Getting Too Close
Chapter 3
(A/N): I'm trying to get my italics and bolds to work, but I don't think it's happening. So please, pace yourself when reading this. There are significant breaks in the story. Don't read to quickly, or you'll miss them!
The bartender's name was Joshua Ford, he was killed with a stab wound to the heart, and he had no affiliation with Jake Price whatsoever. Michael Price, Jake's father, never once stepped foot inside a New York bar. Or at least, that was what he said. So how did his fingerprint end up on Joshua Ford's dead body? Stella considered bringing the father in for another round of Q's and A's, but Mac decided enough was enough. The father's print was at a murder scene. It was time for a search warrant.
Danny and Lindsay were able to recreate the knife in its original state on the computer. It was steak knife – twelve inches long and a quarter of an inch wide. The angle it created when used match the slashes on Jake Price's body exactly. Duplicates of it were sold everywhere. They finally had a murder weapon, and unfortunately, it was one that could have belonged to anyone in the country; or the world, for that matter. Due to the fact that it was burnt beyond recognition, it was clear at once they weren't going to be able to pull any prints off it. Once again, they hit a dead end. All they had to go off on was Jake's blood on Joshua Ford's body. But they had no idea how it ended up there.
"So someone killed the killer," Hawkes said abruptly.
The entire team was gathered in Mac's office, and all were getting extremely anxious. They knew they were on the brink of finding answers. The only thing standing in their way was the connection.
"We haven't established that Joshua Price was the killer," Mac countered forlornly. "Sure, Jake's blood was found underneath Joshua ford's nails, but we have no idea how it even got there in the first place. What if, for some out of this world reason, the bartender was at the wrong place in the wrong time? For all we know, Joshua Ford could have been a witness. Or maybe he was even trying to save the victim."
Danny cracked his knuckles loudly. "He did it, Mac. You know he did. I know he did," he said.
Lindsay looked distraughtly at Danny. "We all know he did it, Danny," she murmured.
Stella tossed a sympathetic glance at Lindsay. "We need to find out how Jake Price's blood got on Joshua Ford. Then we need to find out how Michael Price's fingerprint got on Joshua Ford's wallet."
"Hence, the warrant," Flack said. He took out a pile of folded papers from his pocket and handed them to Mac.
Lindsay stared at the stack of papers currently in Mac's hands. "Was the fingerprint proof enough for a warrant on the brother's dorm, too?" she asked.
"Oh, yeah," Flack answered happily. "It was more than enough. Jake's blood on Joshua Ford also gave us a warrant to search his house."
Mac nodded. "All right. Stella, you and Hawkes have Joshua Ford's place," he directed. "Flack, you're with me and the parents' home. Lindsay and Danny, you two handle the brother's dorm."
He handed each pair their search warrants. "Let's find that connection."
At Joshua Ford's home . . .
Stella walked up the steps to the bartender's house, Hawkes right beside her.
"For a bartender, the guy sure has a nice house," Hawkes commented.
Stella smiled and rung the doorbell. "More like a nice mansion," she amended.
A woman in her thirties with blonde hair and brown eyes opened the door. She eyed them suspiciously. "Can I help you?"
"I'm Detective Stella Bonasera and this is Dr. Sheldon Hawkes. We're with the crime lab. I believe you've already spoken with my partner, Detective Mac Taylor?"
Recognition flooded through the woman's face. "Come in, please. Is there something you needed? Did you find out who killed my husband?"
Stella walked in, followed by Hawkes. "Not yet," Hawkes answered. "But we believe it may have been an act of revenge."
Mrs. Ford looked between Stella and Hawkes in confusion. "What?"
Stella took out the search warrant. "The blood of another murder victim was found on Joshua Ford's body. Your dead husband is now the primary suspect of a murder. We'll need to process your house, Mrs. Ford."
At Mr. And Mrs. Price home . . .
Flack knocked on the oak door of the Prices home. No one answered. He and Mac exchanged a look of vexation. Mac took a try and knocked on the door, harder and louder.
"This is NYPD. Open up!" he demanded.
A series of clicking noises followed and the door finally opened. Mrs. Price stood before the two detectives, looking tired and worn out. "Yes?" she said meekly.
Mac's gaze was cold and firm. "We have a warrant to search your house, Mrs. Price," he informed. "Evidence points to your husband being connected to your son's death as well as the death of a local bartender.'
Mrs. Price paled. "W-what? That can't be."
"We'll see, then, won't we?" Flack remarked. "Where's your husband?"
"He's at work," she replied.
"That's too bad," Mac said, snapping on his latex gloves. "Now, if you'll step aside, Mrs. Price. We need to prove your husband's guilt."
At Bryan Price's dorm . . .
Lindsay stepped out of Danny's SUV and slammed the door. Squaring her shoulders, she headed towards NYU's dorms. Danny cocked an eyebrow at her conduct, looked at his slammed door, then back at her.
"What's his room number, again?" she asked her partner.
Danny, who was trying to keep up with her faster than usual pace, fumbled a hand through his coat pocket and fished out a scrap of paper. "He's in Building C, room number 112. He's on the second floor."
Lindsay nodded in response. She had been feeling rather restless during the car ride. She knew that the search warrant was the break they needed. Something told her they were getting close. To what exactly, she didn't know. But they were close, and that was all that mattered.
After what seemed like an eternity, the two finally reached their destination.
"Do you think he's in there?" Lindsay mused.
Danny glanced at her with both eyebrows raised. "Let's find out," he said, and knocked brutally on the door.
A few seconds passed, and no one answered.
Lindsay frowned and tried knocking on the door herself. Again, silence ensued.
"He's probably in class," Danny reasoned.
Lindsay crossed her arms and glared at the door. "Now what?"
Danny grinned. "We go in anyway," he replied.
He set down his kit and peered at the doorknob, examining the lock. Lindsay stepped aside to see what it was exactly Danny had in mind to get them in. He opened up his kit and took out a small exacto-knife. Slipping on a pair of latex gloves, he carefully jammed the knife into the lock and started rattling it around.
"Maybe we should go to the administrative office," Lindsay suggested. "I'm sure they've got a spare key."
Danny stopped what he was doing and looked at her. "Search warrant states that we can't investigate someone's home if the owner's not in the same room with us," he said, and turned his attention back to the doorknob. "I don't think it's a good idea to let the administrators know NYPD is breaking protocol. We'd be kicked off the case. Maybe even fired. I don't know about you, but I kind of like having a job. Pays the rent, you know."
Lindsay stood gaping at Danny. "Oh," she said. "Right."
And that was all about she could say.
"Not to mention," Danny continued. "Mac would probably kill us if he found out."
Lindsay deadpanned. "I get the point, Messer."
Danny chuckled. After a few more tries with his knife, a soft 'click' resounded. He smirked in triumph at Lindsay and tossed the knife back into his kit.
He turned the knob and opened the door for Lindsay. "After you, Miss Monroe," he said with a grin.
Lindsay rolled her eyes. "Should I be worried that you just broke into someone's home?" she asked, walking in.
"Nah," Danny said, following her in. "It's only bad if you get caught."
They stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by clothes, books, trashy posters, and the average college filth.
Danny rubbed his hands together and took out his flashlight. "Now lets get a processing."
Back at Joshua Ford's home . . .
"This can't be happening," Mrs. Ford said distraughtly. "He wouldn't do something like this. My husband was a good man. He wouldn't kill anyone."
She was pacing back and forth in the master bedroom, ranting and raving.
Hawkes and Stella exchanged looks of weariness as they were processing the four-poster bed.
"Just looking at her is making me exhausted," Hawkes muttered to Stella.
The detective smiled. "I'm going to look in the closet," she told him.
"Closet?" Hawkes inquired.
Stella arched an eyebrow at the doctor. "Yeah," she said, pointing to two sliding doors in the corner. "It's right over there."
Hawkes eyes widened a fraction. "I thought that was another bedroom."
Stella laughed quietly. She walked over to the pair of doors and cautiously opened them. Hawkes was right. It looked like another room all in its own. There were several drawers and clothes hung neatly on hangers lined half the room. The place was bigger than most bathrooms.
Turning on her flashlight, she began searching through the drawers for anything out of place. After a while, she made her way to the different articles of clothing hanging on the walls. A sudden, faint odor began filling her nose. Stella blinked in surprise. It smelled extremely familiar. She started probing frantically through every piece of garment on a hanger, sniffing each one thoroughly. Each piece of clothing that didn't possess a scent only made the odor she was looking for stronger. A light wave of nausea hit her, causing her to become slightly lightheaded. She held up a black dress shirt that was placed in the very back and inhaled it softly. The same queasiness filled her head, this time more overwhelmingly. Stella shook her head roughly to clear her mind of the nausea. She set the shirt back on the hanger and shined her flashlight on it. Obvious stains of some form of fluid that had dried off were splattered indiscriminately everywhere.
Stella clicked off her flashlight and merely stared at the shirt. "Chloroform . . ."
Back at Mr. And Mrs. Price's home . . .
Mac rummaged through the every single drawer of Jake's bedroom and found nothing. He sat down on the bed, his forehead creased in frustration.
"Flack," he called. "You find anything?"
Flack poked his head from the bathroom. "Sorry, Mac. Nothing yet."
Mac sighed and rubbed his eyes despairingly. It was then that he noticed a piece of paper folded next to the foot of the bed out of the corner of his eye. He got down on his hands and knees and picked up the small parchment carefully and found it to be a business card.
'Sullivan's Bar'. That was the bar Joshua Ford tended. Mac flipped the card over and found Mr. And Mrs. Price's addressed scrawled on the back, along with directions on how to get from the bar to the house. In the top right corner, there was a series of numbers and beneath the numbers it read: '2 am'. That was around the time Jake Price was killed. Mac turned the card back over and stared at it. He remembered Mr. Price distinctly saying that he never went to bars. So what was the business card of a dead bartender doing in his son's room?
"Looks like somebody's a liar," Mac muttered to himself.
"Hey, Mac!" Flack came out of the bathroom with a stack of wrinkled papers. "You are not going to believe what I found taped to the back of the toilet."
Mac looked at the papers in Flack's hand. "What?"
Flack opened the papers and presented them to Mac. "Insurance documents," he said.
Mac looked at him with disbelief. "In the bathroom?"
Flack held up his hands in mock defense. "Hey, I sometimes use my desk bureau at home as a sock drawer," he rationalized.
Mac stared at Flack expectedly, waiting for him to continue. Flack smiled awkwardly.
"They're not just insurance papers," Flack sustained. "They're life insurance papers – Jake Price's life insurance. Apparently, the five year old was worth about 1.5 million. That's a pretty good reason to have the kid killed, don't you think?"
Mac looked through the insurance documents and stopped when he saw the value. "I think," he sighed, "we just found a motive."
Back at Bryan Price's dorm . . .
"Are all teenage boys this messy?" Lindsay wondered out loud as she poked around the piles of clothes in the middle of the room.
Danny stopped going through Bryan Price's desk and looked at Lindsay skeptically.
"Never mind," she said.
"I'm going to check out the bathroom," Danny let Lindsay know.
She nodded and continued looking through the heaps of dirty, unwashed clothes. At that moment, a boy with dyed blue hair, numerous body piercings and dark eyes walked in. He froze when he saw Lindsay.
"Uh . . . what's going on? What are you doing in here? Who are you?"
Lindsay stopped examining a rumpled checkered shirt and looked up, surprised.
She tossed the shirt back into the pile. "NYPD," she responded, flashing him her badge. "We're with the crime lab."
The kid's eyes expanded. "Crime lab?" he repeated nervously. "Look, whatever it was, I didn't do it."
"Now how do we know that for sure?" Danny asked teasingly, walking out of the bathroom.
Lindsay suppressed the urge to roll her eyes. "I take it you're Bryan Price's roommate?" she questioned him.
He nodded. "Yeah. I'm Thomas Hendricks."
Danny looked Thomas Hendricks up and down. "Nice earrings, man," he commented, before turning his attention on to Lindsay. "I found a knife hiding in the toilet. Couldn't get any prints off it. But, it tested positive for blood."
He took out a plastic bag with a silver dinner knife and smiled charmingly at his partner. "I think this is what we call 'a break in the case'."
Lindsay beamed.
Thomas cleared his throat. "Um . . . e-excuse me? I-I don't mean to question you or anything and, well, I don't know much about law and stuff, but . . . isn't it kind of illegal to search a place without its owner present?"
Lindsay's smile faltered and she glanced uncertainly at Danny.
'This can't be good,' Lindsay thought forlornly.
"This can't be good," Danny garbled incoherently to her.
Lindsay tossed a distressed glance at him.
How were they going to get out of this?
(A/N)
All right, some of you have been asking for some DL, and no worries, okay? It's coming. I'm just following in the style of the show (and that means it'll be a little slow). If you read closely, I've had a few indications here and there. There are definitely loads of interaction between the two – you can't deny that. Just be patient.
Okay, I know all the new characters are getting somewhat confusing, so I thought I'd help clear some things:
Jake Price: five years old; brutally slashed and killed; his body was dumped in a dumpster near central park; chloroform was found splattered all over his clothes, suggesting a struggle; traces of his blood were found on Joshua Ford (the bartender found murdered in Central Park); his older brother is Bryan Price
Bryan Price: Jake Price's older brother; NYU student; is majoring in Criminal Law; sharp and aggressive; the CSI team (particularly Lindsay) suspect him of being connected to his brother's murder somehow
Joshua Ford: a local bartender found murdered in Central Park; worked in Sullivan's Bar; traces of Jake Price's blood was found splattered underneath his nails; Michael (Jake and Bryan's father) Price's fingerprint was found on his wallet; his business card is found in Jake Price's room; he's currently the primary suspect in Jake Price's murder
Michael Price: Jake and Bryan's father; his fingerprint was found on Joshua Ford's wallet at the murder scene; he's currently connected to Joshua Ford's murder as well as his son's
Thomas Hendricks: Bryan Price's roommate at NYU