Disclaimer: I do not own of the characters, they belong to CBS and all of those other people...yada yada.
Authors Note: My first fan fic, so im still new to the whole thing...this story doesnt take place during any particular season, and pleas review!
Catherine Willows walked briskly into the morgue, the curt clicking of her heels on the linoleoum ringing around her in the empty hall. She walked past the silent bodies lined up outside the autopsy rooms, lying on their separate gurneys, waiting patiently for their turn to be processed and examined. Catherine sighed, running a quick hand through her blonde hair. Well, maybe those bodies had all the time in the world, but she definitely didn't. It had been a long shift, and she had a feeling it was about to get longer. With the amount of cases she had on her hands at the moment, she was going to have to pull another double. She thought of her daughter Lindsey, who she had only seen once in the past 48 hours. Sighing again, she pushed open the heavy doors to autopsy room #4, where her latest case was lying on the slab, fresh from the crime scene.
Catherine greeted the coroner, Doctor Al Robbins with a tight smile and a small nod. "So what do we have, Doc?" She asked, immediately businesslike. She had no time for chatting. Approaching the autopsy table, she surveyed the body. It was a young girl, no older than 18. A few years older than Lindsey, and the thought made Catherine's stomach clench. Raising a teenager in Las Vegas was no easy task. Especially after seeing cases like this every day, Catherine was sure the stress was going to kill her. Pushing these thoughts aside, she focused on the X-rays the doctor was holding up.
"Let's see…well, her liver temperature was 86.2, so that puts TOD at around 7 hours ago." He moved to pick up his scalpel. Catherine was still looking at the girl. She had been found in the shallow end of a small lake, and hadn't been ID'd yet, so no parents had been contacted. Catherine could already see the mother's broken, shell-shocked face as she realized her daughter was never coming home. She saw those grieving faces every day, but each time, fresh needles of pain and sympathy pricked her heart. Catherine ran a hand over the bruises on the girl's face. They felt hard and knobby under her fingers.
"And these?"
"Those were inflicted peri-mortem, and coupled with the defensive wounds on the palms of her hands, it shows definite struggle. She went down fighting."
Catherine nodded silently, and her eyes traveled lower, to the victim's legs. Or rather, leg.
When the girl had been found, she was floating face down, minus her right leg. Nick had looked for the severed limb, but his wading and searching through mud and weeds had proved futile. The wound on the body was ugly and gaping, revealing the shining white of the pelvic bone. The laceration wasn't clean, with flaps of flesh hanging around the hole, but whatever had done it had to have been strong, to cut through the bone in one sweep like that. The missing limb gave the whole body a grotesque, disproportionate appearance. Catherine shuddered. Poor girl.
The coroner let his tools clatter to the table. "COD was blunt force trauma to the back of the skull, causing a fracture of the occipital bone and massive hemorrhage on the brain. The object that did this must have been pretty hefty, just look at the impression it left." Catherine looked to where the doctor was pointing.
"Yeah, I see it. Nasty."
" Uh-huh. But even if she hadn't been clubbed, she would have died," Doctor Robbins continued. "Her C1 vertebrae was crushed. Completely."
Catherine couldn't hide her surprise. "Wow, hangman's fracture. That would've taken a lot of force…could it have been from the blow that killed her?"
The coroner frowned, his bushy white eyebrows dipping down toward his nose. "No, the trajectories of both wounds say otherwise. The spine was injured prior to the head trauma. Normally, this kind of a spinal fracture can be seen after a body is hanged, but there are no abrasions around the neck, so we have to rule that out. It probably resulted from something forcefully colliding with her chest or neck- maybe an airbag in a car accident."
Now it was Catherine's turn to frown. "A car accident? But there are no signs of accident-related trauma on her, and we didn't find a car anywhere near the crime scene!"
The doctor shrugged. "Hey, I've done my job, now it's your turn. I'm just telling you what I see." Catherine chuckled.
"Tell me about the leg... I mean, the lack of one ."
"Well," Doc Robbins began, crossing the room to pick up a circular metal ruler. The harsh fluorescent lights glinted coldly off the instrument. "I can't tell you much until you find me the actual limb. But judging by the shape of the wound, and the jaggedness of the cut, her leg was sawed off. And since there seems to have been no vital response from the tissue, it was cut off post- mortem.
Catherine rubbed her forehead with a dainty hand. "Well, at least that's good."
"Why?" the coroner placed the ruler on his table, glancing questioningly at Catherine.
"Would you want to be alive when someone was cutting your leg off?" She exited the morgue, leaving the doctor to smile to himself and wheel in the next body.
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He watched its muscular legs tentatively explore the palm of his hand, beaming at the tickle of it lazily creeping up his arm. A sudden knock on the door to his office startled him, and he looked up sharply.
His assistant supervisor and good friend, Catherine Willows, stood in the doorway, arms crossed and an annoyed expression spreading across her pretty face. He couldn't help a small grin.
"What can I do for you, Cath?"
"Put your hairy spider away, Bug-man. I got a puzzle for you."
"Well, I've always loved a good puzzle. And for the record, it's an African red-kneed tarantula, and it's insulted that you think of it as a 'hairy spider'." Dr. Gil Grissom lowered his pet into its tank, never taking his eyes off of it.
Catherine rolled her eyes. "Whatever. 'Hairy spider' is better than Greg's nickname for it, anyway. Listen, have you seen the evidence and case files for my floater? They're not in the right slot."
Grissom glanced at her, raising his eyebrow. "No, but maybe Nick and Sarah have, since they are working the case with you. Don't leave them out, Catherine." The assistant supervisor just shrugged under her boss's stern gaze. "Now, what was that puzzle you mentioned?"
"It's about my floater. Doc Robbins confirmed that the COD was blunt force trauma, but he also found an unrelated spinal injury. He thinks it was caused by an airbag being deployed in a car accident. But where I get lost is how this girl got from a car wreck to swimming in a lake face first. Without a leg."
Grissom folded his hands slowly, studying the young woman, his crystal blue eyes intent on her face.
"There's no possibility that the leg was severed during the car accident?"
"No, it was chopped off after the girl had died. And the neck injury didn't kill her. It just doesn't make sense."
Grissom raised his eyebrow at her again, blue eyes peering gravely at her from over his wire glasses. "Murder never makes sense, Catherine."
Catherine threw up her hands , eyes widening in exasperation. "Yeah, well, if someone wanted her dead, they could have just left her in the car, let her die from the broken vertebrae. What kind of a killer drags an already fatally wounded woman to a lake, conks her on the head, chops of her leg and takes it, for God's sake, and then dumps her in plain sight!?"
Grissom stood suddenly, and walked toward the door, guiding Catherine out along with him. "Let's find out."
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