Two

There were a lot of angry fans outside the arena watching anxiously as police officers walked yellow tape from one side of the building to the other. To them it was as if they were roping off any possibility of them getting to attend the concert they had waited so long for, and for some of them see the group they’d been waiting to see their whole lives.

Those who had paid for VIP passes had been to see sound check, had their pictures taken and their tour around backstage just  before the boys went for dinner so they were genuinely surprised when they came back to discover that the show had been cancelled before it even began. Of course they had all been assured that they would be refunded in full but it did nothing to satisfy the mob that had collected outside of the venue. Some of them were pissed about the concert but there were a few in the group that were genuinely interested in what had happened. Rumours were spreading like wildfire through the group but the general consensus was that a dead body had been found in the alley next to the arena.

“Make a hole!” a man yelled and two people pushed their way through the crowd of women, dressed up for the occasion, holding signs and CDs tightly in their hands.

The crowd parted and the man and woman approached the yellow tape where they were stopped by a uniformed police officer. The taller of the two was the female. She was Amazonian in build, strong and lean, nearly pushing 6 feet. Her Scandinavian heritage was apparent in her appearance. She had her blonde hair pulled into a tight bun and she wore a black trench coat over top a stylish suit, far too warm considering the temperature outside. From her pocket she pulled out a badge and flashed it at the officer. The man followed, pulling his own badge off a belt clip next to his gun holster. He, too, was wearing a trench coat (in dark grey) over a suit and tie making it apparent to all the other police officers that were lingering around the scene that the detectives had arrived.

A heat wave had gripped the entire eastern seaboard and Maryland seemed to be at the epicentre of it all. It was only mid-May so despite a late to rise, early to bed sun it was easily getting over 90 degrees during the day. It had actually led to more crime through the city. The streets and sidewalks were still dark early which made it easy for criminals to move around and the heat was pushing people out of their homes creating easy targets for thieves, rapists, and murderers. So it hadn’t been a surprise to the two homicide detectives to get a call about a body in an alley, it would only add to the final statistic when someone called this the most dangerous spring on record.

The crime scene unit had already been at the site for an hour collecting evidence and when the two detectives made their way into the alley the medical examiner was looking over the body. The alley way was now brightly lit thanks to some well placed tower lighting which only exposed the filth that littered the ground and the walls of the buildings. Grease and mud were smeared across the pavement leading up to a dumpster. Next to it the dark grime turned to a deep shade of red and both detectives were surprised by the sheer volume of blood that was on the ground, marked strategically with yellow flags by the crime scene investigators.

The male approached first, sticking his hands in his pockets as he watched the medical examiner work, “Hey! Baltimore PD, I’m Detective Knox, this is Detective Jensen, and this is our crime scene.”

“Nice to meet you,” the doctor said from beneath a face mask, leaning close to the body.

“What do we have? There’s an awful lot of blood, is it just the one DB?” the woman asked, circling around but careful not to step on anything that might be considered evidence even though the scene had been released by the CSU.

“Just the one,” the medical examiner, Dr. Murphy, confirmed. He stood and stepped away from the body, lifting the mask of the face shield he was wearing. Television M.E’s were one of his biggest pet peeves. He often would run into this rookie cops that would be surprised by his get up considering that the night before on CSI: Miami the coroner had been stylishly dressed in a $400 suit, a pair of stilettos, and a pile of jewellery littering her dainty fingers. In reality that would never happen there was a certain decorum that you had to keep and a uniform you had to wear in order to properly get evidence from a scene and it did not involve being camera ready. Every time Murph watched one of those cop shows he would list off the variety of toxins that each of those Hollywood M.E’s inhaled every time they stuck their face within an inch of a dead person.   It disgusted him.

“When is your guess for time of death?” Jensen questioned, pulling a small notepad and a golf pencil out of her pocket. She flipped to a free page and looked up at the older doctor expectantly.

Dr. Murphy chuckled and motioned to a piece of equipment off to the side of the corpse, laying seemingly unused. Typically the first thing he did was try to establish a time of death. The laws of physics say that a hot body will always come back to the temperature of its surroundings. If you keep a glass of hot milk on the table it will eventually be room temperature and bodies work the same way. At time of death, all life processes stop and the body cools down to the temperature of the environment. Murph’s preferred method of determining time of death was by making a small incision in the abdomen and using a special thermometer to get temperature from the liver. He then used a formula to determine (based on what time of year, and time of day it was) the difference between the normal body temperature and how long it would take to get to the temperature he’d just taken. When he’d arrived at the scene he’d gone about his usual routine, collected his supplies but discovered something quite unusual once he actually started his investigation.

“I went to figure that out when I first got here, do a liver temp... but there was a little bit of a problem,” he said, watching the woman’s dusty blonde eyebrow rise in curiosity.

“What kind of a problem?” she asked; noticing that the thermometer he had motioned to seemed to be completely clean.

“Her liver is gone.”

Jensen cocked her head to the side, "What do you mean gone?" she asked but her partner immediately chimed in with his own question before she could get an answer.

"You think this is some kind of black market thing?" Knox prompted, "Steal someone's liver then go sell it for a transplant?"

Dr. Murphy shook his head immediately, "No, in my opinion it couldn't possibly be a black market surgery. The liver would have been in terrible condition; no way would someone be able to use it as a donor organ. I can't be absolutely certain until I get her back to the morgue but I really don't believe this was a surgical procedure, it was ripped out," he stressed, "Whatever, or whoever, did this...if I didn’t know any better I’d think they did it with their bare hands."

~*~

"What do you think of what the M.E. was saying out there?" Knox asked as he and his partner made their way through the dim corridors of the arena. He found it a little exciting to be backstage, seeing gig boxes lining the walls and roadies still milling around. He was hopeful that he might even get a glimpse of the changing rooms for the local college basketball team, the Terrapins. He had gone to University of Maryland and played on the Lacrosse team, but always idolized the much taller, much better looking basketball jocks.

Jensen shrugged, her eyes scanning her surroundings habitually, "I have a hard time believing that a person could rip out someone's liver without a scalpel or some kind of tool. Most people wouldn't even know where to point if you asked them where their liver is. Besides, he did imply that he knew better than to suggest something so preposterous.”

“It’s an interesting theory anyway,” he shrugged and continued looking for the sign for the dressing room where they would find their witness.

The two of them had been partners for the better part of six years. They knew each other going through the Academy and hit it off as friends immediately. They both had similar goals of getting through the obligatory years as uniformed cops working a beat and getting to real detective work. They hadn’t necessarily expected they would continue to move up the ranks together but when two opportunities opened up in Baltimore’s Integrated Homicide Team they both jumped at the chance.

They both stopped in front of a bright yellow door, a piece of paper taped to it reading “Backstreet Boys”. It was a little surreal for them to be interviewing celebrities as part of their investigation; Baltimore wasn’t exactly a hotspot for the Hollywood elite. After a quick knock on the door Knox went in first, holding it open for his partner to follow.

The room was surprisingly full, but dead silent. The four men that the detectives recognized from the posters outside were sitting on large leather couches, each accompanied by a woman by their side. A couple of kids were playing on the floor while large bodyguard types lingered around the outside of the room. 

Jensen cleared her throat and two dozen eyes were on her in a flash, “Which one of you is AJ McLean?”

Slowly one man stood from a couch in the corner, his hand still tightly holding onto the hand of the woman next to him who looked equally as shaken. Nervously, he shifted from foot to foot and it was clear by his puffy eyes and distressed expression that he had been crying.

“I am.”