The Better Part
Author: wobbear
Rating: Teen. Case details may be disturbing.
Disclaimer: The principal characters don't belong to me, but it's fun to play with them.
Spoilers/Timeline Set after Built to Kill Part 1.Anything earlier is fair game.
Author's note: After BTK1 I was reading Mingsmommy's excellent One more chance and remembering how much I like Brass. It took a while, but this was the result. There's a reference to a scene in my fic Occam's Razor, but it's not vital to read that first. Includes my first vague tilt toward a case file. The remaining chapters will be posted as regularly as real life permits.
Much appreciation to PhDelicious for the beta.
Summary: While Grissom is away on a consult, Sara works a case with Brass—oh, and there are some phone calls. GSR, co-starring Brass.
Chapter 1
Tuesday morning―pre-dawn
Sara paused on her walk-through of the homicide scene to jot down a few notes, and wondered when Grissom would turn up. It had been close to the end of shift when they had been summoned to respond to this case. She and Grissom had been walking out of the lab together, kits in hand, when he'd been called back to deal with a phone call from Carson City. He'd told her to go ahead, he would follow.
Now, it was time to start processing the scene, but first she had to collect her kit from the truck. As she started toward the door, an electronic warble broke the silence; her phone's display read 'Grissom' and she grinned to herself. Speak of the devil.
Walking swiftly out the door to where she'd parked the crime lab Denali, Sara flipped open the phone and pressed the answer button, saying, "Hi." Leaning against the side of the hood she continued, "What's up? I thought you'd be here by now."
"Sorry, but you're now working solo. The Carson City Sheriff's Department has requested my help. They've got an insect-infested corpse found on the eastern shore of Lake Tahoe. Warrick gave me a ride to the airport on the way to his scene; I'm waiting for my boarding call as we speak."
"Bugman to the rescue, huh? OK, I've already started here; I'll get on with it. Hey, I'd been thinking about us getting away to Lake Tahoe for a break. If you get a chance, could you scope out secluded cabins for rent?"
"Sure, that's a great idea. Uh, I forget what it said on the dispatch slip; who's the detective on your case?" Grissom knew all too well what a difference that could make to a CSI's work.
"Oh, no worries there, it's Brass."
A sense of calm settled over Grissom. She would be all right, no matter how difficult the case. He knew Jim Brass would look out for her.
"Good. Uh, Cath's in charge. She may be able to lend you Greg, but she's got a strange-sounding double murder in a Caesar's Palace hotel room, so don't count on it. Remember to take breaks, Sara. Especially if you're solo. Go outside, talk to Brass, the cop on the door, whatever."
"Got it—really." His protectiveness could be endearing, but it bordered on suffocating at times. She willed herself not to sound petulant. "You know, I've been doing this for a little while. I'll be fine." She heard a PA announcement in Grissom's background.
"Yeah, I know. They're calling my flight; got to go. Call me, whenever, please. Stay safe."
"Goo—" Sara stopped. He'd cut the connection. Her bugman was clearly in a hurry. She collected her kit from the back of the truck and headed back inside.
-------------------
A policeman stood guard outside the imposing wood-paneled front door on Desert Quail Drive. The house, in the Pueblo Village area of Summerlin, was owned by Grant Dorlowe, whose forty-something corpse had recently been found inside. Numerous stab marks to the victim's back brooked no doubt; suicide was not the COD. No one else had been in the house when the police had first arrived, alerted by an anonymous call.
Sara was in the garage, which appeared to be the primary crime scene, taking multiple photos of the workshop area. A workbench ran the length of the garage's back wall, and a large vise was attached to the edge of the bench about half way along. The man's dead body lay in a crumpled curl below the vise and a sizeable blood pool surrounded him. She murmured to herself, "Wounds not immediately fatal; he bled out."
"Huh? Didn't quite catch that." Jim Brass had appeared in the doorway, back from an initial canvas of the neighbors.
"Talking to yourself now? I thought you left that to a former CSI, now LVPD detective." He smirked genially at her. Theirs was a serious, often harrowing job, and a little levity could sometimes lighten the load—as long as the victim's family and friends were well out of earshot.
"Just thinking out loud. The difference is, I don't do it when I know other people are around and may be annoyed by it."
"So, where's your fearless leader? I thought you said he was going to be joining us."
Sara set the camera down on her kit, done with pictures for now. "He was, only he just called. He's at McCarran, about to catch a flight to Reno."
"Lemme guess—body with bugs?"
"Man, you're good."
Brass fashioned a flowery bow in response. Then he considered Sara and the large, well-packed garage. "Not that I don't love having you to myself." Sara rolled her eyes. "But couldn't you use a hand here?"
"Probably, but no one's available. Nick's off in Austin--"
"Oh, yeah, the Longhorns game." He nodded. "The others?"
"Warrick's got a trio of home invasions, which may be linked—sounds like he needs help himself—and Cath needs Greg at Caesar's. I just spoke to her, too."
"Hmmm. Well, I can stick round for a bit. You know, Grissom sometimes lets me stay within 10 feet of him when he's working a crime scene; I've picked up a little here and there. Got any spare gloves?"
Sara grinned as she crouched over her kit, and tossed him a pair. "Not to mention that you used to head the unit."
"Yikes, these are tight." Brass flailed around in an exaggerated effort to don the gloves.
"Uh, Jim, I really appreciate your offer of help, but why don't you have some in your own size with you?"
"Eh―" Brass wiggled and flexed his right fingers as he tugged the latex with his left hand. "I got out of the habit with that little stretch I had off work."
Scuffling sounds coming from inside the house announced the arrival of David Phillips to pronounce death. "Hi, Captain Brass, Sara. Is this the sole victim?"
"That's right, David," confirmed Brass.
The assistant coroner leaned over the body, speaking quietly as he worked his way through the prescribed procedures. "Lividity is fixed, and confirms that this is where he died." He tried moving the victim's right hand, then the arm. "Rigor has come and gone."
He carefully noted down the liver temperature on his clipboard. "Given the ambient temperature, TOD was, oh, between 8 and 9 pm last night."
David then leaned in to look more closely at the wounds on the deceased's back. Measuring, he spoke louder. "These incisions are all the same size, just under 20mm in length and with little trauma around the cuts, indicating a sharp implement."
Brass, over by the work bench, surveyed the neatly-arrayed hand tools. All were clipped in place on a brown pegboard, which ran the length of the bench. "Something like a chisel?"
"Ah, yeah, could be."
Sara moved to join Brass, and scanned more closely, playing the beam of her flashlight slowly over the collection. "Wow. This guy, or someone, has outlined each tool in narrow white lines on the board."
"Anal, much?" muttered Brass. David shook his head in amazement.
She wandered further along. "And there's a chisel missing. We've got"—she bent to read the blades—"a one-inch chisel, a gap, then a half-inch one."
"The one in the middle is likely to be a three-quarter inch blade, or 18 millimeters," remarked David. "Just under 20mm, like the wounds on the victim's back."
"Killed with his own chisel, ya think?" Brass raised an eyebrow. "Weapon of opportunity, or some sort of karmic retribution?"
"I'll leave that to you people to find out," said David. "Uh, I'm finished here. You've done all you want to with the body in situ, Sara?"
"Yep."
She pressed the button to raise the garage door while he called in his assistant; together the two manhandled the corpse into a body bag and onto a gurney. Pushing it out of the garage, David turned back with a small shy smile to say goodbye. "See you at the autopsy, Sara."
"Yeah, see you there, David."
As the door rolled shut again behind the departing Coroner's van, Brass chuckled. "I love it, the guy's happily engaged and he still blushes like an idiot around you."
Sara decided it was easiest to ignore that comment. "C'mon, let's get to it."
-------------------
As he entered the arrivals waiting area of Reno-Tahoe International Airport, Grissom spotted a placid-looking deputy holding a piece of card that read, in thick marker, "DOC GWISSOM". He grumbled mildly to himself as he hastened over. Looks like Elmer Fudd does the writing in the Carson City Sheriff's Office. Likely he was being over-sensitive, but he would rather not be seen responding to that sign.
"Gil Grissom." His abrupt non-salutation startled the officer into dropping the sign—face down, Grissom noted thankfully. He thrust out his hand for a perfunctory shake.
The man recovered, shook the offered hand and replied, "Uh, Deputy Joe Morrow, Doctor. I'm to take you directly to the scene, unless you want to stop somewhere first."
He picked up Grissom's overnight bag saying, "I'll take that, sir. Would you follow me? The cruiser's right outside."
Grissom grabbed his kit, and easily kept up with the taller man's deliberate stride. Morrow had sparse, closely cropped fair hair and a ruddy outdoors complexion atop a rangy six foot two frame. The deputy seemed to be one of those men who thought that pulling a wheeled bag showed him to be soft—that wasn't Grissom's problem.
"By the way, sorry about the sign, Doctor. Our receptionist wrote it; she's a little over excited by the birth of her first grandchild, and wasn't paying attention. She gave it to me with a pile of files, and I only noticed it once I was here waiting—no markers handy."
"Deputy? We're around the same age, and you're making my bones creak every time you address me as 'Doctor' or 'sir'. Do me a favor? Call me Grissom."
"Only if you'll call me Joe, Grissom. Sorry for the formality. I don't meet a whole lot of PhDs, and you never know."
"Sure, don't worry about it. Joe it is. Where are we going, exactly?" Grissom inquired as they reached the vehicle, which was parked in the cross-hatched 'emergency vehicles only' zone.
"It's a cove known as Secret Harbor, on the eastern shore of the lake. It's about 15 miles from Carson City; from here, it should take about an hour."
Grissom felt his initial tension fading away as Joe loaded his bags into the trunk. They got in the car and headed south.
"Carson City only has responsibility for a few miles of shoreline, but the stretch includes some popular beaches." Joe looked over briefly at Grissom, and seemed to be weighing his words.
Grissom wondered at the hesitation, then saw the deputy had made a decision.
"Heck, I guess you've seen pretty much everything in your job. Secret Harbor is one of Lake Tahoe's 'clothing optional' beaches."
"Oh, right. The body?"
"No, the DB is clothed. We're working on the theory that he was dumped from a boat; it's several minutes' hike down from the parking area."
"Some of the beach regulars found the victim?" theorized Grissom.
"Uh-uh. You'd expect that, but no. A couple of kayakers who were paddling their way round the Lake Tahoe water trail landed to rest their arms and eat lunch. They were trying to keep their distance from the nude sunbathers, they said, by sitting on a couple of big boulders at one end of the main beach. Then it started to rain, so they took refuge under a tree, and disturbed a bunch of pine branches which had been laid over the body." He concluded, "It's kinda jammed in under a large boulder."
Grissom pursed his lips, considering. "They weren't alerted by the smell? I gather he's been dead more than a day—even if you don't know what it is, the stench of a decomp is hard to miss."
Morrow nodded in his measured way, "Yeah, I wondered about that too. But there's a breeze that rises off the lake in the afternoons, and . . . maybe they were distracted by the amount of skin on show."
-------------------
Together they processed the scene, Brass doing most of the scut work and Sara the actual collection so she could truthfully sign the chain of custody forms. Thorough dusting of the workbench for latent prints revealed only a couple of partials. The tools were carefully bagged and tagged for examination back at the lab.
"Blood, and maybe mucus, on the vise," announced Sara as she took photos. "But the rest is very clean. I'm not convinced it was the killer cleaning up; the whole place looks almost obsessively clean and tidy. The rest of the house is the same."
"Hmmm. That'd be in keeping with the lines on the pegboard."
Kneeling down to take swabs from the drying blood pool, Sara caught a metallic glint out the corner of her eye. She turned in search of the source, but all she could see was Dorlowe's large, black vehicle. Brass was over on the other side of it, scanning with his flashlight—maybe she'd just seen the moving beam?
"Huh—Cadillac STS," Brass grunted. "Wonder why he got the grille and wheels in matt black?"
"To make it look mean?" Sara put the blood swabs safely in the evidence crate, and crouched to annotate the log, which lay on the floor beside the box. Again she half-saw, half-sensed something. Her Maglite was on the bench a few feet away. "Hey, Brass, would you shine your light under the car?"
Brass grunted as he lowered himself, "Sheesh, the things I do for you. I'm not a young man, y'know."
"Enough with the age thi—"
Brass spotted it at the same time. "Well, whaddaya know—the missing chisel."
Sara could reach it, just, but was concerned about collecting the chisel as cleanly as possible. Fortunately she had already examined the vehicle. Brass found car keys on a hook just inside the kitchen, and backed the car out into the driveway.
"Surprise, surprise, there's blood on it." Sara took a few swabs, then very delicately placed the tool into an evidence bag. She would fume it for prints back at the lab.
Shortly after that find, Sara declared that they were done. Brass helped her load up equipment and evidence. They left in their respective vehicles; Sara heading for the lab and Brass to LVPD to follow up on people who had known the dead man.
TBC
