Summary: Past and present collide for Nick when a former love is called upon to help the team track down a serial killer. Set Season 6, shortly after "Gum Drops." References to previous episodes, but no real spoilers. Nick-centric, with generous helpings of Warrick and a smattering of the rest of the team.
Rating: Rated 'M' for harsh language, violence, and sexual content.
Disclaimer: I lay claim to the original characters of the Bad Guy and the Good Girl, but the rest of 'em belong to TPTB who bring to us the CSI television series. I have no illusion that they're mine. If they were, Nick would never, ever, be on screen without his bare lip and his Hot Haircut and he would have a heck of a lot more storylines.
Author's Notes: I was inspired to try my hand at writing this by reading the superior works of Kristen, Kim, and Beth, and it is to them that I dedicate this. I especially want to thank Beth for her encouragement. I may have written it without you, Beth, but I never would have had the guts to post it had you not told me it had some worth. So, thank you.
This story was over a year in the making and was both a joy and a struggle. If you find that you enjoy it, please leave me a review every now and again to let me know.
They got the call at 5:45, just as the autumn dawn was breaking. It was a popular jogging trail, and already the first of the Monday morning athletes formed a crowd around the yellow tape. Field coroner David Phillips took no note of the growing assembly. Instead, he looked up from his crouched position by the body to the two CSIs who had responded to the call.
"You done taking pictures? I'm going to have to move the plastic to take a liver temp."
Warrick Brown took one more photo and then turned to his partner.
"Okay by you, Nick?"
Nick Stokes surveyed the body. They were obviously dealing with a dumpsite and not a primary scene. The body had been wrapped in plastic sheeting and left in the middle of the trail. There had been no attempt to hide it. The sheeting had been either torn away or opened up below the torso, revealing a nude adult female. The sheeting above the waist was securely in place, obscuring the woman's face and chest. Still, Nick could see the red through it. He crossed over to Captain Brass, who was trying to shoo people back away from the tape.
"Who called it in, Jim?"
Jim Brass nodded to a man in his twenties, clad in a jogging suit, giving a statement to a uniformed officer. Nick approached him.
"Sir? Nick Stokes, crime lab. The plastic on the body, did you move it at all?"
The man glanced over to the body and shook his head.
"No. I didn't touch anything. I knew when I saw her she was dead. Had my cell with me, called the police."
"Were there other joggers when you found her?"
"Nope. I was the first one on the trail this morning. Usually am. Others started coming by, though, after I found her. But at first it was just me and her and the dog."
"The dog?"
"Yeah. There was a big dog--yellow lab, I think--worrying at the plastic. It ran when I yelled at it."
Nick nodded his thanks and went back to Warrick. "Witness saw a dog," he reported. "Could be why the plastic is torn."
"Could be," Warrick agreed. "You ready to see the rest of her?"
"Yep." Nick turned to the assistant coroner. "Okay, Super Dave, let's see what we've got."
The young coroner took a blade from his kit and carefully slit the plastic, beginning at the back of the head and slicing down the center of the body to the open portion of the sheeting. He cleaved the plastic apart with his hands and then drew back abruptly. There was a murmur from the crowd, low at first, and then building to a loud cacophony. The jogger who had found the body was vomiting into a clump of juniper bushes.
"Get 'em back!" Captain Brass barked to the two uniformed officers on the other side of the tape.
The crowd was herded further back into the park to stand by the picnic tables, talking among themselves in low, horrified voices. Brass stood over the body, studying it along with the two CSIs. The woman was blond and young, between twenty and thirty, probably. A white cord was wound around her slender neck and dark smudges marred the pale, waxen flesh below her open blue eyes. She had an athletic body type with well-toned upper arms and no visible body fat. At least, none that could be seen beneath the smears of blood on her torso.
"What the hell," Brass muttered. "Is it completely gone?"
David Phillips opened the gash in the plastic a bit wider. "Yes," he confirmed. "It is. It's not detached in the plastic."
Nick shook his head, peering down at the gory mess where the woman's right breast should have been. "There's a sick bastard out there."
"You got that right, bro." Warrick's camera clicked as he took photos, circling the body to make sure he covered all angles.
Brass was on his cell phone. "Yeah. Okay, we won't do anything else until you get here. Thanks, Gil."
Nick frowned. The pronounced Texas accent revealed his agitation. "You called Grissom? Warrick and I responded to this. We got it."
"Sorry, Nicky. I'm playing a hunch right now, but if I'm right, this is bigger than the two of you. Hell, bigger than all of us."
Before Nick could respond, Brass ventured back into the crowd, quizzing the jogger who had already given his statement, and who by now seemed a little disgruntled, not to mention a little shaky and pale.
Warrick looked at Nick and shrugged. "I guess we don't get to know what his 'hunch' is. Better not do the liver temp, David, until we get orders from the boss. What can you tell without it?"
"Lividity is set, and she's in rigor. It's been ten hours, at least. I'll know more when we get her back to the morgue."
"Whenever that will be," Nick muttered.
Warrick put his hand on his friend's shoulder. "Don't get your panties in a bunch. Let's walk the trail; see if we can find anything. I'll take north, you go south. We'll meet back up when Grissom gets here."
Nick sighed his displeasure, but he headed slowly down the trail, eyes scanning the ground with each step. He and Warrick had already done some work. They had checked the strip of grass between the nearest parking lot and the trail and had found no drag marks. There were no grass stains on the plastic, so it was unlikely the body had been dragged across the grass. They were near the handicap parking area and this was a handicapped-accessible trail, so it was possible, they had supposed, that the body could have been dragged across the asphalt connecting the parking lot to the trail. No way of telling until they got the plastic back to the lab to see if it was scratched up. There had been some footprints in the grass, but they were indistinct. They did find a blood drop, just one, a few feet away from the body, but it had tested as not human.
And there didn't appear to be anything else to find. Nick walked the trail for fifteen minutes, then headed back at a quick pace. He wasn't surprised to see Grissom getting out of his Denali to join Brass in the parking area behind the picnic tables. Warrick had already returned and he shook his head at Nick's questioning gaze.
"Me neither," Nick offered before Warrick could ask the question.
Grissom spoke to Brass for a moment and then the two of them walked from the lot to the body in the center of the trail. Grissom eyed it critically.
"Well?" Brass sounded impatient.
Gil Grissom took his time in answering. He circled the body slowly, rounded shoulders hunched as he inspected the corpse.
"Could be," he said finally. "Strangled, wrapped in plastic. Breast removed. But it could also be…"
Nick had had enough. "You two want to fill us in on this, or should we just go on home?"
As he often did, Grissom chose to ask a question instead of answering the one posed to him. "Did you and Warrick take photos of the parking lot and the grass? And the body before the plastic was cut?"
Nick shot him a scalding look. "Damn, Gris. No, we let Dave cut it up before we…"
"Of course we took photos," Warrick broke in, just as annoyed as Nick but trying not to sound like it. "And before you ask, we didn't find anything probative in the parking lot, the grass, or either direction on the trail. One blood drop; animal, not human. Now do we get to know what you're doing here?"
"What I'm doing here," Grissom said pointedly, "is trying to determine if this is the work of a serial killer."
Nick looked up sharply. "A serial?"
Grissom nodded. "Signature's the same as the recent ones in Denver and in Atlanta before that."
The light went on for Warrick. "The Atlanta Hacker?"
"That's the unfortunate name the media has given him, yes. And not entirely accurate, if this is indeed his work."
Grissom looked again at the woman's chest. The breast had been cleanly removed, almost with surgical precision.
"It could be him," Grissom speculated. "If he's gone from Atlanta to Denver, he could be on the move again, still moving west. But," he continued, "I was trying to say that this could also be a copycat at work."
"Maybe. But she's just as dead either way," Brass said sourly. "I'm going back to the station. I'll make some calls to both Denver and Atlanta. See if they'll fax some files. Call me if you find out anything in the morgue."
Grissom watched Brass's retreating back and then turned to David Phillips. "Okay, David. You and your guys can take her. Don't do anything to her until we get there."
He looked at Nick and Warrick. "You two sure you got everything you can here? We can't afford to make any mistakes on this one."
"We can never afford to make any mistakes," Nick said grimly. "And yeah, we're done here. That is, unless you want to retrace our steps."
Grissom held up his hand. "Look, this is going to explode if it is a serial. He's killed seven in Atlanta and six in Denver. The media will be all over this if we get another one here. The guy will have crossed three state lines and the FBI will be called in. It's going to get messy."
"We can handle messy," Warrick said confidently.
"I know you can," Grissom agreed. "So this is still your case and you two are going to call the shots. For now. But I'm going to keep my hand in, and I want you to call on Sara, Catherine, and Greg if you need to. This is graveyard's number one case right now."
Warrick and Nick exchanged knowing glances, two familiar partners confident in each other and in the job they had been assigned to do.
"Okay," Nick said. "Let's get over to the morgue."
They arrived only shortly after the body, but already Albert Robbins, Clark County's chief medical examiner, had it laid out on a steel table in the center of the room. Grissom left to go back to the lab, but Warrick and Nick stayed to process the body. Warrick took more photos of the plastic sheeting and then helped Doc Robbins remove it. He bagged it and, taking Grissom up on his offer to employ other members of the team, called Greg Sanders on his cell to come get it and take it back to fume for prints.
They scraped under the nails and inked and printed the fingertips. Greg showed up and stared down at the body before giving a low whistle.
"Someone sure did a job on her. Did you find the missing, uh…"
"No," Nick said quickly. "We didn't."
"Bet the bastard took it," Greg said. "Souvenir."
Neither Nick nor Warrick responded, and they watched Doc Robbins examine the victim, taking photos of the anomalies he pointed out. Besides the obvious missing breast and ligature marks around the neck, there was bruising on the heels of both feet. Postmortem, Dr. Robbins noted. And even more disconcerting, bruising around her genital area, also postmortem, according to Doc Robbins.
Greg's eyes widened. "You mean he did her after she was dead?"
"Would you rather she had been alive?" This from Grissom, who had just entered the room with Brass.
"No. It's just that this is the first…I didn't mean…"
Warrick leaned over to Greg. "Relax," he said lowly. "He knows what you meant."
Greg may have been green and experiencing his first evidence of necrophilia, but the rest of them weren't. They had seen it before, and after a sad shake of their heads were ready to move past it.
"I'll do a kit," Doc Robbins said. "See if there's semen."
"Anything else?" Grissom asked.
"Adhesive residue around both wrists. Probably from duct tape. Everything else pretty much what you would have expected. Preliminary examination reveals cause of death was asphyxia by ligature, about fourteen hours ago. I'll know more after I open her up. Breast tissue was removed postmortem, most likely with a surgical instrument. I found a small puncture wound in the left shoulder. Could be from a hypodermic. I'll do a blood draw and you can take it back with you to tox."
Warrick turned to Brass. "You get Denver or Atlanta to send you something?"
Brass smiled. "Better. Atlanta's sending someone."
"Yeah?"
"Yep. Some crackerjack forensic psychologist."
Grissom pursed his lips. "A profiler?"
"She's supposed to be good, Gil," Brass assured him. "Worked the cases in Atlanta from the beginning and was called in to Denver to work those, too. If anyone can tell us if this is the real McCoy or a copycat, she'd be the one to do it."
"I hope so," Grissom said. No sense arguing about a done deal. And besides, he'd worked with a few profilers in his time who actually had cogent information to contribute. The sooner they found out if they had a serial killer on the streets of Vegas, the better.
Brass consulted a piece of paper in his hand. "Her plane gets in at eight tonight. One of you jokers want to pick her up, or should I send a uniform to do it?"
"I'll do it," Greg offered. "She can profile me."
Brass held up his hand. "Down, boy. She has a Ph.D. after her name. Probably at least fifty."
They all looked sideways at Grissom and he scowled at them. Nick didn't partake in the joke. If the psychologist from Atlanta was who he thought it was, she wasn't fifty. She was thirty-two, and he was betting she was every bit as attractive as the last time he saw her. He knew Greg wouldn't regret his offer to escort her from the airport. But he had to be sure.
"You got her name?" Nick asked. He tried to sound casual, but his heart was beating so fast it was becoming painful, and it was quite an effort to appear calm. He hoped he was pulling it off.
Brass looked once more at the paper in his hand. "Caroline Brighton. Dr. Caroline Brighton, Ph.D.," he added, looking pointedly at Greg.
Nick had known what the detective would say even before he asked the question. How many crackerjack forensic psychologists could there be in Atlanta? Still, the familiarity of the name caused him to draw in his breath sharply and he mumbled something about taking the fingerprint cards back to the lab. He grabbed them and left the room, looking around to see if anyone was watching before leaning on the wall for support. Caroline Brighton. Carrie. In ten hours past and present were going to collide and now he had to figure out the best way--any way, really--to brace himself for the impact.