The Incomprehensible Corruption of Innocence

“It’s clear!” An officer called out, and the crime team entered. The smell was overpowering, but they compressed their lips and processed the scene with as much care and thoroughness as they had a thousand scenes previous, and would process a thousand scenes after.

They took all the evidence to the lab, and spent several hours processing all of it. “Horatio,” Natalia trembled as he entered the lab, and she looked down at her microscope tearfully. “The condoms you gave me, well, there were four types of semen, and we were able to get all kinds of DNA from it. A lot of the condoms had blood and fecal matter on them, but a few only had saliva traces, and epithelia were all over everything. These guys made no effort to hide what they did.”

“They tortured him, Horatio,” Valera scowled as she entered the lab, papers in her hands. “Judging by the amount of blood and fecal matter we found, it’s more than clear he was raped repeatedly, and with the amount of blood on the floor, and the spatters on the walls and what furniture there was, he was beaten . . . a lot, and not only with fists.”

“And have we put any names to our DNA?” H asked, as fury made his voice calm, and his eyes blaze.

“AFIS came up with three, other than Ryan’s,” Valera answered, and handed him the pile of paper.

“Anton Caparthy, AKA Psycho, Jose Manzailla, and Willard Cray, both long time associates of Anton’s,” Natalia answered, and H nodded.

“Give me an hour to get the warrants, and then have Eric and Calleigh meet me in the lot.”

“Horatio,” Natalia said, and her voice trembled. “No one deserves this . . .” she indicated the papers, and he nodded.

“Bring him home,” Valera said, and H nodded.

“I intend to,” he said, and left the room. True to his word, he had the warrants in his hand, and Eric and Calleigh met him in the parking lot with Alexx right beside them.

“Alexx,” Horatio said, and she shook her head.

“I’m going, Horatio. He’s going to need me. One . . .” She blinked and lowered her gaze. “One way or the other. No one’s going to touch my Baby other than me.”

“Understood,” H nodded, and put on his glasses. “Then let’s roll, Team.”

And roll they did.

They pulled up at the first address they had, and it was Anton Caparthy’s address. They followed procedure to the letter, and the man didn’t give up easily. In fact, he blasted out of the house, guns blazing, and the police were forced to take him down . . . take him down, and out, completely.

“Damn it, H!” Eric cursed loudly, and H nodded.

“We’ll get the next one,” H said, and put his glasses on his face as they drove to the next address, Jose Manzailla’s. Turned out that he wasn’t home, and they went to the final address, though they left others at the other houses to process them.

And there they hit paydirt. They got both Manzailla and Cray, though neither man escaped unscathed.

Cray was the only one able to talk, and once he’d been patched up, H, Eric, and Calleigh stood around his hospital bed, and stared down at him for a long time in silence.

“If you’re trying to intimidate me,” he rasped, “I don’t intimidate much.”

“And if you’re trying to be brave and tough things out,” Calleigh scowled deeply. “It isn’t going to work. We’ve got enough evidence to send you away for a few dozen lifetimes.”

Cray laughed. “But you don’t have the cop. If you did, you wouldn’t be here wasting my time.”

“You are wasting ours,” Eric hissed. “And right now you’re one step away from joining your boss in Hell,” Eric loomed over the man, who shrugged.

“Been on my way there for a long time,” he said, and smiled. “But damn, that cop was good. Once we got him past that defiant stage, he made the perfect little Slave Whore. You should have seen him when he broke. Beautiful. Psycho and us, we did a number on him, and he cracked like an eggshell under a foot. I tell you, we made a mint off that cop, and ain’t nobody going to see him ever again.”

“You rotten son of a bitch!” Eric yelled, and launched himself at the man in the bed, but H stopped him, and backed him off.

“He means, Eric, that Ryan is still alive, and I’m sure that when we process the scenes, we’ll find something we can use to find him . . .”

Suddenly, H’s phone rang, and he stepped away from the others to answer it. He blinked, and nodded. “Good work, Boa Vista. We’re on our way.”

He hung up the phone, and looked at the others. “They’ve found him,” he said, and the man in the bed snorted.

“You’ll never get him to testify.”

“We don’t need him to testify,” H narrowed his eyes, and silently vowed that the man would never survive in prison, and if Manzailla lived through his surgery, he wouldn’t either. “They found the DVD’s.”

He led the others out of the hospital, and as they went down to the parking lot, Calleigh and Eric glanced over at H’s face, and saw that while he looked angry, his face was pale, even more pale than normal, and they knew that something was very wrong.

“H?” Eric asked, and risked a rare touch on his arm. “What did you mean, ‘DVD’s’?

“It seems, Eric,” H said, his control tightly in place. “That those . . . monsters . . . made DVD’s of the things they did to him. Boa Vista found them while she was processing Caparthy’s place.”

“But you said they found him,” Calleigh said, her voice quiet, as she realized that they were going to have to watch the DVD’s in order to document them properly.

“More accurately, they found a bill of sale,” H swallowed, and his control slipped. “Once I look at that . . . receipt . . . we’re going to go get him back.”

No one answered, but they all had the same thought, and that was whoever had bought him was not going to live any longer than the bastards who sold him.


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