Burned at the Edge
by Rusty Nail

Chapter Three: Open Wide

Mac marched past the lab on the way back from the morgue and caught sight of Stella leaning over their victim's clothes. He pushed the door open and entered. Stella Bonasera looked up and smiled vaguely when she saw him. He noticed that she looked tired as he took his lab coat off the rack, hanging his jacket up simultaneously.

"You find anything on the murder weapon?"

Stella shook her head dismally, keeping his gaze on a bloody length of pipe that had been unearthed at the scene and the lack of prints it had given. They had uncovered it in the garbage of the alley but it had been wiped clean and half hidden behind a folded up cardboard box,

She looked down at the clothes spread in front of her, "What I do have is semen on the pants, long brown hairs but no epithelials and bloody finger prints on her shirt but there's nothing defined enough to run. Green and blue fibres from a blanket or something similar, they're synthetic in any case. I lifted a mucus-like saliva sample from the jacket too," she gestured to the patch of the shirt she had smoothed out in front of her, and the missing circle of fabric she had cut for the sample.

"Charming." Mac said wryly, "So the hair was shed, not pulled. There was no sign of a struggle at the scene."

"The girl knew her murderer."

Mac nodded. "She was also raped, according to Hawkes, he sent the sexual assault kit to DNA."

"Jane's going to be busy then,"

Mac smiled, pulling on a set of sterile gloves. There was a pile of trash to be waded through for trace and he had to start somewhere, Danny and Aiden were still out at a scene according to Stella so they had the lab to themselves for a while at least. Before he got very far Detective Flack came into the lab, he stopped a few paces from the table, holding a note pad.

"So I asked around the area, no one saw or heard anything, go figure." He smirked all the same, "I took a photo of the dead girl, showed it to the guy who was the teller at the ticket booth last night and get this; he said that she was with some other girl, older than her who bought two tickets. I did some checking, and I got a list of names of women who bought tickets at the depot last night, figured maybe our vic was one of them, wanted to get out of the city maybe,"

Mac looked up and Flack shrugged

"The names are going through Missing Persons and CODIS right now... could be a while but I thought you'd wanna know."

"Another girl?" Stella repeated, turning the new information over in her brain. It looked like this new piece of information had gotten Mac's attention too; it explained the long brown hair they had found on the victim.

Flack nodded, "I got a description out of him, but it was pretty vague; brown hair, brown eyes, thin, pale. Said they both looked homeless, I put out an APB."

Stella raised her eyebrows, "Maybe we're looking for a woman for the murder, separate to the rape?"

"We need more to go on than a vague sighting of a woman with the victim and a brown hair," Mac pointed out, Stella nodded in agreement.

"Thanks Flack." She said.

He nodded and turned to go, leaving them to their work and Stella looked across at Mac. He was bent over a pile of screwed up newspaper, going through it for anything potentially discarded by the killer. They both knew it was a long shot but with the small amount of evidence they had from the scene and the potential murder weapon they had already unearthedm they needed everything they could get their hands on. She continued to process the clothes in the hopes of picking up something she may have missed the first time.

Sometime later her pager buzzed against her hipbone, the DNA lab was trying to get hold of her, "That's Jane." She said absently, checking the screen.

"Let me know what she found." Mac nodded; sifting through some screwed up newspaper sheets.

The DNA lab was small and always too warm for Stella's tastes, Jane turned around from her station the moment she heard the door open and close, she smiled warmly and extended a sheet of paper to Stella.

"Your semen and saliva are from the same man." She stated, sliding her hands into the pockets of her lab coat, "He has a very low sperm count, another couple of years and he will be completely impotent I dare say."

"Huh. Decreasing sex drive, a perfect reason to try and get it back through raping an innocent girl." Stella chaffed in disgust.

Jane raised her eyebrows, "Indeed." She said, "The saliva was interesting, though."

"Saliva is interesting?"

"This particular fellow's is." Jane gestured for Stella to have a look at the microscope, "The PH levels of this saliva are well above average, there is only a 12 ratio of bicarbonate ions in the expectoration and hardly any fluoride at all."

Stella looked up, bemused, so Jane continued, "These numbers are the result of a rare gum disease, somewhat similar to normal Periodontitis, though much more damaging. This man's gums would be swollen and likely very painful, he probably sucks mints constantly to battle the persistant bad taste and halitosis, but that merely adds to the already severe decaying of his teeth which-"

"-without the normal levels of bicarbonate to counteract the aciditiy of his saliva just rots the teeth right out of the bone.." Stella said, nodding.

Jane smiled, "Precisely. The ironic thing is that it is easily curable by a dentist."

Stella returned the smile now, looking hopeful, "How rare would you say this disease is?"

"About 5 of the world's population. Practically 90 of them will have it treated though, in many places in the world it's covered by National Health insurance."

"You sure know a lot about it."

Jane conceded, "My Uncle suffered from it."

"Lucky for my case." Stella said.

"Not lucky for my Uncle, he left it too late and had a whole set of fake teeth at sixty-two."

Stella nodded. She wasn't sure how this fitted into the case yet, they had a potential murder weapon with no prints, a witness putting a brunette female with the victim mere hours before her death and a brown hair, but no DNA to match the two and nowhere to start looking for this Mystery Brunette. That combined with acidic spittal and bad teeth on the rapist who seemed increasingly less involved in the murder was not much to go on.

Stella thanked Jane and took her findings back to Mac, she was curious to know what he made of all this, and more importantly if he had found anything in the garbage they had collected from the scene that could explain any of it.

To Be Continued