Disclaimer: All I own of these two shows is the DVDs (and in the case of H:LOTS, some old VHS tapes). No profit, just fun.
Background Information:
This story is set post S6 ‘Knockout’ and is rated M for language and violent content. Real police curse almost as bad as sailors.
For most NCIS fans, some of the Homicide: Life on the Street lingo may seem a little foreign. I’ve tried to get the point across as best as possible without having to get overly wordy in exposition and explanations, while remaining as true as possible to the dialogue and spirit of the two separate shows.
Any minor racial slurs are used in character and not intended to offend the reader. One of the H:LOTS guys has a tendency to use them as “terms of endearment”.
Also, this will not be slash, because I want to keep as close to canon as possible (so I may do subtext). Any references to homosexual or bisexual characters will have existed in the original series (Homicide, anyway - I can’t think of any from NCIS).
Chapter 1 - December, 1999
“Homicide - we speak for the dead.”
Detective Meldrick Lewis answered the phone in typical acerbic Baltimore Homicide fashion, trying to rub away the headache that was determined to make his already shitty day even worse. He was secretly praying for an easy drug murder, a simple wife-kills-abusive-husband, or a basic trick-gone-bad killing; anything to keep him from a long, drawn-out case working with the new guy.
Gaffney’s new guy.
With Gee out of the department playing politics and that jellyfish mick Gharty filling in as shift commander, the Captain made his power play by recruiting some new detectives for the ever-aging, ever more cynical and increasingly jaded crew currently at work. And just Lewis’ luck, he got stuck with the young kid who, rumor had it, came from money and had some fancy college degree to wave over his head. At least the kid was Italian, so he had one point on Lewis’ pro column: some of the best cops he’d ever worked with were Italian.
Crosetti. Best not to get stuck on that train of thought right now.
Falsone. Better. Crotch-driven and little dense, but better.
In the middle of his musings and his prayer, he caught the words dead kid and really messed up come from the beat cop on the other end of the line, and retching in the background from someone who couldn’t stomach the crime scene.
Guess the answer to the prayer was “no”.
“Ah, fuck.” Lewis muttered the curse under his breath, replacing the phone none too gently in its cradle. Standing and looking around, he spotted his new partner sitting at his desk, right where he was supposed to be, nose in a file. No excuse to leave without him or grab somebody else. God, I’d rather take Munchkin, even. Damn.
“Come on, DiNozzo. We caught a big one.” Lewis grabbed his hat and the car keys off his desk and started for door.
“Red-ball material, maybe?” Lewis didn’t answer and it didn’t matter. DiNozzo gathered his backpack and rushed to follow, scrunching his nose at the idea of a brass-involved case so quickly into his tenure here. They’ll probably boot me off of it anyway, if it gets that far.
They were met at the scene by two uniformed officers, the troubled looks on their faces clear as day, despite the darkness of the hour. Lewis sighed, parked the car, switched off the blue light on the dash, and popped two aspirin for the persisting headache. Neither of the uniforms was a rookie, and if they were both that wigged out about what they’d seen…well, it’d be a way to test the new guy’s stomach, that was for damn sure.
“Whaddya got for us, Mikey?” Lewis ducked under the crime scene tape DiNozzo held up for him, making a mental note that despite the crime scene crew already being on site, the new kid was carrying a camera and a sketch pad, and had his backpack full of God-knows-what slung over his shoulder. Come to think of it, Lieutenant Jellyfish might’ve mentioned something about some specialization. Damn. Musta been too busy bemoaning my bad luck and recurrent misfortune with partner assignments. At least the kid was prepared.
“It’s bad, Meldrick. You know me, I been a cop most of my life, and there ain’t much that shocks me these days. But this one…I got two kids at home. Two little girls. And, well. I’m gonna let the Doc tell you about it.” The uniform - Mikey - led the way through the small, urban park to a pile of tires set up as a makeshift fort, where the crime scene unit was setting up floodlights and the M.E. was already doing his thing. It did not go unnoticed by the two detectives that neither uniformed officer came any closer to the crime scene than was absolutely necessary.
Doc Griscom stood, looking a little grey, but not nearly as bad as the officers - the result of years spent in City and County basements, analyzing the dead, and the inherent personality traits that might drive one to become a forensic pathologist. “Victim is a pre-pubescent girl, around 8 or 9 by the look of it, black, and has been dead for approximately” - he checked the liver probe - “eight hours. At first glance, I’d say the cause of death was exsanguination, but trauma is so extensive and pervasive that I won’t be able to tell for certain until I get her on the table.”
Lewis shined his flashlight towards the body at the same time as the flood lights suddenly snapped on. He heard DiNozzo’s sharp intake of breath before his own eyes adjusted to the sudden stimulation, and when he blinked away the haze, even he had to admit cases like this always bugged him.
To say the girl had been mutilated would paint a poorly inadequate picture. More like…well. Meldrick didn’t really want to elaborate on that metaphor. Her throat had been slashed ear-to-ear, and there were multiple stab wounds present on her torso and legs. Rage. Her arms had been cut up a little, but the incisions looked more like carving marks than stab wounds. Ritual? Her wrists were bound over her head and her legs had been splayed open at an obscene, unnatural angle. Friction burns were visible on her knees. Damn. Sexual Assault… The remaining tatters of her school uniform were so covered in blood that the blue, white and green took a visual backseat to the sheer abundance of red. Her eyes were wide open and her face displayed a myriad of cuts and bruises. Terrified.
“Fuck.” DiNozzo cursed so quietly that Lewis almost didn’t catch it, but he agreed. He stood there, a deer caught in the headlights, taking a few seconds to find his voice.
DiNozzo spoke again, his voice stronger this time. “Was she raped?” When the medical examiner responded that it was likely, the new kid’s green eyes shut tight for a minute, making him look to Lewis all of 16 or 17 years old instead of 28 and incredibly…vulnerable.
When he opened them a second later however, a blank, emotionless mask slid into place so quickly that Lewis physically started, covered by adjusting his hat, and spared a moment to question why a guy not even thirty had developed this skill so perfectly when he, a homicide veteran in his mid-forties, was having trouble maintaining a stoic façade.
“Does it look like we’ll get any physical evidence off of this one, Doc?” Lewis finally wrung the words out of his throat. He needed to start acting like the professional murder police that he was, for fuck’s sake.
“Looks like, Meldrick. Even if the guy used a condom or a foreign object, given the violence of the attack I’m pretty sure there will at least be hair transfer. She fought back, too; there’s blood and tissue under her fingernails. We might be able to get some blood typing, but I’d be surprised if there was enough for DNA testing. Anything I get I’ll send to the crime lab for analysis on a priority.” Griscom looked over Lewis’ shoulder, where DiNozzo was already taking notes and making sketches. “New guy seems to have his head on straight. I think even Bayliss would’ve been sick over this one.”
“Yeah, well, Bayliss gets sick over everything these days. He’s gone a little queer, know what I mean? In all senses of the word. Not like there’s nothin’ wrong with it - I mean, I got nothing against guys who like guys, but…or guys who like guys and girls. Just, you know, it’s Bayliss.” Talking himself into a hole, Lewis just stopped and shrugged. “You know.”
“Hmmm.” The M.E. just grunted his agreement and went back to the body. Sighing again at his luck for the night, Lewis slouched over to a corner of the lot where DiNozzo was kneeling and shined his flashlight in the kid’s face. “Find anything, college boy?”
DiNozzo winced. He had known one minute into his first shift that his presence was part of a pissing contest between the brass and the Homicide detectives and that he was not welcome. Apparently, Captain Gaffney had talked him up as ‘college-educated’ and ‘the type of new blood this department needs’ and shit like that.
Basically, the kind of words that made guys like Lewis - guys who worked their way up from squad cars and parking tickets and saw the gold homicide shield as a symbol of the blood, sweat, and tears poured into a lifetime of police work - it made those guys just hate him and everything they thought he stood for. It didn’t matter that he was good at his job, or that he wasn’t some green rookie punk straight from some Masters program. He was taking up space in their close-knit world; invading support structures and invisible defenses that they had worked so hard to build, and they hated him for it.
Shaking off the self-pity by reminding himself of the dead little girl lying not thirty feet away, DiNozzo snatched Lewis’ light and aimed it at the chain-linked fence. “Someone pushed through the fence here, and it looks like they cut themselves and snagged their jeans. Might get DNA from the blood, if there’s enough, and Forensics should be able to compare fibers and tear marks from the denim when we have a suspect.” Shoving the light back into Lewis’ grip, he snapped a photo and called out to one of the crime scene guys to take samples and bag-and-tag.
“Not bad, kid. We’ll make a murder police outta you yet, in spite of that fancy college degree.” Lewis, in his own backwards way, meant the offhand remark as a compliment, but judging by the way the younger detective’s eyes narrowed and his jaw set, the kid had taken offense. DiNozzo stood quickly, coming eye-to-eye with Lewis (which, at 6’2”, not everyone could), and stepping just enough into Lewis’ personal space to make the situation uncomfortable.
“I already am a homicide detective, Lewis. I may not have the experience that a lot of you older guys have, but I assume that’s why I got partnered with a veteran.” He shrugged, tossing his hands up a little, and ran a latex-gloved hand through his light brown hair.
“I get it. Gaffney brought me in to piss you guys off that worked under Giardello. I’m not wanted. So, don’t hang out with me after work, spot for me at the gym or ask me about my personal life - and I’ll do the same, as long as you let me do my goddamn job and watch my back in the street.”
Lewis blinked, surprised by the sudden show of backbone; and then smirked a little, tapping the brim of his hat up a notch with his index finger. Kid had just earned a few more points in the ‘pros’ column. “Bet Gaffney didn’t know you had balls when he hired you. He likes ‘em spineless and brainwashed. What’d you do, Columbo your way in?”
DiNozzo looked confused for a second at the sudden approval; then flashed a grin that threatened to blind anyone in a ten-foot radius. “Yeah, something like that.” Bringing his camera back into position, DiNozzo paused for a minute.
“You do know that my ‘fancy college degree’ is in Physical Education, right?”
Laughing at a crime scene like this one was unimaginable, and Lewis did it anyway, as DiNozzo aimed his camera over his shoulder and snapped a shot of the older detective’s reaction. Might like this kid after all.
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.