Chapter III
The More Things Change
The body had been brutalized, beaten almost to the point of non-recognition. Catherine crouched over it and waited for the coroner, a fresh from the university twenty-something by the name of Yvonne, to show up. She didn't need the coroner to tell her COD, though, it was obvious. They'd lost another to the Fremont Fights. It was a brutal, bare knuckles fight club that operated underground and left dead bodies in its wake. The brand on his shoulder, two intertwined Fs, was still fresh. This poor schmuck had probably just participated in and lost his first and only fight. It was almost a waste, bringing Stephen out her with her. The CSI I was on perimeter, though, she didn't expect him to find anything useful.
"Chalk up another one for the Fights, huh?" She looked up and saw the heavily muscled form of one of the Homicide Detectives that worked nights. She stood up. "You caught this one too, huh, Con?" Conner Tipps was a bear of a man. He stood six foot six if he was an inch, weighed at least two hundred and fifty pounds, and every ounce of it was pure muscle. He'd lead the NFL in sacks for the 2008 season and had been looking at a promising career with the Super Bowl bound Green Bay Packers when a miracle interception had turned into a nightmare three-on-one tackle. He'd blown his knee, and his pro career, but had graduated Penn State with a degree in Criminal Justice.
Catherine liked him. He was a good detective, and despite the locker room talk, the man had earned his Detective's shield. His rough-hewn face was cast in shadow as he looked over the scene. "There are plenty of third rate motels that wouldn't mind hosting a less-than-legal get-together around here. Not if their check cleared."
As they were on a less-than-affluent part of Dockery Avenue, way off the strip, she was inclined to agree. "The uniforms could canvass, but we're talking hundreds of rooms and thousands of lookey-loos who don't know anything." He blew out a breath, "The first rule about Fight Club... Well, we'll do it anyway. I want these guys." Catherine nodded and looked down, once more, at the decimated face of a young boy who looked like he should have been passing notes with Lindsey in English 314, instead of lying dead on the street. "We'll see what we can do."
Yvonne arrived, and paused a minute to send Tipps a look before going to her duties. Catherine looked around the scene and got out her Digital Notebook. Now was going to be as good a time as any to start taking her notes.
Unlike the paper of yesteryear, the touch screen didn't crumple, wrinkle or tear. Using the stylus, she jotted down notes and sketched out the scene. They didn't really rely on sketches anymore, but the habit was ingrained, and while procedure didn't include it anymore, she worked best with a sketch to build from. Photographs and full area scans were much more efficient and up-to-date. Give it another year or so and they'd be able to recreate scenes with three-dimensional projections. She'd once asked Gil if he was afraid that technology would replace him. He'd answered no, but of course, he'd never even dreamed of some of the capabilities she had now. A ping alerted her to the fact that the victim's fingerprints had been matched to the database. She tapped a few keys and pulled up his ID. He had the right build and coloring, though the face was mostly a loss. The fingerprints matched up though. Thanks to wireless Ethernet and the Identification Act of 2010, an offshoot of the earlier Patriot Act, she knew their victim's name was.
She looked over at Stephen as he scanned the evidence with his Digital Notebook, or DN as the younger crowd called them for short. He carefully noted everything before he bagged and vacuum sealed it for transportation to the lab. "Man, I hope Keith has everything running. Seriously, the backlog is turning epic." Catherine shook her head, "I remember when DNA analysis took days, this is nothing." A glare told the much younger man that comments about her age would not be tolerated, so he only shrugged, "Sometimes I don't see how you guys did it all without DNs or AR Tech." Catherine chuckled, "We've only had them for three years or so; back in the stone age, as I'm sure you think of it, we used a little thing called skill."
Good-natured ribbing about skill, or lack there of, lasted all the way back to the lab. Her good mood might have lasted a lot longer, but her least favorite person in the entire world was waiting for her. She ground her teeth together, "Ecklie." The years had had little effect on the weasel of a man. There was, perhaps, a little less hair on his head, but he made up for it with plenty of misplaced arrogance. "Catherine." Her only hope was that he would get that Deputy Sheriff position and would be out of her hair, come election, in two more years. His suit looked just as off-the-rack as ever, and he sent her a smile that he probably thought was charming. "I came by to see how the updates were coming." She shrugged, "And I came by to solve a murder, Conrad. You remember what that's like, right?" He didn't seem particularly amused by her comment. "Look, I put these updates in your hands." He looked around at the missing ceiling panels and the cords that were littering the halls and labs, "And I'm starting to regret it." Catherine swooped into the Trace Lab and dropped the plastic evidence bags, with the appropriate electronic file numbers and her initials carefully written on them, in the inbox. "Look, this would have been done days ago if you'd let me hire one of Archie's teams to come in here and do it for us." One would have thought that having once employed the man who'd revolutionized Forensic Technology would have made Ecklie happy; it didn't. "You said Gannon could do it." She sighed, "I said Keith knew how to do it, not that he could sub himself in for an entire team of highly trained professionals." He shook his head, "We can argue this until doomsday. Get it done and do it quickly, period." She watched him walk off, muttering to himself and clamped down on the childish urge to flip him off behind his back. She needed coffee.
Despite all the changes, one thing remained the same. The nightshift ran on coffee, and the coffee was in the break room. So were a handful of her CSIs. Warrick was on his cell phone, obviously arguing with Tina. There had been a time, years ago, when he would have done so in private. Those days were long over. "Damn it, Tina, I don't care what Jack and his family has planned, this is my weekend with the kids." He ran, sighed, and ran his hands through his hair. "No we can't trade off; I have to work next weekend. Yes, I know that his ball game is on Tuesday and, yes, I'll be there. Look, I don't have time to argue about this with you. I will be there on Friday morning to get them and I will bring them back Sunday evening, end of discussion." There was a pause and Warrick scowled, "Don't like it? Talk to a Judge, I know 'em all." He ended the call and blew out a breath. She knew exactly what was going through his head, the same thing that had gone through hers so many times with Eddie. Why had he gotten married in the first place?
Fawn Drex pretended to not be listening, her head buried in a Forensics Journal. She looked up and saw Catherine, "Hey, Catherine. How's the Fight Club thing going?"
Fawn topped the scales at a little bit over five feet and one hundred whopping pounds. She had the dark coloring of her father, who had immigrated from India, the sharp mind of her mother who was the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company and an attitude all her own. An attitude, Catherine mused, that more often than not, got her in trouble. "It's not, unfortunately. Your 419?" The woman shrugged, "I've done everything I can with the computers down. Now it's sort of a waiting game." Catherine nodded absently and poured herself a cup of coffee. "Ecklie's already been in and bitched about the updates." Warrick rolled his eyes and Fawn muttered something in a foreign language. Something Catherine didn't have to be able to translate to know that it had been inappropriate for the work place. Catherine raised a brow, "Well, since you feel so strongly about it, go help Keith out with it." The woman pushed her hands through her chaotically styled and streaked hair. "I'll go light a fire under his ass." Catherine watched her leave and flopped down on the couch beside Warrick. He smiled at her, "Hey there, Boss-Lady." She lightly shoved him. "Half of our team is just out of their twenties and the other half act like it." She laid her head on the back of her couch, "How the hell did we get to be so old?" He chuckled, and stretched, "Don't know, but I'm going to go bother all the young 'whipper-snappers', I need my trace results back sometime this century."