Disclaimer: I don't own them, wish I did though.
Warning: This story deals with rape and murder. That's why it's rated R.
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He was tall, could've been a basketball player. He was wearing a tan button-down shirt and black slacks. He was looking down at a petite young girl in a turquoise polo shirt and black pants. She was standing up against a brick wall, staring up at the man. There was a good foot and a half height difference between her and him. Her hands were flat against the brick, the sharp edges cutting into her palms. She pressed her back against the wall trying to get away from the man. He placed his hands above her shoulders next to her head. He leaned in for a kiss, but she turned her head. Grabbing her cheeks, he turned her head back to face his. Keeping his hands on her face, he leaned over and kissed her hard on the lips. She tried to wiggle away, but he pressed his body up against hers. "You're mine," he whispered in her ear. "I don't care about that little prick of a boyfriend you have, you're mine." Keeping the girl near him, he reached down and unbuttoned his pants. "And just to prove that you're mine, you're going to get what's coming to you."
Nick Stokes pulled the black Chevrolet Tahoe into the McDonalds parking lot. As he parked the car near the yellow crime scene tape blocking off the dumpster area of the restaurant, he commented to the man sitting beside him, "Hm, no Krystal tonight."
The man sitting next to Nick looked at him before reaching for the handle inside the SUV and opening the door. Both men were dressed similarly in polo shirts and slacks but the younger one was wearing a black vest sporting "LVPD Crime Scene Investigations" on the back and the Las Vegas Police Department logo on the upper left front and his last name "Stokes" on the right side, and the older one was wearing a navy blue light weight jacket with "Forensics" screen-printed on the back and the Las Vegas Police Department logo on the front. From the back of the vehicle, both Nick and his superior, Gil Grissom gathered their respected field kits and walked towards the flashing lights and uniformed police officers.
An older man, slightly balding, in a suit walked up to the two crime scene investigators before they reached the tape. "What've we got?" Grissom asked the detective.
"Female, about twenty years old. Worked for the company. Discovered by a homeless guy," the detective said looking at his notebook. He was Jim Brass, Captain of the homicide investigation division of the Las Vegas police force. "Nothing's been touched. She was obviously dead when the old guy found her. Had enough sense to call 9-1-1, but he's wasted."
All three men ducked under the crime scene tape and walked over to where they could see the black shoes and black pants of the victim visible in the light cast from the cars. The top portion of her body was hidden in the shadow cast by the restaurant building. Grissom pulled out his mini MagLight flashlight and turned it on. Sweeping the area carefully, watching where he stepped so he wouldn't inadvertently destroy any evidence, he walked over to the body. Nick followed close behind watching what Grissom shone the beam of light on. He stopped the light on the victim's face and both investigators felt their hearts jump to their throats. It was Krystal Davies.
Grissom willed the emotion to go back to where it belonged. Just because he knew the victim didn't mean he had to lose his composure. In fact, he needed to remain together even more to make sure her killer was brought to justice and not let go because of his sloppiness. Nick got out the camera and began taking pictures of the victim, trying his best to keep it together. The best way for him to do that was to get right to work and keep working until he had the time to deal with it.
Grissom knelt down next to Krystal's body. Her uniform didn't look soiled and it was on straight, suggesting that she was dressed before she died. But upon closer inspection, Grissom noticed that her shirt collar was up. "Hey Nick, have you ever known Krystal to not be dressed properly?"
Nick Stokes stopped taking photographs of the scene and looked at where Grissom shone his flashlight and snapped a quick couple of pictures of the collar. "She's always perfectly dressed when I see her."
"So why is her collar up?"
Nick shrugged his shoulders. Before he went back to photographing the scene, he asked, "Did you know she worked at McDonalds?" Grissom shook his head and got up to look around the area. Outside of the boxes and waste in the trash receptacles, there was not a shred of physical evidence surrounding young Krystal. No blood, no glass, nothing. "Hey Gris, look at this," Nick said, squatting down and pointing to her neck. There were red horizontal marks over her throat. "Looks like she was strangled. Maybe her collar was up to hide the marks?"
"We'll have to see what the coroner says," said Grissom, shrugging his shoulders and not wanting to jump to conclusions.
Looking around, Nick spotted something in his flashlight beam. There was a flower bed nearby and in it was a muddy footprint. It looked fresh being the ground had just been watered. Nick went back to the Chevy Tahoe and gathered materials to make a cast of the shoe impression. Before he made the cast, Nick was sure to take pictures of the print with measurement markers.
As Nick was doing this, Grissom walked up and said casually, "Looks to be about a size thirteen or so." Probing around the parking lot with his flashlight, Grissom spotted a Honda Accord in a parking stall near the front doors. "Who's car is that?" he asked Brass.
"R.O. is your vic," Brass replied as he hurried to catch up with the CSI heading towards the car.
Grissom's flashlight cut through the darkness in the car as he examined the inside of the car. "The doors are locked," he commented and then turned to Nick. "Hey Nick," he called. "Does she have keys in her pocket?"
Nick walked over to Krystal's body and patted her pockets gently. There in the left hand side was a small key ring with a car key and house key on it. There was also a black round plastic coil on the key ring. He handed the keys to a uniformed police officer who too the ring and carried it over to Grissom. Placing the keys in Grissom's latex-gloved hand, he bowed his head and briskly walked back over to where Nick was pouring the plaster-of-Paris for the mold of the shoe impression.
Grissom glanced on last time over his shoulder at Nick, who was finishing up and heading to the back door to dust for fingerprints, before he slid the car key into the lock on the door. Searching inside the driver's side with just his flashlight beam through the window before opening the door, he carefully lifted the handle and pulled the blue door open. Grissom looked at the interior of the car. It was spotless. The scent of a cleaning agent still hung in the air. "She just cleaned her car," he said out loud. Although he didn't suspect anything had happened in the car, he still looked around. He found a pair of blue jeans and a tee shirt folded up in the backseat, along with a pair of Nike tennis shoes on the floorboard. There were two clothes hangers hanging up in the back with a simple gray sweatshirt jacket hung on one. On the front seat was a notebook. Carefully, Grissom picked it up. Opening to the first page he read what was written there:
August 1Crime Scene Location: Lake Meade
CSI(s) attending: Grissom, Stokes
Beyond that were notes on the scene. Girssom realized that this must be one of the many notebooks he had seen her writing in while on the scene with them. That's how the team knew of Krystal: she was an aspiring crime scene investigator and spent her free time at crime scenes observing actual investigations. It had started as an assignment for one of her classes, but she began to relate to the investigators. She really wanted the coveted internship on the night shift at CSI, so she spent time with them, hoping to learn enough by observing to actually earn the spot.
Grissom closed the notebook and bagged everything in the car as evidence.
While Grissom was combing the car, Nick was lifting fingerprints on the outside of the door. With a little luck, he might be able to get a match on the prints and find out who killed Krystal. The coroners were gently placing Krystal's body in a body bag and lifting it up to set it on a stretcher.
Grissom watched the van with Krystal's body as it rolled away off to the morgue. He couldn't help thinking about the promise that Krystal had. He had just found out that day that she had been assigned to be the night shift intern. The internship was a yearlong assignment and the last thing completed to fulfill the graduation requirements. She would have been graduating that spring. She wasn't going to find out about the internship for another week, but he knew and he had been looking forward to helping her along the long road that was forensic science.