Lethal Fractures: Chapter 23-Conclusion

A/N: Yes, you read that right: conclusion. I know 23 chapters seems incredibly short after some of my other stories (a 43 chapter opus I like to call "Of Jews and Gentiles" comes to mind), but it is what it is. I wish I could say that I have another story written and ready to be posted, but between trying to survive the last couple of months of medical school (!) and the story I've been posting on fictionpress, I haven't had much time for writing fanfiction. But I will be back :)

For those of you not familiar with military and medical jargon and acronyms, here are a few translations for this chapter:
ROTC: Reserve Officer Training Corps
Article 134: also known as a General Article. Offense subject to court martial, defined by the Uniform Code of Military Conduct
NCOIC: Non-commissioned officer in charge
Counter-tranference: in psychiatry, the therapist transferring his/her own experiences and emotions onto the patient. In other words, the therapist is not reacting to the patient's personality or problems, but rather to his/her own internal conflicts.
2LT: Second Lieutenant, the lowest officer rank in the Army, Air Force, and Marines. All medical students sponsored by the Army and Air Force are second lieutenants (Ensign in the Navy is the equivalent rank)

Okay, I think that should do it. I hope you enjoyed the story, and I look forward to seeing you again soon (well, 'seeing' isn't the best word, but you know what I mean).

Major Sonja Gracy stepped into the corner deli across the street from the medical center at Georgetown University, a slight smile on her face. It had been more than two years since she the last time she had been there, and fourteen years since the first, but in all of those years, nothing had changed. It hadn't become any more or any less classy in over a decade, but had remained what it always had been and always would be—a place for students and hospital staff alike to grab a quick meal during a short break or park for a couple of hours with a textbook and coffee cup that never seemed to empty.

"Good God, Sonja, you showed up in uniform?" Gracy swung around to find herself face-to-face with one of her best friends, both in the Army and outside of it. She had started the habit of meeting with Shaena O'Leary at least once a month for lunch back when her friend was a psychiatry intern at Walter Reed and she was a fourth year medical student at Georgetown, when they were Captain Shaena Grady and Second Lieutenant Sonja Gracy. In the decade that followed, they had completed their separate residencies, been sent on separate assignments, but somehow managed to find themselves back in the same city once again. "People are going to talk if they see me dining with an Army officer."

"Right," Gracy replied with a grin. "As if wallpapering your office with Army memorabilia wasn't enough." For a woman who had never had any enthusiasm for joining the Army and left as soon as she could, she was intensely proud of her service. "I see you're still continuing to have babies as if it's your job to do so." Her friend was six months pregnant with her fifth child, her previous four children ranging in age from seven—three months older than Nate Gracy—to twenty months, with a pair of three-and-a-half-year-old twins in the mix.

"I'm Catholic, Sonja. It is my job to do so." She grinned. Robbie and Shaena O'Leary liked to joke about their kids being the result of the Catholic church's stance on birth control, but Gracy knew that they both came from large families and a multitude of children was always in the plan. "And I see you're still believing that two is enough."

"Kinda hard to have kids without a husband."

O'Leary waved dismissively. "No it's not. I used to see one or two eighteen- or nineteen-year old female privates a month who could tell you that." At Gracy's confused expression, she quickly explained, "First time away from home, feeling overwhelmed by joining the Army, and that sergeant over there is oh-so-helpful." She gave a quick grin. "They need to start issuing these girls birth control at basic training. But anyway, you look good, Sonja. Even with that beret line across your forehead."

Gracy's hand involuntarily flew to her forehead, where she knew from experience there was a straight red line from the pressure of her beret. Dr. O'Leary chuckled at the move, which had been the desired effect of the comment, forcing Gracy to admit defeat. "Oh, come on. I never laughed at you for beret lines."

"That's because you always had them, too." O'Leary grinned. "Robbie told me about the swim meet down in Norfolk. Jaelynn was quite impressed with Maddie's performance. I didn't have the heart to tell her that when it comes to the swimming pool, there's no way she'll be able to meet the standards of a Gracy." Both women had been collegiate swimmers, but their experiences were completely different: for Gracy, it had been an all-consuming facet of her four-years, as her continuing education depended on her ability to be the fastest one to the other end of the pool. O'Leary, having swam for Emory University, a Division III school in Atlanta, trained hard but studied harder—her scholarships came from her academic achievements, not her athletic ones. "My goodness, Sonja. I can't believe we're swim team moms together."

"God, don't remind me. I hate swim team moms." They both grinned before lapsing into silence, allowing Gracy to think back on their friendship over the years. Shaena had been the first person Gracy met in the Army, with the exception of Scott and his ROTC friends, and the two young women, put next to each other by the randomness of their similar last names on a hot afternoon in June, stuck together for those six weeks as they together tried to figure out this new experience and new life as Army officers. They were bound not just by their assignments as 'battle buddies', but also by their similar personalities and ironic humor that was often found among medical professionals. Their relationship had always had an aspect of depreciating humor, even in their serious moments. There was only one time that Gracy could remember when it had been any different. Shaena and her family had just moved back to DC from Eisenhower Army Medical Center, where she had finished her obligation to the Army after graduating from residency and being deployed to Iraq, to find her best friend widowed, on leave from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, and close to finding herself admitted to the psych unit where O'Leary once worked. It was Shaena who convinced her to take a medical discharge from the Army and pay off her debt to the government as a CID agent, where her background in forensics would come in handy. "Civilian life still treating you well?" she asked to distract herself from such thoughts.

O'Leary snorted. "Right. I do the same job and now have to deal with insurance companies. I never should have left the Army. And it's not as if the pay raise was that great. Your parents are professors, you know what academia pay is like."

"Oh, don't give me that. Your husband is a glorified drug dealer, distributing Ritalin to the children of the nation's elite."

"Hey, someone's gotta pay the bills." And pay for the new wardrobe and stylish haircut, from the looks of it. "Have you given any thought to what you're going to do when you're done paying your time?"

Gracy shrugged. "I have ten months left, so I figure the job offers will start coming in three. I'll see what's out there and decide then." O'Leary nodded; she had gone through the same process a few years before. "But I'm going to try to stay in the area, whether that means leaving the Army or sticking with it."

"Well, you did just move back. I can see not wanting to move the kids twice in a year."

"Yeah," Gracy replied, smiling at the waitress as she brought them their sandwiches. "And I've started seeing someone," she added casually.

"It's about time," O'Leary said dryly, then grinned. "That's great, Sonja. Serious?"

Gracy waffled her hand back and forth in a gesture of not knowing. "Too early to tell." At this point, it was hardly more than a couple of evenings of mostly-casual sex. "His track record with relationships sucks," she said bluntly. "He was married and lost his wife and daughter. Since then, he's been married and divorced three times."

"Ah." As a psychiatrist, it took a lot to surprise O'Leary. "Well, do what's good for you now. The rest will work itself out. What do the kids think of him?"

"They already think he's more fun than I am," she said, rolling her eyes. "He builds boats in his basement, so that must be the criteria for 'cool' these days. He's actually the NCIS agent who helped bring in Colonel Hauser and Musawi, so I think he had a lot to do with Maddie being the kid she is now. Oh! You'll get a chance to meet him. We're having a housewarming party-slash-BBQ on the tenth—Saturday. He'll be there, as will the rest of the NCIS team I worked with and a bunch of exciting AFIP-types. You and Robbie and the kids have to come."

"Of course," O'Leary replied with a grin. "The tenth—that's right after Scott and Nate's birthday, right? We'll bring a gift. Well, for Nate, of course." Nate Gracy had the distinction of sharing a birthday with his late father, which unfortunately for him, made the day somewhat bittersweet for the family.

They continued to chat about work and kids as they ate their lunches, easily slipping back into the familiar friendship despite the years apart. It wasn't until they were contemplating slices of pie for dessert that Gracy remembered that catching up with her old friend wasn't her only purpose for calling to arrange lunch. "You know I've started doing autopsies for CID again, right?"

"Well, I figured as much," O'Leary replied, "seeing as you are a forensic pathologist and all."

Gracy nodded. She still hadn't figured out how to break the news to her friend, even though it had been a week since Masters had been arrested for the murders of eight people and sent off to a psychiatric institution—hopefully to stay, but she knew how psych institutions worked. There were no life sentences, only 'treatment' until someone deemed the patient 'improved'. It was why Masters had kept getting out to kill more couples. She was hoping that the newly-discovered fact that he was killing people would encourage his new psychiatrists to keep him around a little bit longer this time. "We caught the guy responsible for those deaths of Army officers and their boyfriends," she finally said.

"Oh, I remember hearing about that. Broken necks, right?" She shuddered slightly. "You deal with a lot of wackos."

"Unfortunately, so do you." At O'Leary's confused expression, Gracy finished in a rush. "The killer was one of your former patients. A Sergeant Russell Masters."

"Oh, God," O'Leary murmured, her already fair skin blanching further.

"You remember him?"

O'Leary nodded miserably. "He was my first real failure as a psychiatrist," she admitted. "I've had quite a few since then, but you always remember your first. I was just a second-year resident when he was assigned to me. It was supposed to just be a routine evaluation for an Article 134."

"What for?"

"Insubordination, failure to follow orders, I don't remember exactly. His NCOIC gave one of those damned 'hooah' speeches as they were getting ready to go to Afghanistan—you know the ones. 'Raise your hand if you don't want to go kick some Taliban ass back to the dark ages where they belong' or some such crap." Gracy did know those speeches; she had overheard a first sergeant giving a similar speech to a group of infantry privates in Iraq, and couldn't help but wonder if that was the best message to be giving a bunch of nineteen-year-old boys. "Well, Masters raised his hand, which, as you can imagine, pissed off his NCOIC. In the course of working everything up, they sent him in for a psych eval. At first glance, he seemed perfectly normal, your typical twenty-something boy who thinks he's a man because somebody taught him how to kill with his bare hands. Then after talking to him some more, I realize that he's got all the classic features of schizophrenia—linear thinking, inability to comprehend sarcasm, even mild reactions to voices that weren't there, so instead of an Article 134, he gets a psych admission, and even though I was just a second-year, they kept me with him because we had established a 'rapport'." She shook her head slowly, her green eyes both sad and angry. "I was too damned inexperienced for that. Counter-transference, the curse of psychiatrists everywhere, was definitely present. I kept looking at Masters and seeing Dev." She paused and appeared to be collecting herself. "And then Dev killed himself, and I thought, if his sister's a psychiatrist and he still can't be helped, what chance does Masters have? And I worked harder."

"When did it get to be too much?" Gracy asked softly.

"Not too long after Dev died," O'Leary admitted. "I should have seen it coming sooner, but like I said, I was blinded by seeing what I wanted to see, on top of planning a wedding and dealing with my future mother-in-law about what caterer to use or some such thing." Gracy remembered that wedding—it was the last week of her internship, the end of O'Leary's—then Grady's—second year of residency. A massive affair in the greens and golds of a stereotypical Irish wedding, including the bridesmaid's dress that Gracy hated. The food was pretty good, as Gracy remembered, but not knowing if that was Shaena's caterer or the mother-in-law's, she didn't say anything. "I transferred his case to my attending after he started asking questions like what food I liked to eat or what I liked to do on the weekends or asking if I would be his girlfriend, of all the obscure questions. I told him that wasn't appropriate, but he obviously didn't get the message."

It was starting to make sense to Gracy—Masters had developed a crush or some sort of attachment on his psychiatrist, who obviously didn't return the sentiment. He hadn't taken the rejection very well, and in killing those women and their boyfriends, was killing Shaena and Robbie. "Did he ever meet Robbie?"

"God, Sonja, no!" O'Leary exclaimed. "You're more likely to socialize with your patients than I am. And I certainly didn't bring my fiance in for show-and-tell."

Gracy shook her head. "There must have been some time," she insisted. "Some time when Robbie came to pick you up or stopped by to surprise you for lunch or something. Scott did it to me all the time."

O'Leary shrugged. "I guess," she said, unconvinced. "Oh, God. He took it as a romantic rejection and then somehow saw me and Robbie together and got jealous. And the Army did a pretty damn good job of teaching Masters how to kill."

"Yeah."

They sat in silence for a few long minutes, both thinking about how Masters had been symbolically killing Shaena over and over. "But why those women?" O'Leary finally asked. "There are hundreds of female officers in the DC area. Why those four?"

Gracy shrugged. "You're the shrink."

"There must have been something about them that reminded him of me, other than the uniform."

"The first one looked like you," Gracy said, wondering if she was being helpful. "But none of the other three even had a passing resemblance. And none were killed in uniform."

"I don't know," O'Leary said with a sigh as she reached into her purse in search for her wallet. "Knowing how schizophrenics' minds work—or rather, don't—it could have been anything." She fished her keys from her purse and set them on the table.

"God, Shaena, you're still using a lanyard with your keys?" Gracy asked in mock horror. "You're not a student anymore."

"It's the best way to keep from losing them," O'Leary said defensively as she fingered the Georgetown University lanyard. "Easy to fish out of the purse, too. And you should be proud of me—that seemingly endless supply of Army Healthcare lanyards has finally ran out, so I had to upgrade to a Georgetown one."

"Yeah, because pulling a blue Georgetown lanyard out of a Coach purse is much classier than a black Army one," Gracy said sarcastically. She could remember a twenty-three-year-old 2LT Shaena Grady swinging her black Army Healthcare lanyard—one of the countless little items given to prospective Army recruits and current scholarship students alike—in her hands while impatiently waiting for the world's slowest elevators, in the Bachelor Officer Quarters at Ft. Sam Houston. Suddenly, she was faced with another memory, or rather, four of them—evidence sheets from crime scenes that she had glanced at. Four ID holders on keyrings, all attached to lanyards. She started to laugh, not at amusement, but at the absurdity of it all. "Oh, God," she finally managed, breathless in her near-hysterics. "It's the damned lanyard."

"What?"

"They all kept their ID's and keys on lanyards," Gracy explained. "All four of them. Masters must have seen them at some point—maybe around Walter Reed, where they would come for routine care, maybe somewhere else—swinging their damned lanyards, just like you always do. It must have been enough to set him off."

"God." O'Leary stared in horror at the seemingly innocent strip of cloth in her hand before she started to giggle. Their laughter started to get attention from the other diners, but they ignored them. "I knew lanyards were childish, but I had never considered it an instrument of death until now."

"If there's one thing I've learned in my line of work, just about anything can be an instrument of death."

O'Leary chuckled slightly, shaking her head in wonder before she glanced back up at her friend. "My God, Sonja, I'm glad you're back."

"Yeah, all that happiness and sunshine was such a drag. Nothing like a good old serial killer to say 'welcome home'."

O'Leary shook her head. "No, that's not what I meant. I'm glad you're back in DC and all, but what I mean is, I'm glad you're back to being you. I've missed you, buddy. I don't know if it's the time that's gone by, or the Hawaiian 'vacation', or this new guy that you have, but… welcome back."

The End