Author's note: By now most of you will have noticed that this story is set during Season 1 of CSI:NY. I liked Hawkes in the morgue more anyway…

CRESCENT OF STEEL AND DARKNESS

Chapter 2

The hive of activity that was the downstate New York headquarters of the FBI had reached full buzz by 10 AM. In the offices of the Missing Persons Unit, all eyes were on the whiteboard and the timeline drawn upon it – a timeline now distressingly short of detail. To worsen the matter, little had been added since the team had caught this case nearly twenty-four hours ago. No one wanted to mention the conventional wisdom on missing-persons investigations: that a trail two days cold would likely never be warm again, and the chances of finding not a living subject, but a body, rose steadily with time.

Special Agent Jack Malone reviewed what they had. "So Alexa Duhaine – usually known as Lexi – was last seen at 8:20 PM Monday night, when the last of her colleagues went home, leaving her still working. Apparently this was her usual practice when deep into a project. No one at her building saw her arrive home."

"It seems safe to assume she never got there," Vivian Johnson continued.

"Not necessarily." Danny Taylor stood up to make his point. "Remember that we couldn't find any neighbors who had any more of a relationship with her than saying hi in the elevator. Most of them who recognized her picture didn't even know her name."

There were nods and murmurs around the board. Samantha "Sam" Spade took up and continued Danny's point. "Not to mention that we haven't found any boyfriends, current or former, or old school friends still in touch, or any relatives she might be staying with. Mother recently deceased, father clear across the country in San Francisco and didn't seem too concerned about his only child dropping off the face of the earth." She sighed. "That must have been some divorce."

Malone carefully kept himself from wincing. "It seems as if, aside from the Museum staff, this girl stayed pretty much off the social grid." He glanced at the picture stuck to the whiteboard; it showed a slim woman in her early twenties, with bobbed blonde hair, a subtle smile, and green eyes that seemed older than the rest of her face. "Which is a little hard to believe."

"No kidding," said Danny emphatically. "They told me at NYU Institute of Fine Arts that she came up from Yale and finished the master's degree program in conservation in one year, and the Met hired her right out of it." He shook his head with an air of bitter humor. "Last I heard, girls with Ivy League educations, rare skills, promising careers, and who look like that, generally don't come to New York to disappear – in any sense of the word."

Johnson considered his observation. "What about the chances that both of Lexi's disappearances – the social kind and the literal one – were voluntary?"

"It's a thought." Malone looked again at the nearly empty timeline. "Still, we have nothing that points to it. If she wanted to drop out and vanish, she seems not to have mentioned it to anyone. But that would go with her willful isolation. People who don't want to be found are the hardest to find." The team leader turned his attention to the last member of his unit. "Martin, you've been pretty quiet. Any thoughts or hunches to share?"

But Martin Fitzgerald didn't have a chance to reply before the telephone rang. Malone took it. "Special Agent Malone… About what?... Really…Send him up." He hung up and answered the team's collective question. "We're about to receive a visit from a Detective Don Flack of the NYPD. Seems that the Metropolitan Museum was robbed last night, and a guard was murdered. The local cops are investigating the possibility of a connection to Lexi Duhaine's disappearance."

"What kind of a connection?" Sam asked almost eagerly.

Malone looked past her to the doorway, watching the entrance of a tall man in a black leather blazer. "We're about to find out, Sam."

XXXX

The high-vaulted chambers of the City morgue were, as always, too cold and too quiet. Detective Taylor strode into the autopsy room with a calm born of long familiarity. "You wanted to see me, Dr. Hawkes?"

"Actually, I wanted you to see this." The emphasis was subtle, but unmistakable. Forensic pathologist Dr. Sheldon Hawkes led the other to the examination table and the draped body of the murdered museum guard James Abbott. Hawkes reached for the sheet but then, to Taylor's mild surprise, seemed to think better of it and released his hold, turning to regard the criminalist. "Before we go any further, I think I should warn you: neither of us has ever seen the like of this before."

Taylor regarded the slim dark man before him with frank professional admiration. "We've seen the like of everything else; how different could this be?"

But Hawkes' even brown gaze grew shadowed. He shook his close-cropped head and replied quietly, "I really have no idea what to make of this, and I guarantee that you won't either, Mac. And to be completely honest, it scares me." With that, he turned, took the drape and drew it down.

The cold in the room seemed to deepen and seep into Taylor's flesh as he stared. As was standard in the course of the autopsy, Hawkes had cut open the victim's chest, sundering the ribs to bare his heart. That heart lay before them now – neatly bisected from top to bottom, as if cloven with a single stroke.

Taylor turned to the pathologist, who answered the question in his eyes. "No, Mac, I didn't do it. This is exactly as I found it when I cracked his chest."

The criminalist stared at Hawkes for a moment, then turned the same stare back to the violated body. "Exactly as you found it…" he breathed. There was only silence for almost too long before Taylor looked back up and said softly, "Sheldon, are you saying that this man's heart was sliced in two – from the inside?"

"That is exactly what I'm saying. There wasn't a mark on him anywhere, except for a couple of old scars that had obviously been there for years. Once I removed his clothes, I didn't find a thing – not so much as a needlestick. Superficially, he showed no signs of violence or ill health. Then I opened him up." Hawkes waved a hand at the body, indicating both it and his own helplessness. "There's our cause of death. What I can't even imagine is the cause of our cause of death."

"Dear God." Taylor shook his head very slowly, and considered. "Is there a chance that – that this is some disease we've never seen before? That this man's death had nothing to do with the theft, but was due to an entirely coincidental natural cause?"

Hawkes could only shrug. "There's a chance of just about anything. At this point, I couldn't possibly guess the implications of this. It could mean anything from a single unique anomaly that we'll never explain, to a catastrophe of Biblical proportions." He shrugged again, and turned to pull the drape back up over the dead man's face. "I'll continue the autopsy, and let you know as soon as the bloodwork comes back."

"Thank you." Taylor paused for a moment. "Stella should see this, and Flack too."

"But no one else who isn't on this case," Hawkes replied firmly. "If this gets to the tabloids…can you imagine what those headline writers will come up with?"

Taylor smiled wryly at the thought, in spite of the situation. "Who can forget the glory days of 'Headless Body in Topless Bar'? We'll keep the lid on it, Sheldon. If I have my way, this will hit the press first when you write it up for the New England Journal of Medicine and become even more of a legend in the field than you are already."

With a small, indulgent smile and a nod, the pathologist dismissed his colleague. But as Taylor returned to the crime lab, his own thoughts were far darker and more turgid than he would admit to Hawkes. There was something about that cleanly divided heart, something unnatural, far more disturbing than any of the hideous mutilations and decompositions that the CSIs were forced to consider in the line of duty. Taylor was already sure – why, he could not say – that the bisection was the result of no illness or natural phenomenon, however rare, nothing so innocent as that. He considered what Hawkes had said about the possible implications of this death, and reflected that the pathologist might likely have been, if anything, too optimistic…

Taylor let a small sigh escape him before clamping down on any more show of emotion, and adjusted his jacket absently. First he'd debrief Flack on what the detective had learned from the feds, and how they'd reacted to the NYPD's case. Then he could send both Flack and Bonasera to the morgue, but without describing anything in advance; let them see for themselves and draw their own conclusions free of his interference. It'd be good to have more than one trusted colleague to share this awful secret; together the four of them might be able to come up with something. The crime scene had yielded so little evidence of any other kind; it was clear that the bizarre death of James Abbott would break this case if anything could. And Taylor had an unquiet feeling that breaking this case would only be the beginning – of what, no one could possibly know.

XXXX

Stroking his beard thoughtfully, the older man looked around, appraising the elegant dining room. It would do, he decided: the heavy bottle-green velvet drapes had been drawn across the windows, and all the foul and distracting paintings had been taken down from the walls. Similarly, the useless, ostentatious luxuries usually displayed on the table of hand-carved Thai teakwood – the silver candlelabrum, the Belgian lace tablecloth, the painted Ukrainian bowl piled with fruit, all of them – had been taken away, leaving bare wood and room for two far more important objects. His orders had indeed been followed to the letter, and he was pleased. Now to summon the others…

The younger man and the woman came swiftly as hunting dogs to his whistle. It was gratifying to see how quickly and well they had learned. As instructed, they waited for him to sit first before sitting, and for him to speak first before speaking. With this last element of their training in mind, he let them wait in silence for a full minute before he spoke, just to reinforce his lessons. Yes, it was also gratifying to see that self-control was not completely beyond them; there might be hope for their nations yet. A quick glare at the woman was sufficient to remind her to tuck those last loose strands of hair under her cloak, and he was ready to begin.

"Something must be done."

The younger man smirked, pushing back that lank oily hair he was so unaccountably proud of. "Right. Something must be done. So why don't you just whistle up those mysterious little friends of yours you've been talking about so much, and have them do it?"

The other folded his arms and glared. Putting up with this disrespectful ass was the hardest part of the operation by far. His sneering attitude, his annoying accent, his boasting atheism, and that hair – everything about him rankled. Pity that it was his house. Nothing could be done about that…yet. "I intend to, but not before careful plans are made. Only fools move before they know where they are going."

"That doesn't seem to have stopped the cops or the feds."

He turned sharply to the woman who had spoken, and glared harder. "Who addressed you?"

She dropped her gaze, but not before he caught the flash of resentment. Across the table, the younger man grinned at her and needled, "Ooh, better be careful, love!"

It was almost unbearable being stuck between these two. The older man ground his teeth, but carefully controlled his temper; the Prophet, peace be upon him, had endured far worse. He'd have to explain their position in terms a child could follow. "I have consulted the mirror and observed at length. The local police and the FBI started sharing their information sooner than expected. Both are now aware that the dhu'l-fakar has been taken, that the cameras were turned off, and that – "

"Don't worry about it," the younger man interrupted. The others turned to stare at him, she astonished, he incredulous and indignant at the impertinence. "Hear me out!" the other urged, raising placating hands. "So they know the same few useless details, but they've no way to put them together. And there's a way to guarantee that they won't put them together."

The elder stroked his beard, indignation ebbing. "Go on."

"Let's give them a distraction. Something bigger." He grinned. "Something personal."

The woman shrank down, withdrawing into her draperies, as the other man leaned forward, growing excited. "Explain!"

"It's time to pinch something else, to go with these." With a toss of his hair he indicated the two items lying alone on the table: the book bound in ebony and red leather, the gold- and black-inscribed scimitar. "They don't even know about the book. If we give them something else to think about, they'll forget all about the bloody sword too…"

TO BE CONTINUED