HELLO BEAUTIFUL

Rating: NC17  for violence, murder, gunplay, adult themes. For safety’s sake, this will apply to ALL chapters. There will be no smut in this fic. There will be references, but references only, to rape, murder, mutilation in places throughout the story. There will be no detailed scenes. (I don’t do non-consensual)

Copyright © November 2006 xxxevilgrinxxx

Ch 3

“Why the fuck would anyone want to do that to a woman, Alvarez. I just don’t understand that.” Danno stared out of the window as we drove down the back alley towards the morgue. The rain had started early this year and the sky was grey and dark already. Rain spattered against the windshield.

He had been quiet on the drive over, his face set hard. Every one of these cases got to him and nothing I could say would change the way he looked at it. I had my Adriana and the two boys to go home to, something to live for. Miguel, my oldest, was four and little Sandro was barely two. My work never touched them and I wouldn’t let it. They were my light and my life.

Danno didn’t really have anybody, not anybody steady anyway. We had talked about that but Danno was never really ready to commit to someone. There was a time for a couple of weeks when his apartment was neater that I thought he might have been seeing somebody but he never really said anything to me about it. He looked happy but I knew Danno too well; he could never stay with just one woman, and I couldn’t imagine any woman would put up with that for very long.

I looked at him as he stared blindly out the window. “Would you really want to understand why a man would do that, Danno? I can’t understand it either; I don’t really want to understand it, because if I do it makes me like them. Just a little and I’d rather kill myself.”

He nods absently and chews on his knuckle, staring out the window into the rain. I should have stopped. Right there I should have stopped and turned around and went back, but I didn’t. I couldn’t, neither of us could. It had gone too far for that.

Even Peters looked stern and grey, as though the darkness from outside had crept in here. The fluorescent light couldn’t touch it. The body lay out on the cold steel table, covered in a white sheet. It all looked so sterile that sometimes it was hard to come to terms that there was a real person under there. I had grown used to seeing them, in the years I had been coming to visit Peters, but this was still the hardest thing for me. To look at that body covered in a sheet, sometimes the only dignity the dead had left.

I looked over at Danno, his face intent as he looked down at the covered body, and turned to Peters. “Where did they find her?” I wanted to get as much information as I could before we took a look. Sometimes it was hard to think clearly, to remember what you wanted to ask, when you looked death in the face. At all the things one person could do to another.

“She was found in much the same way as the other six. She was dumped in an abandoned warehouse close to the border. A security guard walked by and his dog alerted him.” Peters spilled out the details succinctly, clinically. The security guard would have been checked out of course, this went without saying. The warehouses down there had been abandoned for years. When companies found it was cheaper to manufacture elsewhere they moved out, and left the moldering rusted out hulks of their factories and warehouses to the drug dealers, the gangs.

I asked the basics; how long she had been dead for. Identifying marks, not just tattoos and scars, but also marks that would identify the weapon used which might give a clue as to the killer’s identity. Nothing. Nothing but a cruelty I didn’t want to fathom. She had been alive this time; she had been tortured before death. The others had been killed first and then mutilated. The killer, or killers, were escalating. Every couple of weeks there was another death, and every one of them got worse.

Peters had seen a lot in his time, his face was professional and cold, but he couldn’t hide from me, I had known him too long. If this was nothing he wouldn’t have called me. He wanted me to know about this, he needed me to, so that something would be done to make it stop.

Danno hadn’t moved. If I thought it was possible I’d say he hadn’t breathed. Peters moved up towards the head of the table and reached out to straighten the sheet a little. He did the same thing every time. The dead didn’t care, but Peters did. He would adjust the edge of the sheet before he lowered it respectfully, only as far as the neck. He never pulled the sheet all of the way off, if it was a woman. Even in death he treated them with dignity, as if he made up in whatever way he could for how they ended up here.

She would have been a pretty girl, once. A small oval face with a clear olive complexion; everything about her was delicate and well defined. If she was alive she would be considered cute, and pretty, but never beautiful. Peters had pulled her black hair back gently when he had washed her and it lay curled against the side of her neck to partially cover the bruises there. Peters would have done that on purpose. Her eyes were closed of course but if I had to guess I would say they were brown.

Danno’s knuckles cracked loudly, the only sound in the silent room, and I looked up towards Danno on the other side of the steel table. His knuckles were white, his hands in fists as he looked down at the girl on the table.

I should have stopped the car before we got here, should have just turned around. But I didn’t. Danno was crying. He didn’t sob or break down; he stood and silently wept, as he looked down at her face. I had never seen him so affected before, and then it dawned on me. He knew her. He knew this girl that lay before us, dead now.

“Danno…” I called out to him, the sound sharp in the room. He looked up at me, and I saw just how young he was, how young we both were then. He had seen a lot, maybe more than a lot of people, but he was only twenty six, just a little younger than me. I wondered how well he knew the woman and found that I really didn’t want to know the answer; I didn’t want to be told because I already knew.

There were so many women, and he loved every single one of them, just not enough to love just one. Except for that short time when his apartment was cleaner and he looked happier, more content.

His voice broke in a strangled sound that he fought back with a muttered ‘fuck’ that came out as a short bark. He spun and ran from the room, the door to the autopsy bay slammed hard against the wall and echoed in the room.

I wanted to go after him, but I had to know how bad this was, because I knew I would never bring Danno back here, not ever. Peters knew it too. He waited until he was sure that Danno was gone before he pulled the sheet back. Gorge rose and I fought it back, before I closed my eyes, her image still imprinted on my lids. Probably forever.

I should have left when Danno ran. I should have gone after him. Maybe I should have ignored my phone altogether that day and stayed home. I drove for an hour and couldn’t find him anywhere. I waited at his apartment for another two hours. He was gone.

Three days later he showed up again, when I got another call.