Snafu 10 and Val Constantine
Apr. 26th, 2005 05:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbard*grimace* I'm not entirely satisfied with Mac or Stella in this, and I think I got overly informative again at the end - and I know DNA fingerprinting takes a week or so, but the shows speed it up, so I'm doing so too. As for the tape - well, who needs reality anyway?
“Danny, come in here. I want a word.”
Danny flashed Aiden a terrified look. She shrugged in sympathy, then headed off in the direction of the DNA lab.
“Yeah, Mac?” he said after Mac had shut the door of his office behind him. The sound the door made as it clicked softly shut was too much like a cell door closing, and he shuddered softly.
“How’s the case going?” Mac asked, settling back behind his desk.
“The case? Oh, it’s – it’s great.” He made a face, knowing he was going to end up talking and talking and maybe if he talked long enough, Mac would get bored and tell him to leave before he got to the hard stuff. “Aiden found a body in the cupboard, which, y’know, makes me pretty sure Flack’s gonna wanna go apartment shpping sometime soon because, well, dismembered bodies – y’know how that goes.”
“ID?”
“Kid’s got a Tanglewood tat. Aiden went off to get some samples to DNA and then run his prints.” Danny shifted nervously from foot to foot, his eyes on Mac’s face. “And I, uh, got a call from Curly Sassone on my cell. Well, actually it was from Flack’s phone, but it was Curly made the call, so –”
“You’re babbling, Danny,” Mac said dryly. “Who’s Curly Sassone?”
“Curly? He’s a well, he’s a Tanglewood Boy –” And some part of Danny’s brain screamed at him stop! Stop now! because he was venturing into forbidden territory, that part of his life that he Did Not Talk About. “You arrested his brother a couple months ago, y’know, Sonny –” And he stopped, because this was Forbidden Territoy. Cui ci sono dei mostri. Here be monsters.
“Tanglewood,” Mac said flatly.
Danny looked out at the lobby of the lab, then at Mac, then up at the catwalks beofre looking back at Mac. He laced his fingers nervously behind his back, then unlaced them and twisted them in his sleeves. “Yeah,” he said after a long pause in which the chatter of the lab seeped into the office. “Tanglewood.”
“You know the Sassones from Tanglewood, Danny?”
He swallowed, speechless for once. It was a stretch even to get the single syllable of, “Yeah,” out.
“What about Vincent Patriso? Phillip DiCarlo?”
Danny nodded shortly.
Mac leaned back in his chair, bracing his chin against one hand. “Nice friends you have.”
“Had,” Danny croaked, surprised he got the word out. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Had. I been out for over a decade.” Twelve, almost thirteen years to be exact, but he really didn’t want to think of that. “Until yesterday I hadn’t talked to Phil and Curly in years.” His jaw and his back ached at the memory. They hadn’t been talking, they’d –
– Phil slams him facefirst into a wall and Curly’s voice is a hot slather of syllables in his ear. “Fuck you, Messer. We’ll show you what happens to goddamn traitors –”
And Danny can’t say anything even if he could think of anything to say because Curly broke his jaw when he hit him earlier. Shattered it, more like – Danny can feel bonechips grate as Phil shoves his face against the wall. A wet hiss makes him freeze, then he squirms frantically, catching the bright glow of heated metal out of the corner of his eye.
“You don’t deserve that pretty tattoo we gave you,” Curly snarls, and Phil pushes him more securely against the wall.
firepainburnpainpainPAIN
Danny screams through his broken jaw –
Mac was saying something, but Danny couldn’t hear him. Instead, the sick hiss of flame-heated metal on his skin hummed in his ears like a bumblebee on crack.
*
Stella saw disaster coming long before she stepped from the fingerprint lab to the lobby. She’d seen it yesterday, when Mac did the next thing to tearing Danny’s shirt off – although at least he’d had the grace to do it when only the team was watching, not out in front of the house for the world and uniforms and the precinct detectives to see. She’d seen it last night, when the court records from the Patriso case popped up on her computer screen and the words Daniel Messer and unreliable witness were put together in the same sentence. She’d seen it before that, in Mac’s silence and sudden flares of anger, in You should be the one put to death and the way he’d looked at Claire’s funeral (not that there was a body, just an empty coffin).
But when she stepped out into the lobby, she thought she could stop Mac before he went Too Far and did something bad like throw Danny out through the wall of his office, because really, that isn’t going to look good on his record, and the thought made her chuckle deep in the back of her throat.
“Hey, Mac,” she said, throwing the office door open with more force than was probably necessary. “Danny,” she added, nodding to him. He looked at her with sick relief in his eyes. “Look, DNA and fingerprints came back from the Patriso house.” She shoved the folders across the table at him. “Oh, and the court records from the Patriso trial are in there too, somewhere.” Not that she wanted Mac looking through those, but hey, she can only delay things so long and if she doesn’t have ‘em when he asks, well, her ass is going to be in a sling.
Danny, next to her, went abruptly still. Panic danced across his eyes, sheer terror, and Stella resisted the urge to throw him out him out of the office himself, because she was pretty sure that wasn’t going to help much either. “Hey, Danny,” she added. “I think Aiden wanted to talk to you, something about some bullets you recovered from the crime scene?”
“What?” he said faintly.
“Aiden,” she sounded out for him. “Bullets. Crime scene. Ballistics lab? There’s some words of more than one syllable in there, you think you can handle it?”
“Yeah. I mean…yeah, Stella, thanks for letting me know, I’ll leave you guys alone to go over your case.” He fled, with as much grace as he could.
“I was attempting to have a conversation,” Mac said, looking put out.
“Yeah? Didn’t look like that to me. I’ve seen suspects look like that in the interrogation room, right before they break down and tell you the story of their life. Break down, not throw it in your face.” She scowled at him. “I know you didn’t notice, but Danny was scared out of his goddamn mind. When we’ve got five bodies, two of ‘em detectives, and another missing cop, we need every CSI we’ve got.”
Mac looked – well, gleeful wasn’t the way Stella would describe the look on his face, but it had something of that. He held up a tape. “This is the conversation Danny had with Curly Sassone when Sassone called him on his cell from Flack’s phone.”
“I’m sure that conversation went well.”
“I haven’t listened to it yet.”
Stella raised her eyebrows. “Wow. That is a surprise. Before we get into cross-examining one of your detectives – your detective, not Homicide’s or the precinct’s – do you mind looking at the results I had Jane working overtime for? Let’s look at the bodies for a moment.” She flipped a folder open at random. “Epithelials recovered from Vincent Patriso’s skin – Curly Sassone. Fuck, the guy was right there at the scene, we could’ve hauled him in then if we were fucking thinking.” Scowling, she flipped another folder. “Epithelials recovered from the wire that killed our Jane Doe – Vincent Patriso. Also matches semen recovered from the body.”
“He raped and murdered her,” Mac said slowly. He laid the tape down on his desk.
Stella glanced up. “It gets better. Fingerprints from her? Came back Kristen O’Malley. Andrew O’Malley’s widow, the cop Patriso murdered.”
Mac scowled. “Why now, twelve years later? Why not right after he got out of jail?”
She shrugged. “Damned if I know, and Patriso’s not talking. Okay, get this – Missing Persons finally came through and the woman Jarensky and Crehan were trying to find?”
“Kristen O’Malley.”
“Congratulations, you win a blue ribbon and a washing machine,” Stella said dryly. “Hole in one. Epithelials on Crehan’s badge? Came back Vincent Patriso. Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got ourselves a cop-killer.”
“Who’s already dead,” Mac pointed out. “Stella – we need to find Curly Sassone. If he killed Patriso and kidnapped Flack –”
Stella held up a hand. “Wait – I’m not done yet. Fingerprints from the house came back Vincent Patriso – understandable, since the guy was living there – Curly Sassone, Phillip DiCarlo, some kid named Darrel Manero, and some partials we couldn’t match. DNA from the blood in the house matches Lynda Jarensky, David Crehan, Kristen O’Malley, and Darrel Manero. Fingerprints from the hand in the bathroom match Darrel Manero, so we’re lookin’ for some kid missing a right hand. We’ll remember at this point that the dismembered body Aiden found in Flack’s apartment only had a left hand.” She glanced over at Mac. “I’m also gonna note that your ‘everything is connected’ thing is starting to look more and more convincing.”
Mac shook his head slowly. “This doesn’t make sense. Why would Vincent Patriso kidnap Kristen O’Malley and kill her, then kill the detectives who showed up looking for her? Why would his friend Curly Sassone kill him, or cut off Darrel Manero’s hand? Why would Sassone and DiCarlo go to the trouble of kidnapping Flack?”
“Why would they point us at Danny?” Stella asked. “I mean, you’ve got to admit that they practically threw him at us.”
“Bait,” Mac said. He looked like the concept wasn’t quite getting through.
Stella glared at him. “And you took it without looking twice.”
I've briefly mentioned that Danny's mother was a Constantine (think Mafia family here; don't worry, all Shall Be Explained), and since her little brother Val (don't call him Valentine) is one of my favorite OCs, I thought I'd give you guys a look. Sort of rambly, just Danny's impression of Val and his friends.
At fifteen, Danny is the youngest of the Messer clan, the only one still in school, and the only to share more than a passing interest in his mother's side of the family.
Val Constantine is Angela Messer's younger brother, a lean whiplash of a man with dark blond hair and sparkling green eyes. Danny watches him with barely concealed curiousity each time he visits. In winter he brings houthouse flowers that are bright swatches of color against the grimy city snow. In summer, when the days are longer and lit by deep pools of sunlight, he comes more rarely, and when he does, he is always accompanies by one of his friends.
Benny Sforza is a second cousin - or maybe a third. He's a small man but stocky in a bulldog sort of way, with curly black hair and a charming grin. Carmine d'Alessandro is a slender redhead who uses his hands to gesticulate vividly when he speaks. Ace Mercutio is quick-tongued and sarcastic, with only one eye covered by an eyepatch and a startling shock of snow white hair.
Angela argues with Val in short snatches of conversation Danny can barely hear. What he does hear is angry and violent, and once Angela slaps Val across the face. Carmine, across the room with Benny and Ace, stands up and takes several quick steps forward before Val waves him back. Once, Val came to their door with his arm in a sling, asking almost apologetically if Angela, a registered nurse and one-time EMT, can watch Benny while he, Carmine, and Ace go out. Angela only agrees reluctantly, and lets neither Danny or his brothers near the guest room where Benny is sleeping.
“Danny, come in here. I want a word.”
Danny flashed Aiden a terrified look. She shrugged in sympathy, then headed off in the direction of the DNA lab.
“Yeah, Mac?” he said after Mac had shut the door of his office behind him. The sound the door made as it clicked softly shut was too much like a cell door closing, and he shuddered softly.
“How’s the case going?” Mac asked, settling back behind his desk.
“The case? Oh, it’s – it’s great.” He made a face, knowing he was going to end up talking and talking and maybe if he talked long enough, Mac would get bored and tell him to leave before he got to the hard stuff. “Aiden found a body in the cupboard, which, y’know, makes me pretty sure Flack’s gonna wanna go apartment shpping sometime soon because, well, dismembered bodies – y’know how that goes.”
“ID?”
“Kid’s got a Tanglewood tat. Aiden went off to get some samples to DNA and then run his prints.” Danny shifted nervously from foot to foot, his eyes on Mac’s face. “And I, uh, got a call from Curly Sassone on my cell. Well, actually it was from Flack’s phone, but it was Curly made the call, so –”
“You’re babbling, Danny,” Mac said dryly. “Who’s Curly Sassone?”
“Curly? He’s a well, he’s a Tanglewood Boy –” And some part of Danny’s brain screamed at him stop! Stop now! because he was venturing into forbidden territory, that part of his life that he Did Not Talk About. “You arrested his brother a couple months ago, y’know, Sonny –” And he stopped, because this was Forbidden Territoy. Cui ci sono dei mostri. Here be monsters.
“Tanglewood,” Mac said flatly.
Danny looked out at the lobby of the lab, then at Mac, then up at the catwalks beofre looking back at Mac. He laced his fingers nervously behind his back, then unlaced them and twisted them in his sleeves. “Yeah,” he said after a long pause in which the chatter of the lab seeped into the office. “Tanglewood.”
“You know the Sassones from Tanglewood, Danny?”
He swallowed, speechless for once. It was a stretch even to get the single syllable of, “Yeah,” out.
“What about Vincent Patriso? Phillip DiCarlo?”
Danny nodded shortly.
Mac leaned back in his chair, bracing his chin against one hand. “Nice friends you have.”
“Had,” Danny croaked, surprised he got the word out. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Had. I been out for over a decade.” Twelve, almost thirteen years to be exact, but he really didn’t want to think of that. “Until yesterday I hadn’t talked to Phil and Curly in years.” His jaw and his back ached at the memory. They hadn’t been talking, they’d –
– Phil slams him facefirst into a wall and Curly’s voice is a hot slather of syllables in his ear. “Fuck you, Messer. We’ll show you what happens to goddamn traitors –”
And Danny can’t say anything even if he could think of anything to say because Curly broke his jaw when he hit him earlier. Shattered it, more like – Danny can feel bonechips grate as Phil shoves his face against the wall. A wet hiss makes him freeze, then he squirms frantically, catching the bright glow of heated metal out of the corner of his eye.
“You don’t deserve that pretty tattoo we gave you,” Curly snarls, and Phil pushes him more securely against the wall.
firepainburnpainpainPAIN
Danny screams through his broken jaw –
Mac was saying something, but Danny couldn’t hear him. Instead, the sick hiss of flame-heated metal on his skin hummed in his ears like a bumblebee on crack.
*
Stella saw disaster coming long before she stepped from the fingerprint lab to the lobby. She’d seen it yesterday, when Mac did the next thing to tearing Danny’s shirt off – although at least he’d had the grace to do it when only the team was watching, not out in front of the house for the world and uniforms and the precinct detectives to see. She’d seen it last night, when the court records from the Patriso case popped up on her computer screen and the words Daniel Messer and unreliable witness were put together in the same sentence. She’d seen it before that, in Mac’s silence and sudden flares of anger, in You should be the one put to death and the way he’d looked at Claire’s funeral (not that there was a body, just an empty coffin).
But when she stepped out into the lobby, she thought she could stop Mac before he went Too Far and did something bad like throw Danny out through the wall of his office, because really, that isn’t going to look good on his record, and the thought made her chuckle deep in the back of her throat.
“Hey, Mac,” she said, throwing the office door open with more force than was probably necessary. “Danny,” she added, nodding to him. He looked at her with sick relief in his eyes. “Look, DNA and fingerprints came back from the Patriso house.” She shoved the folders across the table at him. “Oh, and the court records from the Patriso trial are in there too, somewhere.” Not that she wanted Mac looking through those, but hey, she can only delay things so long and if she doesn’t have ‘em when he asks, well, her ass is going to be in a sling.
Danny, next to her, went abruptly still. Panic danced across his eyes, sheer terror, and Stella resisted the urge to throw him out him out of the office himself, because she was pretty sure that wasn’t going to help much either. “Hey, Danny,” she added. “I think Aiden wanted to talk to you, something about some bullets you recovered from the crime scene?”
“What?” he said faintly.
“Aiden,” she sounded out for him. “Bullets. Crime scene. Ballistics lab? There’s some words of more than one syllable in there, you think you can handle it?”
“Yeah. I mean…yeah, Stella, thanks for letting me know, I’ll leave you guys alone to go over your case.” He fled, with as much grace as he could.
“I was attempting to have a conversation,” Mac said, looking put out.
“Yeah? Didn’t look like that to me. I’ve seen suspects look like that in the interrogation room, right before they break down and tell you the story of their life. Break down, not throw it in your face.” She scowled at him. “I know you didn’t notice, but Danny was scared out of his goddamn mind. When we’ve got five bodies, two of ‘em detectives, and another missing cop, we need every CSI we’ve got.”
Mac looked – well, gleeful wasn’t the way Stella would describe the look on his face, but it had something of that. He held up a tape. “This is the conversation Danny had with Curly Sassone when Sassone called him on his cell from Flack’s phone.”
“I’m sure that conversation went well.”
“I haven’t listened to it yet.”
Stella raised her eyebrows. “Wow. That is a surprise. Before we get into cross-examining one of your detectives – your detective, not Homicide’s or the precinct’s – do you mind looking at the results I had Jane working overtime for? Let’s look at the bodies for a moment.” She flipped a folder open at random. “Epithelials recovered from Vincent Patriso’s skin – Curly Sassone. Fuck, the guy was right there at the scene, we could’ve hauled him in then if we were fucking thinking.” Scowling, she flipped another folder. “Epithelials recovered from the wire that killed our Jane Doe – Vincent Patriso. Also matches semen recovered from the body.”
“He raped and murdered her,” Mac said slowly. He laid the tape down on his desk.
Stella glanced up. “It gets better. Fingerprints from her? Came back Kristen O’Malley. Andrew O’Malley’s widow, the cop Patriso murdered.”
Mac scowled. “Why now, twelve years later? Why not right after he got out of jail?”
She shrugged. “Damned if I know, and Patriso’s not talking. Okay, get this – Missing Persons finally came through and the woman Jarensky and Crehan were trying to find?”
“Kristen O’Malley.”
“Congratulations, you win a blue ribbon and a washing machine,” Stella said dryly. “Hole in one. Epithelials on Crehan’s badge? Came back Vincent Patriso. Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got ourselves a cop-killer.”
“Who’s already dead,” Mac pointed out. “Stella – we need to find Curly Sassone. If he killed Patriso and kidnapped Flack –”
Stella held up a hand. “Wait – I’m not done yet. Fingerprints from the house came back Vincent Patriso – understandable, since the guy was living there – Curly Sassone, Phillip DiCarlo, some kid named Darrel Manero, and some partials we couldn’t match. DNA from the blood in the house matches Lynda Jarensky, David Crehan, Kristen O’Malley, and Darrel Manero. Fingerprints from the hand in the bathroom match Darrel Manero, so we’re lookin’ for some kid missing a right hand. We’ll remember at this point that the dismembered body Aiden found in Flack’s apartment only had a left hand.” She glanced over at Mac. “I’m also gonna note that your ‘everything is connected’ thing is starting to look more and more convincing.”
Mac shook his head slowly. “This doesn’t make sense. Why would Vincent Patriso kidnap Kristen O’Malley and kill her, then kill the detectives who showed up looking for her? Why would his friend Curly Sassone kill him, or cut off Darrel Manero’s hand? Why would Sassone and DiCarlo go to the trouble of kidnapping Flack?”
“Why would they point us at Danny?” Stella asked. “I mean, you’ve got to admit that they practically threw him at us.”
“Bait,” Mac said. He looked like the concept wasn’t quite getting through.
Stella glared at him. “And you took it without looking twice.”
I've briefly mentioned that Danny's mother was a Constantine (think Mafia family here; don't worry, all Shall Be Explained), and since her little brother Val (don't call him Valentine) is one of my favorite OCs, I thought I'd give you guys a look. Sort of rambly, just Danny's impression of Val and his friends.
At fifteen, Danny is the youngest of the Messer clan, the only one still in school, and the only to share more than a passing interest in his mother's side of the family.
Val Constantine is Angela Messer's younger brother, a lean whiplash of a man with dark blond hair and sparkling green eyes. Danny watches him with barely concealed curiousity each time he visits. In winter he brings houthouse flowers that are bright swatches of color against the grimy city snow. In summer, when the days are longer and lit by deep pools of sunlight, he comes more rarely, and when he does, he is always accompanies by one of his friends.
Benny Sforza is a second cousin - or maybe a third. He's a small man but stocky in a bulldog sort of way, with curly black hair and a charming grin. Carmine d'Alessandro is a slender redhead who uses his hands to gesticulate vividly when he speaks. Ace Mercutio is quick-tongued and sarcastic, with only one eye covered by an eyepatch and a startling shock of snow white hair.
Angela argues with Val in short snatches of conversation Danny can barely hear. What he does hear is angry and violent, and once Angela slaps Val across the face. Carmine, across the room with Benny and Ace, stands up and takes several quick steps forward before Val waves him back. Once, Val came to their door with his arm in a sling, asking almost apologetically if Angela, a registered nurse and one-time EMT, can watch Benny while he, Carmine, and Ace go out. Angela only agrees reluctantly, and lets neither Danny or his brothers near the guest room where Benny is sleeping.