Perspectives 4: Melinda

I hate my job sometimes.

I hope Elliot doesn't lose sleep over this.

I've seen too many bodies that fall from a height. I've seen people who fell of their own accord; I've seen people who were pushed, dropped, thrown, kicked, punched, shot off rooftops, and otherwise 'helped' to fly. I know someone who's been helped.

Chris Smallwood was helped.

You know what the bad part of it is? I don't regret it. Not a bit. And I should, because I'm a doctor. A doctor of corpses, true, but a doctor nonetheless. I should be upset with Elliot, because he played God and chose to save one life at the expense of another.

But I was in the Air Force. I've seen death, I know what it means to kill. And I know that there are people who need to be killed. I'm not saying that Chris Smallwood needed to be; only a jury could have decided that, and because of Elliot Stabler he will never face that trial.

And I don't care.

I don't know what I would have done. I don't think that I could have made the decision Elliot did. But I do know that a man who would rape a five-year-old is never going to stop, there is no cure, and that a cop who's done so much good so far and will continue to do good is worth more than a pedophile and baby-raper.

I don't flinch as I pull the sheet back from this body. I don't usually like head wounds; I find it helps to look at the faces of autopsy victims. I feel more of a connection, I feel like they want me to find the truth. But the face of this guy is barely there, it's a mess of shattered blood and bone, and I could care less. I know the truth. I don't need the autopsy to tell me.

However, this is my job. I hate it sometimes, but it's my job. I go on autopilot, carefully dissecting, cutting, weighing organs, measuring. And while I do that, dictating notes into the recorder, I think.

My heart stopped when I got to the scene. Although my responsibility was the corpse, the terrible screaming coming from the rooftop caught my attention, and I wanted desperately to leave the dead and go help the living. I knew whose voice that was; I knew who was lying on that rooftop, hurt, crying, possibly dying. But I forced myself to bend over the body, and when I looked up next, I saw the EMTs taking Olivia Benson into the ambulance; and behind them, behind her, came Elliot Stabler, looking like he was almost dying himself.

I could see from the other detectives' faces that they wanted to follow too. Even their captain. But he stopped long enough to give the uniforms orders, and then Detective Tutuola came to me and started to speak. I cut him off. "Go see your friend, Detective," I told him. "I know how to do my job." He gave me this look of thanks and headed for the sedan.

Ruben Morales came up behind me as the detective was leaving. "Jesus. What happened?" he said, looking at the corpse in front of me, oblivious to the fact that they had just dragged my friend off the rooftop. He hadn't gotten there soon enough to have seen Olivia; I forgave him for that silently.

"This guy shot Olivia Benson and then tried to pull her and her partner off the rooftop." I know that much. I don't know the specifics, but I know this much.

"He fell." Ruben says flatly. I nod; he knows as well as I do that a body doesn't end up this far into the middle of an alley without some sort of lateral propulsion. But neither of us is going to mention it. We both know who the guilty party is, and we both know that a human body can be weighed and measured, but the worth of a soul can't be measured by conventional means. Elliot is a devout Catholic; it means that he makes some decisions based on his religion, but I know that in this instance, there was no religious leaning here. Elliot made his choice; this guy, or his partner.

His partner. I smile a little at that. There is all this talk about the 'boys in blue', about the fierce loyalty and blood ties between them. I've seen a lot of partners in this job; some are partners, some aren't. Some are more.

Elliot and Olivia are more.

I wonder why it's taking them so long to see it, to acknowledge it. I see it every time they're in here; every time they exchange what I've come to think of as 'that look' when I tell them what I've found from yet another body. It's silent communication, subtler and deeper than ESP. They're two halves of a seamless whole; they know what the other is thinking. I swear they even match strides when they walk out of here.

I've seen the way they look when one of them is on the hot seat. I saw Elliot's look when he came to get the autopsy report on Horace Gorman, the man that defense attorney tried to accuse Olivia of killing. He knew she hadn't, and he was praying that the evidence would prove to the rest of the world she hadn't. When I told him the cause of death was a stabbing, I saw him visibly relax. If Olivia had killed him, cause of death would have been a gunshot wound.

I saw his look when Jeff York came into the morgue and I found he was HIV positive. It was part of the reason why I offered to do Olivia's test myself, no paperwork, no pay. It was as much for his peace of mind as it was hers; after I'd told her, I called his cell phone and told him one word: negative. All he said was "Thanks Doc," but I knew that, as brief as it was, the thanks had been as sincere and heartfelt. Yes, I knew I shouldn't have told him her test results; but he'd been just as worried about her as she was about herself and I also knew that he was the first and only person she would tell about the result. They were each other's significant other before either realized it, even before Elliot divorced Kathy.

So this shouldn't have come as a surprise. Fin stopped in before he went home last evening; he'd finished the crime scene report, and in a move that surprised me, he wanted me to see it first. I hadn't thought he'd seen Olivia and I together often enough that he'd think that we were friends, but he did.

"What happened?" I asked him.

He normally has this hardened look. Mr. Former Narc, thinks he's seen it all, but last night he looked haggard, as if seeing his squad mate in so much pain had done a number on him. They're a close-knit group with a turnover rate virtually nonexistent compared with the other SV units in the city, so it probably did. He needed to talk; I know John talks to Olivia, Elliot and Olivia talk to each other, but I didn't know who Fin talked to. I'd bet it's Olivia, although I haven't seen them so I can't be a hundred percent sure.

He just shook his head, tapped the folder with a finger, and left. I was right; he talks to Olivia. She's the heart of the unit; if she dies, the unit will stop functioning, like a human body after the heart has stopped. I hurry out of the office and catch him in the hall waiting for the elevator. "Is she going to be all right?"

He looks at me with the ghost of a smile. "Yeah, she's gonna be okay. She's a tough cookie." And he's gone, into the elevator, and I'm left holding the folder.

I spent fifteen minutes after the autopsy reading the report in Fin's handwriting, and another half an hour imagining everything, seeing in color what Fin's report tells me in black and white. She grabbed Elliot's left forearm as he went over, and dislocated both her arms when she hit the rooftop and Chris Smallwood's and Elliot's weights came to a stop at the end of her arm. I know that adrenaline took the edge off some of her pain, enough for her to be able to focus on keeping hold of her partner, but that's all. Adrenaline couldn't compensate for her blood loss, couldn't give her the strength she needed to pull them both up. Adrenaline couldn't overcome the added handicap of a bullet in her shoulder, right where her muscles were stretching from the weight on her arms.

I can see Elliot hanging there at the end of her arm, feeling his own breath coming harder because Chris Smallwood's weight was stretching him thin, agonizing over the sounds of Olivia's pain above him and Smallwood's grasping, greedy hands pulling on his clothes as he clawed his way up Elliot's body. Elliot would have felt that, would have known that Smallwood would climb over him and use Olivia's faltering grip to get himself up over the edge. And I know no one who's shot a cop would hesitate to kick that same cop, who's lying on the edge of the roof in pain and unable to defend herself, into the alley below. He wouldn't care that he'd kill not only her, but also her partner. And two people whose lives are worth more than his would have died trying to save each other.

I want to see them together. But not in death. Thank you, Elliot, for making that choice.

I write in the cause of death blank, "Falling from height'. Falling. Just falling.

No mention of the angry kicking Elliot did to hurl Smallwood into the alley. No mention of the bruising on Smallwood's chest where Elliot's heels impacted. No mention of the last desperate kick that contacted Smallwood's diaphragm and forced the wind out of him, so he had to let go. No mention of Olivia's pain as she hung onto his flailing body, feeling her own body slip ever closer over that edge, helpless to stop her slow slide forward. No mention of one detective's desperate, agonized decision to save the life of the woman he loved by violating all of his long-cherished religious beliefs, deliberately committing murder to save someone who represented all the noblest emotions of the human soul.

I wish I could be truthful about what I saw, because falsifying my report could cost me my job if anyone finds out. But telling the truth could cost my friends what they fought to keep; each other, their lives, their jobs, possibly their freedom if someone decides that saving the one you love shouldn't come at the cost of a baby-raper's life. And truth, especially for a baby-raper, isn't worth that possible cost.

It isn't often that I get to make someone's life better. Usually my job means I can only give a death meaning, or give the police a case against someone who took a life.

This time I can give two of my friends a better life.

Sometimes I love my job.

Notes: I suddenly realized I should point out where I got the source material for some of my references. So: The reference to Melinda having been in the military is from the 7th season episode 'Blast'. The reference to Horace Gorman is from the 5th season episode titled 'Control'. The mention of Olivia's HIV test is from the 5th season episode titled 'Lowdown'.