The staircase is dark, and musty, as if it hadn't been used in years. Only the faint wafting of his partner's perfume gives him temporary relief from the suffocating scent, which has now crawled into his nostrils and settled in, sucking up any moisture that may have been there. This momentary distraction causes him to stumble, nearly introducing his face to the stair in a most unpleasant manner.

"Still breaking in the new shoes?" his partner cracks.

"Still...um...breaking in my feet" he shyly jokes back, without the slightest hint of a smile. His ears perk to the click, whine and pop of over anxious cameras that can be heard through the door leading to the stairway. Slowly, he nudges the door open and slinks through, his eyes searching for…there. In the middle of the hall. Men in blue cloistered outside an open doorway, chattering nervously. Her heels click behind him as he stalks down the hallway, purposefully. Without realizing it, he's already reached into his overcoat and retrieved his badge, cupping it in his palm, ready to be shown when asked.

He places his hand on the shoulder of the officer nearest to him. The man turns to find Goren's huge frame and badge inches from his face. Eames smirks to herself, noting that a month locked up in a room with Miss Manners wouldn't cure her partner's boundary issues. "Hi…I'm uh…Detective Goren. This is my partner" gesturing behind him, "Detective Eames. We're here from Major Case…is there a…um, D-DIC we can speak with?"

"Right over there, Sir. Grey jacket, Mahoney."

Goren sidesteps the deputy and searches the crowd for a grey jacket. He spots the man near the window at the back of the apartment, apparently inspecting the window latch. He takes one step into the room. Instantly his nose is violently assaulted by the smell of iron and musk. Blood. Three more steps into the room leads him to the source. A naked blonde woman is strung up in the middle of the living room, her arms over her head, and her knees bent with her legs behind her at an almost perfect ninety degree angle. Fighting his instinct, Goren decides it best to introduce himself to the man in charge before conducting his inspection of the scene. He was, as usual, on thin ice with Deakins, and had made a conscious effort in the last few months to correct his…offending…behavior. He snaps his head away from the victim and once again finds Mahoney, this time talking to Random Deputy B. With one huge step he is next to the man in the grey jacket, sticking up his badge, as if in surrender. He is halfway through his introduction when the man interrupts him.

"MCS, huh? Yeah, I got a call about you guys dropping by. Apparently, you've seen shit like this before." He huffs quietly, "As if we haven't." Still, he politely sticks out his hand to Goren, and then Eames. "Vic's name is Charlotte Truman, 24 years old, transplant from Connecticut…one of those wasp types, you know?" As he speaks he leads the team over to where the woman is hanging. Goren loses touch with Mahoney's voice as he narrows in on the girl.

Somehow, a pair of latex gloves has made their way onto his hands, stopping a full inch short of his wrists. He keeps forgetting to add "Extra Large Latex gloves" to the office supply list. It's enough to conduct a satisfactory inspection without contamination though, and he once again pushes the idea out of his head. Behind him, the drone of voices continues: Eame's, Mahoney's, Random Deputy's C, D and B.

His eyes drift upward, to the configuration that is keeping the girl in such a strange position, despite being well past rigor. Two metal rings, thick and silver, jut down from the ceiling, perfectly parallel from each other. He follows a line of dark blue rope threaded through the rings, to the victim's wrists, which are extended above her head. Pushing his sleeve up, he slowly reaches over and brushes back the victim's hair, revealing her neck, and the dark blue rope that surrounds it.

Snap, snap goes Eames' gloves.

Click, whine, pop goes the camera.

Sssh, sssh goes the crime scene booties.

Pulling her hair completely behind her neck and holding it there, he examines the path of the rope on her skin. Wrists, ceiling, neck, breasts, stomach, waist, front of thighs, knees, front of shins, ankles. Descending from her neck, the rope trails a path between her breasts, encircling them once each, then down to her waist, where it circles and continues down the front of her thighs, circling the knees, then down the shins, finally coming to a rest around both her ankles. Leaning in, he studies the rope. It is delicate, but strong. Not nylon or polyester, with a texture almost like silk. The pattern it weaves down her torso is intricate, a series of braided knots and twists, reminding him of sailor's knots or Boy Scout badge earners. Rising to his full height, he wraps his index fingers and thumbs around the victim's wrist, holding his other fingers taut and away, almost like she were contaminated meat. Slowly, he pulls her wrists down, toward the floor. And slowly, her body rises up a few inches. He repeats this several times, a twinge of guilt hitting the bottom of his spine. Grim images of marionettes parade through his head, and he pushes them away. Silently, he apologizes to Charlotte. It is common practice in law enforcement to disconnect oneself from the victim and the scene, analyzing it as if it were a cold, dead frog in a metal pan, skin split down the middle. Goren was guilty of this practice as well; sometimes he felt it necessary to make it through the day without ending up in an institution. But, occasionally, he allowed himself to be reminded that these victims were people, with lives and families and people who loved them, and today, he let that fact slip in. Once more, he repeated the action, listening to the whisper of the rope against the metal rings. Finally, he understood.

"Eames, take a look at this."

She quickly excuses herself from the conversation with Mahoney and slides in besides Goren, leaning over him to get a better look at the rope.

Honeysuckle.

"What is it?"

"It's um…r-rope. But not your typical rope. This rope is…special. It's not strong enough to restrain or hold things down. It's manufactured for um, "looks" rather than…function. But watch what happens when I do this."

Sorry, sweetheart. Just one more time.

He lowers her wrists, and Eames' head follows the movement of her body. She looks at him quizzically, not understanding.

"If she keeps her arms pulled down, supporting her body weight, the rope around her neck stays loose. But, if she relaxes her arms, and allows her body weight to respond to gravity…"

Eames finishes for him "…the rope pulls on her neck." She exhales in disbelief. "After hours of holding up her own body weight with just her arms, she got tired. The bastard forced her to strangle herself."

Goren has lost her voice already. He is kneeling below the victim, pointing to the carpet. "See this dust here? Those hooks were not here. He brought them with him. He…he planned this out, painstakingly." Standing and circling around her, he finally finds the source of the blood. Deep gashes cris-cross her back, not deep enough to damage organs, but deep enough to bleed. For hours.

"Detectives." A voice calls from across the room, distracting Eames. "We found this in the toilet." The deputy holds up a black plastic object. Upon stepping closer, Eames pulls an evidence bag from her pocket and extends it to him. He drops it in, and she brings it to her face. A stud finder. Her mind drifts briefly to a joke her sister had made a few months back, while she and Eame's sat in the living room, the sound of her husband renovating the study into a nursery above them. Natalie had picked up a similar device from the coffee table and handed it to Eames, joking that maybe if she brought it to a bar, she could go home with a man instead of files and paperwork. She rolled her eyes inwardly, and then turned to her partner, who is still examining the victim's wounds. As she walks the new found evidence over to him, she sees his arm shoot out, latching onto the arm of the nearest CSU investigator.

"Tweezers." He added as an afterthought "Um..Please?"

The investigator eyes him before reaching into a tool bag to retrieve a pair of thin, pointed tweezers. Goren takes them and slowly, as if diffusing a bomb, inserts them into a large wound on the victim's back. Pulling back, she sees his eyes go wide. He's found the Cracker Jack prize, she muses. Frantically, he searches his pocket for a baggie. Cursing quietly, he almost didn't notice when Eames held a bag out to him. He wipes the tips of the tweezers against the sides of the bag, being sure to capture his prize. "Got something?"

"A fiber. I can't tell what it is…it just smells like b-blood. We'll have to get it to the lab." Gently, he takes the bags from Eames' hands and politely asks an investigator to forward them to the lab. Goren slinks around her, back to the front of the victim, to examine the complicated rope pattern. He resists the urge to run his fingers over the rope's surface, noting that there had to be fingerprints somewhere in those twists and turns. This pattern is…incredible, even beautiful. He hears the click of Eames' cell phone closing, and he crashes back to earth.

"That was the Captain. The family is on their way from Connecticut, he wants us there to question them."

Straightening himself, he takes one last look at Charlotte, annoyed at being pulled away from his examination. He allows Eames to extend the typical goodbye, here's our number, call us if you find anything formalities, while he focused his attention on one of the photographers. Being careful not to startle this one, he gently reaches out and touches her elbow.

"E-excuse me, ma'am? I'm uh…gonna need some close-ups of this rope pattern, i-if you don't mind." He fumbles with his binder, snatching a card from one of its pockets and extending it to her. He gestures with his still-gloved pinky. "Here's my email address at the Plaza. If you could email them when you get back to your office, I'd be very grateful." He hoped his dark eyes conveyed a pleading look. The photographer dipped her head in agreement, a soft "Yes sir" escaping her lips before bringing her head back up. Goren thought he saw her eyes linger at his lips before connecting with his eyes, and he felt the heat rise in his cheeks before he chided himself and slipped away. Eames was close behind him as he charged for the elevator, snapping his gloves off.

Once in the SUV, Eames turned to her partner, intent on inquiring about his interest in the way the ropes were tied. She caught a glimpse of him, one leg over the other, scribbling furiously in his binder.

She'd lost him already.

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