Perception Deception

a tale composed by the Rabid Raccoons

……………………………………………..

Disclaimer: (a) a denial or disavowal of legal claim… (b) a writing that embodies a legal disclaimer… Definition courtesy Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Springfield, MA, U.S.A. Copyright 1979. COLLEGIATE is a registered trademark. Furthermore, NUMB3RS is a trademark of CBS Studios Inc. TM, © and ® by Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved. Perception Deception, a Rabid Raccoons production, is not recommended for young children. This disclaimer applicable to Perception Deception in its entirety. The corporation known as "Rabid Raccoons" further disavows claim to any or all fan fictional works attributed to FraidyCat and/or Serialgal. At this point we also deny any connection to unsolved federal crimes. The compilation of this disclaimer took longer than the story you are about to read.

A/N: "Perception Deception" is the mathematical term for an optical illusion...

.........................................................................

Chapter 1: The Illusion Begins

Don reached down with a gloved hand and plucked a splinter of wood from the vic's blonde hair. "You got an evidence bag?" he asked Colby.

"Right here," answered Granger, holding the small bag open while Don dropped the splinter inside. He eyed the shattered wooden baseball bat lying next to the body. "Whaddya wanta bet that this splinter came from that bat?" he deadpanned. He began to seal the evidence bag. "Let's see. Broken bat less than two feet from the body. Busted head on top of said body. Splinter of wood stuck in the congealed blood."

Don suppressed a smile – notwithstanding the defensive responses of detachment and gallows humor that naturally developed after years of police work, it would be inappropriate to grin over a dead body -- concentrating on the vic's youth and former beauty. She had been 16, 17 at the most. Probably her first job, working at the ice cream shop to earn money for a car, or something. Damn shame. "We collect the evidence anyway," he ordered. "Last thing this child's parents need is for a slam-dunk case to be thrown out of court, and their daughter's murderer to walk...just because we got lazy."

Colby shook his head vehemently. "That ain't gonna happen," he retorted. He eyed the bat again. "I'm just thinking I need to go back to the vehicle for a bigger evidence bag."

Don called out to a member of the FBI's Crime Scene Investigation unit. "Andy! You guys got a bag big enough for this bat?"

"Not a problem, boss," Andy responded, not even looking up from the glass display case he was dusting for prints. "Just leave everything to me."

...................................................................

Liz and Nikki waited for the distraught mother to blot her eyes with a sodden tissue. "I just don't understand how this could happen," she finally choked out. "Jeanie was a good girl" -- she gulped -- "popular, always had a lot of friends..." Her plaintive gaze traveled from one agent to the other. "Who would do such a horrible thing to a young girl? Was it robbery?"

Nikki shifted her weight to her other leg, standing in the small living room of the cluttered apartment. She shrugged. "We don't know, yet. Other agents are interviewing the manager, but it doesn't look like anything is missing. The till still had cash in it."

Liz shot her a look and reached out to steer the woman toward a lumpy couch. "You should sit down, Ms. Ames," she encouraged gently. "Are you sure there's no-one we can call for you? A friend, or minister?"

"Maybe your daughter's father," Nikki suggested, then hissed when Liz stepped solidly on her foot as well as elbowing her in the ribs as she led Jeanie's mother to a seat.

The woman began to cry, again. She blew her nose into the tissue as she sank down on the couch. "Jeanie... Jeanie's father never knew about her," she confessed. "I found out I was pregnant when I went to the hospital after he b-b-broke my jaw. I never went back to him...didn't even speak to him again."

Nikki sat on the other end of the couch without being invited. "Maybe he found out about her anyway," she mused.

Ms. Ames shook her head. "I don't th-think so. Anyway, he's dead now."

Liz pushed gently. "How did you find that information?"

The woman looked at her for a moment, and then past her to a school photograph of Jeanie that hung on the wall. Her eyes welled with barely suppressed tears. "It-it was in the paper, a few years ago," she shared. "I guess he b-b-beat the woman he finally married, too, and she didn't just leave him. She l-l-locked him in the sauna for a week and b-b-baked him."

She sniffed over Nikki's comment, but Liz still heard. "Damn," Nikki muttered. "Sounds like he would have been good for it, enjoying beating women and all."

Liz glared at her partner. "Nikki," she ordered abruptly, "go out to the car and call this in to David. Now."

Nikki looked chagrined. "I just meant..." She stopped talking as the expression on Liz's face darkened. She hung her head as she stood. "My condolences for your loss," she mumbled before she walked out the still-open front door.

Liz watched her leave and sighed. Nikki could be a good investigator, ballsy and fearless. She could also be clueless and brash, which could not only be totally out of place in a situation like this, but also signaled a potential disciplinary problem -- something Don had been dealing with ever since Agent Betancourt joined the team. She refocused her attention on the grieving mother, sitting close to her on the couch. "Please. Let me call someone for you."

Jeanie's mother began to wail in earnest. "I'm alone now," she cried. "Someone stole my baby, and I'm all alone!"

...................................................................

It was a fairly simple interrogation, so Don let Colby and David have at it, and stood watching from behind the one-way glass. The suspect was a 16-year-old kid, and it was all by the book. Granger and Sinclair had gone to his house, talked to his parents, and scheduled a time for the kid to come in with his attorney, who sat next to him now in the interrogation room.

"Like we mentioned at your house," Sinclair was saying now, "you're not being charged with any crime at this time. We just want to talk to you about your girlfriend."

"Jeanie," the boy supplied helpfully.

"Right," Granger responded. "We need to get a better handle on her life." He looked down at his notebook. "Her boss says she worked at the ice cream shop about six months."

The boy nodded. "She has…had…a single mom, so there wasn't a lot of extra money in the house. She wanted to save for a car…" He stopped, cleared his throat, then lifted his chin almost defiantly. "Not like you'd think, though. She wanted to buy her mom something, get Ms. Ames off the bus line."

David smiled. "She sounds like a very special girl."

Her boyfriend nodded enthusiastically. "Oh, yeah, she's great!" He dropped his gaze to the table; his shoulders drooped and his voice lowered. "I mean, she was great. Really pretty, and smart. Took a lot of AP classes."

"How long did you two date?" David asked gently.

Tears welled in the boy's eyes, but his voice remained steady. "Since junior high; 7th grade. Pretty near three years, we been 'steadies'."

There was silence in the room while Colby looked at his notebook again. He studied it for a while and then purposefully placed it on the table in front of him. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. "Kind-of strange, then, that she went to the Junior Prom with some other guy, don't you think?"

Don could almost feel the electrical charge in the interrogation room through the glass. The kid jerked his head up, staring at Colby with huge, round eyes. For a moment, the "deer-in-the-headlights" expression reminded Don of Charlie, for some reason, and his mind wandered. That was almost exactly the look on Charlie's face when he told Don that he had asked Amita to marry him, and she had said 'yes'. Don hadn't been able to decide if his little brother could not believe his luck, or had just figured out he was supposed to get married soon. Maybe both.

He shook himself and tuned back into the conversation. The kid was refusing to look at anyone, and speaking defensively to the tabletop. "…me," he was saying. "I know she did. We've talked about going to UCLA together after high school, sharing an apartment in student housing!" He lifted one hand to the table and started outlining circles on the surface. He snickered. "Then the bitch said she didn't think I could get in, just because I flunked a few classes this year." He looked up, defiant again, his formerly wide eyes narrow. "I told her it didn't matter. I knew she was lots smarter than me, and school meant more to her. She could still go to college. We could get a little place off-campus, and I'd just keep working in my uncle's gas station."

Colby waited half a beat. "There was no ring on her finger," he pointed out, "but there was a tan line, like there had been one, for a long time. We thought maybe she just took it off for work – or maybe it was stolen – but her boss told us she just stopped wearing it a few weeks ago."

David's voice was still gentle. "Did Jeanie give the ring back to you, Bob? Did she break things off?"

Bob's face twisted into an ugly mask. "That damn ring cost me almost 100 dollars," he snarled. "I saved every penny I got for birthdays, and Christmas. I collected cans and bottles for recycling. Cleaned my uncle's garage on weekends. Took me over three months to earn enough so that I could buy that for her last year." His voice grew louder in the small room. "And what does she do?" he nearly shouted. His attorney placed a hand on his arm, but the teenager shook it off. "What?" he repeated. He huffed sarcastically. "Throws it in my face and shows up at the dance with some asshole! Makes sure the whole school knows!"

Don was distracted again by Liz's entrance into the observation room. She offered him a file. "Don, the tech found something on the ice cream shop owner's office computer. Usually it would take Charlie to find this so fast, but the tech said it was a sloppy job that anyone with half a brain should have been able to spot." She grinned sarcastically. "I think that was an insult."

Don opened the file folder to look inside. "What?"

Liz started to explain. "Looks like some kind of electronic funds transfer fraud. This means the shop owner could have been the intended vic all along…" She was interrupted by a loud crash from the other side of the glass. Bob had apparently stood, kicked his chair across the room, and then collapsed onto the floor.

His arms were cradling his head, and he was sobbing, but his muffled words were easy to understand. "…didn't mean it," he was crying. "I only wanted to scare her, but she laughed at me. Laughed!" Another sob tore from his throat.

Don sighed, and closed the file folder. "Nice work, Liz," he said, "although it looks like it's unrelated to this case. I'll pass it on to Wright, see if he wants us to look into it or give it to the Secret Service. Looks to me like we've got our guy."

Liz shook her head in disappointment. "Sixteen-year-olds taking baseball bats to their girlfriends," she observed quietly. "Sometimes, this job sucks."

………………………………………………

End, Chapter One