(no subject)
"Now, I've heard of hatin' Valentine's day, but this . . ." Danny Messer motioned to the corpse they were all standing around. "This is just . . ." his voice trailed off and Stella turned her head up to look up at the CSI and finished his thought, "over kill?" Mac had to agree with her observation. The team had been called to the alley crime scene that brutally early Valentine's Day morning ready to process and begin their shift like any other day, ignoring the romantic over tones of February 14th.
Instead they focused on the victim, laid out on the cold pavement was a dark haired woman, mid twenty's to early thirties, wrapped in a long black mink coat. The uniformed officer who had secured the scene, had handed over the wallet he had found by the body. It seemed like an odd kind of robbery, all the money and credit cards were gone, leaving only a driver license to identify the victim.
"Lisa Smigielski, thirty years old and a local. Apparently some love birds thought this place would make a romantic love nest and stumbled upon our girl shortly after four in the morning." Flack looked up from his memo book and raised his shoulders in a sort of shrug.
Mac knelt by the body, gently pushing her eyelid up and examining the conjuctiva of the eyes before glancing looking over at Stella, eyebrows raised. "Signs of petechial hemorrhaging," he clarified before opening her mouth and using the same light to study her mouth and throat. "Look at this break," he pointed out the break in the hyoid bone at the base of her tongue. "Strangulation," she spoke before looking up at Mac, "with some force." The older man nodded and let out a breath before moving further down the body.
Pushing the coat open revealed what the woman was wearing out on her last night alive. Black slacks and a white blouse with a curious redish stain over her heart as if the designer had added the little detail just for Valentine's Day. A swab of the stain came back with a very faint trace of blood, and Mac set to work unbuttoning the blouse gingerly with his gloved fingers. When the fabric was pulled back, Danny who had just come up from the SUV whistled low.
Her heart was gone. Where it once laid in her chest was a rather neat hole, as if someone had taken care to carefully break through the rib cage and remove everything surrounding the heart out. For a moment the three of them were silent, each trying to either process what they were seeing or make an appropriate quip. Apparently Danny struck first with the obvious Valentine's day reference.
"Don, anyone find a heart?" Mac called as he looked toward the mouth of the alley where the uniforms and Don were all gazing upward toward the brightening morning sky.
"Uh, Mac I think you should come here an' see this." The detective called back without taking his eyes off whatever was holding his attention. Getting up from his crouch caused Mac's knees to pop and he grumbled something as he moved toward the group of rubberneckers. "What's going on, Don?" The question went unanswered as Don just pointed up at the billboard that had become unveiled with the morning light.
In big, angry letters, for all of New York to read was the phrase: "Lisa Smigielski stole my heart so I stole hers." The note might have been interpreted as romantic by any passer-by, but with the dead body in the alley behind them the two men knew better.
"Think that goes to motive, Mac?" Don turned his head, dark eyebrows raising at the grim looking investigator.
"This is why I don't celebrate Valentine's day," was his response and a shake of his head.
This response was written for the prompt heart no Danny's, Don's or Stella's were harmed in the writing of this prompt.