Spoiler Alert: Spoilers for Seasons 2 & 3, up to and including "Silent Night".
A/N: As always, my reviewers are awesome, and I can't believe how many people are hitting even without alerts working. Thanks to everyone reading and, hopefully, enjoying the story! I apologize in advance if it takes me a while to answer reviews, but I promise to respond as soon as possible to anyone who leaves me a thought or comment. Hopefully the alert/PM situation will be fixed soon.
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 50: Searching for the Answers
And it really doesn't matter if
I'm wrong I'm right
Where I belong I'm right
Where I belong
Stella sat down beside him, and touched Don's arm gently. Hawkes and Mac glanced at each other and silently agreed to be elsewhere.
"You okay?"
"I'm sorry I didn't make it back, Stel." His blue eyes stared into hers as if there were no one else in the world.
"You did good, Don." Her voice wouldn't quite work properly.
He shrugged, "Did the job, that's all."
She smiled, "You'll be lucky to get away with that when the reporters camped out at the station realize that you're here."
He looked at her in horror, "What reporters?"
She just laughed and squeezed his arm soothingly. "You must be about wiped out. Why didn't you just go home?"
"I'm okay. Couldn't miss the next thrilling installment in the Montana Mystery Tour, could I? Besides," he wrapped his hand around hers, "I didn't want to go home alone."
Her breathing hitched at the look in his eyes, and she had to look away, afraid that the world would just combust from the heat.
"Let's focus here, Superman! John Monroe should be phoning in soon, and Hawkes has some stuff for us to look at too."
He grimaced and rolled his shoulders, but then shoved himself up from the table and held out a hand. "Let's go see what kind of detective Messer makes on his own. Maybe between us all, we can keep the Feds from screwing it up."
When they entered the conference room, Hawkes had a webcam connection set up, and John Monroe was already greeting the other members of the team who were in the room: Mac, Peyton, and Adam. Adam was still on shift, but between cases, so as long as nothing big broke, he was available. Peyton had finished her shift a couple of hours ago, but had put in the intervening time working with Hawkes on some of the records from the original Montana case.
Stella smiled at Peyton, whose eyes were glued to Mac, and nodded to Adam before sitting down in one of the chairs in front of the screen. She looked at Monroe, tracing the family look he shared with Lindsay: deep brown eyes, thick, slightly curly brown hair. Unlike Lindsay when they first met though, there was no smile lurking in John Monroe; he was all business.
"This is Detective Stella Bonasera, CSI and Detective Don Flack," Mac finished the introductions as Don leaned casually against a wall, staring at the screen.
"Detectives," Monroe nodded. They nodded back, Don carefully impassive, Stella smiling for Lindsay's sake.
"How's Lindsay?" Stella would ask, if no one else had.
John's face softened a bit, "She's okay, thanks. A bit shaken up and battered, but she's strong. She'll keep things together. It's Messer I'm worried about."
All the members of the team stiffened in automatic defense of their partner, except for Mac, who stifled a sigh.
"What did he do now?"
"Put in a performance worth of an Oscar; I think he's missed his calling!" There was no mistaking Monroe's likeness to Lindsay now; the grin made his face a mirror image of the country girl she had been when she arrived, still shiny as a new car, before the troubles of the last year had knocked some of the bloom off.
Quickly, he filled in details of the last couple of days, including a dead-on impression of Danny's Staten Island accent that had even Flack grinning. "So," he concluded, "When I got back to the police station, they rolled out the red carpet for me! I think they were so relieved that Messer didn't come back with me, they'd have given me the keys to the city, if they could."
"So what did you find out?" Mac shook off his lingering worries about Danny in Montana; he should have known that Danny would come up to scratch when Lindsay's safety was at stake.
Monroe gestured to the timeline on the board beside Flack. "Well, if we're going to deal with the old case first, I'd love to get a copy of that so I can see it."
Hawkes tapped on the board, went to his computer and asked, "Email address?"
Monroe rattled it off.
"Okay, are you up and running?" At Monroe's nod, Hawkes said, "Copy's been transmitted; should be up in a moment. It's an interactive whiteboard, so as we add things, we can send you updates."
"Great. So you have everything we had until I got a hold of the original records that Lindsay couldn't get. I don't know what was going on in '95. So many of the reports were inaccurate or missing information, it looks like it was deliberate. But that doesn't make sense – this was huge. If they couldn't deal with it, they could have asked for the Bureau's help."
"Why didn't they?" Stella asked.
"I don't know. There was pressure from the mayor, from the parents, and from the internal review board to get help. I guess they had the kid. And they had shot him down – on camera – which was a huge public nightmare."
"The news was there? Can we get copies of the tape?" Hawkes perked up.
Monroe nodded, "I'll try. It's been tough even finding out where stuff is held. I'll check with the TV station; they must have archival copy with this new trial coming up."
They ran through the information they had, Monroe adding some of the local details, like McKim's relationship to one of the victims.
"So where was McKim when the original shooting happened?" Mac was standing in front of the whiteboard, writing in details.
Monroe was looking at an updated printout of the board and said casually, "McKim was out of the country. He came back in December of '95, went into the Forest Rangers, working in the back country."
The New York team raised their eyebrows at that.
Monroe looked up at six pairs of eyes waiting for more. He sighed, "Okay. I went to school with McKim. We weren't tight, but we were on teams together – basketball and football mostly. He was competitive. Extremely competitive. He was also world-class at biathlon. Could have gone way further than he did."
Peyton asked, "Biathlon?"
"Combination cross-country skiing and marksmanship. He competed nationally, even internationally, before he left high school. Was tapped for
the Olympics in Lillehammer, but got injured just before the trials, so he missed it. Should have been in Nagano in '98, but he'd stopped by then."
"How come?" Flack asked.
"Too competitive," was the clipped answer.
Mac's eyebrows rose, "How is it possible for a world-class athlete to be too competitive?"
Monroe seemed to contemplate how to answer that for a moment; then with a frown, he continued. "McKim was, probably still is, a bad loser. And I don't mean just a sore loser – swear a little, kick a team bench. I mean a 'clear the bench and the stands too', 'take the winners down like a pack of wolves' loser. He was bounced off the National team."
"Juvie record," Hawkes passed it over to Mac first, who read it silently, then handed it on to Stella.
"Yeah. He broke a competitor's leg. It was written up as an 'under the influence' and he was given probation, counseling, and community service. But anyone who knew him knew better."
"Knew what?" Flack asked, his eyes flickering over the record handed to him.
"McKim rarely drank, and never to excess. He may have got away with it, but it must have been cooked up by someone after the other kid had been knocked down the mountain."
"So McKim looks good for the attacks on Lindsay," Adam pointed out. "She pissed him off somehow, and he went after her."
John Monroe was shaking his head before Adam finished the first sentence. "No way." His voice left no room for argument.
"Why not?" Mac asked. "He was on the spot or nearby for all the attacks. Everyone trusts him."
Monroe's mouth was a grim line, "If John McKim had shot at Lindsay that first night, there is no way he would have missed." He said it simply.
"On a horse, at night…" Hawkes started.
"There is no way McKim could have missed."
"You are pretty sure of that," Flack remarked, his eyes narrowing suspiciously.
"When you ran McKim, you find a hole in his record?" Monroe turned to Hawkes.
"Yeah, about 8 months unaccounted for. How'd you know?"
Monroe ran a hand over his face. "He was recruited. Spent a couple months training with Special Ops, then got sent over to the Middle East. Spent a couple more months on a sniper detail."
"Target?" Mac's face was set, and Peyton moved closer to him, but not touching.
"He had a list of high-level targets. Can't give you details – not one of our operations, and long before my time anyway. I stumbled across the records a few years ago and recognized the name. Christ, he was barely nineteen."
"He wash out?"
Monroe shook his head. "I don't think so. He was pulled when the op was called off after the Riyadh bombing in November of '95. Next thing we knew he had joined the Ranger Service and was working the Montana back-country in the National Parks."
"Okay," Flack said, "So we got a policeman with military training, ranger training, back-country experience, but is content to stay in uniform? It's not adding up for me."
"Add that his nephew was one of the original victims, and explain to me why, when two of my people are hiding in said back-country, I shouldn't be worried." Mac's voice was cold, his whole body poised for action.
Monroe shrugged his shoulders, "I told you. If McKim had wanted Lindsay dead, she'd be dead. He could have easily manufactured a fatal accident for her when he was training her five years ago. He would not have missed her, no matter what the conditions, that night she was out on Dusty."
He looked around the room, seeing, even on the grainy monitor provided by the webcam, the doubt in people's faces. "I've done the Profiling sessions with Special Agent Jason Gideon and his team in the FBI's Behavourial Analysis Unit, people. I know that McKim could kill without a second thought; he's organized, precise, and extremely well-trained. But he didn't do these things to Lindsay. He'd never have trusted to luck: snatching a car and hoping to catch her in the street, or opening the drip and hoping no one would come back in. Those are the actions of an opportunistic killer; McKim would have planned every move. And he would not have failed. Not once. Never three times."
He watched as people reluctantly nodded around the room. They had to admit his logic. Only Stella was not agreeing, sitting tensely forward and frowning deeply. She looked up in his face and said quietly, "What about the whole 'come away with me' thing? Seems to me you've left that out in your calculations."
The rest of the team turned and looked at her. She shrugged and said, "I talked to Linds this morning before Jamie and Mick got her out of the hospital. She told me McKim had shown up at 6 am to try and convince her to go away with him. He told her he loved her, had always loved her."
Monroe frowned, "Yeah, Mick told me Messer said that. I thought it was just …" he shrugged as the New York team glared at him. "I mean, have you seen those two in a room together? Little evil grinning Cupids flying around their heads?"
Flack, Hawkes, and Adam snorted with laughter; even Mac cracked his first smile in a while.
"But Lindsay would never overplay McKim saying that," her brother admitted, thinking deeply. "What the hell game is he playing?"
"Could he be planning to use Lindsay as bait, maybe?" Flack offered. "Maybe solving this crime is his ticket to something else?"
Monroe mulled that over. "I'll check that out, see what I can find."
"In the meantime, you've hidden my people away in a place that one of my main suspects knows like the back of his hand," Mac pointed out in a deadly quiet voice. "Solve that."
John Monroe looked up into Mac's eyes fiercely, "She's my goddamned baby sister, Taylor. You think you pull rank on this one? We put them in the safest place we could think of. There's no way we're getting them out, or anyone's getting to them soon, no matter how good they are."
Flack leaned forward. "What are you talking about?"
John picked up the webcam and pointed it towards the window. The New York team could see the snow filling the sky. "The meteorological service is predicting two to three feet, more in the mountains where Linds is. No one will be getting in or out for a couple days at this rate."