CSI:NY fic: "Close to Bone"
Feb. 11th, 2007 09:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardTitle: Close to Bone
Fandom: CSI:NY
Rating: PG-13
Summary: AU. It's about what isn't there, not what is.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Characters are the property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer Television, CBS, and Alliance Atlantis.
Danny lifts the skull in his hands, feeling the curve of the bone beneath his fingers, the small splinters around the perfect hole where the bullet entered. The rest of the skeleton lies nearby, pale and dirty against the thick dark soil. There are only fragments of cloth left after so long, NYPD blue and soft with age. Next to him, Stella leans down and picks up the old service pistol with a plastic glove held between two fingers.
“Mac,” she calls, and he comes over to take it from her, eject the clip and check the bullets.
“One’s missing,” he says and crouches down next to Danny, runs a hand through the dirt in the hollow where the skull was lying a minute or so ago. He comes up with a bullet, flatted out where it struck. It might be blood that’s stained across the metal, or just old dirt.
“Entry wound,” Danny says, and tilts the skull toward him so he can see. “Hard to tell with just a skeleton, but I’d say – this is what killed him.”
Mac nods, sweeps another hand through the dirt. It runs through his fingers, turns up a button, a scrap of leather. “Thanks for coming out, Doctor,” he says. “You can take him in now.”
Danny stands up, still holding the skull in his hands, and looks up: at the stark, uncompromising sky, the city lights, the skyscrapers in the background, behind the line of trees in Central Park. He looks down again quickly. “Nice to get out of the morgue,” he says, trying to ignore the edge of paranoia biting at the back of his neck. He is proud to note that his hands only shake slightly, barely noticeable unless someone is looking closely. He doesn’t think Mac is.
-
-
The badge number – the first thing to turn up, where a couple kids playing in the park followed the dull gleam of silver to a badge half-buried beneath a rowan tree – matches to an officer gone missing years ago. The ID number on the gun turns up the same officer. The crime lab is just waiting on Danny to finish the facial reconstruction – something he could turn over to a CSI, he supposes, but for some reason he wants to do this himself.
“Here,” he says, standing in front of a wall of oversized computer screens with an NYPD laptop balanced crookedly on top of a lab table. “It’s a perfect match.”
The skeleton’s real face is young and handsome, brilliant blue eyes that shine even through the pixels of the screen and seven years of secrets and dirt and pain, messy dark hair nearly hidden beneath his uniform hat. Something in Danny’s chest beats when he sees him; there’s a burn at the back of his skull he remembers from the sound of a panic room’s door slamming shut on him. He looks down at the keyboard beneath his hands, fingers stuttering just above the keys. His eyes hurt; he’s been looking at a computer screen too long.
Stella sighs tiredly and palms her hair. “I’ll call the family,” she says. “And the partner.”
“The partner?” Mac questions, eyes narrowing. “Are you sure you want to do that?”
Stella gives him a long look, the kind that Danny has learned means, I am a real cop and you are not. “I’m going to have to interview him anyway,” is all she says, though.
-
-
Danny is doing paperwork in his office, listening to Evan sweet-talk Aiden and Lindsay through the autopsy of stab victim from Ozone Park, when someone knocks on the door. It’s the officer Stella assigned to the morgue, ostensibly as an honor guard for the dead NYPD officer whose bones are covered with a cloth a few feet away.
“Dr. Messer?” he says. “There’s someone here about –” He hesitates. The crime lab haven’t publicly released the name of the bones yet.
“Yes, yes, of course,” Danny says distractedly, standing up, pushing his papers aside. He drops his pen on his desk, picks it up again, drops it. He can’t think of a reason he’d need it.
There’s a police officer in the lobby, still in his uniform, pistol on his belt and badge clipped to his chest. He looks up as Danny pauses in the doorway and says seriously, “Dr. Messer? I’m Gavin Moran. I’m – I was – Donny Flack’s partner. I want to see him.”
“There’s not much to see,” Danny demurs, but he leads Moran back into the depths of the lab anyway and lets him look at the bones of his partner through glass, close enough to touch but forever beyond it.
Moran looks at the bones for a long time: the skull, the femur, the rib cage, the broad curve of the scapula. It’s all there, a full skeleton. “You’re sure?” he says finally, the words heavy on his tongue.
“Positive,” Danny says, almost apologetic, but Moran is a cop, he’ll want the truth.
He sighs. It’s a dark, heavy sound, and it seems to fill the room. “Do you have his badge?” he asks.
“What?” Danny says, startled, and then he processes the request and says, “Yeah, it’s at the crime lab, in evidence.”
Moran frowns slightly, then says firmly, “Good.”
-
-
A week later, Mac meets Danny in the morgue over the body of a girl who was sixteen, pregnant, and strangled. Danny draws the cloth back over her face. “What happened with the Flack case?” he asks, as casually as he can. He hears next to nothing from the lab, unless Mac or one of the other CSIs – Lindsay, Aiden, Hawkes, Adam – needs something from him. They haven’t, not in the past week, so he knows nothing about how the case has ended. He still has the bones, though, hasn’t released them to the family or the lab because no one’s asked.
Mac frowns. “We’re shelving the case,” he says. “We’re keeping it open at the family’s request as a courtesy, but we’re fairly certain it was a suicide.”
“What?” Danny says blankly. “With the angle of the bullet, no way that’s a suicide, it’s not possible unless the bullet did a couple of cartwheels in the air.”
Mac’s frown deepens. “All the evidence points toward a suicide,” he says. “Officer Flack was depressed for some time before his disappearance and he was shot by his own weapon. He had no enemies.”
“That’s not right,” Danny says firmly and Mac shrugs, takes the Petri dish with the gravel Danny pulled out of the vic’s hair.
“Thanks for your time, Dr. Messer.”
-
-
Danny does not expect to see Gavin Moran again. However, he still shows up; he’s in the lobby when Danny walks in from a five minute coffee run, cradling Starbucks in his hands for him and his people, still surprised that he was able to manage it.
“Sergeant Moran, hi,” he says, startled, handing the tray off to Evan as the other pathologist descends on him. He snags his own mocha at the last minute, juggling it from hand to hand as warmth spreads through the cardboard and wax paper. “Can I help you with something?”
“Detective Bonasera called me this morning to tell me the crime lab is shelving the case,” Moran says, turning toward him. “I wondered if you knew anything about that.”
“I do, yeah,” Danny says warily. “Mac – Detective Taylor – says they’re labeling it a suicide, but leaving it open on the family’s request.”
Moran’s eyes burn. “Donny never woulda killed himself.”
“The angle of entry is wrong,” Danny says, knowing that he’s probably getting himself into something that he shouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. The fact is that the facts are wrong, though. “There’s no way Officer Flack could have shot himself in the head. Unless he could dislocate his wrist on command,” he adds fairly.
Moran raises his eyebrows. “You seem very certain,” he says neutrally.
“I’m a trained pathologist,” Danny says, “not an idiot.”
-
-
When he goes into the Kaminski autopsy, there’s something that strikes him as wrong bugging him all through it. Not about Kaminski, but about Flack – something that he doesn’t know yet but his subconscious does, something that no one else has figured out either. He’s wrist deep in Kaminski’s guts when he thinks he realizes what it is.
“Here, Sid, take this,” he says, reaching out and snagging Hammerback’s sleeve with bloody hands. “It’s Aiden’s case. I gotta go.”
Hammerback blinks at him. “Danny –”
“My notes are there. Bye!”
He strips off his gloves as he walks – not runs, not quite – drops them in a biological waste bin, drops his apron in after them, goes to his office and picks up his phone as he digs around his desk for the scrap of paper where he wrote Moran’s number down.
“Sergeant,” he says as soon as Moran picks up, groggy with sleep – it’s the night shift for him; he still can’t stand – it’s the night shift, “Officer Flack. What was he doing in Central Park that night?”
There’s a pause, as if Moran is thinking. “Talking to a potential informant,” he says finally. “She’s not a suspect. She had a client that night. We tracked them both down. She’s dead now.”
“What was Flack supposed to be talking to her about?”
“Potential drug bust,” Moran says immediately. “It never went down because our informant bailed after she heard about Donny.”
Something isn’t right. Danny thinks, although he has never been good at reading people, that there is a small frown in Moran’s voice, something that’s telling the sergeant that this is an unnatural and macabre interest even for an NYPD pathologist who had to leave the police academy in his second week because of a wannabe mobster and his stupid but effective threats.
“Dr. Messer,” Moran adds finally, “I’ve already gone over this with Detective Bonasera.”
Danny winces. “Yeah,” he says, “I know. I just – there’s something. I can’t put my finger on it.”
-
-
The next day he ducks Sid’s annoyed questions and takes a walk down to the crime lab, sticking close to the walls, head down, until he reaches the building, where he takes the stairs down to the basement and digs through piles of cold case boxes until he finds the one labeled Flack, Donald. He sits down on the floor right then and there, spreading out the materials around him, and reads through old and new lab reports, witness interviews, picks up pieces of bagged evidence and turns them over in his hands, frowning at them through the plastic. There’s something here, he can feel it. He just doesn’t know what it is, not yet.
“What are you doing, doc?”
He didn’t hear her coming. He never hears her coming. Danny looks up and offers what he hopes is a sheepish grin. “Hi, Detective.”
Aiden turns her head sideways so she can read the files upside down. “I thought Mac and Hawkes shelved the Flack case last week,” she says.
“Yeah,” Danny says. “There’s just – I think he missed something.”
Aiden squats down next to him, black hair falling over her shoulder. “What?”
“I don’t know,” he admits. “I just – I got a vibe. I can’t figure out what it is.”
“Let me see,” Aiden says, sprawling her legs out amid the mess of papers, looking at the puzzle with real pleasure in her eyes. Danny likes her. She’s a good detective, a smart CSI, and she never brings up the tattoo on his shoulder, the one Lindsay outed to everyone during the Sassone case.
Twenty minutes later, she says, “Huh,” curiously, puts the file she’s reading down, and snags the witness interviews out of Danny’s hands. She flips through those, says, “Huh,” again and gets up, casually scattering pieces of paper all over the floor and Danny’s lap.
“What’s ‘huh’ mean?” Danny asks, pushing his glasses back up his nose.
“I’ll get back to you on that,” Aiden says distractedly, walking down the line of shelves, frowning at the boxes. Danny looks down quickly.
He likes the dark of the cold case room the same way he likes the morgue, the way the walls close in on him and he can hear the room breathe – the loneliness. The isolation. It’s not that he doesn’t like his fellow pathologists, but there’s a reason he works the night shift.
“Here,” Aiden says, dropping a box down in front of him. Danny jumps.
She gives him a worried look, but shrugs it off and continues, “I was on the cold case squad for about a year before I joined the crime lab. There was a case I worked, went down maybe ten years ago, with a similar MO. The homicide cops that originally worked the case figured out it wasn’t a suicide because the cop that died kept a golden bullet in his bedroom drawer – you know, the mail order kind.”
Danny grew up in Staten Island, in a family that tried to carefully stay back from the line but ended up hovering over nine times out of ten anyway, where one parent was NYPD and the other was Mafioso, and somehow they made it work. He knows what Aiden is trying to say.
“So,” he says, trying out the word in his mouth. “You think?”
“I think I should go talk to the partner,” Aiden says. “You wanna come?”
For a moment, Danny considers it. He really does. And then he thinks what that implies and can’t breathe for a moment, the panic rising up inside him like a bad chemistry experiment, and finally manages to choke out, “No. I’ll just –” He waves a hand at the mess of boxes and files surrounding him.
Aiden regards him solemnly, and then nods once and leaves.
-
-
Eventually Danny cleans up the mess and goes back to the morgue, where he presides over a bunch of severed limbs that don’t really count as a corpse and does his best to ignore Lindsay’s unreasonable glares, because Sid is busy with the corpse that Danny turned over to him yesterday and it’s Evan’s day off. Just like yesterday, though, there’s something ticking at the back of his brain, something that twigged the last time he talked to Moran and something that he read today, in the other dead cop’s file, but he still can’t figure out the connection. It’s there. He knows it is. He just doesn’t know what the hell it is and it’s driving him crazy.
Sometime around three in the morning, he can’t make himself step out of his morgue to go back to his crappy apartment. He ends up sleeping on the couch in his office, showers quickly in the locker room before the day shift can really start trickling in, and is well on his way to mainlining coffee by the time Aiden wanders in.
“Here’s the thing,” she says, leaning over his desk and shoving back the jean jacket she’s wearing over her shoulder holster – apparently a fashion decision, since most detectives Danny knows wear their guns on their hips, just like Aiden usually does. “I’m still not sure what the connection is aside that Flack and Hodgins both worked in the Bronx. They both did a couple drug busts, but everyone does that, I don’t think –”
“That’s it,” Danny says, and nearly knocks over his coffee cup going for the files he’d photocopies yesterday. Aiden rescues the coffee.
“Here,” he says, spreading the files out in front of her. “This guy, McGraw.”
“The narco dick?” Aiden says skeptically, cradling his mug between her palms. “Why?”
“Look, the investigating detectives interviewed him after Flack disappeared, right?” Danny says eagerly, really getting into it now. “He worked with Flack and Moran for a while when they were doing drug busts. Then Hodgins – they were on the same narco team. There’s no other connection, this has to be it.”
Aiden cocks her head to one side, considering. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. Hey, I’ll be back later, okay, doc?”
For a moment Danny almost asks to go with her, and then he remembers that he’s a pathologist, that he’s not a cop and he gave that up years ago – not willingly, true, but he gave it up nonetheless, and now the closest he can get is cleaning up after the mess, trying to help with what he can, his scalpel and his bonesaw and everything he can’t do. He nods.
-
-
Three days later Stella Bonasera comes in to get Lindsay, who’s regarding Sid with more warmth than she’s offered Danny in months. “Your cell’s off,” she tells Lindsay. “Hawkes needs you in the lab.”
When Lindsay’s gone, Stella puts one hand on the doorframe of Danny’s office and leans inside, says, “So I hear it’s you we have to thank for clearing Flack.”
Danny turns around. “Yes?” he says dubiously and Stella smiles slightly. He doesn’t know her like he knows Aiden or thought he knew Lindsay; she’s homicide, and they’re not around the morgue nearly as often as the CSIs are.
“Detective McGraw was arrested yesterday,” she says, with the sour twist to her mouth that comes from taking down another cop. It disappears quickly. “Two murders that we know of. Dirty cop,” she shrugs. “He killed them because he didn’t want anyone to find out, and he almost got away with it.” For a moment her eyes are distant and angry, and then she looks at Danny with something real in her expression.
“Thanks, doc.”
“My pleasure,” Danny says, mouth suddenly dry, and there’s something odd and sad and quiet that slots into place in the back of his brain. Something missing, something still incomplete. Something where the last few pieces will always be missing. “Anytime.”
end
Fandom: CSI:NY
Rating: PG-13
Summary: AU. It's about what isn't there, not what is.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Characters are the property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer Television, CBS, and Alliance Atlantis.
Danny lifts the skull in his hands, feeling the curve of the bone beneath his fingers, the small splinters around the perfect hole where the bullet entered. The rest of the skeleton lies nearby, pale and dirty against the thick dark soil. There are only fragments of cloth left after so long, NYPD blue and soft with age. Next to him, Stella leans down and picks up the old service pistol with a plastic glove held between two fingers.
“Mac,” she calls, and he comes over to take it from her, eject the clip and check the bullets.
“One’s missing,” he says and crouches down next to Danny, runs a hand through the dirt in the hollow where the skull was lying a minute or so ago. He comes up with a bullet, flatted out where it struck. It might be blood that’s stained across the metal, or just old dirt.
“Entry wound,” Danny says, and tilts the skull toward him so he can see. “Hard to tell with just a skeleton, but I’d say – this is what killed him.”
Mac nods, sweeps another hand through the dirt. It runs through his fingers, turns up a button, a scrap of leather. “Thanks for coming out, Doctor,” he says. “You can take him in now.”
Danny stands up, still holding the skull in his hands, and looks up: at the stark, uncompromising sky, the city lights, the skyscrapers in the background, behind the line of trees in Central Park. He looks down again quickly. “Nice to get out of the morgue,” he says, trying to ignore the edge of paranoia biting at the back of his neck. He is proud to note that his hands only shake slightly, barely noticeable unless someone is looking closely. He doesn’t think Mac is.
-
-
The badge number – the first thing to turn up, where a couple kids playing in the park followed the dull gleam of silver to a badge half-buried beneath a rowan tree – matches to an officer gone missing years ago. The ID number on the gun turns up the same officer. The crime lab is just waiting on Danny to finish the facial reconstruction – something he could turn over to a CSI, he supposes, but for some reason he wants to do this himself.
“Here,” he says, standing in front of a wall of oversized computer screens with an NYPD laptop balanced crookedly on top of a lab table. “It’s a perfect match.”
The skeleton’s real face is young and handsome, brilliant blue eyes that shine even through the pixels of the screen and seven years of secrets and dirt and pain, messy dark hair nearly hidden beneath his uniform hat. Something in Danny’s chest beats when he sees him; there’s a burn at the back of his skull he remembers from the sound of a panic room’s door slamming shut on him. He looks down at the keyboard beneath his hands, fingers stuttering just above the keys. His eyes hurt; he’s been looking at a computer screen too long.
Stella sighs tiredly and palms her hair. “I’ll call the family,” she says. “And the partner.”
“The partner?” Mac questions, eyes narrowing. “Are you sure you want to do that?”
Stella gives him a long look, the kind that Danny has learned means, I am a real cop and you are not. “I’m going to have to interview him anyway,” is all she says, though.
-
-
Danny is doing paperwork in his office, listening to Evan sweet-talk Aiden and Lindsay through the autopsy of stab victim from Ozone Park, when someone knocks on the door. It’s the officer Stella assigned to the morgue, ostensibly as an honor guard for the dead NYPD officer whose bones are covered with a cloth a few feet away.
“Dr. Messer?” he says. “There’s someone here about –” He hesitates. The crime lab haven’t publicly released the name of the bones yet.
“Yes, yes, of course,” Danny says distractedly, standing up, pushing his papers aside. He drops his pen on his desk, picks it up again, drops it. He can’t think of a reason he’d need it.
There’s a police officer in the lobby, still in his uniform, pistol on his belt and badge clipped to his chest. He looks up as Danny pauses in the doorway and says seriously, “Dr. Messer? I’m Gavin Moran. I’m – I was – Donny Flack’s partner. I want to see him.”
“There’s not much to see,” Danny demurs, but he leads Moran back into the depths of the lab anyway and lets him look at the bones of his partner through glass, close enough to touch but forever beyond it.
Moran looks at the bones for a long time: the skull, the femur, the rib cage, the broad curve of the scapula. It’s all there, a full skeleton. “You’re sure?” he says finally, the words heavy on his tongue.
“Positive,” Danny says, almost apologetic, but Moran is a cop, he’ll want the truth.
He sighs. It’s a dark, heavy sound, and it seems to fill the room. “Do you have his badge?” he asks.
“What?” Danny says, startled, and then he processes the request and says, “Yeah, it’s at the crime lab, in evidence.”
Moran frowns slightly, then says firmly, “Good.”
-
-
A week later, Mac meets Danny in the morgue over the body of a girl who was sixteen, pregnant, and strangled. Danny draws the cloth back over her face. “What happened with the Flack case?” he asks, as casually as he can. He hears next to nothing from the lab, unless Mac or one of the other CSIs – Lindsay, Aiden, Hawkes, Adam – needs something from him. They haven’t, not in the past week, so he knows nothing about how the case has ended. He still has the bones, though, hasn’t released them to the family or the lab because no one’s asked.
Mac frowns. “We’re shelving the case,” he says. “We’re keeping it open at the family’s request as a courtesy, but we’re fairly certain it was a suicide.”
“What?” Danny says blankly. “With the angle of the bullet, no way that’s a suicide, it’s not possible unless the bullet did a couple of cartwheels in the air.”
Mac’s frown deepens. “All the evidence points toward a suicide,” he says. “Officer Flack was depressed for some time before his disappearance and he was shot by his own weapon. He had no enemies.”
“That’s not right,” Danny says firmly and Mac shrugs, takes the Petri dish with the gravel Danny pulled out of the vic’s hair.
“Thanks for your time, Dr. Messer.”
-
-
Danny does not expect to see Gavin Moran again. However, he still shows up; he’s in the lobby when Danny walks in from a five minute coffee run, cradling Starbucks in his hands for him and his people, still surprised that he was able to manage it.
“Sergeant Moran, hi,” he says, startled, handing the tray off to Evan as the other pathologist descends on him. He snags his own mocha at the last minute, juggling it from hand to hand as warmth spreads through the cardboard and wax paper. “Can I help you with something?”
“Detective Bonasera called me this morning to tell me the crime lab is shelving the case,” Moran says, turning toward him. “I wondered if you knew anything about that.”
“I do, yeah,” Danny says warily. “Mac – Detective Taylor – says they’re labeling it a suicide, but leaving it open on the family’s request.”
Moran’s eyes burn. “Donny never woulda killed himself.”
“The angle of entry is wrong,” Danny says, knowing that he’s probably getting himself into something that he shouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. The fact is that the facts are wrong, though. “There’s no way Officer Flack could have shot himself in the head. Unless he could dislocate his wrist on command,” he adds fairly.
Moran raises his eyebrows. “You seem very certain,” he says neutrally.
“I’m a trained pathologist,” Danny says, “not an idiot.”
-
-
When he goes into the Kaminski autopsy, there’s something that strikes him as wrong bugging him all through it. Not about Kaminski, but about Flack – something that he doesn’t know yet but his subconscious does, something that no one else has figured out either. He’s wrist deep in Kaminski’s guts when he thinks he realizes what it is.
“Here, Sid, take this,” he says, reaching out and snagging Hammerback’s sleeve with bloody hands. “It’s Aiden’s case. I gotta go.”
Hammerback blinks at him. “Danny –”
“My notes are there. Bye!”
He strips off his gloves as he walks – not runs, not quite – drops them in a biological waste bin, drops his apron in after them, goes to his office and picks up his phone as he digs around his desk for the scrap of paper where he wrote Moran’s number down.
“Sergeant,” he says as soon as Moran picks up, groggy with sleep – it’s the night shift for him; he still can’t stand – it’s the night shift, “Officer Flack. What was he doing in Central Park that night?”
There’s a pause, as if Moran is thinking. “Talking to a potential informant,” he says finally. “She’s not a suspect. She had a client that night. We tracked them both down. She’s dead now.”
“What was Flack supposed to be talking to her about?”
“Potential drug bust,” Moran says immediately. “It never went down because our informant bailed after she heard about Donny.”
Something isn’t right. Danny thinks, although he has never been good at reading people, that there is a small frown in Moran’s voice, something that’s telling the sergeant that this is an unnatural and macabre interest even for an NYPD pathologist who had to leave the police academy in his second week because of a wannabe mobster and his stupid but effective threats.
“Dr. Messer,” Moran adds finally, “I’ve already gone over this with Detective Bonasera.”
Danny winces. “Yeah,” he says, “I know. I just – there’s something. I can’t put my finger on it.”
-
-
The next day he ducks Sid’s annoyed questions and takes a walk down to the crime lab, sticking close to the walls, head down, until he reaches the building, where he takes the stairs down to the basement and digs through piles of cold case boxes until he finds the one labeled Flack, Donald. He sits down on the floor right then and there, spreading out the materials around him, and reads through old and new lab reports, witness interviews, picks up pieces of bagged evidence and turns them over in his hands, frowning at them through the plastic. There’s something here, he can feel it. He just doesn’t know what it is, not yet.
“What are you doing, doc?”
He didn’t hear her coming. He never hears her coming. Danny looks up and offers what he hopes is a sheepish grin. “Hi, Detective.”
Aiden turns her head sideways so she can read the files upside down. “I thought Mac and Hawkes shelved the Flack case last week,” she says.
“Yeah,” Danny says. “There’s just – I think he missed something.”
Aiden squats down next to him, black hair falling over her shoulder. “What?”
“I don’t know,” he admits. “I just – I got a vibe. I can’t figure out what it is.”
“Let me see,” Aiden says, sprawling her legs out amid the mess of papers, looking at the puzzle with real pleasure in her eyes. Danny likes her. She’s a good detective, a smart CSI, and she never brings up the tattoo on his shoulder, the one Lindsay outed to everyone during the Sassone case.
Twenty minutes later, she says, “Huh,” curiously, puts the file she’s reading down, and snags the witness interviews out of Danny’s hands. She flips through those, says, “Huh,” again and gets up, casually scattering pieces of paper all over the floor and Danny’s lap.
“What’s ‘huh’ mean?” Danny asks, pushing his glasses back up his nose.
“I’ll get back to you on that,” Aiden says distractedly, walking down the line of shelves, frowning at the boxes. Danny looks down quickly.
He likes the dark of the cold case room the same way he likes the morgue, the way the walls close in on him and he can hear the room breathe – the loneliness. The isolation. It’s not that he doesn’t like his fellow pathologists, but there’s a reason he works the night shift.
“Here,” Aiden says, dropping a box down in front of him. Danny jumps.
She gives him a worried look, but shrugs it off and continues, “I was on the cold case squad for about a year before I joined the crime lab. There was a case I worked, went down maybe ten years ago, with a similar MO. The homicide cops that originally worked the case figured out it wasn’t a suicide because the cop that died kept a golden bullet in his bedroom drawer – you know, the mail order kind.”
Danny grew up in Staten Island, in a family that tried to carefully stay back from the line but ended up hovering over nine times out of ten anyway, where one parent was NYPD and the other was Mafioso, and somehow they made it work. He knows what Aiden is trying to say.
“So,” he says, trying out the word in his mouth. “You think?”
“I think I should go talk to the partner,” Aiden says. “You wanna come?”
For a moment, Danny considers it. He really does. And then he thinks what that implies and can’t breathe for a moment, the panic rising up inside him like a bad chemistry experiment, and finally manages to choke out, “No. I’ll just –” He waves a hand at the mess of boxes and files surrounding him.
Aiden regards him solemnly, and then nods once and leaves.
-
-
Eventually Danny cleans up the mess and goes back to the morgue, where he presides over a bunch of severed limbs that don’t really count as a corpse and does his best to ignore Lindsay’s unreasonable glares, because Sid is busy with the corpse that Danny turned over to him yesterday and it’s Evan’s day off. Just like yesterday, though, there’s something ticking at the back of his brain, something that twigged the last time he talked to Moran and something that he read today, in the other dead cop’s file, but he still can’t figure out the connection. It’s there. He knows it is. He just doesn’t know what the hell it is and it’s driving him crazy.
Sometime around three in the morning, he can’t make himself step out of his morgue to go back to his crappy apartment. He ends up sleeping on the couch in his office, showers quickly in the locker room before the day shift can really start trickling in, and is well on his way to mainlining coffee by the time Aiden wanders in.
“Here’s the thing,” she says, leaning over his desk and shoving back the jean jacket she’s wearing over her shoulder holster – apparently a fashion decision, since most detectives Danny knows wear their guns on their hips, just like Aiden usually does. “I’m still not sure what the connection is aside that Flack and Hodgins both worked in the Bronx. They both did a couple drug busts, but everyone does that, I don’t think –”
“That’s it,” Danny says, and nearly knocks over his coffee cup going for the files he’d photocopies yesterday. Aiden rescues the coffee.
“Here,” he says, spreading the files out in front of her. “This guy, McGraw.”
“The narco dick?” Aiden says skeptically, cradling his mug between her palms. “Why?”
“Look, the investigating detectives interviewed him after Flack disappeared, right?” Danny says eagerly, really getting into it now. “He worked with Flack and Moran for a while when they were doing drug busts. Then Hodgins – they were on the same narco team. There’s no other connection, this has to be it.”
Aiden cocks her head to one side, considering. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. Hey, I’ll be back later, okay, doc?”
For a moment Danny almost asks to go with her, and then he remembers that he’s a pathologist, that he’s not a cop and he gave that up years ago – not willingly, true, but he gave it up nonetheless, and now the closest he can get is cleaning up after the mess, trying to help with what he can, his scalpel and his bonesaw and everything he can’t do. He nods.
-
-
Three days later Stella Bonasera comes in to get Lindsay, who’s regarding Sid with more warmth than she’s offered Danny in months. “Your cell’s off,” she tells Lindsay. “Hawkes needs you in the lab.”
When Lindsay’s gone, Stella puts one hand on the doorframe of Danny’s office and leans inside, says, “So I hear it’s you we have to thank for clearing Flack.”
Danny turns around. “Yes?” he says dubiously and Stella smiles slightly. He doesn’t know her like he knows Aiden or thought he knew Lindsay; she’s homicide, and they’re not around the morgue nearly as often as the CSIs are.
“Detective McGraw was arrested yesterday,” she says, with the sour twist to her mouth that comes from taking down another cop. It disappears quickly. “Two murders that we know of. Dirty cop,” she shrugs. “He killed them because he didn’t want anyone to find out, and he almost got away with it.” For a moment her eyes are distant and angry, and then she looks at Danny with something real in her expression.
“Thanks, doc.”
“My pleasure,” Danny says, mouth suddenly dry, and there’s something odd and sad and quiet that slots into place in the back of his brain. Something missing, something still incomplete. Something where the last few pieces will always be missing. “Anytime.”
end
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-12 06:43 pm (UTC)I love how this universe is almost canon, canon tilted and shifted a few degrees off center. The details are marvellous - Stella as a homicide detective, Aiden being the one who helps Danny figure out what's bothering him about the case. I love this version of Danny, too - an ME because it's the closest he can get to what he originally wanted.
If you'll pardon my nitpicking (I can't turn off the proofreader in my head), there seems to be something odd about the pronouns in this sentence: He doesn’t know he knows Aiden or thought he knew Lindsay; she’s homicide, and they’re not around the morgue nearly as often as the CSIs are. Typo?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-13 01:13 am (UTC)Gyah! Yes, that is a typo. It should be: He doesn't know Stella like he knows Aiden... *goes off to fix*
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-15 12:32 am (UTC)The fact that you killed Flack makes me weep, but that's beside the point. :)
I absolutely adore your Danny, the tentative movements, the fear, the paranoia, but also the strength that's in there, and the ability to do what he has to do, and to go against what he's been told because he knows what's the right thing to do. And the idea of him as a pathologist... I really like that. I'm trying to figure out where you diverge from canon, though, with him, because you mention the panic room, but I assume he was there in the capacity of a pathologist, and not as a CSI?
Lindsay sucks. Aiden rocks. No more words need be said. She’s a good detective, a smart CSI, and she never brings up the tattoo on his shoulder, the one Lindsay outed to everyone during the Sassone case. Arg, that line really got me, because it's not something I can see canon-Lindsay doing to canon-Danny, but I think I could see her doing it in this 'verse.
I'm curious to know where the canon branches off into this fic, though? Why is Danny like this, surrounding himself with loneliness because of fear?
Anyways, yeah. This was really well done, and the character of Danny here is just so perfect, the alternate what-if version of Danny that I think is totally a realistic possibility.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-15 01:09 am (UTC)Okay. This Danny diverges from canon long before the canon; I kind of took some canon events and reshuffled them around in the frame of his life: the panic room incident happened when he was in the police academy, Lindsay came to NYC much earlier -- conversely, the first Sassone case ("Tanglewood"), happened much later, while she and Danny were dating. It also uses some Bardverse fanon -- Danny's family, his association with Tanglewood -- rather than show canon, just because I think it worked better here.
Up until he entered the police academy, this Danny is basically my usual Danny -- a little milder than the Bardverse version, but with some of the same events in his past -- and, for some reason, there was the Panic Room Incident, which was totally Sonny Sassone's fault and bears no resemblance to the canon episode (although, I may, sometime in the future, write the story in this 'verse where Danny does get in the canon ep. Er, without the canon -- you know what I mean). Details have not yet been worked out, but it was a bad joke that went wrong. As a result, Danny's nerves were totally killed, and he had to drop out of the police academy, but he still wanted to do the law enforcement thing, so he went to med school and became an ME. Eventually became head of the department -- he's basically in Hawkes' position in S1, except with...okay, for some reason he's agoraphobic, but he's definitely not claustrophobic. And he dated Lindsay and then this 'verse's version of "Tanglewood" happened and...yeah, problems.
I'm glad it works! I think I might want to rewrite this sometime, because I didn't exactly accomplish what I set out to do -- I'm really not satisfied by the way I tied up the case, but maybe sometime. *shrugs* It was supposed to be -- yeah, I didn't establish the connection between Danny and Flack I wanted to (and the vague supernatural stuff came, um, out of nowhere). For some reason, however, I am really struck by the mental image of Danny as ME. (I will admit. I forgot what the hell they call pathologists on the show. *facepalm*)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-15 01:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-15 01:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-15 04:39 am (UTC)I really like this Danny, but I've said that before. Sorry, I'm not much more coherent then that at the moment... CSI:NY tonight KILLED ME DEAD.
There are just so many little moments in the fic, where Danny shows just how vulnerable he is, and at the same time just how strong he is, too, like the opening scene where he's emerged from his lab to go out into the city, and the strength that must have taken.
I sort of thought there was something between Danny and Flack, the mentions of the heat in Danny's head, and the fact that he wanted to do the facial reconstruction himself, not pass it off to CSI. I didn't see the supernatural bits, though?
I LOVE the idea of Danny as an ME, partially because it means you get to see the geeky-genius side of him that only rarely emerges in the show, as opposed to the street smart (but still geeky) attitude he always has.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-20 03:53 am (UTC)...and, and, I totally forgot what I meant to do with this story, because now I want to write Danny as, like, secret forces super soldier guy. There has to be a good balance between writing geek Danny and super Danny. *facepalm*
BUT. Yeah, I kind of went with the "destiny averted" thing, which I don't usually like to do in fic (or see, for that matter -- actually, as a side note, it shows up more often in Star Wars fic than in any other fandom, which is really quite interesting), but seemed kind of interesting to do in this one, where Danny is vaguely aware that something's gone wrong -- something that was meant to happen: his being a cop, or working with Flack, or...yeah, it doesn't really work in this fandom or in this story.
Danny would make a great ME.