Re: Alley Pond Park, Queens: Cerise & Clem & Cris
[The woman on the bench was wringing hands and the kind of shaken up shock that Cerise used to think only existed on the TV. It'd taken her a real long time to realize that people didn't just adapt, they didn't just blink slow and accept that monsters were real and living among the herd. Men with bad habits and worse intentions, men with pretty lies and fingers that smeared funeral ash with every touch. The woman said she just couldn't believe it, that she'd never seen anything like that before. Cerise didn't remember shock, and she didn't miss it. She didn't miss muscles that froze like fawns in the highway beam, unspeakable fear filling up the mouth, cotton thick. Memories that played behind the eyes, unyielding. This body was particularly gruesome, barely resembling a person. More like a rough outline sketched in the dark. Cerise remembered skin that burned like parchment, like sticky wax paper in a screaming inferno. She remembered buildings going up in flames, homes with families inside. She remembered bodies stacked up, a dozen deep. She remembered a girl tied to a stake. The smell, burnt hair and so much meat. She hadn't eaten for days after that first time, and she wasn't sure she would eat today either. This case reminded Cerise of when she was young, which didn't sit well with so many years spent suppressing the past. Every day put those hardships further behind her, and it'd been a long time since just thinking about any of that terrible stuff made her want to run blind, scarred up arms outstretched to dopemen like opening a vein was a substitute for screaming til raw.
Before Zoe, that had been the all-soothing tonic, a crystallis to keep her safe from the world. But the child had given Cee a purpose outside of herself. A reason to not only be better, but to also better the world. She thought of Zoe now, while speaking with the woman of the body's discovery. The children chased one another around the bench where Cerise sat, and soon she was entertaining them with pen doodles on slim pieces of notebook paper. The woman had little to contribute to the investigation, but was visibly shaken, and Cerise ended up sitting with her well until a bus came to take the body away to the coroner. Invested in a budding conversation about preschools in the area, when Detective Stone finally rose from the park bench to walk the mother and her children out of the park, she figured that SVU had already returned to their precinct. It would be awhile before they heard anything from the medical examiner. Possibly days, depending on the tests that would be administered. She didn't like the idea of waiting that long, a stretch of time gave her room to obsess, but there was no stopping that anyway. When she finally returned to the borrowed squad car, she was on the phone to request copies of files and crime scene photos. It would be wallpapering one of her bedroom walls by dinnertime.]