Chapter Text
Daryl hated the sight of Rick on the floor. His eyes were closed, his breathing was quiet, and from a distance, he really did look like he’d been murdered, dark red blood splattered across his chest, face, and hands. But worse were the walls, showered in droplets, showing an initial point of impact—a gunshot, clean through the back of Rick’s head, the eerie shape of his body outlined against the peeling white paint. Like he had been cornered, and shot anyway. Like he’d tried to run, but never made it.
This wasn’t the first staged crime scene Daryl had ever worked, but it was his first time with a 'victim' who wasn’t from his more specialized criminology classes (usually it was Sasha who ended up with the short straw, her face to the cold tile and her loud curses echoing across the room whenever someone handled her too roughly). Expectations were high, of course, because after two years of working together, everyone was supposed to know exactly how to act around each other: they knew who was ticklish and where, who would kick them if they pressed too hard, and who would flinch at the touch of a cold instrument on their skin. Daryl was prepared for all that. He wasn’t prepared for Rick.
Like hell if he’d let that derail his first day as team lead, though.
With his group in tow, Daryl explored the makeshift crime scene. Yellow caution tape marked the space around the room they were allowed to work in, the tiny guardrail woven between pieces of antique furniture that had likely been stolen from some old lady’s apartment. The floor was littered with ‘evidence’, catalogued with orange cones and faded black numbers. A bloody footprint had a number ‘3’ beside it, a spent cartridge a ‘9’. Stepping carefully, Daryl pointed to each item, just to make sure the people behind him didn’t accidentally disturb anything—they’d all lose points for that.
Rick was lying in what was supposed to look like a hallway, the adjacent rooms outlined with scotch tape and chalk labels that read ‘kitchen’ and ‘living room’. Rick’s body had been posed to look like he had slid down the wall, his legs out in front of him and his head near the baseboards. His shirt was covered in red and black grime, like he’d been stabbed, and the pool of blood beneath him was drying quickly, turning pink around the edges and betraying its true identity as food colouring. His hair was dark in some places, more towards the back, and beside his right ear was a few pieces of scrap metal, likely meant to simulate bullet fragments. There was even a thin line of blood that trailed from the edge of his lip down his chin, along his neck, and onto the floor.
“Thank god it’s not me today,” Sasha mumbled under her breath, the flash on her camera blinking quickly. “They did not skimp on the special effects.”
“Stay in character, will ya?” Daryl whispered, gesturing to the left side of Rick’s body for more photos. The chatter would only distract him, and he was already distracted enough.
On his knees, Daryl rummaged through his medical bag. Pulling out a pair of plastic gloves, he tugged them carefully over his knuckles, wishing, as he always did, that they came in more than one size. When Sasha was done documenting the initial state of the body, she kneeled down on the other side of Rick, and together, she and Daryl started their search.
Sasha looked for Rick’s wallet first, pawing through his pockets. Daryl hesitated a moment too long, earning him a look of irritation, but he shrugged it off as to imply he was just trying to be careful. With his right hand on Rick’s left shoulder, and his left hand on Rick’s left hip, he gently pulled him sideways, giving Sasha access to Rick’s back pocket.
Rick had been given a fake name, and his driver’s license said he was thirty-five, wore glasses, and had two kids. There was a picture of his ‘family’, which of course was just a stock image; his wife was petite, and his two little girls had bright red hair. They looked nothing like him, with his dark curly hair and high cheekbones, his blue eyes and his long nose. It made everything feel kind of cheap.
“Should I take this to Shane?” Sasha asked, wiping some of the blood on the wallet onto her gloves. “He’s team lead for the investigators, right?”
Daryl just nodded, letting her wander off into the kitchen where several investigation students were crowded around a knife block—with, presumably, a knife or two conveniently missing.
The other members of his team bent down to get to work, moving their hands over Rick’s legs, ‘feeling’ for injuries they would eventually just identify based on the colour of the makeup stains on his pants. Daryl, as team lead, was left with Rick’s chest and head, a task he should really should be handling in a lab, with Rick on a metal table and a towel over his—
No. Daryl pushed that thought from his mind.
Knowing Rick likely died from the gunshot to his head, Daryl started with that. Carefully, he took Rick’s jaw between his fingers, turning his face first to the left, then the right. The shot was clean through the middle of his forehead, with dark soot around the wound. Apparently, the shot had been made at almost point-blank range. But why would Rick have let the gunman get so close to him?
Gently, Daryl cradled the back of Rick’s head and neck with his right hand. The makeup around his exit wound had been obscured by his time on the floor (and likely some degree of sweat), so there wasn’t much to see. Still, Daryl pretended to feel around with his other hand. “Evidence of one point of entry, one point of exit,” Daryl noted, more for the sake of procedure than anything else. This was basically textbook.
Placing Rick’s head back on the floor, Daryl moved to his chest. Somewhere ahead of him, he could hear Sasha telling Shane and—Andrea? It sounded like Andrea, but Daryl couldn’t be sure—about Rick’s wallet, along with her initial findings. To his left, the rest of his group chattered about blood loss and bloodstains. To his right, Rick was almost perfectly silent, his breaths shallow and measured, his eyelids fluttering just a little against his cheeks.
Even covered in blood, god, he—
Focus, Daryl reminded himself, tearing his eyes from Rick’s face, occupying himself with Rick’s chest instead. He swept his hands over the ‘wounds’, marking each, recording them on audio with an old-school tape-deck. Seventeen stab wounds, postmortem. Clear overkill. A crime of passion, perhaps.
Daryl traced his fingers over Rick’s ribs, noting which ones would have been nicked by the blade, which lung would have been punctured, which artery or vein would have been cut. The wounds were deep, he realized, but they hadn’t bled too much. Two different kinds of weapons were used, one jagged, another sharp. Maybe a third, but it was hard to tell. Evidence of more than one assistant?
As Daryl was moving back towards Rick’s stomach, he slipped into a small divert, and he heard Rick inhale sharply. His head jerked back just a little, like he’d been stung, and his forehead creased, right between his eyebrows. Daryl squeezed his shoulder in apology.
Touching Rick’s pelvis after that felt like cheating. Threading his fingers through the rips in his shirt, along the ridge of his bones, across the little strips of his skin. Rick was warm to the touch, even through Daryl’s glove, and his breaths trembled through him as he fought to keep his chest from moving too much.
“Hey,” Daryl whispered, trying to keep his voice from being heard by a prof. “You don’t have to hold your breath or anything. Not worth the work.”
And to Daryl’s surprise, Rick smiled. A small but honest pull of his lips.
And maybe Daryl could have taken a moment to enjoy that, if Rick hadn’t—just then—peaked open one of his eyes.