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A Tangled Web (2)

" – hard to tell if it was his pureed brain, his snapped neck and shattered spinal cord, or the iron fence pole sticking through his chest that killed him, technically…" Dr. Morales looked up from the mangled remains on his autopsy table. "But I think it's safe to say that your victim died as a result of the injuries from his jump."

"Shocker." Lt. Flynn gave the Captain a dry sideways glance. Both of them stood on the outer side of the transparent wall, while inside the sterile field the ME, wearing a protective suit, continued to circle the body. "Any evidence that he was a nutcase, yet?"

"You're gonna have to look into his medical files for that." Morales glanced up again and sighed. "…Unless don't know who he is. Figures."

"No ID on him, and the DMV database doesn't recognize half-smashed faces," grumbled Flynn. "We're running the prints but no hits yet. So can you look into his brain or something and confirm that he was just a lunatic, so we can wrap this up and go home?"

"You know, it's difficult to diagnose mental disorders by brain physiology when the brain is intact," the doctor commented, "let alone when it looks like chunky chowder and half of it's been scraped off the sidewalk." He rolled his eyes. "I don't know if this man was crazy, if that's what you're asking... although, given that he took a nosedive off a bridge at midnight, I'd say chances are that he had some issues."

"Unfortunately, that's not good enough to write off his warnings as delusions," said the Captain. "We're going to need something tangible before we can file this as a false alarm and move on. Anything that might help us identify him, Doctor?"

There was a brief silence, then Morales' voice came again through the staticy speakers. "No tattoos, distinguishing birthmarks, or implants that I could find… I can try to put together the dental records, but don't hold your breath. Human teeth weren't exactly designed to smash into concrete at fifty miles per hour."

Sharon nodded. "Do what you can." She took a step back and was about to turn and head back upstairs, when the doctor's voice stopped her:

"There is one thing that's kind of weird..."

She turned back.

"You mean, weirder than this nut job jumping off a bridge yelling out bomb threats?" Lt. Flynn was not in a good mood. Morales flashed him a curious glance before replying:

"You tell me." He paused briefly, before revealing: "He was dying already."

The doctor's pronouncement was followed by a few seconds of startled silence. Flynn frowned:

"He was sick?"

Morales gave a lopsided nod. "…only in the sense that his liver was dissolving." He held up a container with the organ in question for them to see: it looked bruised and shrunken in various places, and not at all like livers were supposed to look. "There are also signs of inflammation in his pancreas, partial necrosis of the tubular epithelium – that's his kidneys – and some damage to the heart tissue."

"What the hell kind of disease did all that?"

The doctor held up a finger. "Poison. Well – officially we're still waiting for tox screen to confirm," he amended. "Shouldn't be long… say the words 'toxin' and 'attack' over the phone and you tend to get moved to the head of the line. Lab results should be in shortly. They're testing for… hm, everything, I suppose." His eyebrows arched. "I for one never saw this before, so I have no idea what did it."

The Captain's eyes were still on the blackened liver. "Is it safe for you in there, Doctor?"

"I appreciate the concern, Captain," (he still managed to sound half-sarcastic, even though he probably meant it), "I'm fine." He tapped his breathing mask. "This filters out pretty much anything. And I didn't see significant damage to his airways or lungs so I doubt that whatever did this was airborne."

Flynn crossed his arms and glanced at Sharon. "So maybe there was something to this guy's lunatic raving after all. If someone went to the trouble to poison him with a deadly toxin…"

"…or it was an accidental poisoning," Morales piped in from behind the glass. "You might find this surprising given your line of work, but about ninety percent of all toxin-related deaths are actually unintentional. He could've accidentally come into contact with a poison, which could've led to an altered mind state and ended in him jumping off a bridge."

Raydor's eyebrows arched meaningfully at Flynn – that was also the possibility that she'd been considering – and the lieutenant gave a conceding nod:

"One can only hope."

Back in the murder room, Sharon considered the screen of her phone a little indecisively. It was almost ten a.m. now: Rusty was probably awake, and she'd promised to call him. Then again, maybe he was still sleeping… he didn't usually sleep that late, but it was a Sunday after all, and they'd had a later night than planned, courtesy of a kitchen mishap and the subsequent cleaning efforts.

A sigh escaped her at the thought of those bits of dried-up dough that they'd had to scrape off all visible surfaces. Not to mention the half-destroyed electric socket, or the unplanned load in the washing machine... Rusty's clothes were still in the dryer (unless he'd remembered to take them out that morning, which was unlikely), Sharon needed a new hand-mixer, and they were out of eggs, milk, sugar and countertop cleaners.

All in all it had been a long night. If Rusty had wanted to sleep in, she couldn't blame him. She decided to shoot him a quick text instead of calling.

"Buzz and I finished processing the audio from the footage." Tao was holding up a USB drive, which he plugged into his computer. "It's still not too clear, but we'll be able to make out most of what this guy was saying, exactly."

"Good. With a little luck it'll all be the usual discourse… 'down with authority'…'the world just doesn't get it'…" Provenza rolled his eyes, "and we can send this one back downstairs and go home."

"Hopefully," said Tao. "Kathy and I were supposed to visit her brother's family today."

"I have tickets to a play at three," Buzz piped in.

Provenza gave them both a disapproving look. "Didn't anyone tell you that Sundays are for resting?"

"Maybe someone should forward that memo upstairs to the Chief's desk," Flynn scoffed, and everyone shot him slightly wary looks. Not that any of them were happy at having been called in at unholy a.m. on a Sunday...

The buzzing phone drew her attention, and Sharon checked it to see a text from Rusty; it confirmed that he was indeed awake and asked if they were still on for lunch. Putting the phone back in her pocket for the moment, she turned to Tao. "Mike, play back the audio for us. Let's hear what our mystery victim –"

"He's not a victim," grumbled Flynn.

" – had to say before he jumped," Sharon finished, overlooking the interruption.

As everyone gathered around Tao's desk, he turned up the volume on his computer and started the sound file, playing it in parallel with one of the videos from the security camera footage. The picture quality was bad, but they could make out the silhouette of their jumper on the side of the bridge. His voice was a little distorted on the reconstructed audio file, but the words were clear enough:

"…not the way to do it, man…who's gonna get it if we just blow everything up… this – the way to go – make everyone listen… everyone, listen‼" The unexpected shout startled them, and on the video they saw the man stiffen, arms out as though making a speech to a crowd. "Listen to me!"

"The very picture of sanity," Provenza deadpanned, and Sharon shushed him so they could continue to hear the audio.

" –doing it all wrong – not how it's supposed to be!" The static gave his words an eerie quality. " –zero footprint – don't need another – for – crowd… don't you see? It's all social pressure… impulse-driven behavior… but take away the context, and you change the behavior! That's why…" He threw his hands up in an evocative gesture, " – up in flames! All of it! Context gone… the crowds, gone! And you people…"

The speech degenerated into another few seconds of incoherent mumbling, that hadn't really been captured by the camera crew's microphones. The man continued to mutter the indecipherable words to himself or his phantom audience, until mid-sentence he stepped off the bridge as casually as though he were stepping off a curb.

Everyone in the room winced involuntarily at the unmistakable sound of his body thudding against the concrete.

Flynn shook his head and rolled his eyes again, muttering something that sounded a lot like 'waste of time'.

Sharon's lips pursed in displeasure. She didn't know what to do with this, the recording of the man's last words didn't clarify matters in the least. If anything, it made him seem more deranged. Which left them right back where they'd started.

"I can try to work on the bits that are still unclear," Tao offered, "but we probably won't get much more than this. Camera crew was almost a hundred yards away, and their microphones aren't that sensitive. Plus they were talking over the guy, we had to filter out their voices."

She nodded in appreciation of his efforts, fully aware that even if they did get some more of the man's speech, it would probably be along the same lines and just as unhelpful. "Can we use all this video footage to get a better image of his face that we can run against the DMV database?"

"Buzz is working on that," said Tao.

Sharon glanced thoughtfully at the murder board, before turning to Provenza: "The guards at the storage facility, did we get their statements?"

The older lieutenant shook his head. "Patrol officers did. They'd already let the guards go home by the time we got to the scene. But I read over their statements…'didn't know the guy, didn't know what he was talking about'… in other words, nothing useful."

As he spoke, he handed Sharon a copy of the patrol officers' incident report, and she scanned it briefly, getting nothing out of it but a vague notion of familiarity when her eyes passed over the officers' names.

"Did they notice any suspicious activity in the last few days around the area? Could they have seen this man around before – maybe he lives nearby or the bridge is on his way to work…? There's a reason that he picked that location over another," she pointed out, "and it might help us figure out who he is." At the very least, they couldn't declare the case closed until they'd ID'ed the dead man.

Provenza nodded. "We'll ask the guards a few more questions." He walked to pick up the jacket from his chair. "Sykes, you're with me."

Sharon redirected her attention again. "Det. Sanchez, please see if Doctor Morales can give us a more precise age, so we can further narrow down the print search. Oh…and if the lab sends back the tox screen results, let me know immediately."

"Yes, Ma'am."

Sharon dipped her head in silent thanks, then turned to Andy: "Lt. Flynn – with me, please." She motioned them to her office. Provenza shot his partner a quick glance, to which he received only a sour mien in return… then Flynn started to follow the Captain to her office, and the rest of them all proceeded to their respective tasks.

"Andy, would you like to tell me what's bothering you?"

She'd closed the door to her office and walked to stand by her desk, eyeing his stormy look with a calm expression.

"You mean other than the fact that we got called in at four a.m. on a Sunday on a wild goose chase, so that Taylor can look good in front of the Mayor?"

Sharon waited in silence, and after a few seconds he let out a frustrated groan.

"It's just such a load of crap sometimes, you know? We're supposed to be bringing criminals to justice, not wasting time looking into some crackhead lunatic who hops off a bridge screaming nonsense!" He sounded almost accusatory.

She pondered her reply for a moment. "Doctor Morales says he was poisoned," she reminded him. "There might be more than a suicide to look into here."

"Yeah, well the Chief didn't know that when he assigned us the case," Andy retorted. "We're just … being used to fulfil someone else's agenda. To make it look like the LAPD is doing something, because some city council asshole thinks that'll look good in the news!"

Sharon sighed. "Andy. Projecting an image of competence, a confident presence, has always been a part of the law enforcement process."

"Yeah? Maybe it shouldn't be." He wasn't in the mood to be reasonable.

"Maybe. Or maybe it's a necessary evil, in order to maintain the public trust that's so vital to us doing our jobs properly." Her small smile did nothing to assuage Flynn.

"You can phrase it so it sounds good," he shook his head, "but it doesn't change the fact that we work for politics just as much as for the public good. And that just pisses me off."

It was hard to argue more without feeling hypocritical, because just that morning on the phone with Provenza, Sharon had had more or less the same thought. "It's not something that we can change at the present moment," she told him instead, calmly. "So I'd rather do our jobs well, regardless."

"It's not our job to make Taylor look good with the Mayor."

That, she couldn't agree with. The fact that their efficiency made the Chiefs look good was one of the main reasons that the Major Crimes Division had survived a whole deluge of scandals and drama that would've gotten any other unit disbanded long ago.

"This is a waste of time, Sharon," Flynn continued resentfully, "and you know it too, so frankly I don't get why you're playing along, sending everyone out to do rookie work, instead of just … "He trailed off, his breath leaving him in a long sigh, and Sharon's eyebrows drew together in an almost sympathetic expression. As Andy had obviously just realized, there wasn't a whole lot that she could do. Yes, she did have decision power as to which cases to take, on paper… but to just flatly refuse to investigate this one would've done more harm than good. When it came to navigating politics, she'd long learned to pick her battles.

More importantly, investigating some junkie's suicide might have been outside Major Crimes' purview and a poor use of resources, but …

"There's still a man down in our morgue whose family deserves to know what happened to him," she said quietly. "And we can't notify them until we figure out who he is."

Flynn let out another sigh, one hand going to the back of his neck. "I know," he acknowledged, the bitterness having left his tone. "You're right, I know. It's just…"

She crossed her arms, head tilting slightly to the right. "Why don't you tell me what's really bothering you?"