Chapter 3

Life, Death, Things of That Nature

Author's Note - This part is currently incomplete, but I'm still working on it. We had a death in the family recently, I didn't lose my new job (Yay!) and I didn't take another job offered to me (Yay! - no, really, this is a good thing), and finally, my father, a cancer survivor with diabetes, didn't end up in the hospital with leg problems (Tripple YAY and a WOOT!).

Life's been a little hairy since my uncle Len died, so I haven't been able to publish or write a whole lot, but I finally got to the point where I knew that Ch. 3 is almost finished, so I'm happily working along on it. I'll keep writing.

Please keep in mind that nothing here is edited yet, and won't be until the story is finished, so if you see plot holes or what have you, they *will* be dealt with, later.

***

The guys didn't normally patrol in the daytime. Too much light meant more chance of being spotted and ending up with your mug on the six o'clock news. To every rule there was an exception, though, and the dead body qualified. They had to move quickly but carefully out in the afternoon traffic.

Leo found Raph waiting for him on the balcony of some abandoned apartment building, watching the world go by. New York City streets always seemed so fast-paced in action movies, where heroes drove ninety as they dodged pedestrians and avoided swissing bullets, a flash flood of motion. Reality was a lazy river of metal, with puddles of humanity here and there in the eddies of the street corners. Everybody moved constantly along with the tide, out to work, in to home, out again for the night or the weekend, drawn by its own gravity, rather than the moon on her peek days.

Leonardo joined him on the balcony and leaned against the railing. "The cops are there. How've things looked so far?"

Raph gave a half-shrug. "No other dead bodies. Can't believe the poor bastard was still alive through all that."

In his mind's eye, Leo saw the arm go up and down, the blade go into the man's chest. He briefly shut his eyes in sympathy. "He was a Foot soldier," he said, "meaning Karai might know what's going on, or at least have an idea of what happened to him."

"Karai's fruiter 'en a nut cake," Raph said, lazily twirling a sai around his right index finger, "but she wouldn't go in for recreational torture and human skin bibliopegy."

Leo's meditative calm died a violent death, and his eyes flew open. "Biblio-what?"

Raph's lips set in a tight line that wasn't quite a smile. "You dunno what bibliopegy is?"

"What amazes me more is that you do."

"Jesus," Raph rolled his eyes, "ya make it seem like I ain't related to the freak that makes his own transistor radios outta scrap. Donnie wants ta get Splinter's copy of The Three Musketeers rebound for Christmas."

"He never said anything about it to me."

"Yer a great brother, Leo, but ya can't keep a secret for shit."

Leo took a moment to do the mental math on whether, as a whole, that sentence added up to an insult. He decided it did, and decided to ignore it. "Bibliopegy being book-binding, then. Well, no sign of what happened to the skin. No sign of a struggle, either. He was probably skinned somewhere else and dumped there –"

"Whoa, whoa, back up." Raph raised a hand and looked at his brother severely. "The clothes were all tore up an' the guy's kama got nailed to a wall back there, all bloodied up, too. The alley was a wreck."

Leo blinked in recollection of the scene, frowning. "But the only blood there was on the Kama and directly beneath the body. From the way it looked, the blood was pooled under the body like it had dripped down."

"There's an image Alzheimer's ain't gonna erase."

"No. But if there was a struggle, wouldn't there be more blood elsewhere?"

"Who're you, Gil Grissom now?"

Leo frowned at his brother's glib tongue. "Think for a moment, will you? In battle, whenever there's bloodshed of any type, there's always blood all over the place. You can't control the arc of motion enough to keep it from spreading. There wasn't any blood except on the kama and directly under the body! And don't forget, he was laying on top of that short blade he killed himself with, but didn't have anything else around. Somebody could have placed it on the ground and then dropped his body on top. It looks less like an attack and more like it was staged, if you ask me."

Raph followed along as his brother spoke. He had a great memory and could almost see places he'd been before as if he were looking at a photograph, just by picturing where he'd been. Leo and their brothers had used that talent of Raph's before, to help them locate emergency exits that they might have missed when going into buildings. Raph got that far-away look that told Leo he was back at the scene, seeing it again.

"Body mighta been dumped, scene coulda been staged, but that's a damn lot of stagin' just to impress us. Clothes were torn up, looked like they'd been ripped offa him. An' Leo, if he'd been skinned somewhere else, they didn't do too good a job skinnin' him. Took meat offa him, too. So how'd he survive a messy, botched skinnin' like that, and the trip out to our lair?"

For that, Leo had no answer.

"Look, bro, bugs the shit outta me, too, but we gotta leave that stuff to the cops and the CSI teams. Donnie might come up with somethin', or he might not. Doesn't matter. What we have to figure out is who killed the guy an' why, an' what it might have ta do with us. Don't gotta worry about how the guy died."

"It might be important." As Leo spoke, both he and Raphael became aware of two shadows, in the distance, separating from the midday shade. Since they knew Donnie and Mikey from a hundred yards away, neither Leo nor Raph worried.

Raph raised his brow at his brother. "No, Leo, it ain't. We ain't forensic experts. Not our calling. We just gotta make sure it never happens again, right? I don't give a damn about motive or method. I wanna make sure what happened to that guy don't happen to anybody else."

Donnie and Mike crossed from the roof of the nearby building to the apartment balcony in time to hear that. "Woman," Donnie corrected.

Both Leo and Raphael stopped to look at him, brows raised on both of them now.

Leo noted Mike looked a little pale and was playing with his 'chucks nervously. Donnie continued, "Before we came looking for you, we stopped to check out the team working the crime scene. One of the techies said the body was a woman."

That would explain the high-pitched scream, Leo decided. He wasn't surprised they had assumed the body belonged to a man: none of them had taken a good look at the body, so details like hip size were lost on the turtles, and Leonardo certainly didn't have a clue what breast tissue looked like from the inside, so either she was a small-breasted woman and they'd all honestly been unaware, or her mammary glands had been removed in the skinning. As for external genitalia, there hadn't been any of either variety for quick observation, and none of them were inclined to look at the corpse there.

"Ugh," Raph said. "Didn't need to hear that, thanks, Donnie."

"Splinter wants us home," Mike said. "Like, yesterday. He was looking up something and wants to talk to us. Guys?" Leo hated seeing Michelangelo looking so stressed. He'd have bet good money his brother's eyes had dark circles beneath them, hidden by his mask. "Can we please just go? The longer we're out here the more freaked out I get."

"We're going, Mikey. What's wrong?" Leo asked.

"I dunno. I don't want to think about it anymore. Let's go and let Splinter figure it out, okay?" He shoved his nunchucks in the sheathes along his belt and used both hands to propel himself forward, off the balcony, without waiting for the others.

Leo saw Donatello goggled after Mike while wearing a long frown. Don did his level best to keep an eye on their mental state, leaving keeping them all in good spirits to Mikey. Mike handled crises by getting quiet and waiting for someone to plot out a workable strategy, and then started with the wise-cracking right away. This abruptness and stress left them all unsettled.

"We better catch up to him," Leo said. "Splinter's still waiting on us." With a wave of his arm, he lead the others off the balcony and into the noonday shadows.

***

The rest of school turned out not to be the ordeal that Hope was anticipating. She had to finish up with gym, which stank on more than one level, but that was okay – Ruby was there again. Gym class was fairly easy, taking advantage of the pretty weather to let the kids walk or jog the track. Ruby and Hope power-walked and chatted about the usual inconsequential things kids discuss during forced exercise. Hope mentioned she had a Wii Fit that was a lot more fun than wandering around a track; Ruby expressed a hope to see it. Ruby mentioned she didn't like her English teacher. Hope sympathized.

October was usually fairly cool in New York, whereas Hope was used to highs in the low 90s down south. Today was a little warmer than average and fairly humid, and while they weren't running the track, they were moving at a brisk enough pace to work up a sweat. The coach told everyone to hit the showers. More gossiping amidst the closed curtains and the billowing steam (hey, it was the school's water bill, right?), though she made it as fast as she could, trying to avoid having to be naked around so many strangers for very long.

In the dressing area she had her bra and panties back on, and was sliding into her jeans when she heard Ruby gasp quietly. "What a funky tattoo!" the red-head commented.

Hope fastened her jeans and bent her left shoulder forward slightly, craning her neck to look down her back. "It's not a tattoo," she said. "It's a birth mark."

People always thought her birthmark was a tattoo, and no surprise, given that it looked almost like a perfect hourglass. She had a bunch of photographs in her baby book immediately after her birth, taken by the doctor and two nurses, who were concerned at first that it might be a malignant growth of some sort. Instead, a biopsy showed it was a harmless skin discoloring, nothing worse than a large and strangely-shaped freckle. The doctors had looked on her parents curiously, but they didn't have any explanation, either. Everyone chalked it up to "one of those things," and never really thought much about it.

Strangers, though, always thought it fascinating, and few believed her that it wasn't a tattoo. She figured that Ruby was going to be another one insisting that she'd gotten it done somewhere, but the red-head surprised her. Ruby just smiled and nodded and whistled to herself before saying, "Do you want to come over tonight?"

"Can't," Hope said, pulling on her blouse. "I have to help the neighbor lady with something." At Ruby's visibly disappointed face she added, "I promised that I'd help."

"Oh." The cheerful look was gone. "Well, if you're sure. I mean, you're always welcome."

"Maybe tomorrow night," Hope offered. The other girl smiled and nodded, but this wasn't the same kind of satisfied smile she'd just flashed. Hope wondered if Ruby wasn't one of those New Yorkers who tried so hard to undermine the city's reputation for being full of snobs, rude people, and all the rest of the bad rap that they'd gotten. Freddy had warned that some folks would look down on Hope and her mother for being from Hicksville, while others would try too hard to be nice and act like they were peaches, only to turn around and act like scum around the people they'd known for years. He'd also warned that the latter group was probably more annoying. At least the first group was genuine.

A little disappointed to think that the one friend she'd made was probably thinking to impress the bumpkin with her kindness, Hope smiled anyway and said, "I'm hitting the road. I'll see you in class tomorrow, right?"

"Right," Ruby said, and waved as Hope finished tying off her shoelaces, snagged her books, and headed out the gym door just as the final dismissal bell rang.

No bus ride home, and that was good. Freddy was waiting for her in the student drop-off/pickup area, leaning against his car. "About time you got here," he said with a grin, and opened the back seat door for her. He had to. Patrol cars were designed to only open the back seat doors from the outside, just as a precaution.

She didn't have a lot of room back there, what with the safety wall between her and the front seat and all, but managed to squeeze herself and her stuff in, while everyone around her gawked.

Riding home in a patrol car had its perks, even if one was riding in the back seat.

Even before they'd moved to New York to be with her mother's new boyfriend, Hope had known that he was a patrol officer, but hadn't realized how it would affect their days. Her mother had found a job as a day nurse in a geriatric ward, while Freddy worked the evening shift, so there was always someone around. And Freddy worked an alternating pattern of days – four twelve-hour days one week, three twelve-hour days the next, with every other Saturday off and a guarantee of four hours of overtime. So every other weekend she had both of them around to talk to. That was good. When they first moved up, Hope had felt a little scared that she'd be stuck in a lonely apartment by herself all the time.

But even if the "grown-ups" weren't always around, the neighbors in the building where great. The lady she was helping paint her apartment was, for one thing. Hope didn't like excessive physical labor anymore than the next teen, but she was really looking forward to helping Gio out with her living room walls.

Freddy locked her in tight, mock-saluted a pair of by-standing sophomores that gawked at them, and got in the driver's seat. He had to wiggle a bit, being in his uniform still. Ordinarily he'd have been off all day today, but one of the guys on day shift had come down with H1N1, aka the Swine Flu, and Freddy jumped on the chance for some overtime. Christmas was coming up. He and Hope's mom were intending to pick up as much extra cash as they could, with the intention of making it a really special holiday this year. So, since Freddy was responsible for picking up Hope while her mother still worked, he came directly from the beat, gun and all.

It was quite a way to make an impression, she decided, seeing Ruby pop out of the gym door and do a double-take. Ruby waved again, limply, and Hope wondered if she didn't possibly have something against police officers. Oh well.