"Cena Delicti " by 3Jane In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are not their stories. The air was filled with the sugary smell of French toast as Detective Lennie Briscoe walked past the dumpster and the clutch of crime scene techs thronging the alley. “Hey, Ed,” he greeted his partner. “You know, this joint is so classy, they even have a front door.” Green grinned. “You sayin’ you don’t want to see the kitchen?” “I went in one of those once and came out married. Who’s the stiff?” Briscoe turned his head, looking around. “Actually, maybe I should ask: where’s the stiff?” Green gestured with his cell phone toward the back of the dumpster, where a photographer was taking pictures of a fifty-five gallon drum wedged between it and the back wall of the restaurant; a long trail of viscous brown trickled down the side of the drum. “Are you serious?” Not waiting for an answer, Briscoe stepped closer to the container, close enough to see the wavy pattern of the shoe soles inside that glimmered underneath a thin layer of syrup. “Huh. Rodgers’ll have fun with this one.” “Vic’s one Kevin — “ Green wedged the phone against his shoulder and squinted at a sticky driver’s license held gingerly between his thumb and first finger. “I don’t know. How would you pronounce that?” “No idea. Who found him?” Green pointed the license at a uniformed cop, currently bent over and bringing up his last meal a few yards away from the crime scene tape. “Guess we’ll have to ask him over breakfast,” Briscoe remarked. Working as a forensic pathologist was, in many ways, as Dr. Elizabeth Rodgers liked to say, better than Christmas; true, that was usually the stage of the conversation where Briscoe pointed out that was another one in the plus column for Hanukkah, but even so, he never denied there was always something neat to open (at least before mumbling something about how Van Buren wanted him to pick up her dry-cleaning, then fleeing at high speed with a slightly worried expression). And today? Today was no different. “You two always bring me the nicest corpses. Just for future reference, though, if you want to bring me breakfast, I like a nice corn muffin, easy on the butter.” She slid the plexiglas visor down over her face. “Oh, yeah: if you could keep it on the outside of the vic? Also a plus.” “We’ll keep that in mind. You find anything yet?” “Other than drums of maple syrup make good storage for dead bodies?” She folded the sheet away from the cadaver’s face, rolling it down to reveal a stark Y-incision bisecting the trunk. “That, we know. How about him?” “AFIS says his name’s Kevin — “ Rodgers consulted a clipboard. “Hell, I’m not going to even try that one. Anyway, couple of disorderlies and a DUI: nothing spectacular in that — but he does have one of the most exciting livers I’ve seen in a while. You don’t want a look, do you?” She shrugged as they shook their heads. “Your loss. It would’ve killed him in ten or fifteen years, but turns out using your lungs for something other than oxygen is not such a good idea and acts much quicker than cirrhosis.” “What, he drowned in the syrup?” She shook her head. “No, that’s the odd thing. If you look here,” she said as she leaned in toward the cadaver, lifting a flap of tissue with the flat of her scalpel. “That isn’t anything you’d find coming from a tree.” “Is that -?” Green’s eyes widened as he put his hand over his mouth. “Oh, god. That’s just not right.” “Yeah. I’m assuming the smell is coming from that rather than bacteria or a MSUD variant, but that’s pending results from the lab.” Rodgers rolled her gloves off briskly. “Judging by the contents of his lungs and the amount of petechial hemorrhaging, preliminary will probably be something along the lines of asphyxiation. Look, fellas, I got another one coming in, so if we can snap this up?” she asked. “Guy was decapitated with his own cutting board.” Briscoe made a face. “That’s disgusting,” he said. “Why would anyone want to work here?” “Free cutting boards.” It was a truth universally acknowledged that shit rolled downhill; and given the placement of One Hogan Place, that the 27th Precinct’s cases would find their eventual dumping in the office of Jack McCoy, Executive Assistant District Attorney. McCoy himself, however, was of the opinion both that truth was for suckers, and that finding himself stuck with the 27th’s crap was an unsatisfactory state of affairs; which was why he shot Lennie Briscoe a sour look when the detective sprang through the door of McCoy’s office that afternoon and made for the bottle of whiskey that lived in the bottom drawer of his desk. “You couldn’t find a closer bar than my office?” McCoy asked. “Wait, you’re drinking again — oh God, I just got used to this one. Don’t tell me this one thinks she has a film career too?” Briscoe wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, screwing the cap back on with the practiced ease that came from familiarity with the finest distilled liquors that life had to offer. “Sorry, counselor. And you’re going to need it, too.” He handed the bottle back gravely. McCoy frowned at the few drops of amber liquid still clinging to the bottom. “What are you talking about?” he asked, giving the bottle a shake. “Oh, you’ll see.” Briscoe paused on his way out, holding the door as Abbie Carmichael, McCoy’s latest assistant ADA, came in balancing two takeout coffees atop a stack of files. “Hey, Lennie,” she said. “Dropping off or picking up?” “Dropping off,” he called over his shoulder. “The Waffle murder. Hey, Ed bought jelly donuts this morning while we were out — want one? Assuming Profaci didn’t eat them all already.” “Save me a raspberry and I’ll front you a warrant next time.” Carmichael scanned her notes as the door swung shut behind him in a neat segue from one scene to another. “Now this is impressive,” she announced to McCoy, handing over a coffee. “Death by hash browns.” “What, the cholesterol?” He frowned, sipping from the paper cup. “I know those things will kill you, but seems like that’s a little on the slow side for us to get involved. Can we stick the FDA with this one?” “Not when the vic is found with three pounds of them jammed into his lungs.” McCoy blinked. “Who did it, Dr. Atkins?” “Close. Last time anyone saw him alive, he was mouthing off to a second year med student from Berkeley and another guy — haven’t been arrested as of yet, but Green says they’re on the way to pick them up for questioning — followed by a wham-bam, thank you ma’am in the face.” “‘Mouthing off’?” “Called the Berkeley kid’s friend a ‘high yellow faggot’; charming. A real smooth guy, according to the eyewitnesses at the Waffle House.” “A Waffle House?” McCoy gave her a suspicious look. “There aren’t any Waffle Houses in Manhattan.” “No, closest one’s in Pennsylvania. Allentown, maybe?” He choked on the hot liquid. “That’s not even the right state! What am I supposed to do with this?” Carmichael rolled her eyes. “Right. Like I’m going to ask you to try a Pennsylvania murder? Pfft. Give me a little credit, Jack; I caught up on my sleep in contracts, not first year crim pro.” “Oh, thank God.” McCoy balanced the cup precariously on a towering stack of subpoenas and began wiping coffee from his tie. “So where did they find him? The East Village? The GWB? In the river?” “Kansas.” “Ka — !” He sputtered. “How do we have a Kansas homicide? We don’t have jurisdiction over that!” “CPL 20.20,” she said, producing a thick volume that fell open with an uncanny precision to the relevant section. “Subsection 2(e): ‘A person may be convicted in the criminal courts of this state of an offense defined by the laws of this state, when: even though none of the conduct constituting such offense may have occurred within this state, the offense committed would otherwise result in a deficiency in plot as would be found herein a work of fiction.’” “. . . we’re filling a plot hole?” “I prefer to think of it as a plot opportunity,” she responded and set aside the book for the case file. “Anyway. So, we have a dead college kid, found bent in half and stuck in a barrel of maple syrup with a wad of potatoes stuck in his lungs. Question: natural causes?” McCoy gave her a look, then gave up. “Still, hate speech isn’t anything a jury likes hearing. If either the student or the friend look like caving, I’ll plea them down to manslaughter at eight and a half and count myself lucky,” he said, brightening as a thought struck him. “About breakfast, though. I know this place that does this great Bloody Mary buffet —“ ”Shh.” Carmichael hooked a chair with her foot and yanked it over to block the door, not bothering to look up from the notes. “Interesting: before getting his clock cleaned, Waffle Guy was shouty and belligerent inside the restaurant. Wonder what was going on there? Still, can’t be important to the case.” “Is ‘shouty’ even a word?” “It is now. Huh — apparently neither the student or the friend seemed any too surprised to hear what happened to Waffle Guy. Any idea why Green would put that in his report? Doesn’t look like it’s that important.” McCoy sighed, a beaten man. “If I promise to meet with them, can I at least get a new bottle of Bushmills? Briscoe finished mine off.” Carmichael considered this. “He told me a couple days ago Kevin’s on Lispenard will sell you a bottle of the twelve-year-old,” she said. “But be back in twenty minutes, or I’ll make you do your own work.” They both looked almost absurdly young to McCoy, despite the streak of gray in the one kid’s hair (not that gray was not an appropriate color of hair for a man who was vibrant and sexy and in the prime of his life and could bang any woman he goddamn well wanted to and any dry spell he might be having could be chalked up to a lack of available women in Manhattan, or having been assigned Genghis Khan as his assistant); but that was where any resemblance ended. The med student was a compact Bengali, maybe half a foot shorter than the friend who gangled over him, though part of that was probably the friend’s dreadlocks. Either way, the friend was fidgeting in his seat, which he always liked to see; best to take the student first, and let the skinny kid sit and stew in his own imagination. “Mr. — ” McCoy glanced at his notes. “ — Ramapurthy. Last time I looked, this wasn’t exactly commuting distance for Berkeley. What’re you doing out here?” “We were making a road trip to see my sister at RISD. TJ said he’d come along, keep me company.” A little tension there? Interesting. “What were you doing at the Waffle House?” The shorter kid rubbed at his eyes, smoothing his fingers over the dark circles underneath. “We already went over this with the two detectives, but okay. TJ was hungry, and I’d never been to a Waffle House before, so we stopped.” There was a thread of west coast in his voice, coiling around a deeper edge of Hindi; McCoy noted it, then moved on. Even if English wasn’t his first language, he was proficient enough that it was doubtful it’d be an issue on appeal. “And what happened there?” “We were just talking.“ He glanced back at his companion. ”’Bout hash browns,” the wild-haired kid supplied. “Yeah. I was reading the menu — which sounded like everything was diseased.” Carmichael quirked an eyebrow. “Everything was either smothered, or chunked,” the student explained. “Sounded like my first semester PBL small group topics. A little disturbing, but . . . anyway. We weren’t there long — couple minutes, tops — when that guy came in yelling about his girlfriend and where was she and aargh.” He hooked his fingers into claws and held them up to indicate a general state of Godzilla-ness. “Was she there?” “The waitress at the counter said she wasn’t, then he started asking why her car was still there. Pretty impressive he was still able to string his sentences together like that.” “Why?” “He was doing the drunk walk. Bloodshot eyes, reflexes looked off — I’d have put him at maybe six or seven drinks in an hour’s time. Probably not the first time: he looked like he was pretty good at managing. Avoid sharp corners, that kind of thing.” “Huh.” McCoy scrawled ‘girlfriend?’ in his notes. “Did the waitress say where she went?” “Home sick,” the shaggy kid answered. “Sounded like one of the other waitresses drove her home.” “She have a name?” The kid thought a moment. “Katie? No. She got a ride with Katie. Julie, that was it.” “Julie the waitress. Right. Who was the waitress at the counter, did you hear her name?” “Ann,” the shorter kid supplied. “It was on her nametag.” “And then what happened?” “The — um, Ann at the counter said they should sit down and she’d bring them coffee and hash browns. Which was kind of funny, because we’d been talking about hash browns; nothing big, but one of those moments where you sort of need to laugh, because you really shouldn’t, you know? And then — I don’t know. We were goofing off, kind of.” “Goofing off?” Carmichael asked. “What did you do?” The shaggy kid exchanged a glance with the student. “I was singing, a little. Haaaash broooowns,” he sang, in a pleasant, if slightly cracked, tenor. McCoy blinked. The last time a suspect had started singing during questioning was . . . well, weeks, anyway. “You sang? That’s it?” Shaggy nodded. “Ooookay. And then?” “That’s when he said, ‘What’re you singing about, you high yellow faggot?’” the stocky kid answered for him, mouth compressing into a thin line. “Asshole. Then the waitress told him to leave her customers alone. We ate, and then we paid and left.” “But that wasn’t the last time you saw him,” Carmichael interjected. “You saw him after you left.” “Yeah.” The student flushed, thin blotches of color along his cheekbones. “We were getting into the car when he came out. He’d sobered up a little, but just enough to pick right up where he left off.” “How did he do that?” “He — “ There was a shrug, eyes flickering over to the shaggy kid then back. “Same song, different tune. He didn’t have much of a vocabulary.” McCoy’s eyes went to the shaggy kid, who was chewing the side of his thumb. “And that’s when you hit him?” he asked. “TJ, right?” The shaggy kid looked startled but nodded. “Why’d you hit him? You didn’t in the restaurant, so why then?” “He came up to us,” TJ muttered. “We were getting some stuff out of the trunk, so we didn’t see him before he was right there. I figured he was just gonna talk trash, but then he starts doing this chest bumpin’ thing and yanking at my backpack. ‘Hey, fag, what you got in your purse?’ So I popped him in the nose to get him to back off and we got the hell out of there.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t have hit that hard, ‘cause he was getting up by the time we left the parking lot.” McCoy paused, mid-scrawl. “He was standing when you left?” “Pretty much. Little wobbly maybe, but he was on his feet.” “Why didn’t you just give him the bag and call the cops?” Carmichael asked. “If he was doing it just to screw with you, wouldn’t it have been easier to let them sort it out?” There was a pause, then: “My stuff’s in there. I didn’t want to give it to him.” She frowned. “You didn’t think you’d have been better off letting him have it? If he was trying to intimidate you physically like that, why would you give him a reason to ramp it up by fighting back?” “Why should he have?” the stocky kid interrupted angrily. “He was supposed to let that asshole walk all over him, just because he was picking a fight?” Carmichael shook her head. “Look at it from our point of view — a drunk picks a fight with a total stranger, who admits the drunk tried to take his bag; the next thing anyone knows, the drunk’s been murdered and his body stashed. We’ve only got your word for it that you never met him before,” she told him. “So I have to ask: what’s in that bag?” “It’s just my stuff,” TJ said, crossing his arms over his chest tightly enough for McCoy to see the kid’s shirt pulling over his collarbones. “Coupla CDs, extra shirt, toothbrush. Nothin’ he woulda been interested in.” “Mind if we take a look, then?” “Yeah, we do,” the stocky kid replied, face a thundercloud. “We didn’t do anything.” “Amal. It’s cool.“ TJ held up a hand. “He’s right, though. ‘M not opening it.” “Look, I don’t care if you have a couple joints in there,” McCoy said. “Do you think I can’t get a warrant to take a look? Because I can tell you probable cause is not going to be a — “ He broke off at the loud tap against the door, and looked up to see Green beckoning at Carmichael from the other side of the glass; Carmichael exchanged a look with McCoy — what now? — but got up and let herself out into the hallway. “That’s one of the detectives we talked to,” Amal told him. “Just ask him; there has to be someone else who was there after us.” “It’s not a question of — “ The flow of McCoy’s speech was interrupted by the bang of the door as Carmichael came back in, followed by Green. “Mr. Ramapurthy,” she said, smiling. “TJ. Thanks for stopping in. If you’ll follow me, I’ll take you down to the main reception area and you can get your parking validated there.” The two looked startled but wasted no time in making their escape through the door that she held open for them. “Well?” McCoy asked. “It’s not them,” Green said, as Carmichael shooed the kids off down the hallway. “It was a mob hit. The waitress at the counter was a soldier for the Kirilenkos.” “What, the ones out of Staten Island? I thought they only ran hookers and blow.” “No, even worse. These are the ones that work out of Queens; they specialize in food service issues.” McCoy stared at the other man. “A waffle mob?” “Not just waffles, man.” Green shook his head as Carmichael let herself back in the room. “We’re talking about the hard stuff, too: biscuits, toast, eggs — you name it, they have their fingers in every dirty little griddle from here to Belgium. Turns out IHOP’s been making nice with the Chinese, as part of a bid to start franchising places in the country; Waffle House wanted in, but they told them no. So they decided they were gonna undercut IHOP on the black market and drive them out that way.” “What kind of money are we talking?” Carmichael wanted to know. “Two hundred mil to start. Bonus of ten mil each, for closing IHOPs in Shanghai and Guiyang before 2010.” The assistant ADA whistled. “Damn. That’s serious business.” “You know it. Anyway, turns out that Ann was a hitter out of Newark: sent her out there to clean up any loose ends, and — “ Green shrugged. “The thing with the hash browns was supposed to be a message for anyone else out there who drew attention to the place, apparently.” “But — “ McCoy gaped at them. “But what about the kid? And the bag? He was clearly hiding something!” “Naw, strictly murder-for-hire on this one; she Mrs. Butterworth’ed her prints all over his sorry ass.” McCoy sagged in his chair, pinching the bridge of his nose, as Carmichael perked up. “A capital case?” she said. “We haven’t had one of those for months! Oh, Major Case is going to crap their pants.” She scampered off happily, followed by a chuckling Green. McCoy shook his head but began to shuffle the case notes back together. At least, he realized, there was a silver lining to the whole deal; now, he knew the bar where Briscoe kept a running tab. *** end