Note: This was written for the CSI Big Bang. Thanks to Elenna for the beta. A big thank you to everyone who left feedback, it's greatly appreciated! Trying to get back to posting two chapters a week, we'll see if this works. This can be considered a sequel to Titania Falling.
Warning: Future chapters will contain non-graphic discussion of sexual violence.
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable CSI: NY characters, settings, etc. are the property of Anthony Zuiker and CBS. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of the CSI franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.

::

Aaron was waiting outside his dorm room when they arrived, having retrieved Tripp's file from the Provost's assistant and Stella's kit from the car. He looked at the large metal case she was carrying with interest. "What's that?"

"My crime scene kit."

"You don't-" His eyes grew wide when he realized the implications. "You don't think our room is a crime scene, do you?"

"Not necessarily, but I need to document what we find in case we find something that could be useful in determining who killed Tripp."

"Oh." He frowned, then started when Angell motioned to the door. "Oh, sorry, just thinking."

He unlocked the door, waiting in the doorway while they entered the room. It was larger than the dorm Angell'd lived in during college; she could tell that much right away. There were loft style beds on either side of the room, with doors - closets she assumed - at the foot of them. "Which side was his?"

"That side." he pointed to the left. It was slightly less messy than the right, but still very obviously the dorm room of a university-aged male. Angell glanced over in time to see Stella sigh softly and pull on a pair of gloves.

"Do you notice anything out of place?" Angell asked, taking the gloves that Stella handed her.

"Um, no, not really. I mean, his side always looks like that."

She wasn't really surprised - if something had been off, he would have noticed, especially when his roommate didn't come home. While Stella started going through the desk, she opened the closet and started looking around. There were mostly button-down shirts hanging in there, with a couple of jackets and lab coats. Flipping through them, she recognized most as designer labels - somehow this kid was getting his hands on money, and lots of it. Frowning, she started looking through the stuff on the floor of the closet. Behind her, Stella started on the dresser, having found nothing in the desk.

Pushing aside shoes, clothes, notebooks, and the other detritus that accumulates at the bottom of a closet, she was ready to call it quits. If Tripp was messing with drugs, he was smart enough not to bring them back to his dorm room. Then something caught her eye in the back corner, partially hidden under an old towel (and boy wasn't she glad for the rubber gloves, digging through someone's dirty clothes and towels). Reaching back, she pulled out a small, empty plastic vial, very similar to one she'd seen before.

"Angell."

She turned to see Stella holding another, the bottom drawer of the dresser open in front of her. And it looked like that one contained some liquid.

"Got one, too," she said, holding up the vial she'd found.

"Those are from his job," Aaron offered from the doorway.

"His job?" Stella asked. She opened her kit, pulling out a well plate and an eyedropper that she placed on the desk with the vial. She carefully measured a small amount of the liquid from the vial into three of the wells.

Aaron watched in interested as he answered, "Yeah, part of what he does includes testing for concentrations of certain chemicals. We've done the same tests in my lab: you filter the sample and dilute it by a known quantity. Then you transfer part of that to those small vials. They usually come in boxes of a hundred. Not that you always need that many, but you just put the filled vials in the box to send to the testing lab. Most labs on campus don't do those actual tests in house - the equipment is too expensive - so there is a single lab on campus that handles it for all of the university's research labs. A way to pool resources, so to speak."

"How often does he bring these vials back to the dorm with him?" Angell asked. Over at the desk, Stella had taken three bottles from her kit. She carefully added three drops from each to the samples, each to a different sample.

"Not very, it's just when one ends up in his lab coat pocket or something like that. He'll find them when he brings the coat back to run through the laundry. It's happened a couple of times. Why?" He looked over at what Stella had been working with, eyes widening to see that the sample in each well plate had turned a different color. "What's that mean?"

Stella and Angell glanced at one another, then Stella turned back to him. "We found a similar vial on him when he died, containing trace amounts of GHB. There isn't a direct color test for GHB that you can do at a scene like this, but there are three reagents - Cobalt nitrate, Marquis reagent and Mandelin reagent - used for color tests for other compounds that do react with GHB. Getting these three color results from those three reagents means that it is very likely that GHB or one of its analogs is present in this vial."

"GHB?" Aaron looked floored. "You mean, like the date rape drug?"

"One of its uses, yes."

"Wow, I mean, I- just- when I thought he was involved in drugs, I was thinking something like meth, not GHB." He pulled the one of the chairs by the door over and sat down, rubbing his hands down his face. "All those girls…" He paused, as if looking for the words to say. "He raped them, didn't he? No wonder when they woke up they-"

He shook his head. "Tripp, he just told me that he didn't tell him he had a roommate, and that's why they were panicking. And I believed it. But that wasn't it, was it? He-he drugged them."

"It's a possibility," Stella said quietly as she dropped the vials into evidence bags. "We don't know yet if he was making the GHB, just that he had some on his person when he died. He may not have lied to you."

Aaron shook his head again. "No, I meant what I said when I said I'd never let my little sister near him. He'd do it, if he had the chance--he'd do that to a woman. He saw women as conquests, not people. I just- I guess I was naive enough to not realize he actually was."

"Do you know the names of any of the women he brought back here?" Angell asked, taking a seat in the other chair and putting a hand on his arm. She needed that information, but she needed to get him past the grief and horror first. Those women were potential victims iand/i potential suspects.

"A few. There's some others I see around campus, but I don't know their names."

"Could you make a list for us?"

"I can try... Are they suspects?"

"Just persons of interest. Like Detective Bonasera said, we don't know if he was drugging any of those women, and we won't know until we have the chance to talk to them. It'll help us determine what happened to him."

Aaron turned and looked at Stella again, watching her put away her equipment. "Okay, um, I'll work on a list."

"Good." she handed him her card as she stood to leave. "you can just email it to me here, okay?"

"Yeah." he took it, reading it over before standing as well. "I'm sorry."

"Sorry for what?"

"I should have realized what he was doing. Maybe I could have stopped him."

"Aaron, predators like Tripp don't want to be stopped. There might not have been anything you could have done."

As they stepped out of the building and onto the sidewalk, Angell turned to Stella. "What do you think?"

"He truly had no idea what his roommate was up to," Stella replied. "He was probably so wrapped up in his books and studies that he didn't even think about the real reason those girls were in the room."

"Yeah," Angell nodded. "Something tells me Danny's vic wasn't the only one dealt a hand of karma."

::

"Hey doc, got anything for me?" Danny asked as he crossed the autopsy room to where Sid stood.

"Are you here for Mr. Oswald?"

"As long as it isn't Lee Harvey, it's my guy."

"Now there's a thought. I wonder what the ME on that case was thinking when he-"

"Sid, I need my results."

"I take it the lab is still short-staffed."

"Badly. Let's just say my double might be turning into a triple if we don't get any relief soon."

"Well, I can say that Mr. Oswald was pretty straightforward."

"How'd he die?"

"Massive traumatic injuries."

"Massive traumatic injuries?"

"It looks better on the death certificate than 'he got squished'."

"You got a point there," Danny conceded. He nodded at the body. "The car do all that?"

"It's my guess that it was more than just a car." Sid moved the sheet to show the grill transfer across the victim's torso. "These bruises are too high up on his body to be from a sedan; I'm guessing a truck?"

"SUV."

"Close enough. Those bruises are from the impact of his body against the SUV, the force of which would have caused massive amounts of damage. Most of his ribs are broken, as is his spine. There were more injuries when he impacted the pavement. The force of that impact combined with the force of the collision with the SUV is what caused his appendages to be twisted. Both of his legs were broken, his arms broken and dislocated."

"Could he have survived it all?"

"Possibly. He would have had a very poor quality of life, but he could have survived. Except for the head injury."

"Head injury? He had a head injury?"

"While he didn't have much more than a few bumps in terms of cosmetic damage, he suffered a traumatic brain injury, most likely from his head impacting the pavement. In this case his brainstem was crushed."

"The brainstem is the portion of the brain that controls breathing, right?"

"Exactly. With it damaged, he was unable to breathe and expired almost immediately."

"So there was nothing hinky going on?"

"Define hinky?"

"No sign he was pushed in front of that truck?"

"He has a long scratch down his arm, but otherwise no bruising or anything like that."

Danny nodded: Cynthia Carland, whose purse had been snatched, had mentioned she'd scratched him trying to get it back. He'd already sent the trace from under her fingernails to DNA for testing. If it came back as Oswald's, it'd corroborate her story.

"Sounds good. Supports everything our witnesses have said so far. This might turn out to be pretty open and shut. I like that in a case. Thanks, Sid."

"Glad I made your day."

::

It was completely dark out when Stella came up for air from her lab work. She'd been running tests on the liquid found in Tripp Norton's dorm room, comparing it to the liquid in the vial found on him. Both were GHB and fairly chemically pure, though the vial found in his room was even more so: it was darned near perfect. They must have come from separate batches of the chemical. Frowning, she made a note to have the GC-MS to analyze the chemical again, this time to identify exactly what the differences were between the two solutions.

Stretching, she yawned and glanced across the lab. Danny and Lindsay had already left for the day, and Mac had sent Hawkes home not long after them. Mac himself was still there, carefully examining some of the evidence they'd found at their scene. Yawning again, she headed over to his workstation.

"How's it coming?"

"Mmm?" He glanced over at her from where he was examining the shelf that had been pulled free in the Rangers' locker room. "Not very good. This wasn't our murder weapon."

"It was supposed to be?"

"I was hoping it was--we need to close this one quickly. Apparently the owner of the Rangers has already called the Mayor a couple of times about the case. He's called the Commissioner, and the Commissioner called the Chief of Detectives-"

"Who called you."

"Exactly." He sighed, setting the board down on the light table. "I'm not going to have the team work faster, or longer when everyone is already exhausted, only to start making mistakes. But we're already getting a lot of pressure from the top."

"The kid was a hockey star. It's bound to attract attention."

"Yeah," he picked up the hand lens again, set to go over the edge of the board one more time to look for something - anything - that he'd missed.

"Mac, give it a rest for the night."

"Stella-"

"How long have you been here?"

"Oh, just a few hours."

"Uh-huh. When did you last eat?"

"Um-"

"Exactly. The fact you had to stop and think is proof it's been too long. Put that away, you're taking me to dinner."

"I am?"

"Yes, you are. Then we're going to go home and get some rest. And tomorrow Quinn's people will hopefully be here to help, so we won't all be run ragged."

"I see. And do I have any say in this?"

"You can pick the restaurant."