Body of Evidence ccsi-4

by Max Allan Collins

"He didn't talk to you?"

  She shook her head. "By the time he called, I was with you. Our receptionist, Debbie Westin, took the call."

  "Jermaine told Debbie," Denard was saying, "he had the flu and expected to be in tomorrow."

  Catherine nodded. "And the last one?"

  "Gary Randle," Denard said. "He had a meeting with a client this morning."

  Looking at his watch, Nick said, "He's not back? It's past three."

  Denard shrugged. "Meeting could have run long-typical in the ad game. He could have gone for a late lunch, either with the client or by himself, or he could be on his way back."

  "He doesn't have to check in?"

  Another shrug. "Mr. Randle has been with the firm quite a long time-one of the top people. He has a certain amount of freedom, not unlike Mr. Newcombe or Mr. Gold."

  "Is he a partner?" Catherine asked.

  "No, but he has been a steady earner for the firm for many years. No one questions the hours of a top earner."

  "I can see that."

  "You're welcome to wait," Janice said. "I'm sure he'll be in sometime this afternoon." Nick looked at Catherine, and Catherine looked at Nick.

  They were both coming up hard on the end of a double shift, and had to be back in tonight. At this point, all Nick wanted to do was catch a sandwich and grab some snooze time; he hoped Catherine felt the same way.

  Her expression said she did.

  "I don't think we'll wait," Catherine said.

  Nick hoped his sigh of relief went unnoticed.

  Denard asked, "Are you posting an officer here?"

  That was O'Riley's bailiwick, and he responded: "No. We've taken the evidence with us. You're free to go on about your regular business."

  Denard just looked at him.

  Then she said, "We'll be running a skeleton staff-even Mr. Newcombe has gone. I'll be here, and some of the janitorial staff."

  Catherine asked, "These last three employees, can you give us their home addresses and phone numbers, please? We're at the end of our shift. We'll give them a call as soon as we can."

  Denard handed Catherine a sheet of paper. Looking over her shoulder, Nick saw the vitals for the three missing employees.

  "Nice," Nick said to her. "ESP?"

  Smiling a little, Denard said, "You learn to anticipate. Comes with the job."

  "Thank you," Catherine said. "This has been a rough day for all of us…. I promise you, we'll follow this up as soon as we can."

  The blonde's smile faded and Nick was shocked to see that tears were welling in the blue eyes. "This is a good place to work, good people, a good company-how could this happen?"

  Nick wished he knew what to tell her, but he didn't. "It can happen anywhere," he said, a feeling of cold confidence running through him. "But whoever did this won't do it again-not here."

  Catherine offered her hand and Denard took it, shook it, and the two CSIs headed for the Tahoe.

  "I changed my mind," Catherine said.

  "How so?" Nick said.

  "I do want breakfast. You still willing to buy?"

  "Sure. Sky's the limit. Denny's?"

  4

  IN THE MORGUE, WARRICK BROWN HELPED GRISSOM LOWER the carpeted package to the floor, after which Sara took more photos.

  Warrick got what Doc Robbins was talking about, with his Sherlock Holmes speech, because the lanky CSI felt the same way. Every crime scene brought opportunities to outthink a bad guy, to outsmart a criminal. Justice was the goal, and you could express that in various high-flown ways; but the truth of the CSI game was that it was, in part, a game.

  Though he'd never spoken these thoughts and feelings aloud, not even to another criminalist (and certainly not to Grissom), the rush Warrick felt when he chased down that crucial piece of evidence, putting some perp behind bars, was not unlike the euphoria he'd felt riding a hot streak, back in the days when gambling ruled his life. "As with every grand opening," Grissom said dryly, "start by cutting the tape."

  After withdrawing a utility knife from his pocket, Warrick cut the three strands of duct tape. The enchilada-shaped bundle loosened and the sickly sweet scent of decay rose like foul if invisible smoke.

  Sara and Warrick took a time-out to apply some vaporizing ointment around their nostrils, to cut the smell. Doc Robbins seemed immune at this point, and nobody even bothered to pass the jar of Vick's toward Grissom-Warrick knew Gris's attitude was that this was science, and smells told you things, and were just generally part of the deal.

  Soon, Warrick, Grissom and Sara were each slowly peeling off a strand of tape, placing them in individual evidence bags for later examination. God only knew what kind of fibers or other evidence might be embedded in the adhesive and there might even be, if they got really lucky, a fingerprint somewhere. Ironically, the tape and carpeting would probably tell them more about the killer than the victim's body.

  Warrick had to fight the urge to just unroll the damn thing, and quickly-an urge he knew Sara shared and probably, though the man would never admit it, Grissom, too-and see what grisly present the killer had left rolled inside the piece of carpeting. Doing that, however, could destroy valuable evidence; and that knowledge alone prompted Warrick to calm himself and take his time.

  They unrolled the bulky bundle once, exposing a sixteen-inch-wide piece of carpeting. This was the time-consuming, tedious work that TV cops always seemed to get done during a commercial break. In reality, the process could take anywhere from one to several hours, depending on what they ran into.

  When Warrick looked at the exposed piece, then at what remained of the roll, he knew damn well they were going to accumulate some serious overtime on Cleopatra.

  Sara took more photos as Grissom and Warrick went over the piece with their mini Maglites and tweezers. Robbins's part would come soon enough, but he hovered behind them, his gloved hands folded Buddha-like over his belly as he watched their every move, as if expecting them to yank the killer bodily out of the remnant.

  Once they had gone over the section carefully, Warrick put a new bag in his hand-held vacuum and went over the section. When this process was finished, these bags would be sent to Trace for chemical analysis of their contents.

  Before long they were unrolling a second section. Sara took pictures of the exposed piece from four different angles, then the three of them got down on their hands and knees, and went over the fabric practically fiber by fiber, just as they had the last one.

  Warrick put another bag in the hand-held vacuum and went over this section. Finding nothing, they unrolled another sixteen-inch swath, and then another, and another….

  By the time they exposed the first piece of the corpse's flesh, Warrick's stomach was growling and they had piled up over two dozen evidence bags with hair, fibers, a penny and material that appeared to be crushed leaves.

  Another hour of intensive work passed before they had the body free. It lay on the floor at their feet, the three of them looking down at it. The stench challenged the Vick's Vapo-Rub around Warrick's nostrils, and whether his growling stomach craved food or not, Warrick Brown just wasn't interested in eating, right now….

  "As we thought, female," Sara said. "Mid-to-late twenties?"

  "That's how I call it," Warrick said, and Grissom nodded his agreement; then Warrick and his boss lifted the body onto the coroner's metal table. Utterly free, now, of her casing of carpet, Cleopatra emitted a sick perfume that seemed to engulf the whole room. Grissom sniffed at the air, like a dog seeking just the right spot.

  Warrick wondered if Gris could actually estimate stage of decay by the degree of smell; but, that being a talent he had no wish to develop, Warrick did not seize the opportunity to ask.

  Robbins bent over his new patient. "Some decomposition. She's been dead for a while."

  Nude, the woman had matted black curly hair cut into a low-maintenance pageboy. Her face was still basically intact, although both jaws seemed to have been broken post-mortem, and were now offset by at least thr
ee inches, the flesh around her mouth having begun to tear away.

  Her eyes were closed; her face, composed and peaceful. But a bizarre aspect struck them all: she wore too much makeup, almost clownishly so-crimson lipstick, an abundance of rouge, mascara nearly dripping from her eyelashes. Applied way too heavily, and carelessly, and perhaps hastily.

  Was the makeup post-mortem, too? It seemed…fresh.

  "Area around her right eye," Sara said, clinically, "swollen…heavy makeup layered over the welt can't disguise the fact she's been punched in the face."

  "Good," Grissom said, as if to a student.

  But then, they were all students of Grissom's.

  "She was beautiful once," Grissom said.

  Sara looked up, almost shocked. "That's not very…scientific."

  "Beauty is a subjective thing," Grissom admitted, staring down at the face. Was that sadness in his eyes? "But by the standards of our culture…even with the damage, the camouflaging, perhaps ritualistic makeup…this was a beautiful young woman."

  Warrick could only agree. The woman's olive skin had gone drab and gray, but in her long straight nose and wide full lips, the shadow of the beauty that had been seemed obvious to Warrick.

  Gently thumbing open her eyelids, Robbins revealed large, lifeless brown eyes that Warrick imagined might well have sparkled with life…before her death.

  "Petechial hemorrhaging," Grissom said.

  Robbins nodded, studying his patient. "Sign of asphyxia."

  "The welt tells us she was punched before she died-question is, how long?"

  Robbins shrugged facially. "We'll know when I've finished the autopsy."

  Her skin was a mottled gray, blue and white mess that would indeed tell them a long, detailed story about her death, once Robbins completed his work. Her torso and limbs seemed to be in relatively good shape, but for a dark necklace of torn flesh that suggested the cause of death-strangulation-and something, in its own way, even more disturbing. A vicious tearing of the flesh around her vagina, coupled with the broken jaws, gave Warrick an unsettling notion of what this body had endured after the murder.

  Sara's eyes were tight, but if the horror before them, and all it suggested, had shaken her, she was not letting it show. Clinical, professional, she was the first to say it.

  "Necrophilia?"

  Grissom nodded.

  Sara bent to study the victim's face-specifically, the broken jaws causing the bottom half to be offset; this, with the swollen eye and garish makeup, gave Cleo a slightly surreal appearance.

  "My turn," Sara said. "For an unscientific observation."

  "What?" Grissom asked.

  "Something familiar about her," Sara said, cocking her head a little. "It's hard to look past the makeup and the distortions caused by beating and death, but…I'd swear I know this woman from somewhere."

  Warrick and Grissom both took a closer look too; they had been looking at a corpse, and now they looked at the person, trying to see through the destruction and obscene face paint.

  "Yeeaaah," Warrick said. "I do feel like I've seen her somewhere before. Damn! What is it that's so familiar about her?"

  Gil Grissom felt a cold burn settle in his stomach; he recognized this woman.

  "Meet Candace Lewis," Grissom said.

  The two young CSIs looked at him with wide eyes. Then they looked down at the autopsy tray.

  Warrick was first to find his voice. "Oh, shit…."

  Sara was studying the face through narrowed eyes. "You think this is Mayor Harrison's personal assistant? I don't know about that…." But Sara kept looking, then finally she said, "No," but it wasn't a disagreement. "No, no, you're right. Yeah, I see it, guys. It is her."

  This, Grissom thought, was all they needed right now….

  In the three weeks since Candace Lewis's disappearance, the young woman-previously all but unknown to the media-had garnered more Vegas coverage than Danny Gans, Clint Holmes and Siegfried & Roy combined.

  The twenty-eight-year-old brunette, personal assistant of Mayor Darryl Harrison, had attended a political dinner not long after the first of the month; and then, on her way home that evening, she had fallen off the planet.

  Her car, a three-year-old Lexus, had been found in the driveway of her townhouse within a gated community near the intersection of Green Valley and Wigwam Parkways. Fingerprints in the car matched Candace's and Mayor Harrison's prints were found on the passenger doorhandle and seatbelt; but no one else's prints were found anywhere in or on the vehicle.

  Given the arid nature of Vegas, Grissom hadn't been that surprised that no other prints had been found. Fingerprints exposed to the weather didn't last long here; and even those protected by being inside the car and under a carport didn't have a terribly long lifespan. For his part, Mayor Harrison explained his fingerprints in Candace's car by saying, "On the day she disappeared, we went to lunch together…and that was the only time I ever rode in her car."

  The mayor's story had been backed up by Jill Ganine, a KLAS reporter with a nose for news and the teeth to hang onto a story. She arrived at CSI HQ with a videotape shot by her cameraman that showed Mayor Harrison climbing out of Candace's Lexus on the day in question. But almost from the moment the tape had aired, tongues had wagged around the city that the "lunch" was actually a euphemism for something else altogether. So, whether the tape had exonerated Harrison, or merely suggested a motive for him, was still an open question. To Gil Grissom, anyway.

  Most of the media though-KLAS and Jill Ganine excepted, their take on the story having been established at the outset-did not have Grissom's open mind or need for proof.

  Mayor Harrison had been vilified for the alleged affair, particularly in the newspapers; and of course the political and sexual aspects of the case, added to the glitzy Vegas backdrop, caught the attention of the national media. In a matter of a few weeks, a promising political career-the result of years of hard work and meticulous grooming-had been reduced to a talk-show joke.

  "How deep are we standing in it?" Warrick asked.

  "I don't think science has come up with that measuring tool as yet," Grissom said, mock-pleasant.

  Sara said, "So it's a media crime. How does that affect us? Can't we just fly in under the radar? Doesn't it help that we're night shift?"

  "Well, let's take it point by point," Grissom said.

  He held up one finger.

  "Until just now," he said, "Candace Lewis was a missing person, and a probable kidnapping, with the investigation under the jurisdiction of the FBI; and now she'll be ours again."

  "Isn't that a good thing?" Sara asked.

  He answered by holding up a second finger.

  And saying, "Let's not forget that we picked up the body at the doorstep of a federal installation, in a high-profile political case. So, maybe the FBI isn't out of our hair just yet."

  "Not a good thing," Sara admitted.

  Grissom ticked off a third finger. "The late Ms. Lewis is the personal assistant to the mayor and, rumor has it, his lover."

  A fourth finger came up.

  "Not to mention," he continued, "that Mayor Harrison's chief political rival right now happens to be the man likely to run against him in the upcoming election…."

  "Unnnggggh," Sara said.

  Warrick had the glazed expression of a caught carp.

  "…Our boss."

  "Our boss," Grissom said amiably. "Sheriff Brian Mobley."

  Captain Jim Brass chose this moment to come walking into the morgue, and noticed Grissom's upraised hand with four fingers raised. With a smirky little smile, the detective said, "What you cipherin' there, Jethro?"

  The pop culture reference didn't penetrate Grissom's concentration, and he motioned with that upraised hand, in a presentational manner, to the body. Brass's eyes followed the CSI's gesture.

  "If I may," Grissom said, "Jim Brass-meet Candace Lewis."

  "Holy shit," Brass said, his normally sleepy eyes wide awake, whites showing all around. "Does
the press know?"

  Shaking his head, Grissom said, "We just now I.D.ed her. We won't make an official identification until we check her prints."

  Brass was at the edge of the tray, looking down at the garishly made-up corpse. "Oh, that's her, all right. Hell." He cast his mournful gaze on Grissom. "You and I better go see Mobley, my friend-this is gonna get real ugly."

  Grissom grimaced, not relishing the notion. "Do I need to go? Isn't that more…administrative?"

  The cliché most people fell back on to describe Grissom and Sheriff Mobley was oil and water; the CSI supervisor himself viewed their relationship as more along the lines of gasoline and a lit match. It wasn't so much that Grissom didn't like Mobley-he didn't really have enough regard for the man for that to be an issue.

  Despite all the blustering about law and order during his campaign, Brian Mobley was a politician first and a sheriff second; and Grissom disliked politics intensely. The constant battles over the CSI budget had been so bitter that Grissom had even considered resigning the supervisor's post so he could concentrate on the science; but in the end, he'd stayed on when he realized that if he didn't fight the budgetary constraints, no one would.

  Only the high success ratio of arrests-to-convictions-they were rated number two crime lab in the nation-had helped convince Mobley (and other politicians) to keep the money flowing. With tourism the primary industry, keeping Vegas safe was a priority; this, added to the CSI success rate, enabled the lab to tap into the top technology in the field. But it also meant Gil Grissom had to deal with Brian Mobley far more often than he cared to.

  "We're both going to have to deal with Mobley," Brass was saying, "throughout this mess-so I'd advise you to come. I can't force you."

  "Let's get it over with, then," Grissom said. Turning to Sara and Warrick, he said, "Start working the evidence-I'll be back when I can."

  "Fingerprinting first?" Warrick asked.

  "Yes-and let me know for sure this is Candace. I know, I know…it's her. But let me know when it's officially her. For one thing, we'll have a family to notify."

  A sober moment followed this observation.

  Then Grissom said, "DNA can wait. All right?"