Edrisa was very good at memorizing stuff, particularly some of the most useless tidbits of information that she could find. Like, for example, she knew that New York had its own indigenous species of ant, the ManhattAnt... or that the average person can spent around six months of their entire life waiting for traffic lights to go from red to green.

Medical textbooks had been like candy to her. Applying all that knowledge to actual human beings, however, had proven to be a challenge.

Mostly because she was terrified of causing any degree of pain to people. In the beginning, she would actually flinch horribly whenever she had to stuck a needle into someone, which is, you know, fine-ish if you're dealing with a vein or some stitches, but when she was dealing with arteries... nope, you better not flinch.

Corpses, fortunately for her, had no functioning nerve terminals, no working neural network to connect to and certainly no live vocal cords to express their discomfort. She could cut through a sternum like a pro, without even breaking a sweat.

It was just different with living, breathing patients. Most of the time it was impossible to separate the healing from the causing pain part, especially when her regular rotation had placed her in the trauma room of Manhattan's busiest ER.

….

The guy trapped in Malcolm's chokehold had taken one look at the clock hanging above the exit door and smiled. It was a most disturbing sight.

"Wha' you smiling at, asshole?" JT hissed, handcuffs clicking around the man's wrists with a certain degree of satisfaction. "You got a big date or somethin'?"

Edrisa could feel the fine hair in her arms standing on attention for reasons that completely escaped her rational thought. After all, the threat was gone. The man was under arrest, his gun tossed on the floor near the wall, no escape at all except towards a criminal law system that would sink its claws deep into the guy who had dared to invade her work space to... what exactly had he been doing there?

"It's on a timer, isn't it?" Malcolm voiced defeatedly, the words seemingly too innocent for the weight they carried or the effect they had on both JT and Dani, both visibly blanching. "You came here to get it back, but it's already set to go off at a specific time all the same, right?"

Only then did the medical examiner managed to connect the dots. And the final image was not NotreDame.

The first body had been found less than a week before. Blood and gore were kind of part of Edrisa's job, having become as unremarkable to her as brushing her teeth... yes, gross, but accurate.

But even she had been a bit disturbed to find pieces of small intestine hanging from the ceiling of the crime scene. The ceiling and virtually every other surface in that room. The victim's guts had, according to all evidence, just exploded. Easiest COD that she had that whole week.

In the bodies that followed the explosions had just kept getting bigger and bigger, telling them that, not only that they had another serial killer on their hands, but also that he- and Malcolm had no doubt that it was a he- was evolving from being a mission oriented serial killer to one with a growing lust for pure destruction. Apparently, that was bad.

The last body that had been found, just that morning, hadn't been much of a body at all, the explosion having been so destructive that all that had been left behind were charred pieces of bone.

"Oh, God! We need to evacuate the building ASAP!" Dani let out, her hand already reaching for the radio. "How much time do we have?"

The question had been directed to the man in cuffs, but everyone knew that he wasn't going to answer. His smirk had just gotten deeper as he stared at each one of them, as if he was imagining their dead corpses already.

"Th-the time of death," Edrisa found herself stammering. She was pretty sure they had all but forgotten that she was still there. "Time of death on the first three victims," she went on, confident that she had the answer to their question. "They all died around midnight... give or take a few minutes."

Now it was everyone else's eyes that travelled to the proverbial ticking clock, hers included. It was eleven fifty. They had about ten minutes.

"Ok, that's good enough for me," JT declared, taking charge of the situation and dragging the prisoner towards the door. The gunman looked disappointed. "Let's get the hell out of here!"

Edrisa blinked. He couldn't be serious. "No," she found herself saying, even though every fiber in her body wanted nothing else but race through those doors. "We can't... the bodies... we can't just leave them here!"

JT have her a sideways glance, as he often did, looking like he wasn't exactly sure if she was joking or talking seriously. However dark her humor tended to be, Edrisa would never joke about something like this.

"You're joking, right?"

There it was, the need for confirmation.

"Edrisa, honey, I understand where you coming from," Dani's voice was laced with practiced empathy. The underlaying urgency made it sound somewhat fake. "But we can't risk lives over-"

"Dead people!" JT let out. "As in -they're already dead!" he pointed out rather needlessly, as they were in a morgue. "And we'll be joining them in- eight minutes if we don't haul ass! Now!"

"Edrisa is right."

The medical examiner could almost smile as she heard the words. Of course Malcolm would understand her, kin souls that they were. Only he would see the cruelty in denying the families of those victims closure; how the dead bodies in her morgue were theirs to keep safe until delivered to their final resting pla-

"We need to defuse that bomb and study it if we stand any chance to save all the others," Malcolm's voice cut through her thoughts. How could he sound so calm and collected?

And also, no! That wasn't why they shouldn't leave... although he did make a good point on—wait! There were others?!

"You can't save them! They don't deserve to be saved! Fat pigs, all of them!" the cuffed man hissed between his teeth, anger replacing all smugness in his face. From the way his face turned beet red at the words, Edrisa suspected a serious blood pressure condition.

"Is that why you killed them?" Malcolm asked, sounding genuinely interested. "Because they were over-weighted?"

Edrisa blinked. Despite the eminent danger and all the craziness that had taken over her life in the last few minutes, her brain offered a complete catalogue of the explosion victims she had been dealing with all week. None had been had been morbidly obese and at least two were actually underweighted. So, why-

"This all very fascinating-" JT gritted between his teeth, pushing the prisoner closer to the door. "Think we can we do this someplace where there isn't a BOMB about to go off?"

"Building's clear," Dani let them know, her eyes looking nervously at the clock. "I'm sorry guys, but I agree with JT... we should leave."

Edrisa rubbed her eyes tiredly, knowing that they were right. Still the idea of leaving all of those people behind, knowing that she would have to contact each and everyone of those families to tell them that, not only had their loved ones died violently, but also that the NYPD had managed to blow them up...

"Yeah.. you all should go," Malcolm let out, pulling out his jacket.

They were all fooled for about twenty seconds, until his words registered.

"You're not staying down here with a bomb, you idiot!" JT blared, his patience long gone. "Not again, you're not!"