Spoiler Alert: Spoilers for Seasons 2 & 3, up to and including "Silent Night".
A/N: As promised, more Monroes and more about the original case. Thanks to everyone who responds, either by reading or by letting me know what works, what doesn't, what's missing, and what's confusing!
Disclaimer: No infringement of copyright is intended. All characters originated with CSI:NY; all song lyrics are from The Beatles.
It's A Long Journey Home
Chapter 36: Nothing is Easy
Nothing you can know that isn't known.
Nothing you can see that isn't shown.
Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be.
It's easy.
He slept for the forty-five minutes it took to get out to the Monroe ranch, only rousing when the dogs greeted the arrival of family with a joyous outcry.
Two big German shepherds came gamboling over to Danny, begging for petting and sticking their wet noses in his hands and crotch. They didn't look very ferocious at first glance, but Danny caught a glimpse of their teeth and was glad that Diane had been there to vouch for him.
"They've been out patrolling since the shooting," Diane said casually, masking her worry. "They think they've died and gone to doggie heaven, chasing everything under the sun. At least, we should be warned if anyone comes around."
She took him into the big, open kitchen, fed him with soup and homemade bread, and showed him up to Jamie's old room, handing him clean towels out of the dryer to carry up with him. He grabbed his overnight bag and followed her up the stairs.
Before he could try out the bed she had made up for him, though, Flack phoned the cell number he had left him and they talked. Danny hung up first, a little worried he wouldn't be able to control his emotions much longer; Flack had known him a long time, and Danny refused to break down in front of him.
He stretched out on the bed after saying good night once more to Diane. He needed to sleep for a little while, before looking over the evidence Lindsay had collected again. Over thirteen years, she had accumulated a lot.
He had held his breath the first time he had examined her case file: she must have started only months after the original shooting. Her careful, school-girl writing had changed over time to the neat professional writing he recognized from the innumerable cases they had written up together, and the terms had become more technical as she learned more, but even in her original statement, he could hear her voice making precise observations and side comments about the people she came into contact with after the shooting.
Danny closed his eyes and tried to relax. He had talked to Mac, to Stella, to Flack, sending them everything he could find from Lindsay's computer files, including all the photos she had taken in the woods and pictures he took of the bullet Jamie had found when they did a sweep of the field earlier that day. John Monroe had the bullet in his possession; he was going to get it to Mac in the New York lab. Interagency co-operation had been achieved by simply ignoring official channels; neither man had bothered to inform their superiors that they were working together.
Danny put his arms behind his head and stared up at the ceiling, his mind continuing to race through the protective measures he had put in place. He had set Lindsay up with the best watchdogs he could find: her brothers and father would be in her room all night until he could get back to her in the morning. Then he would give Bozeman's finest one last chance to not fuck things up before he took Lindsay under.
Just down the hall from the room he was sleeping in was Lindsay's bedroom. He knew it was hers because it smelled like her: vanilla and something citrusy. He wanted to sneak down the hall and sleep in her bed, surrounded by her scent, by her presence, but he closed his eyes, clenched his fists, and resisted temptation. Bad enough he was here under somewhat false pretenses: Lindsay's parents couldn't have greeted him so kindly had they known he had slept with their daughter. In the neighbourhood he had grown up in, that action was more likely to be met with baseball bats at midnight than homemade soup and bread and a bed for the night.
He deliberately slowed his breathing still more, trying to will sleep to come to him. The short sleep in the truck and the conversation with Flack seemed to have put him off his rhythm, though. His eyes were stuck open, and with a groan, he rolled out of bed and grabbed his laptop. If he couldn't sleep, he could at least get some work done.
Opening Lindsay's file, which he had downloaded onto his own computer, he started reading through her original statement about the shooting, looking for anything that didn't fit with the official statements or media reports he had read before. He scanned through her description of the day up until the shooting: eating lunch in the lab because they had a Science Club meeting, then going back to the lab for final period. She was on a Science Team, preparing for a state-wide competition, and the team was working on its entry.
Even couched in the careful, stilted language of the official statement, he could Lindsay's voice coming through.
"I was in the lab with Patricia Collins, Laura Phillips, Mark Sorenson, and my boyfriend, Cameron Johnston. We were trying our experiment one more time: we were entering in the physics competition, so there were lots of variables we had to keep adjusting for. Mark and Laura were fooling around; they had just started going steady and were being pretty annoying, chasing each other around the room. Cameron was working across the table from me, and Tricia was beside me.
I saw the door open, and someone walked into the room. I didn't know who it was at first. He was wearing a long black coat – I recognized it as a Drizabone – and carrying a rifle. His face was covered with a bandana."
In Lindsay's careful adult writing, she had added the make and model of the rifle, referencing the appropriate police file. Danny smiled at her precision, but shook his head once again at the incomplete evidence collection at the crime scene.
"He shouted out, "Down on the floor, all of you!" and I recognized Justin Forbes' voice. No, I didn't know him well. He was in my algebra and history classes, and had tried out for the Science Team. He didn't make it; Laura beat him for the Alternate's position. His science was okay, but he was weak in math.
"His voice was distinctive: it was quite high and breathy. He had asthma, and I could hear him wheezing.
"We hit the floor, all of us. Laura and Mark were over by the door when Justin came in. He started walking around the room, pointing the rifle at us and yelling. He didn't really say anything but "Lie down! Shut up!" Laura was crying; Tricia had her hands over her head and was begging him not to shoot her. I heard a shot, and saw Tricia's body jerk. There was blood everywhere. I could smell it; it was on my clothes.
"Everything happened really fast then. Justin yelled, and turned around. Laura and Mark were trying to get out the door. He shot Laura in the back. Mark screamed and tried to get to her. I heard another shot and he was on the ground. I don't know how many times he was shot: I heard the gun fire more than once. I was moving, trying to get away from Tricia's body. Cameron jumped up and tried to get in front of me. He was trying to push me out of the way, but I fell over a stool. Justin turned around and just shot him in the head. I grabbed him and tried to stop the bleeding, but there was so much blood, and … his skull was split open."
"Witness broke down and was given some time to collect herself. Interview recommenced 6:22 pm."
Danny wondered where the statement had been taken; only three hours after the shooting, they must have come to Lindsay while she was still in the hospital. Not that he hadn't done the same thing countless times.
"I looked at Justin; he was standing over me. No, I didn't see his face, just his eyes; he'd pulled the bandana up over his nose and the lower face of his face. Yes, like a bandit in one of those old Western movies. He stared at me and lifted the gun; then he said, "Bang." That's all I remember.
"I came to when the police rushed the room. There was blood everywhere. Cameron was lying on me, his head in my lap. I was bleeding from a scalp wound; I don't know where it came from. The rest – they were all dead. Laura bled out before the paramedics got there; the others had died instantly.
"Justin didn't really speak other than to tell us to get on the floor. After that, he just yelled – I couldn't really tell what he was saying. I think I heard him say, "Don't!" once, maybe when he shot Laura. The investigator, the one at the school? She told me the whole thing took less than 15 minutes."
Danny closed the file, his hands shaking a little. Until now, he had neither realized that Lindsay had been involved with one of the dead students, nor that she had been so close to him when he was killed. Reluctantly, he turned over the crime scene photos she had acquired and put in her personal case file. There was Tricia, lying on her stomach, with a bullet hole in her centre back – the ME's report listed COD as exsanguination, but her heart had simply exploded in her chest when the bullet hit.
Laura had also been hit in the back, but not as clean a shot. She had been hit lower and had bled to death relatively slowly – a through and through which had perforated her lower abdomen. If she had received immediate help, she might have survived.
Mark had been shot several times, with fatal shots to the head and chest. When Danny looked at the more recent ballistics report Lindsay had charmed out of Brendan, one of the techs, he noticed that bullets from two different guns had been taken out of the body, a detail that, it seemed, had once more been overlooked.
And Cameron, the boyfriend, had died with his brains splattered all over Lindsay, trying to protect her. Danny retched as he looked at the photo; no wonder Lindsay had passed out.
He looked at Lindsay's crime scene photo last, examining the wound on her head. She could have fainted and hit her head as she went down. Or she could have been hit by the butt of a rifle; he looked at the picture as closely as he could, then made a note to get Sheldon to zoom in on the wound and see what he could figure out.
Danny looked through the rest of the photos: school pictures of the dead students; one of Justin Forbes, dark and ineffectually angry in his yearbook photo; a formal shot of Lindsay and Cameron, perhaps from prom. Cameron looked the prom king type. Actually, he looked a lot like John McKim: tall, blond, good-looking in a fresh, country kind of way. Another one of Lindsay, taken at the hearing, her eyes haunted and face wan, looking much younger than fifteen.
Danny looked at the picture in his hand, placed it carefully back in the box, and stood up restlessly. He paced around Jamie's room, picking up books and putting them down, puzzling over the ribbons for steer-wrestling and team-roping which covered one wall.
On near silent feet, he crossed the floor and opened the door, stopping to listen for Diane. He could hear her in the kitchen, running water as if to wash dishes; then he heard a rhythmic slapping sound, which he identified as the sound of an angry woman kneading bread. He moved across the hallway to the bathroom she had pointed out to him two hours ago, when they had both mistakenly thought he would go off to sleep easily.
He finished in the bathroom and came back out into the hall, stopping again to listen for Lindsay's mother. He stood for several moments by the bathroom door, trying to make up his mind.
When Diane came to check on him before going to her own room, she found him fast asleep on Lindsay's bed, curled up and shivering a bit in the cold room. She smiled, but with a catch in her breath, and pulled a quilt from the chair in the corner over him, before closing the door and going to bed to lie awake and worry.