Medieval

By Dany

Summary: There is actually a part of Vegas' weirdness that they haven't seen yet.

A/N: Response to this weeks Unbound Improv Challenge. I hope this is crazy enough.
And please don't shun me if I got the medical facts wrong. This IS fiction.

xxxxx

"That's something you don't see every day," Grissom noted.

Warrick leaned in to get a better look. "Is that what I think it is?"

"Yeah," Sara stood at the head of the bed studying the hands of the victim.

"This is a..." Warrick could obviously not get over the fact that this was found on a young woman, in the present time... in Vegas.

"Yes Warrick, that's a chastity belt." His supervisor was getting slightly annoyed that he was stuck on this fact and did not complete his examination of the room. Feeling guilty Warrick stood up and walked back to the table near the window, which was still set for a romantic dinner for two.

"No ligature marks or abrasions on the wrists," Sara stated in a cool voice trying hard to keep her feelings in check. "This doesn't make any sense."

"Yeah," Warrick agreed. "No sign of forced entry, romantic dinner table, no signs of struggle. But we have a dead body. So what killed her?"

xxxxx

"The heart malfunctioned." Doc Robbins looked over the slat at the two fellow scientists who stared at him disbelievingly.

"She was 28," Sara exclaimed, her frustration eroding her determination that she remain calm.

"Heart attack?" Grissom asked not quite sure what to make of this case either, but decades of managing his emotions, made him better at hiding them.

"No, not quite. There is no scar tissue or any other medical anomaly. Only thing I can say with certainty is that her heart just stopped. I can probably tell you more when I get the tox report back." Robbins pulled the sheet back over the young woman, finalizing his examination.

Grissom and Sara looked at the slat one last time before heading back to trace, hoping to get some results for the collected evidence.

xxxxx

At the end of shift, Warrick was still cataloguing evidence without results.

The only thing they had so far was the name the room was registered to. A Robert Cardinal had paid for the room and Brass had already put an APB out on him.

Sara and Grissom walked in, obviously discussing the tox report heatedly. "This is not possible," Sara ground out.

"How can a healthy 28 year old woman just drop dead? No medical problems, no drugs or other substances. And Doc Robbins said she was not suffocated." She was ranting now, her restraint long forgotten.

Warrick just watched, knowing it was better to let her get it out instead of interrupting.

"But look at those hormone levels, they're elevated." Grissom handed her the sheet and she snatched it out of his hands. "But hormones can't kill you. At least not these."

Now Warrick was curious and wanted to see what they were talking about so Sara handed him the results.

"Well, there are theories they can, in a certain dosage." Grissom looked pointedly at Sara, daring her to say it, but she didn't.

She clamed her mouth shut and waited for Warrick to draw some conclusions. "Man, this is weird. What does the Doc say?"

"He says it's not without the realm of possibility. There is not enough research to support or exclude the theory." It was unusual for Grissom to go with unproven theories, so both Warrick and Sara wondered what was up.

At this moment, Grissom's beeper went off. The message read 'Suspect brought in – Brass'.

xxxxx

"Mr. Cardinal, you don't seriously consider telling us you have no idea how she ended up dead?" Brass was pulling his interrogation routine while Warrick remained quiet. Sara and Grissom had chosen to watch from the next room.

"But I don't. I don't know what happened. One minute she was...we were..." Robert Cardinal was in his thirties and had been picked up in the same hotel. He had rented another room and shut himself off in there. Now he seemed genuinely disturbed that the young woman had died.

"Well, you were not having sex." Brass couldn't help the sarcastic remark, having had enough of all those weirdoes who came to Vegas.

"No, but...we were just at the verge of breaking the promise when..." The man fidgeted in his seat, not knowing how to explain any of this.

"Mr. Cardinal," Warrick spoke up cutting any further off-hand remarks Brass would have made off. "So right in the middle of your... liaison she stopped breathing?"

"Yes." His voice was so low it was barely audible. "She was begging me to open the belt and love her, but we wanted to wait until the wedding and then she didn't move anymore."

Brass shook his head and Warrick looked down on his hands, neither knowing what to say.

xxxxx

Behind the mirror, Grissom and Sara were wondering about the absurdity of life.

"So she died from sexual frustration." Grissom used his maddening clinical tone and it did not fail to stir up something in Sara.

The look Sara gave him as a response to his calm statement scared him. 'Then you and I are likely candidates' she prophesied and the made the cold run down his back at that thought.

When she turned to the door to return to their normal world, Sara heard him mumble to himself.

"Only in Vegas," he sighed.

The end