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 likes working with her too, of course. Her brilliance is one of the things that attracted him to her, and it's never more on display than when they've got a case to solve. For his part, he's able to mostly keep it professional at work, but he's always been more subdued than her.

He arrives with the rest of the team and gives Edrisa a smile before looking down at the body strangely arranged body. Now that's interesting.

"What've we got?" he asks.

[thatsfascinating]

She beams back at him. "Hello, Agent Bright!" She gestures at the body. "It appears that what we have here is the end product of about five day's worth of work! I mean, far be it from me to say that this guy took pride in his work...that's more of your department...but let's just say there's no surprise whatsoever he left this out in the open. I'm surprised he didn't leave it somewhere more visible, to be honest. I think I would, if I created this. I mean, if I was the sort of person who would kill people! Because I'm really not. But still, you gotta admire the artistry here!"

"Edrisa," Gil warns as JT rolls his eyes and Dani frowns. "What can you tell us about our victim?"

"Oh!" She points at him. "Yes. Unidentified female, probably in her 20s. Short, slight build. It's hard to see under all the white makeup...or, more accurately, greasepaint...but..." Edrisa lifts some of the curls away from the woman's neck to show a spot where the medical examiner had wiped away some of the greasepaint, revealing deep ligature marks beneath. "The amount of friction burn and embedded fibers suggest that she had a rope around her neck for an extended period of time before it was used to strangle her. When you take into consideration the matching ligature marks around her wrists and ankles, I'd say she was held captive for about three days before her death. Her head was shaved, likely pre-mortem, judging by all the cuts that were probably from her struggling. Post mortem, it appears she was completely exsanguinated before being coated in the white greasepaint and dressed like a doll. The eyes are stitched open with regular sewing thread. The clothes seem to be handmade. And there's a ring..." She lifted one of the hands to show Malcolm a very distinctive piece of costume jewelry, a cluster of flowers made from gold plate and purple glass jewels.

[prodigalmess]

It's kind of sweet that Edrisa still calls him 'Agent', considering that he hasn't worked for the FBI in nearly a year. He suppresses a smile when she goes on about the victim's body. They can talk about that later when they're alone.

Back to business. He listens to Edrisa's explanation before adding his thoughts. "It's obvious that we have a killer with a very specific fantasy. I don't think this was a personal attack. She was an unfortunate victim, possibly someone who fit a certain type for him, though I wonder about the wig. Is it a different color from her natural hair color?"

[thatsfascinating]

At this point "agent" is almost a term of endearment, while simultaneously signalling that they're in work mode. She catches that expression of Malcolm holding back a smile, and her own smile widens for a second before she turns her attention back to the matter at hand. She points at Malcolm when he asks the question. "No, it is not! Here..." She reaches over and slides the wig back, baring the roughly shaved head. There were small tufts that were clearly darker than blonde. "I'd say she was a brunette. Once I get the body back to the morgue I can pop those contacts out and have her eye color as well."

[prodigalmess]

"It's possible that he took this victim even if she didn't fit his fantasy because he had the opportunity, or the shaving of her head could be part of the ritual. I think it's still early to tell."

Malcolm crouches down, looking at the victim's face. "Any signs of sexual assault?"

[thatsfascinating]

"Not yet. I'll have to give her a more thorough examination when we get her back to the station, both to assess any trauma to the genitals and to see if there's any bruising elsewhere that's currently being hidden underneath greasepaint." She sits back to survey the whole body. "This is going to take a cubic buttload of cold cream..."

[prodigalmess]

Malcolm nods. "My guess is that this wasn't sexual. Well." He shrugs. "It is sexual, but the perp didn't assault her." He doesn't have to go into Psych 101 with this. Edrisa will know what he's talking about anyway.

He does smile at the words 'cubic buttload'. Dani raises an eyebrow. "Is that a scientific weight?" she asks.

[thatsfascinating]

Edrisa is definitely on the same page. It isn't her field of expertise, but she's been around this enough to guess that the victim had been turned into a fetish, in more than one definition of the term.

She looks up and smiles brightly. "Volume, actually!" she chirps. "In terms of wine, a butt is about 12o gallons. Considering your standard wine barrel holds about sixty gallons, a butt load translates to roughly two barrels."

[prodigalmess]

Dani just blinks at her and Malcolm suppresses a grin. "The more you know," he tells her.

Once the body is loaded into the van for transport, Malcolm approaches Edrisa after she's taken off her gloves. "I'll meet you back at the morgue and give you so time to examine the body before I come down to see you." He briefly clasps her hand, a show of affection that is probably still work safe.

[thatsfascinating]

She smiles and squeezes his hand. "I will see you there! In an hour and a half or so." She turns and looks at the van, then back at Malcolm. "Actually, with all that greasepaint, maybe make it two and a half. I can call you if I finish before then." She wants to kiss him so badly, and he can probably see that, but instead she squeezes his hand again and pulls away, heading to the van.

When Edrisa gets to the morgue, the body is already on her autopsy table. She exchanges her field jacket for a white coat, pulls on a pair of gloves, and grabs her tape recorder. She records the date and the time, then jumps in.

"Autopsy of Jane Doe, time of death indeterminate, probably 24 to 48 hours. Subject is wearing a dress of blue-checked fabric, fancy, probably handmade, a pair of white lace socks, black patent leather shoes, a shoulder-length curly blonde wig, and a..."

She blinks as she looks at the woman's hand. The ring is gone.

"Shit," she swears under her breath, then clicks off the recorder. She looked all around the body, in the folds of the dress, under the body. Nothing. She went and found the body bag and searched it. Nothing. She wrings her hands for a moment. That was evidence, possibly crucial evidence, and she lost it.

Maybe it's back at the crime scene...

She looks at the clock, then makes a decision. She sheds her coat, grabs her field jacket, and leaves the station.

A short cab ride later Edrisa is heading into the park. The crime scene is a ways in, and it's starting to get dark, so she hurries as much as she can. The crime scene tape has been removed, so it takes a little longer to find the spot, but she finally recognizes the tree, and heads over, taking out her phone to use the flashlight to scan the ground.

She's too focused to hear the man approaching from behind her.

Her light finally illuminates the ring, and she picks it up. "Got it!" she crows.

Then she's grabbed from behind, and a sweet smelling cloth is clapped over her mouth and nose. She drops her phone and the ring and struggles, trying to break away, trying to scream, before the world around her fades and goes dark, and she falls limp in the arms of her captor. The man scoops her up and carries her to a nearby park service van, puts her in the back, and drives off.

[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?"