of injuries on him. The first is a set of contusions to the abdomen and the back of the head. Then, over those, we have the obvious stuff, these lacerations," she said, pointing to the now-clean cuts.
"How old are the bruises?" said Goren. "Same day? Same time?"
"I'd definitely go with 'same day,' although the time is more difficult. If I had to guess, I'd say they probably occurred within a few hours of the rest of the injuries, since the bruising wasn't full-depth - but I wouldn't testify to that in court."
"That's ok," Eames said, feeling her tension ease as she fell back into the comfortable pattern of working with her partner. "We're more interested in the cause of death right now."
"Ok, we can skip to that. What you've got," Rapp said, "is one very pissed, very smart perp. To get the technicalities out of the way, the COD here is exanguination and the manner is homicide. No surprises there, I suppose?"
"Yeah, we'd already worked those out," said Goren. "Can you tell us . . . how it was possible for him to bleed out?"
"You mean was he a hemophiliac or anything? Nah. In fact, he didn't have so much as a cold, let alone an autoimmune disease. That's partially based on my exam, by the way, but also on the medical records we got from his doctor."
"So it was induced?"
"Yup. You're going to like this one - look," the ME said, pulling back the body's top lip.
"His gums were bleeding, too? But I don't see any breaks in the skin," Eames said.
"Gums, gastrointestinal tract, conjunctiva . . . there weren't a whole lot of places the guy wasn't bleeding out of. Mostly the mucus membranes, but I found a small amount of intracranial bleeding, too. I suspect that that was a late starter and he had lost too much blood by that point anyway."
"So not only was he bleeding externally - which is what we saw at the scene," said Goren, "but he was hemorrhaging internally, also."
"He was dead either way," Eames said quietly. "So the cutting . . . that was solely to make a point."
"Or maybe just to make the guy hurt that much more," suggested Rapp. "It was probably excruciating for him, cut after cut on already-hypersensitive skin."
"Did you find evidence of a drug that caused the bleeding?" Goren prompted, trying to hide his impatience.
"You could say that," Rapp said with a grim smile. "He was massively overdosed with brodifacoum."
"Warfarin," Goren translated. "That's . . . an anticoagulant used for heart or embolism patients."
"Neither of which was a problem for our professor," Eames added.
"Well, you're not going to find brodifacoum in the blood of any heart patient I've ever heard of. It's a superwarfarin. Extremely potent and long-acting. Not something you want in you under just about any circumstances," Rapp said, shaking her head.
"Brodi . . ." Eames repeated to herself. "Wait, I've heard of that before. It's in rat poison, isn't it?"
"Very good, Detective. It is, indeed, mainly used to kill mice and rats. Does a good job of it, too."
"So it's not hard to get," Eames said, sensing that they had just lost a possible lead. "Anyone could have walked into a store and bought a box of D-Con or something."
Goren shook his head. "Anyone could have bought it, but whoever used it had this planned out. If they didn't know exactly what the physiological effects would be, they would have no reason to use it the way they did."
"Whoever they are, they did their homework," Rapp agreed.
"Were you able to establish a time of death?" asked Eames.
"Sure," Rapp answered, handing her a copy of her report. "He died between eight and twelve hours before he was brought in. Rigor was just approaching its peak."
"So that would place his time of death in the vicinity of eight the night before," Goren calculated.
"But," Rap went on, "there's a significant time lag between ingestion of warfarin and the start of bleeding."
"How significant?" Eames said.
"Twenty-four hours, give or take."
"Yeah, that's definitely significant."
"So what we should be interested in," Goren said thoughtfully, "is who he was with the night before he died, as much as who he was with the night he did die."
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"There was a . . . datebook," Goren said as they got back in the car. "I saw it in his house."
"You think we took it as evidence?" Eames asked. "Should we go to the scene to check, or just back to One PP?"
"I remember setting it aside. Let's go back; Deakins is going to be on us about what the M.E. had, anyway."
"You got it." She shifted into Reverse and started backing out of the parking space.
They rode in silence for a few minutes, until they reached a red light and neither could pretend to be concentrating on the road any longer. "You . . . wanted to talk," he said hesitantly.
She kept her eyes glued to the red light in front of them. "Yeah."
"About what I said last night?"
Clearing her throat, she willed the light to turn green. "Partially."
Her reticence didn't go unnoticed. ""But I take it you've changed your mind now?"
"No."
"Come on, Alex," he demanded, giving her a weary look. "You've got to give me something to work with."
"Well excuse me for not wanting to listen to you tell me what you think of how I do my job."
This wasn't helping, he decided. Glancing at the clock on the dashboard, he noted that it was past eleven and made a quick decision. "Let's go out for lunch."
"Now?" Eames said, staring at him.
"Yes, now. It's only a little early. And, uh . . . the light's green."
"Shit." She accelerated through the light. "You just said Deakins is going to want to hear the autopsy results ASAP, and now you're suggesting we blow him off and take an early lunch?"
"Well," he said a little defensively, "I've changed my mind. Deakins took up our lunch hour yesterday; we're entitled to a long lunch today."
"Bobby, we're neck-deep in a big-name case. I can't believe that you, of all people, would want to waste time!"
"It's not . . . wasting time," he said. "I can't concentrate on an investigation when we're not working smoothly together, so it's either lunch or sitting at my desk being unproductive."
Finally, he'd said something that made sense to her. It didn't mean she liked it, but at least she could understand what was going on on his head. "How nice; I've become one of your mental blocks."
She had no idea how close she'd come to the truth, Goren thought. Ever since he'd left her apartment the night before, he hadn't been able to rid himself of the corrosive fear that he had truly hurt her, that she would refuse to continue working with him. Struggling to come up with an honest, yet safe, answer, he said haltingly, "It's . . . hard to trust my deductions . . . about a case . . . when I don't seem to be capable of handling . . . my personal life."
" 'Your personal life'?" she echoed, raising her eyebrows.
"Uh, my relationship . . . with you," he rephrased weakly. "If I'm not smart enough to know how to not hurt my . . . friend . . . then how could I be smart enough to work a homicide?"
"Oh, bull," she growled, turning into the One Police Plaza parking lot. "You've never doubted your intelligence in your life, except maybe with Nicole Wallace. Don't try to act like a fight with me has strained your intellect."
"Well, it has," he shot back, losing patience. "I told you last night how important you are to my ability to do my job."
Eames slammed the car into Park, grinding the gears, and jerked the key out of the ignition. "It always comes back to work, doesn't it. You need to be able to do your job again, and how distressing it must be for you to have me interfering!"
"Alex!" Goren cried as she slammed out of the car.
"What?" she said tiredly, leaning back against the car she had just exited.
Climbing out and shutting his door much more gently, he circled around to her side of the vehicle and stood a few feet in front of her, studying her face. She looked . . . exhausted. "Did you sleep last night?" he asked abruptly.
"Does it matter?"
"I'd like to know."
She sighed. "Ok, if you insist - not really. I got about twenty minutes of sleep, total."
"Come on," he said, taking her arm. "Please let me buy you some lunch?"
"I didn't sleep, so you're going to feed me?"
He detected a welcome hint of her usual sense of humor. "Well, I can't put you to bed in the middle of the day. Food is the best I can do. Please?"
Still leaning against the car, she covered her face with her hands and took a deep breath. "I'm a disaster right now. Trust me, you don't want to spend any more time with me than you have to."
Goren gently forced her hands away from her face. Keeping just enough pressure on them to keep her from raising them again, he insisted, "I'm the reason you're a, uh, 'disaster' today in the first place. I need to explain . . . some things. To you."
"Bobby . . ."
"It's either lunch now or I'm following you home tonight."
"Oh, fine. Just remember that you've been warned."
His face broke into a boyish grin. "Good. Come on," he said, using his grip on her hands to pull her away from the car.
"We're walking?"
"Yeah. It's good for you."