A/N. I just remembered that Bobby doesn't drive. Oh, well. Anyway, it took me awhile, but I'm updating! Let me just tell you that you're lucky, because I rarely, rarely update multi-chapter fics that I've started. Just ask the Munchkins, I have, like, three that I haven't finished for them. Ho hum. I'll work on them over Christmas break, I guess. Can I just use this moment to soap-box a bit? Okay... VDO is teh sex! All right, I'm done now. On with the fic. BTW, I heart my reviewers.
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Disclaimer: Don't own anything.By the time they left the crime scene, the sun was rising lazily over the edge of the skyscrapers, lighting the bustling streets with a cold luminosity. Alex caught a ride to One Police Plaza with Bobby, grabbing a few minutes of sleep on the way in. Her dream, the one she had had just earlier that night, was blissfully absent. As he pulled the car to a stop, Goren glanced over at her, curled up in his passenger seat. "Eames. Wake up. We're here." He shook her gently. She opened one eye blearily.
"Yeah," she said by way of letting him know that she was awake. She rubbed the back of her hand across her face.
"You been sleeping okay?"
"Fine. Why?"
"You've just been looking kind of tired lately is all."
"Nah. It's just the long hours. Ready?" she asked, stepping out of the car.
He chose to ignore the change of subject, and followed her silently into One Police Plaza.
………
Deakins perched on the edge of Alex's desk. "So. What've we got?"
Alex flipped open the file, which had arrived a few hours ago. "Female Jane Doe found in Central Park. Looks about twenty, twenty-one." She glanced at her partner; he inclined his head slightly in agreement.
"They're running her prints through the databases now. I'm not holding my breath, though," Alex said.
"And why's that?" her boss asked.
"No tattoos, visible scarring, or piercings, not even her ears. Most juveniles in the database are convicted offenders, and most have ink or piercings as a way of rebelling against parents, P.O.s, whoever. Too young to be armed forces. I suppose she could be a state or federal employee, maybe a paper pusher."
Bobby was leaning far back in his chair, staring pensively at the ceiling and rubbing his forehead thoughtfully. The crime scene photos were in his lap, but he just absently thumbed the edges. They had put a rush on the pictures; the lab had pumped them out sometime in the couple of hours that they had spent on paperwork. Bobby was lost, however, in his thoughts, brainstorming the case, as he often did, and the killer's motives.
Purity of intent. Someone who cared about her, or at least an acquaintance. But there're obviously some underlying feelings of… what? Inadequacy? Narcissism? Hatred of women?
Alex's phone rang softly on the desk in front of her. Picking up the receiver, she gave the customary, "Eames." After a few moments, she said, "All right. Be there soon." She replaced the phone to its cradle.
"Autopsy's up."
"That was fast," Deakins remarked
"Lucky for us," she said, her tone dripping sarcasm.
Bobby sighed, his thoughts interrupted.
It's too soon to say. Maybe Rodgers can tell us more. He hoisted himself out of the chair and grabbed his black leather folder. Likewise, Eames wordlessly gathered her coat and purse. They gave the captain identical nods, and headed out the door towards the morgue. Their steps fell perfectly in time with each others', side by side, matching expressions of calm, collected professionalism adorning their faces.
Deakins stared after them pensively. "Sometimes those two are so alike I wonder how they tell themselves apart," he remarked to no one. Well, there was work to be done, mountains of paperwork, hours of phone calls, and rookies to supervise. He retreated to his office, with an expression not unlike that of a man walking to the gallows. The joys of being a supervisor.
Boy, did he love his job.
………
When they arrived at the morgue, Rodgers was elbow-deep in the cadaver's innards. Catching the look they both sent her, the one that wordlessly asked, 'what the fuck?' she sighed.
"Sorry, sorry, apparently someone threw out the chart that had the organs' weights on it, so we have to do it over again." She shot one of the assistants with an absolutely scathing glance. The girl turned a brilliant shade of pink all the way up to the tips of her ears. "Body needs to be sealed up and shipped off by the end of the day. Family lives in Boston."
"You got a hit off of her prints, then?"
The M.E. nodded. "Mm-hm. Works at the public library. They take your prints when you apply. The database had a sample of her blood. They screened it for diseases when she applied for state medical insurance. We ran it. DNA is a match."
"To whom?"
"Emily Hawthorne." She passed Eames a sheet with the victim's picture and personal information.
"Eighteen. Younger than we thought." She shook her head before moving on. "She only moved here a year ago, right after graduation. Lives in an apartment on the Lower East side… whoa." Eames had flipped through to the picture. "Definitely not the same girl she was when this was taken." She passed her partner the head-shot, blown up from Hawthorne's driver's license. Grey-blue eyes peered out from under thick glasses, masked further by the straight bangs that shaded them. The girl's hair was a mass of what weren't really curls, just a bunch of kinky waves tied back in a ponytail. She wore no makeup, and gave the camera a half-hearted smile that didn't reveal any teeth. She was a plain looking girl, not ugly, but she hadn't been primped like the girl on the slab.
Rodgers' team of pathologists and assistance finally stepped back, their work done with. The ME stripped off her gloves and tossed them in the wastebasket before scrubbing her hands and snapping a clean pair on. "Cause of death wasn't blunt-force like I originally thought, it was exsanguination from slit wrists. As for the head would, he hit her just once. CSU recovered this at the scene." She hefted an evidence bag and removed a rock. "See how this fits, here?" The rock's shape perfectly matched the large purplish welt on the scalp.
"He hit her only once," Alex murmured.
Rodgers nodded. "First hit's a freebie. Usually doesn't bleed." She continued on in her perpetually fatigued-sounding voice. "Laceration marks around the neck and petechial hemorrhages in her eyes indicate strangulation. Also, the hyoid bone, that little U-shaped bone at the base of the throat, was fractured."
"Any way to tell the sequence of events?" Alex asked.
"I was just getting to that. Strangulation came first, depleting oxygen and blood flow to the brain. That's why the blood at the crime scene was so thin: once he let go of her neck, most of her hemoglobin rushed to the brain to repair any damage that a minute or two without air would have caused."
"Hemoglobin… red blood cells," Bobby mused.
Rodgers made a little sound of agreement. "That's why the head wound made such a clear impression. Because there was so much hemoglobin in her head, though, the blood everywhere else was thinner than usual. After she was down for the count, he cut her wrists at the radial artery and left her to bleed out. The process was faster than it normally would have been because of the thickness, or lack thereof. Still, it would have taken her at least two, maybe three hours to lose 40 of her blood. In a human her size, that's about 1.8 liters of the stuff."
Alex was piecing the time line together. "So, if they found her at two thirty, she probably died around… midnight?"
"Sounds about right," Rodgers agreed.
"So, the question becomes 'What would a plain-Jane librarian turned beauty queen be doing in Central Park in the middle of the night?'"
"That's your job. I just slice 'em."
"Th-thanks, doc." Goren turned to his partner. "Her apartment's on Jefferson. Want to take a ride?"
She flashed him that sardonic smile. "You ask like I have a choice."
"Well, you know, I aim to please."
"How chivalrous." Alex cast a glance over the corpse at Rodgers.
"I'll have the photos at your squad by the end of the day."
Alex raised a hand in thanks and slipped out the door, Bobby close on her heels.
"So, Goren, what d'you think?"
"Well, it wasn't overkill."
Alex raised her eyebrows. "The victim was strangled, sliced, and suffered from blunt-force trauma. That's not overkill?"
"Not when you think about it." He stopped in his tracks, ready to outline the whole scenario for her. "He used just enough force to achieve each desired goal. He needed to subdue her enough to get her to the ground, so he cuts off her air supply. He needs to knock her unconscious so that she doesn't escape, so he hits her once, to the back of the head, where the wound isn't visible. He used a smooth rock so that there wasn't any bleeding. Once she was out, he slit her wrists."
"I did notice that he cut up the radial artery."
"Most suicides fail because they think that cutting across will be enough. The most efficient way to do it would be how he did, slicing along the major arteries of the arm to the elbow."
"It's a very passive form of murder, isn't it? Just a few quick slices and leave her there, the blood silently flowing out of her body."
Bobby pulled out the girl's autopsy photo. "Even if she had been able to, there was no one to hear her scream."
Eames shook her head at Emily's fate. "The city's a rough place." She paused for a moment. "You should get some rest."
"But her apartment…"
"It's almost six," she said. Her eyes, he thought, seemed to swallow him in their honey-colored depths at times like this, her compassion and worry, though unfounded, comforting. "You practically look dead yourself. Her apartment'll be there in the morning."
The dead can wait.
He nodded, and they strodewordlessly out of the morgue, the building of dead, and into the still silence of the cold night.