SquidgeWorld Archive

Summary: Some people are born to the Christmas spirit; some people have the Christmas spirit thrust upon them. Some people couldn't find it if it bit them in the ass... and for good reason:

If he had his choice of ways in which to spend Christmas Eve, this way would not have been it. The body of a little boy lay sprawled in a pool of blood, his and that of his seriously wounded mother, beside a thinly decorated Christmas tree. Straw blond hair, dyed an ugly red, dangled softly to the wet floor. High velocity blood spatter splashed across the tree and the few presents beneath it like obscene holiday ornaments, shiny balls of crimson amidst the green needles and the newspaper gift wrapping. Mac squeezed his eyes closed. He had seen this kind of scene before. That sure as hell didn't make dealing with it any easier.

"I hate these scenes." Danny eased into the apartment, trailing cold air and the scent of cookies being baked in the apartment down the hall behind him. "This shouldn't happen on Christmas Eve, not to a kid."

"This shouldn't happen to anyone at any time, but it does." Mac pulled a pair of latex gloves from his equipment box and pulled them on with a snap.

"I know, Mac. It's just that...." Danny set his own box on the floor and crouched beside the tiny body. "He can't be more than... what, four?"

Mac sighed. "The father is in custody, and he's already confessed. But we get everything we can, Danny, everything." He pulled out the camera and carefully focused on a clump of mousy brown hair - probably from the mother, he thought - and snapped a photo of it. "The bastard doesn't get a chance to go back on his confession, he doesn't get to question any of our evidence, and he doesn't walk on this. We clear?"

Danny nodded grimly. "As crystal, Mac."

They were still gathering evidence when word came that the mother had died en route to the hospital.

Three small candles sat on the edge of Danny's desk, secure in a small metal tray liberated from the lab. The candles - puny little tea lights, really - were also lab escapees, leftovers from an experiment in an arson/homicide a few months earlier. Danny had carefully trimmed the wicks and lit them after he had cleared a space large enough that Mac wouldn't bitch about stray sparks setting the lab on fire. He stared at the dancing flames momentarily before returning his attention to his computer screen.

As he pounded out the initial report on the double homicide, the flames still held part of his attention. Three flames, each a prayer to a god he stopped believing in about the time he stopped believing in Santa Claus. Still, 'tis the season and all that - it couldn't hurt. Just lighting the candles seemed to help.

"You're going to include a BPA with that report, aren't you?"

Danny flinched, startled by Mac's appearance in the door to his cramped office. "We got the prints from the gun, Mac, and we got the ballistics matching the bullet from the kid to the gun with the father's prints, and we have the statements of the neighbors placing the gun in the guy's hands as he walked out of the apartment just after the shots were heard. And we got the guy's confession to top that off." He ticked off his points with his fingers and shrugged, hands spread open. "Why do we need to do a bloodstain pattern analysis when we got all that?"

Mac's eyes narrowed, flashing in anger. "Just do it, Danny. This case will be airtight by the time the DA's office goes to arraignment." He turned on his heel and marched away from the door. "And lose those candles," he called out as he turned the corner.

Danny lurched from his seat and started to follow Mac, but stopped at the door. He punched his fist into the door jamb, then promptly cursed his foolishness for taking on a metal doorframe with his knuckles. Mac was in a mood, and there would be no talking sense to him.

Danny saved his work on the report and put his computer to sleep as he sucked on his throbbing knuckles. Mac wanted a BPA? Mac would get his fucking BPA, the best damned BPA ever produced by the New York City crime lab, the bastard.

The candle flames guttered as he stormed past them, then resumed their steady glow.

The bright and clear winter day had given way to an unseasonably warm evening, which in turn had given way to a gray-tinged dawn by the time Danny appended the last diagram to his report. He had paid obsessive attention to the details of the drawings; he wasn't going to give Mac a chance to send the report back to him. He grinned wearily as he signed the report and slid it into a folder. The candles remained on the corner of his desk, close to exhaustion, but still defiantly lit.

He strode into Mac's office, folder held high above his head. "Report with insanely detailed BPA. Prosecution's case, hermetically sealed." He dropped the folder in front of Mac, on top of the paperwork Mac was filling out, scattering some of the documents. Danny couldn't bring himself to care about the consequences of his melodramatic display of insolence. He was pissed, and Mac was going to know it. "The Pope couldn't wiggle outta this one. Now, if you don't mind, I'm getting the hell outta here before my double shift gets stretched further into a triple." He headed toward the door, waving lethargically. "Merry... whatever, Mac."

He was already back in his office by the time he realized that Mac was calling to him, had actually followed him trying to get his attention. He rubbed his eyes. This wasn't going to be pretty. He collapsed into the chair and started shutting down his computer.

"Danny, I just wanted to...." Mac hovered in the doorway of the small office, hands stuffed in his pockets.

Danny cut him off with a wave of his hand. "Don't, Mac. Just don't go there. You wanted the bastard, and you wanted justice for the kid and his mom. I get that. Believe me, I know what it's like to go overboard going after justice for the dead."

Mac's lips pressed together in a tight line. "The silver man case wasn't...."

"No, it wasn't." Danny gathered the pages of the second copy of the report together and tapped them sharply into line on his desk. Mac flinched. "Anything else, 'cause I really want to get outta here this year."

Mac glanced to the corner of the desk. One candle had gone out, and a second was guttering fitfully. "You didn't put them out." He looked back at Danny. The second flame died.

Danny shrugged. "Write me up for it."

Mac stepped up to the desk and held one hand over the weakening flame of the remaining candle. "What were they for, Danny? What did they represent?"

Danny smiled thinly. Of course Mac would figure it out. "Memories." He shrugged. "Seemed to be a good time to remember some things."

Mac nodded. "One of them was for the child yesterday, wasn't it?"

Danny didn't see any sense in denying it. He nodded briefly and slipped the papers into another file folder.

"It was my first Christmas in the CSU." Mac jammed his hands back in his pocket and stared at the fading flame of the candle. "I didn't mind working the overnight shift because Claire was on a business trip in Europe." He watched Danny drop the file folder in a drawer. "The girl was just five years old. Her father killed her and her mother, then tried to turn the gun on himself because he lost his job." Mac squared his shoulders and looked Danny in the eye. "I pushed hard on this case because I have memories, too."

"And somehow the guy skated, right? Screwed up evidence or screwed up confession, one or the other, am I right?" If Mac had been hoping for compassion or understanding here, Danny was going to make sure he knew what was what. "Got news for you, Mac. I don't screw up every crime scene I work, and you can't make up for the past by being a hard-ass now." He grabbed his coat off its peg and yanked it on. "We had enough evidence without the BPA, more than enough. But I spent hours on that analysis, hours that I could have spent on other cases and other vics that deserve justice, too. Convicting this bastard isn't going to be any easier because we know he shot his wife from four and a half feet away, and that he shot his kid...." He stopped and rubbed his hand through his hair. "I gotta go, Mac." He grabbed the strap of his messenger bag and looped it over his shoulder as he fled the office.

Mac wet his thumb and pressed it against the wick bearing the last sputtering flame. The candle went out.

Mac caught up with Danny at the elevators. "That conversation didn't go quite as planned." He grabbed Danny's elbow when the doors opened, and felt Danny stiffen beneath his fingers. He was a little surprised that Danny didn't pull away from his grip and board the elevator anyway. "Can we go somewhere for breakfast? Or did you want to go to church this morning?" Mac loosed his grip on Danny when he felt the younger man relax a bit.

"Church?" Danny laughed. "Nah, I don't do Mass anymore. Haven't seen the inside of a church that wasn't a crime scene in years. It's been a long day, Mac..." His voice trailed off uncertainly. Mac didn't invite other lab rats out; they did the inviting, and Mac either showed or he didn't. Usually didn't. Danny regarded Mac for a long moment, then shrugged a shoulder. "I could do with a coffee that doesn't taste like thioacetamide."

Mac grimaced eloquently. "Yeah, I think that might be good. Let me grab my coat."

Danny leaned against the wall by the elevator doors and watched Mac hurry back to his office. He wasn't sure what had gotten into his boss, and he was too tired to spend much time trying to figure it out. He'd roll with it, though. 'Tis the season, right?

A few minutes later, they were seated at a diner near the station with coffee mugs in front of them. The coffee was strong enough to crumble asphalt, the food was fast and cheap, and the place never closed. Cops loved it, but it was nearly deserted that Christmas morning.

Danny brought his cup to his nose and inhaled the steam coming off the coffee. "Strong enough that the fumes alone will keep you awake for a week." He stretched one leg out along the bench of the booth and settled back. He'd wait for Mac to set the pace.

Mac ran a finger around the rim of his mug and stared out the window. "You said you don't go to church anymore. Mind if I ask why?"

Danny took a sip of his coffee. Not the question he'd been expecting. "Next thing you'll be asking my views on politics." He grinned and waved away the apology he could see coming. "Don't worry about it. You just surprised me is all." He took another sip of the steaming brew while he considered his words. "Growing up where I did, it kinda struck me as... wrong... for guys to be going to the house of god one day and then going to another guy's house to beat the crap out of him the next day. It didn't add up to me, and I was just a kid." He chuckled. "My brother, Louie... he took First Communion with a kid who I knew was running errands for a bookie up the street. I took instruction for First Confession with Sonny Sassone's cousin. Far as I know, that kid was mobbed up before he hit high school, and got his first felony conviction when other guys were getting their first cars." He leaned forward, settling his elbows on the table. "I figured out early on that any god worshipped by liars, thieves, hypocrites and thugs was probably a liar, thief, hypocrite and a thug."

Mac's eyebrows rose. "I can see where you'd go sour on religion early."

Danny shrugged. "My ma tried to tell me that god watched over me all the time. 'Cept I didn't see him watching my back on my way home from school. Found an iron pipe with a nice bend at the end for that. That worked a hell of a lot better than a prayer, I can tell you."

Mac smiled with Danny, then looked away. "If you're not the religious type, then what was with the candles?"

Now there was the question Danny had been expecting. "Didn't say I wasn't religious. Just said I didn't go to church anymore." He waited for the waitress to leave after she had refilled their coffee. "There's something out there a hell of a lot more enduring than fingerprints, DNA evidence or the penal code, Mac. I mean, we got electrophoresis, Andy Pettitt in a Yankees uniform and pizza with extra cheese... there's got to be something, right? I just hope...."

He paused and stared at his coffee. "One of the candles was for Aiden, the one I lost. The other one was for the ones I coulda lost - Stella, Flack, you, Louie. Actually, I'm still not sure whether Louie is a 'lost' or a 'coulda lost'...."

Mac laid a hand on Danny's arm, silencing the rambling speech. "You thought of me when you lit one of those candles?"

Danny quirked a tight smile. "Yeah."

"Thank you." Mac leaned back again and stared out the window. "I owe you an apology. You were right; there was enough evidence to go to arraignment and a bloodstain pattern analysis wasn't necessary. Pushing you that way was wrong. I..."

'... see the face of another child lost on Christmas Eve, see the man who killed her walk away because the car I was driving was hit by another car and the evidence in the trunk was destroyed. Not my fault, but still my fault and my nightmare. I see the faces of others for whom I cannot get justice: faces from Beirut, from the WTC, from that stack of unsolved case files that will always be on the edge of my desk. I...'

"... I'm sorry, Danny."

Danny tapped the window with his knuckle and pointed at the lightening sky. "Look at the sky, Mac. Really look at it, and not at the inside of your own skull." He watched Mac blink slowly and focus on the sky. "You can't see it because, hey! We're in New York City. But the sun is coming up. It would come up whether we got the guy or not. All our victories are bittersweet; more bitter on a day like today, but we still scored a victory. Let's take it and move on, Mac. We don't always win."

Mac shrugged and drank more of his coffee. "Can we really call them victories with a straight face? I can't."

Danny leaned forward and rapped his knuckles on the table in front of Mac. "News flash, Mac. You can't solve all the crimes, and you can't carry the world's problems on your shoulders." He leaned back with cocky grin. "Someone else already claimed that gig. Isn't that what today is all about?"

Mac's hands tightened around his coffee cup. "Some people would call that blasphemous, Danny."

Danny lifted a shoulder in a lazy shrug. "Yeah, and they'd probably be right. Doesn't change the fact that you can't solve the world's problems, no matter how hard you try." He pried Mac's fingers away from the cup and lifted it out of the older man's grasp. "C'mon, Mac. Let's go find us a Mass. Maybe that will help your perspective."

Mac snatched the coffee cup back from Danny and raised his hand to the waitress for another refill. "Like you, I quit believing in god a long time ago." He nodded his thanks to the waitress as she topped off his mug. "I went to church for Claire's sake, not my own."

Danny snorted, waving off a refill of his own mug. "You believe. You're just pissed off at him." He chuckled at Mac's arched eyebrow. "I've seen that scar on your shoulder, and I know at least some of your service record. Doesn't take much to put two and two together. You were in Beirut when the barracks were blown up." When Mac scowled, Danny cut off his response with a sharp gesture. "You have every right to be pissed, Mac, but you also need to lay off some of that burden you take on. Maybe if you went back, you could find a way to do that."

"And what would a nonbeliever such as yourself do during this Mass if I agreed to go?"

"Contemplate the inside of my eyelids." Danny smiled widely. "Nap, just like a quarter of the congregation will be doing at this hour." He drained the remainder of his coffee. "I might not believe in the god of the church, but I do believe in a higher power, Mac. That power created cell structures that allow oak trees to bend and human bones to take a lot of stress before breaking. It created a few proteins that all life shares. It created the atmosphere that allows us to breathe and makes stars glitter at night. Our jobs have us seeing the wonder when it's been buried under a pile of shit. Today would be a good day to look at the wonder again."

Mac regarded Danny for a long, silent moment. "You surprise me."

Danny laughed. "I always aim to keep your life interesting."

"That you do, Danny. That you do." Mac took another quick sip of his coffee and set the mug down with a hefty tip for the waitress. "Let's find that Mass, Danny."

Danny grinned. "Good plan." He slid out of the booth and dragged his coat on. Mac picked up his messenger bag and slid it over Danny's shoulder. "Afterward, wanna come back to my place for breakfast? I've got the makings for waffles that would make an atheist believe in god."

Mac laughed out loud. "Yeah, Danny, I'd like that a lot."

Danny held the diner door open for Mac. "If that higher power saw fit to keep Andy Pettitt with the Yankees, think a prayer to keep Tiki Barber in a Giants uniform will do any good?"

Mac chuckled again. He realized he hadn't laughed like this in... too long. "Let's go find out, Danny. All we can do is try."