ataraxionlogs | They say I cannot be this; I am jaded, hiding from the day.

CHARACTERS: Dexter Morgan and OPEN
LOCATION: Medbay
WARNINGS: Blood, more blood, and knitting patterns.
SUMMARY: The forensics guy has work to do. Cleaning up his own (and Brian's) artistic mess.
NOTES: Open to anyone coming into medbay for any reason (i.e. for aspirin or a check-up following their being shot last week), and for people in medical and security teams, and for people who've heard from someone else etc.

Dexter's forensics bag no longer contained a bin liner-clad body part. Today it was fully stacked with luminol and red twine and a book full of blood drop references--as though he didn't know his job by heart. The morgue door was wedged open, because Dexter needed to take a hand print from the back of it. From the morgue to the elevator, there were bare footprints on the ground, each with a numbered plastic marker set beside them. A diagram of the medbay was sketched on a large notepad, laid out on a counter, and marked with numbers for where the evidence had so far been collected.

Back in the morgue, the story was much the same. A toe tag had been left on a bed, and a smeared body of blood had been left behind on the tray. The excess had dripped onto the floor during the movement that caused the smear, and it was there that the man had stepped into it.

With Brian's help, he'd laid every drop, and now it was left to Dexter to document them all into a believable story. A stack of gauze had been upended where several drops had fallen in a drop-on-drop effect. Blood had been scrubbed onto several before they were tossed aside. Despite that, the footprints continued over to the elevator, even if the drips didn't. Bloodied fingerprints had been made on the buttons, too.

He'd survived by the skin of his teeth with far less time, built a crime scene and slipped out of the back door while the police came in through the front. Compared to those rushed incidents, the terror of standing over his colleagues, all of them falling on the scene to look for his mistakes, this was practically child's play. Vince had caught him out once or twice, and were he here he might find something to question--but that was Vince. He was a smart perverted little weasel when he wanted to be.

At times like this, Dexter missed his camera. The communicator could record images, but it wasn't really professional. His camera - his beautiful camera - really made an impact on people's perceptions. Still, there was plenty to do to prove he was pulling his weight. Lining up a rack of test tubes, Dexter got to work with his cotton buds, collecting a variety of samples from the blood droplets in case one didn't belong to the pirate, even though, if asked, he would swear categorically that the drip patterns didn't suggest a second person.

At least right now.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

News of the pirate's death and subsequent disappearance hadn't settled well with Helen. She should have known, should have realized that something was wrong, that he was still alive. And she was shouldering more than her share of the blame for having missed it.

Oh, she knew a number of ways to successfully fake death, some that would fool even the most experienced doctor. That didn't make it any less of a mistake.

What was worse, she was certain the man hadn't made an escape on his own. Something about the entire affair was off. And she was going to find out what it was.

She slowly made her way through medbay, careful to take in all the evidence he had marked so far. Forensics was more Will's area of expertise, but she had a passing knowledge she thought would suffice for the moment. Still, it couldn't hurt to get a second opinion.

"Have you found anything of use?"

Dexter offered a smile. It was a common enough question; the same kind of question four different lieutenants had asked him in the last nineteen years, and dozens of sergeants, sheriffs, deputies--all of them desperate for their collar. The more gruesome scenes were the worst, but sometimes it would be simple things, with the boys and girls in blue put under pressure from the press or the career ladder to have all the answers laid out in front of them.

Have you found anything of use? they asked, and Dexter invariably did, and he smiled at the poor beleaguered soul and frivolously gave away everything he knew. On the back of his bloodwork, police officers rose through the ranks to better pay and sweeter rides and greater stress, while Dexter - the blood guy - sat in his steady - if unpredictable - job, and got paid to show up every day regardless of if there was a case for him to work on or not.

It wasn't glamorous, but it got him where he needed to be to pursue his other profession.

And that was why he was here.

"Depends what you mean by 'of use'."

That wasn't an answer she had been expecting. She'd thought it a rather straightforward question. In all honesty, she had expected he would try telling her the man had somehow still been alive, that he'd woke in the morgue, then injured and bleeding made his way elsewhere on the ship.

And she wouldn't have been satisfied.

If the man had truly been dead, there was no accounting for the amount of blood, the way it had fallen. The dead didn't tend to bleed. And if he had been bleeding when he left the med bay, they would have known he was alive. She didn't like what that might say about the events that followed.

"Anything to tell us what happened here, what we missed."

They say I cannot be this; I am jaded, hiding from the day.

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