For prodigalmess

[thatsfascinating]

Edrisa has always loved the fascinating cases, the ones that crackle with mystery, the puzzles that invite the team to match waits with a killer before he or she strikes again! They got even better when Malcolm Bright became part of the team, brought in for just such cases. And now that the two of them are together, it's the best! She loves working with him, delving into a case together, so in tune with one another.

The hardest part is trying to be discreet and professional. To be fair, she's never been good at that.

This crime scene, in a wooded area in Central Park, is a doozy. At a distance the body looks like a life-sized doll with curly blonde hair, a blue gingham dress, and patent leather shoes. Up close, though, it's a woman who has been strangled, exanguinated, and posed. The hair is a wig on a head that has been roughly shaved, and the eyes have been sewn open to display bright blue contacts.

It's a whole mess of weird. And Edrisa is on the scene examining the body and looking up periodically, hoping to see Malcolm. He's going to love this!

Comments

[prodigalmess]

Malcolm gives her three hours to finish the autopsy before he heads down to the morgue, surprised that she hasn't contacted him yet. Usually, she's upstairs as soon as she has any info, excited to share it. Maybe it took even longer than she thought it would.

He's surprised to find the morgue empty. Looking around, he finds the body of their victim in a cooler, still wearing the dress and wig. Malcolm doesn't have to take it off to know that there's no Y-incision underneath. Something feels wrong.

Pulling out his phone, he calls Edrisa. Her phone rings until it goes to voicemail. He leaves her a brief message, but something is off. Malcolm doesn't have a good feeling about this. He hurries back upstairs to see if for some reason she told Gil or any of the rest of the team where she was going.

[thatsfascinating]

It would have been a good thing for her to tell somebody where she was going, but she didn't even think of it. It was just going to be a quick trip out and a quick trip back. She would have been able to finish the autopsy in time to be done by the time Malcolm came down, and would have had a story about having messed up but made it right.

Instead, Edrisa regains a woozy consciousness in a dark room, where the only light is a lamp pointed at her, and discovers that she's tied to a pole, her hands behind the pole, a rope around her waist and a rope around her neck. Her ankles are tied, too, and a gag has been tied around her mouth. She pulls at the rope around her wrists, but it's unyielding. She begins to panic, her respiration rate rising, her heart pounding, and she struggles against the ropes to no avail. She finally stops as a wave of nausea washes over her, doubtless from the chloroform in her system, and she pants, closes her eyes, forces herself to calm down, to think.

Footsteps.

Her eyes snap open and she looks up at the man emerges from the darkness. He's tall and wiry, dressed in slacks, a button down shirt, and a vest. He looks at her with a strange flatness to his expression, and Edrisa realizes that he isn't seeing her. He's seeing an object.

He crouches by her legs and pulls a pair of scissors from his pocket, serious, hefty sewing scissors. He takes the hem of her pant leg in one hand and begins to cut upwards. Alarmed, Edrisa tries to twist away. The man stops, reaches into his pocket, pulls out a pin, and stabs her in the thigh with it. She screams in pain, the sound muffled by her gag. The man pulls the pin out, then goes back to cutting. Edrisa gets the hint, and closes her eyes, swallowing her sobs, as the man slices her clothes off piece by piece.

[prodigalmess]

When they eventually trace Edrisa's phone to the crime scene, Malcolm goes into panic mode. He knows without a doubt that their perp has her. Whether it was a crime of opportunity or he lured her back to the crime scene, Malcolm doesn't know. All he knows is that they need to work this case fast before he does the same thing to Edrisa that he did to the victim.

They're able to ID their victim as Abigail Helmick, and from there can look through her online records to find a man she planned to meet from the Internet: Zachary Swift. They get an address out in Staten Island.

Malcolm has been running on adrenaline this entire time and as much as Gil tries to keep slowing him down, it's not working. He insists that he's going in with the SWAT team when they storm Swift's house. Malcolm predicts that this guy is organized, intelligent, and possibly already two steps ahead of them. They need someone with his training if it turns into a hostage situation. Plus, he wants to be there if Edrisa is hurt.

He insists that it's fine and he's not too close to this. Gil knows that he is too close, but that there's also no stopping Malcolm. He just makes sure he puts on a bullet proof vest.

[thatsfascinating]

Edrisa's cold.

The warehouse is unheated. The floor beneath her is concrete. The pipe she's bound to is metal. She's naked and she's shivering.

And somewhere in another part of the warehouse she can hear the whirr of a sewing machine.

The man has been tightening the rope around her neck, bit by bit, and her breath is rasping in her throat. Other that that, he's mostly left her alone, save for once when he came to her with a cloth tape measure. She tried to squirm away from his hands, only to have him stab a pin in her other thigh. She watched a thin stream of blood trickle down her thigh as he measured her body, her shoulders, her bust, her waist, her hips. His hands traveled over her body, over her breasts and stroking her hips, but they were cold, impersonal, admiring her form without considering her as a person. Then he left her. Edrisa wept silently. She knew now that the woman he killed before probably had not been sexually assaulted in any way that Edrisa would have been able to ascertain from an examination, but also that what she would not have been able to see was equally traumatic.

She doesn't have any tears left, and she knows her oxygen saturation levels must be dropping, but her body temperature is dropping faster. She wonders if she would have noticed signs of hypothermia on the woman on her table. Or signs of prolonged hypoxia.

She wonders who will do her autopsy.

Then shakes her head a little. No. Malcolm will find her. He will. Of course he will.

[prodigalmess]

Malcolm is distraught when the search of the house reveals nothing. No Edrisa. He even checks for hidden passages in a fit of semi-madness that has Gil grabbing him by the shoulders and forcing him to take a break. He sits outside, head in his hands, thinking.

Going back in, he searches through drawers, trying to find documentation of some kind of secondary location - a storage unit, a second house, anything. Dani ends up finding paperwork related to a warehouse in Brooklyn, an unused building that used to be a family garment factory but has been closed for years. The team races out there.

SWAT sets up again. Malcolm closes his eyes, hoping against hope that they're going to find Edrisa inside.

There's movement in the warehouse as someone inside realizes that the cops are outside.

[thatsfascinating]

Edrisa has stopped shivering. She knows that's bad. She's tried to move, to warm herself up, to get her blood flowing, but the rope around her throat is too tight, her breathing too shallow, and she's too weak. She's drifting in and out of consciousness when the sound of the sewing machine stops suddenly and footsteps stride quickly across the warehouse. She opens her eyes, struggles to lifts her head. She hears sounds outside. Sounds she recognizes. She thinks she recognizes. She hopes she recognizes, and isn't imagining.

[prodigalmess]

There's a brief scuffle when Swift appears at the entrance to the warehouse with a gun. SWAT pulls back, wanting to protect their guys as this shifts into a hostage negotiation. Gil tries to talk Malcolm out of being the one to go in. He's way too close to his. He may be upset by the condition Edrisa is in. She may be dead. Malcolm knows he can turn all of it off and do his job, and Gil knows that wild horses couldn't hold him back anyway.

Malcolm approaches with his hands up, showing that he's unarmed. Swift takes him into the warehouse.

When he sees Edrisa, he almost breaks down. She's alive, but barely. Malcolm knows that he's not going to be able to convince him to untie her. He's got to get the upper hand.

[thatsfascinating]

Edrisa's vision is still fading in and out. She sees Malcolm...or she thinks she sees him. She can't be sure he's not a hallucination borne of hypothermia and hypoxia. It's what she wants the most at that very moment. To be rescued, sure, that would be great but...just seeing Malcolm, once more.

Swift is trembling with rage as he guides Malcolm in at gunpoint.

"If anybody tries to get in here, I will kill you," he spits out. "If you try any funny business, I will kill you." He points to the floor. "Get on your knees."

[prodigalmess]

Malcolm does as the other man asks, getting on his knees and keeping his hands where the other man can see them.

"The other body was a work of art," Malcolm says. "We all marveled at it."

He's trying his best not to look at Edrisa, because if he does, he might not be able to do this.

[thatsfascinating]

The man frowns. He didn't expect that. For a moment his expression eases, and he almost looks pleased. But then it darkens again, and he takes a step toward Malcolm, thrusting the gun in his face.

"What are you trying to do? Are you trying to distract me? I don't want any distractions! I just want to do my work! I have to make her perfect!"

Edrisa fights to keep her head up, to keep her eyes open, to watch what's going on. When Swift shoves the gun at Malcolm she makes a small, thin whimpering sound of fear for her lover.

[prodigalmess]

Malcolm hears her whimper, but he doesn't turn to face her. He doesn't want to betray anything that might make Swift think that he and Edrisa are anything more than a cop and a victim. Besides, he wants to keep his eye on the gun.

"Of course not. Your work is very important. I'd love to know more about it. You sew the dresses yourself?"

[thatsfascinating]

Swift pays no attention to Edrisa whatsoever. His expression again registers confusion as Malcolm seems to understand how important his work is, except this time when the look turns to pride it stays there.

"Yes. Entirely by myself. They have to be perfect. That's what she deserves."

Edrisa's strength wanes and her consciousness slips again, her eyes closing and head slumping.

[prodigalmess]

He bites his lip and swallows imperceptively when Edrisa's head slumps. Malcolm has to get her out of here. In his earpiece, he can hear Gil tell him that they're trying to see if they can get a sniper on their perp.

"Who is 'she', Zachary? The person you're doing this for."

[thatsfascinating]

A small, sad smile plays on the man's lips, and there's a look of wistful sorrow in his eyes. His hand holding the gun lowers slightly.

"Svetlana. She was beautiful. Perfect. When she danced, it was like magic."

[prodigalmess]

Malcolm shows him a sympathetic expression. His heart is pumping fast, but he's thriving on the adrenaline. He hopes he can get this man to surrender before snipers try to take him out.

"What happened to her?"

[thatsfascinating]

The man is trembling more now.

"She went away," he says thickly. "But she'll come back. If I make it perfect. It didn't work last time, it was wrong somehow, but this time it will be perfect."

[prodigalmess]

Malcolm nods as if he understands all that.

"But.. she doesn't look like Svetlana, does she?" he asks. Malcolm's running on the assumption that a woman named Svetlana doesn't look like a short Asian woman. "Maybe that's why it didn't work the first time either. Do you know where Svetlana went?"

He needs to figure out if she's dead or alive.

[thatsfascinating]

He shakes his head. "No, it doesn't matter. She's the right size. It's all about the make-up and the costumes. It transforms them." At the question of where Svetlana went he swallows. "Gone," he says with a slight shake of his head.

She's definitely dead.

[prodigalmess]

"Just like you felt when you watched Svetlana dance, right?" Malcolm asks. "Transformed. Zachary... I'm so sorry for your loss... but this won't bring her back. I want to help you. Will you let me help you?"

[thatsfascinating]

Edrisa can hear Malcolm's voice in her grey semi-consciousness, and she tries to focus on it as every other awareness is slipping into a darkness she isn't certain she will return from.

The man shakes his head again, sorrow and anger warring on his face. "How can you help? There's nothing you can do." Anger begins to win over, and he glares at Malcolm, raising the gun again. "You're just trying to distract me."

[prodigalmess]

"There's nothing either of us can do," Malcolm says, keeping his gaze on Zachary and not the gun. "But think about Svetlana. Is this what she would have wanted? For you to take lives because of her?"

Gil tells him that the sniper is in position. "You need more time," Malcolm says, trying to convey a message to Gil without tipping Zachary off. "You need more time to honor Svetlana and you know this can only end one of two ways."

They're surrounded by SWAT. The only way Zachary gets out of here alive is if he puts his gun down and surrenders. Malcolm isn't sure that he's in his right mind to make a rational decision though.

[thatsfascinating]

He's trembling again, his brain desperately trying to hold on to the reality he's built for himself, a reality where he can bring back the woman he loved and lost, where the woman he murdered, the woman he's in the process of murdering, are just background characters, not really people, just potential vessels, their lives worth less than Svetlana's life. He can't accept that nothing will bring her back. But the reality of his position gets through to him, and his eyes begin to tear up at the realization.

"I failed her," he whispers. "It's all over."

The hand holding the gun shakes as he begins to lift it to his own head.

[prodigalmess]

"You didn't fail her." Malcolm slowly starts to get to his feet. "There are a lot of things in life that are out of our control."

"Malcolm, you're in the line of fire," Gil tells him. "You need to move."

Not yet. He's almost there.

"The only thing we can control are our choices. Right now, you can make the choice to try to get some help, but you have to put the gun down first."

[thatsfascinating]

The man watches Malcolm get to his feet but doesn't move the gun from his own head. He listens to what he says, his eyes on Malcolm's, searching them, trying to find something in them, some strength, some truth, an answer, something. It's a long moment, his hand shaking, his finger right on the trigger, so close to death, while nearby Edrisa's life is seeping out of her as she begins to lose even her ability to concentrate on Malcolm's voice...

Then with a sob he lowers the gun and collapses to his knees.

[prodigalmess]

"Okay," Malcolm says. "It's okay."

He makes sure that Zachary lets go of the gun, then kicks it away. He helps the other man up. "We're coming out," he tells Gil through the earpiece. Putting his hand on Zachary's arm, he leads the way. As much as he wants to run to Edrisa, he knows he has to make sure that Zachary is secure before he can go to her.

As soon as they're outside, SWAT takes over and Zachary gets on the ground. "Edrisa needs an ambulance now!" he says before running back in to her. He crouches down next to her and cradles her face in his hands, tugging the rope away as he feels for a pulse.

"Edrisa... Edrisa!"