Title: Beyond Repair
Author: StarrySkies
Rating: T
Pairing: Mac/Stella
Disclaimer: Don't own anything that CBS, Jerry Bruckheimer, Anthony Zuiker, etc. own.
Summary: Some things, you just can't fix - no matter how hard you try.
Warning: references to self-injury.
A/N: This is just a work in progress. I have no clear direction with it yet, but hopefully, it will come to me. Just started with an idea as usual without thinking the story through.
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"Whatcha got, Flack?" Stella asked. She surveyed the crime scene – a run-down apartment in a walk-up in Brooklyn. Side tables knocked over, a lamp broken on the floor, couch cushions torn from their proper places. Apparent domestic disturbance. All properly documented by Stella's camera.
He held his black notebook in his hand and flipped it open to the corresponding page. "Approximately 20 year-old Caucasian female. Neighbor called the cops when she walked by and found her on the floor."
"You get a name?"
"Working on it. Called the super, and he's finding the lease agreement for me."
"The neighbors don't know who lived here?"
"I asked, and they said they didn't know her, so she must not have been living here too long. Can't even find a scrap of paper with a name on it around here."
"Anybody see anything?" she asked.
"Neighbors said they heard a scuffle but nobody saw a thing. They conveniently went blind for 20 minutes."
Stella smirked at the comment but didn't take her eyes off of the victim lying on the floor. Her pants were on but Stella noticed right away that they were unbuttoned and unzipped. She snapped a picture while making a mental note to remember to dust the button for possible prints. It was her job to notice things like that. EMTs were standing by, waiting for Stella's cue, ready to put the body into the bag and onto the gurney. She never got used to that part.
"Talk to me." She clapped her hands together, walking through the double doors of the medical examiner's office.
"Found a wallet in her back pocket. Name's Lauren Scott. 16 days shy of her 21st birthday."
"She was just a kid," she said softly. "Cause of death?" she asked.
"One blow to the temple." He pointed to the right side of the young woman's head to reveal a rather large purple bruise.
"I didn't find a possible weapon at the crime scene, so either the suspect took it with him--"
"Or the suspect was the weapon. Looks like a fist did this. There are defense wounds on her hands. Must've been one hell of a fight."
Stella nodded. "Rape kit?" She knew the answer as soon as she saw the girl lying on the floor. But, she still wanted to ask for confirmation's sake.
Hawkes paused before he answered. "…Positive." Wasn't uncommon, but he saw more of those cases on his table than he cared to. "Sent a sample to DNA."
She nodded without a word.
"Check this out." Motioning for Stella to come closer, Hawkes took the vic's hand in his glove, holding her arm up to the overhead light. "See here," he pointed with his pinky finger. "Parallel lines carved into the skin." He ran his fingertip lightly over the scars. Stella stared intently. "My guess would be a straight-edged razor blade."
"Cutter." Stella's stomach tied into a knot, and she closed her eyes, willing herself to detach from her emotions. This is part of the job, she tried to remind herself. Her profession was never easy. Painfully routine, but never easy.
"Exactly," he replied. Stella nodded once again. "There's more." Sheldon put the victim's lifeless arm back at her side and pulled back the sheet to reveal additional scars on her upper thighs. "Not as precise. Some intersecting. More anger resulting in a less-controlled incision."
"Mmm." Stella winced.
"Judging by their color, I'd say these were about six to eight months old. Too healed to be recent, but not healed enough to lose some of their original pink color. Older scars sometimes tend to fade to white on people with her skin tone, depending on the depth of the cut."
"Are there any recent ones?"
"No. These are all old, so it appears that she was trying to stop."
"Good for her."
He turned on the light box a couple feet away and affixed an x-ray to it. "A couple of healed fractures in the right arm. This," he pointed to one faint line in particular as Stella leaned in close and squinted to see what he was referring to, "is the kind of break that results from twisting the limb until the bone snaps in two." He demonstrated the twisting motion with his hands, and Stella had to look away. "The breaks were properly healed, so she definitely went to a doctor to set them. Maybe two years old, but that's just an estimate. Could be slightly older than that. Three, possibly."
"Any family?"
"Called a number I found in the wallet. Turned out to be the husband."
"Husband?" Stella's eyebrows narrowed. "She's barely out of her teens."
"Don't ask me."
"Hey, Bonasera. The husband's here. Told him to wait for you in interro."
"Thanks, Danny," she said with a pat to his arm before they passed each other in the hallway.
Stella walked into the interrogation room to find a young, fairly handsome black man seated at the table, holding his head in his hands.
"Uh… Mr… Scott?"
"Bryan." He stood up and extended his hand.
She offered her hand out just as he did after switching the manila folder she held from her right to her left. "Detective Bonasera. Please, sit." Good eye-contact, she noted.
He did as told but didn't wait for her to speak. "What happened to her?" His eyes were pleading and bloodshot.
"It appears as though she suffered some severe head trauma and was sexually assaulted."
Tears rolled down his cheeks as he digested the words. "Can…" He wiped at his eyes with the back of his shirtsleeve. He tried again. "Can I see her?"
"We can arrange a viewing if you'd like."
"Yeah. Yeah," he nodded with closed eyes.
"When was the last time you saw your wife?" Wife. She's just a kid.
"Last night. I work 10pm to 6 full-time at the factory, and then I work another job from 7am to 11 part-time. All I know is I got a call from that M.E. guy, I got down here as fast as I could, and the blonde guy out front told me I had to wait for you in here."
"If I call, can someone vouch for you being there?"
"Yeah, definitely." He retrieved his wallet and scribbled down two separate phone numbers on the back of a store receipt and promptly handed the scrap over to Stella.
That seemed like an act of innocence, that he was so willing to give her both numbers, but she couldn't go on that alone. She knew from experience that sometimes, guilty people tried to come off innocent at first too. She glanced at the numbers, unaffected, and put them in her pocket. "How long have the two of you been married?"
"Almost 4 months."
"And how long have you known her?"
"I've known her since grade school. I was a year ahead of her. But we didn't start dating until last summer."
Stella watched him carefully for signs of suspicion as she opened the folder and put a couple of photos onto the table. She had to treat everyone as a suspect. "Do you recognize these?" she asked, sliding them over to him.
He picked them up and it only took a second before he was overcome again. He bit his lower lip, trying to stop it from quivering. He nodded. "I finally got her to stop."
"Stop cutting?"
"She had it rough. And, uh, she used to do that before we started dating." He wouldn't take his eyes off of the pictures.
"Rough?" Let him tell you. Don't push, Stella silently tried to remind herself, though sometimes her 'take no bullshit' attitude made it hard to hear that little voice. She, every now and again, forgot that it was even there.
He pursed his lips before he spoke. "We moved here from Ohio 3 months ago. They wouldn't let her leave unless she was married, and I -- I told her to pick a city, and I'd get her out of there. She always wanted to live in New York, so the JP back home married us, and I scraped up enough cash to get us an apartment out in BK. I borrowed from every single relative I've got, called in every favor I ever had coming to me, I -- I'm working two jobs. I know it's not much, but I'm trying… I was trying," he added, applying a past tense to his statement with a heavy sigh. "I did what I had to to keep her safe." He paused briefly and looked up at Stella. "Guess I didn't do enough, huh?"
He was full on crying now, shielding his eyes with his left hand. She noticed light reflect off of the gold band he wore. She was pretty good at reading people and could sense that he was not the culprit here. But she needed definite proof. That's the way it worked, no exceptions. She slowly pulled the pictures back across the table from his grasp and returned them to the folder. Stella didn't see too many grown men cry. The occurrence left her blank on what to do. "Don't say that," she told him. "You did what you could."
"No, it wasn't enough." She watched him shake his head repeatedly and wipe his eyes again. "I'm sorry," he said, embarrassed that he was crying.
"It's all right. You said… 'Keep her safe.' Was someone hurting her at home?"
"No."
"Then who were you protecting her from?"
"Her ex. I was trying to get her away from him. I figured if we left, she wouldn't have to see him. Small town, you know?"
"We took some x-rays, and there is evidence of healed fractures in her arm. Did she tell you anything about those?"
"Yeah. He did that. The day after she turned 18, she said. Broke her arm in two different places."
2 fractures. 2 years give or take. Matches Hawkes' timeline. "Do you think he's the one who did this?"
"I don't know. Maybe. I wouldn't put it past him."
"I'm gonna need that name," she said, searching her pockets for a pen in her Dolce & Gabbana jacket. (No doubt about it, Stella Bonasera made crime scene investigation look good.)
Stella exited into the hallway and found Mac in the room behind the one-way mirror. Apparently, he'd been watching her talk to the victim's husband.
"Hey. What're you doing in here? Checking up on me?" she joked before taking note of his somber mood.
He stood with his hands in his pockets, watching Bryan through the mirror. "No." He sighed heavily. "Where are you going?"
"Gotta talk to Hawkes about a viewing for this guy."
"Let me do that," Mac insisted.
"Mac, I got it." She looked at her partner, his eyes still fixated on the victim's husband in the next room. Stella looked in on him as well. Bryan was wiping his eyes again, and Stella could see that the disconnected stage, as she called it, was beginning to set in with him. He was no longer crying, just sitting in the chair, staring at the table, barely even blinking. Like it was too much for him to process. He knew he had lost his wife, but the how's and why's and who's still unanswered and sheer disbelief often left survivors in a daze.
Stella had seen that with Mac.
A/N: I apologize if a couple of the initials I used in here aren't correct. I'm from TX, so the NY things, I'm just doing the best I can.