Boulevard of Broken Dreams
author: BambiBlake007
summary: Danny & Lindsay investigate the murder of an up & coming movie star.
rating: M
pairing(s): none, yet. hints of DL
author's note: this is the 1st story in a series of CSI:NY related stories i have been working on. i do not own CSI:NY or the characters. they belong to Zuiker & Co. i just get visitation rights, lol. again, while there are hints of DL & angst in this story, this is NOT A DL LOVE STORY!! all mistakes are mine. i take full responsibility. feedback is love :) enjoy!!
Chapter 1
Detective Danny Messer, NYPD-CSI, and Lindsay Monroe were the first on the scene.
The call had come in at 6 a.m. that a police officer who was making his rounds at the park on the lower East side of the Hudson River, had spotted a girl laying on the pavement. He had investigated it himself, first, but quickly realized that he needed to dispatch Homicide. Detective Don Flack, Jr., NYPD, Homicide Division, had called in CSI and told them that he would meet them there. He was not there yet.
Danny made his way over to the yellow colored taped off crime scene area and examined what lay before him: A young woman, between 18 and 21 years of age lay naked from the waist down, except for some ripped stockings and shoes, on the pavement with a puddle of blood around her head, making it look like a halo and casting her in an eerie resemblence to an Angel.
A fallen Angel... Danny thought as he set his kit down to begin his work.
"This job never gets easier..." came Lindsay's soft voice from his right.
Danny looked up. She held her kit in her hand, but her light eyes were glossy as she stared down at the victim. She was white as a sheet, he noted. Something was definitely spooking her about this crime scene.
"See right here, there is something in her wound," Danny said as he dug into his kit to pull out some tweezers and an evidence bag. He reach over and extracted something small and brown, it almost looked like a twig, but it had some weight to it. Danny examined it a bit closer. "Bark?"
Lindsay leaned down and examined the small piece of wood held between the tweezer teeth in Danny's hand. "So, she was hit with a piece of wood?"
He glanced around. "Nothing here. Maybe our perp threw it over the bridge," Danny suggested.
Lindsay lowered herself down beside the vic. "She got a pretty bad beating..."
Danny grabbed his camera and turned it around. He took several pictures, then placed the piece of bark into the evidence bag, before snapping more photos from different angles.
When he looked back up, he noticed Detective Flack coming from the main road. He was dressed in his usual black suit, neck tie, and held a no-nonsense-look over his chiseled face. In his hand he held a styrofoam cup. He stopped at the yellow roped off crime scene line.
"What do we have, Dan?" Flack asked, gesturing to the woman lying on the pavement.
"Female victim--atleast 18 years old--a uniform found her at about 6 a.m. while he was on patrol. It looks like she was murdered sometime after midnight, but I can't be for certain--Sid'll have to determine that..." Danny answered as he stood up.
Flack nodded as he took a sip of his coffee. He pushed the tape aside and stepped through.
"You can't drink that here," Lindsay told him without looking up. She took the vic's hand in her own to examine it.
Flack glanced at Danny, who shrugged. Most of the time, Lindsay did not speak that way to anyone, especially not someone who had seniority over her like Flack, but Danny had a feeling that something was working over-time in her head. She had just returned from Montana and she was still trying to shake things off, he knew, but she wasn't going to let that keep her from doing her job. Maybe it just gave her a bit of a back-bone for the time being.
"I was just finishing it," Flack told her. He took one last sip, then, handed it off to a uniform who stood near by. "Thanks."
Danny stepped back and snapped a couple more photos.
"You think this is random?" Flack asked as he reach into his coat pocket and pulled out a thin black notepad. "Match any other MO's we know of off hand?"
Danny shrugged. "I'd check."
Flack jotted a note in his pad to look into it.
"She put up a fight," Lindsay spoke softly once more. "Check out her fingernails."
Danny leaned down and shot a photo of the nails as Lindsay turned them around for him to see for himself. She pulled out a few tools from her kit to scrape underneath the young woman's nails. She put her findings in an evidence bag, then busied herself with finding more clues.
"COD?" Flack asked as he wrote something down in his pad.
Danny shook his head. "I'm guessin' whoever killed her, hit her over the head with something--see that blood there," he pointed to the caked blood on the back of her head, which had spilled over onto her forehead and dried there.
Flack nodded. "What do ya think the weapon was?"
"Maybe a tree branch. There was wood fragments in her wound. But there's no sign of a weapon here. I guess he could have thrown it in the river," Danny explained.
"It'd be long gone by now," Flack agreed as he wrote something else in his pad.
Danny glanced around the taped off area. "That's probably correct. Unless..."
"What?" Flack asked, unsurely.
"He could have just thrown it down in the park. I mean, wood is wood. Right?" Danny finished.
Flack nodded. "I'll get Murdoch and Fitz to check around in the park if you like."
"That's fine. Montana and I don't mind doing it. That's our job, Man."
Flack grinned, which caused him to wrinkle his nose a bit. Then, he winked at him, knowingly. Danny decided to take that as a compliment. Having Flack not argue with him was better than the alternative, he supposed.
"Do you think she might've been dragged up here?" Flack asked after a moment.
Danny stepped over to the edge of the yellow line where Flack stood. "It's possible. I mean, look at the gravel there. It's obviously been disturbed."
"And no one's been here since the cop found her?" Flack asked, slowly.
"Just me and Montana," Danny answered matter-of-factly, as he pushed his hands on his hips.
"So, maybe she was off that embankment, then," Flack said as he pointed down toward the embankment that went back into the park area.
"I see it. The attack might've started there..."
"And ended here..." Flack finished.
Danny turned to him with a grin of his own. "You took the words right out of my mouth, Don."
Lindsay stepped over to the two men. "You know, her fingernails were manicured, and they have a lot of dirt underneath, more than there should be if you're gonna go to all the trouble of paying for a mani. It's consistent with what I found, Guys. She was dragged at some point, but not on the pavement. There are no scratch marks anywhere here," she told them.
Both men nodded.
"She probably ran from here... To there..." Danny pointed out.
"ID?" Flack asked as he stepped back over to the body.
"No. No ID." Lindsay answered as she followed along behind him.
"Didn't really have to, though. She's an actress," Danny smiled.
Flack glanced at Lindsay who shrugged. Danny saw that neither of them knew who the vic was.
"Um, yeah... She's Chloe Phillips. She's in that horror movie, the one about the serial killer who stalks them sorority girls at that ivy league college," Danny explained.
"Aren't they all?" Flack asked, sarcasm dripping from his lips. He chuckled a bit, glancing over at Lindsay as he did so. She smiled back.
"Seen it, Danny?" she asked, playing along.
Danny frowned. "No. You wouldn't go with me, remember?"
"That's cos Linds here has better taste, Dan-o!" Flack laughed.
"Wise guy," Danny muttered as he turned back to the vic. "Anyway, what I can't figure is, why would someone wanna kill such a pretty girl?"
"She was sexually assaulted, too," Lindsay sighed. "Panties are gone."
"Probably likes a trophy," Flack commented thoughtfully.
"Sick bastard..." Danny whispered to no one in particular.
Flack and Lindsay both nodded, but said nothing more about it. Lindsay took her samples and put them in the evidence bag. She felt herself begin to shake as she did so. Danny noticed it, and figured it must have really bothered her to think that this poor girl had been sexually assaulted and left for dead by some psycho-path.
"Think it was an obsessed fan?" Flack asked as he jotted something down in his notepad. "Maybe she wouldn't sign him an autograph or something?"
Danny shook his head. "I don't think so. See, if it was a fan--he wouldn't have left her lying out on the street like this. He would have been a lot more careful about how he dumped the body and what have ya. A lot of times when it's a passion killing of sorts, the killer will go as far as to stage a scene to leave the body at. I mean, if he was killing her because he loved her and didn't want anyone else to have her, he wouldn't have done it in such a brutal manner like this appears to be. He would have shown some mercy. This guy--he didn't show an ounce of mercy here."
"Check out the bruises on her lips, Danny. He punched her..." Lindsay said as she positioned her camera to snap a couple photos of the bruising.
"Yeah, but those are superficial bruises there. They'd heal in a couple weeks, tops," Danny answered. "She could have worn make up and no one would have noticed."
"He's right. I've seen women come into the station house with this kind of bruising from where their husbands have gone into a drunken rage. The women always wore a lot of make up when they'd come in for an interview. Those were just to make her be quiet, I'd guess," Flack agreed.
Lindsay stood and headed back down toward the embankment. "We've got skid marks!" she shouted back to the two men.
"Probably our vic's. She could have skidded..." Flack told Danny.
Lindsay stepped under the yellow tape and crouched down to examine the gravel just beyond it. "Danny! Flack!" she shouted.
The two men turned and jogged over to where she stood just beyond the yellow taped line.
"What'd you find, Montana?" Danny asked.
"Foot prints. Here--" Lindsay pointed just beside where the gravel was disturbed. "Here," a couple feet below that. "And there," she pointed a little to the right beyond the second ones.
"Three different people?" Flack asked, incrediously.
"I guess we'll find out," Danny answered as he headed back to get his kit.
tht's chapter 1. let me kno what'cha think :)
