Chapter Two
"Bobby?" Eames asked tentatively. But Bobby Goren was preoccupied. His cheek was resting on his arm, on a pile of paperwork, on his desk back at the NYPD precinct. Goren was trying, with little success, to piece together the face of the deathly-pale young girl who had run into him the day before. Eames searched his face for a moment and then waved her hand in front of it.
"Hmm? Oh, sorry, what?" he said blinkingly coming out of his daze.
"Where are you today? Is this about-" as she was speaking, both her's and Detective Goren's pagers went off at the same time.
"Double homicide on 16th." Goren read, "I'll drive." He said with a smile, picking up his usual demeanor. Though Eames wasn't quite convinced, she decided to lay off for a while.
"This is it." Eames said. She and Goren walked up a white-stone staircase and into the uptown flat's grand double doors.
"Morning Detectives," Detective Munch said. Behind him, Detective Elliot Stabler walked up with a box of latex gloves, handing a pair each to Goren and Eames.
"Sex crimes? What are you guys doing here? We got a double homicide ticket." Eames said, snapping on her gloves. Stabler and Munch glanced at each other.
"One of the Vics was female, the other one is her teenage son; the woman was raped." Stabler said.
"How do you know it's her son?" Eames asked. Stabler handed her a picture, torn on one side, with a young woman and her son; the resemblance was uncanny.
"They found that in her back pocket. It looks like we're working this one together." Munch added, shrugging his eyebrows.
"Great!" Goren said happily. "Where are they?"
"Down here Detectives!" a crime scene investigator yelled from a door behind the double stairwell.
"It looks like a secret staircase." Goren said, wiping a finger down the edge of a piece of wall that had been folded out.
"It was plastered and painted over when we found it. Took three guys to dislodge it." The CSI said.
"How cliché…" Munch said.
"How did you know where to look for it?" Eames and Stabler said at the same time. They eyeballed each other for a moment and looked away. Goren couldn't help but laugh aloud at this.
"We got an anonymous 9-1-1 call from a payphone down the block, my people are already working on it. Dr. Warner says they've been dead for all of about a day, which puts time of death at about 2:00 yesterday. The call was put in yesterday at 3:10 pm, cops got here three hours later and it took my people since then to open up the wall."
"Three hours?" Munch exclaimed. "What, did they blow out a tire?"
"No, it was a Judge's birthday yesterday and every single Judge with the authority to sign the search warrant was at the party, in no state to sign anything if you know what I mean. So they had to find this nobody judge from kiddie-court to sign it-"
"About the 9-1-1 caller…" Eames said, getting back to business.
"Right, the operator said it was a kid. And she says that the voice was definitely female."
"Hmm. This is a nice area for a double homicide, and especially for a rotting hidden staircase." Goren said, sniffing the walls again. Stabler, who had never been acquainted with Goren's peculiar style of investigating, gave him an odd look. The CSI kid ignored them both and spoke.
"You haven't seen anything yet, it's right through here." The group had walked down the short staircase and was now stumbling through thin hallways and passages that made up the poured-cement basement. The CSI used a thick cloth to push open a metal door and plugged his nose.
"Wohow!" Stabler coughed, the scene that met them was nothing but horrific, especially considering that almost the entire floor was covered with spatters of dried blood. Long chains with manacles hung from all four walls of the large room; one of these walls had two people, the homicide victims, hanging from it. They were facing the walls, with their arms chained above them. Both were hanging, but their bare feet and almost their knees were on the floor, showing that they were once standing.
"What the hell…." Stabler said, narrowing his eyes at the chains in the room. Goren was playing with one of the empty manacles, which was covered in dried blood. Stabler joined him at trying to remove samples. Eames and Munch had gone straight to the bodies, both of which were badly damaged.
"What's the prognosis Dr.? Cancer? Brain tumor? Should we make a living will?" Munch joked as Dr. Warner came around from behind the body of the teenage boy.
"They would have had the time. If I'm right about the cause of death, it took these two at least an hour to die. " She replied. Warner grabbed the two blankets that had been wrapped around the shoulders of the victims and pulled them off, handing them to one of her assistants.
"Ouch, is this what killed them?" Eames asked, staring blankly at the shoulders of the victims; the other two detectives also flocked toward them. They had only seen similar wounds in the movies, but they knew exactly what had caused them.
"A bull whip, like any common one found on a ranch, or a plantation…" She added gravely. "I think they were beaten to death, but I won't know until I do a full autopsy."
"What does that mean biologically Dr.? They didn't just die from the pain did they?" Eames asked. Goren was walking away, staring at the floor.
"No; biologically they probably bled to death, but the pain would have knocked them out after a while."
"This gives a new definition to the word heinous." Munch said, stepping back slightly.
"They watched…" Goren said from somewhere behind them.
"What do you mean?" Stabler asked, drawing closer to him. Goren motioned them all over to the side of the room closest to the door.
"The empty spaces between the blood, they're footprints." He pointed to them on the ground, "Maybe twelve, fifteen people, they were standing here watching and the blood fell on their bare feet."
"So someone watched as these people were murdered, like a TV show, it was for entertainment." Stabler said, disgusted. Goren shook his head.
"No, they were made to watch, forced. Look at the prints, none of these people moved an inch; they were terrified."