Chapter 9
Grissom was leaned back in his chair, tapping his pen against his lips and reading something out of a brown LVPD folder when Sara knocked on the open door of his office, signalling her presence. "I've got the QD results."
He waved her to a seat and sat up straight. "I just double-checked both Constance Lowell and Heather Marks's statements. Neither of them mentioned that Constance left the archives after she entered." He shook his head. "She didn't fall into that display case and cut her head." He placed the photos Sara had taken of the blood smear on the desk. The glass was still intact, with no abnormalities but the blood. "She was already bleeding when she hit it - if she'd fallen or been pushed into it, the force should have been enough to at least crack the glass."
Sara felt a slow burn begin in her stomach as she looked at the picture. "Someone hit her."
"It looks likely," Grissom said cautiously, watching Sara's reaction. "The question is, who?"
"Cavrel," Sara suggested. "Motive." Her tone suggested she wouldn't have blamed Constance in the slightest.
"The gloves," Grissom countered. "And the fiber on the window. She was wearing a blue suit that night. The fiber was black. And Cavrel's defensive wounds - could she have inflicted those? We're still not seeing the whole picture."
"All right," Sara agreed, but she couldn't stop staring at the photo on the desk. She started when Grissom took it out of her line of sight.
"QD?" he asked gently, and Sara shivered slightly, blinked to clear her mind of the image of the blood, and passed him the sheet of steno paper.
She summarized what Ronnie had said about the paper and the ink. "The last time I took Latin was junior year in high school. I can tell what that says, but beyond that the only thing I can tell you is that I should be able to tell something about what came before and after it by the form of those words. I just can't tell what the form is."
Grissom studied the paper. "A Latin sentence is like a puzzle. Every word has a shape, a form determined by its case, gender, and number, and that shape determines what the other shapes in the sentence will be," he began, in a voice that Sara remembered from a long-ago seminar. She smiled in remembrance and leaned forward to watch him work.
"First things first. Totas, from totus, an adjective meaning 'all' or 'everything.' Meas, from meus, a possessive adjective in the first person singular - 'my.' Adjectives always agree in gender, number, and case with the noun that they're describing. Both totas and meas are in the accusative case, feminine gender, and plural. Therefore, they're describing something in the accusative, feminine, and plural. The accusative case means it's the object of a verb. Think, 'I process evidence.' Laboro evidentiam. 'Evidence' is the direct object of 'process' and so evidentiam is the accusative form of evidentia. Whatever totas meas is describing is the object of the verb. It could be something like 'I wash all my lab instruments before putting them away.'" Grissom was obviously completely engrossed as he thought aloud, and Sara grinned at the picture he made of a dedicated scientist.
"In classical Latin, the noun these words are describing could be almost anywhere in the sentence, within reason. It could come before the adjectives just as easily as afterward - what serves to link them is the case." He paused, tapping his finger against his lip. "But you said this couldn't have been written more than ten years ago, and if we assume the author is working from an English language base, then he's not going to have the logic of a native Latin speaker, and he'll follow the accepted order of words in the English language - and in English, possessive adjectives are directly followed by the noun they describe."
"Well, it's something plural and feminine that starts with a d and then has a not-round letter after it. That's either - i, u, or maybe y depending on the calligraphy," Sara said, concentrating on how she would draw the letters when writing in cursive.
Grissom leaned back and snagged a huge book of his shelf, tossing it on the desk in front of Sara with a thud. "Here you go."
"What?" She stared at the Latin dictionary in disbelief. "Griss, you're the one who actually speaks the language, I really don't know if I'm the right person for the job - "
"Technically, Sara, no one speaks Latin anymore. That's why it's a dead language. And Dr. Gilbert is bringing Heather Marks by for more questioning in - " he checked his watch, " - seven minutes." He stood, making it clear that he didn't expect any argument.
Sara stared in disbelief at the dictionary in front of her - it had to be well over a thousand pages. She sighed and hefted it in her right arm, grabbing the sheet with the words on it in her other hand, and left Grissom's office.
~*~
"I got your page," Nick said cautiously, sliding into the booth. "I really don't think this is a good idea."
"You said if I had anything more to say, to contact you," Constance pointed out.
"I know." He ran a hand through his hair, slightly frustrated. "Look, Mrs. Lowell, I - "
"Constance," she reminded him.
"Constance," he relented. "I'm investigating a crime that you..." He caught himself just in time. "That's close to you. Conflict of interest is only one of the phrases the lawyers could throw around."
"Am I a suspect?" she asked pointedly, staring at her coffee as she stirred it.
Nick opened and closed his mouth, and was saved by the waitress at his elbow. "Can I get you anything, sir?"
Normally he would have responded to her openly flirtatious smile and short skirt, but he only glanced at her distractedly. "Coffee, I guess."
"We have over twenty-five varieties of coffee here," the waitress told him, in a way that suggested he really should have known that before he came in.
"Whatever she's having," he said brusquely, pointing to the cup Constance was concentrating on.
"Right away," the waitress said, and flounced off, seemingly irritated that he hadn't noticed her at all.
"Well, am I?" Constance asked again, looking him in the eyes this time.
"At this stage of the investigation, everyone is a suspect," he finally decided to say, thinking it sounded like something Grissom would say.
"Especially my brother," she said, and he saw a spark of anger in her blue eyes.
Oh, boy. "You have two brothers, Constance, and like I said everyone is a suspect..." It was a weak evasion, and they both knew it.
"Your friends went through his house," she said, and her hand around the mug tightened so he could see the whites of her knuckles. "Geoffrey would never kill anyone."
"My colleagues are following the evidence," he fired back, now annoyed, and then sighed, fixing his gaze on the businessmen sharing cappuccinos in the booth behind Constance, and then looking at the woman in front of him again. "I'm sorry," he said softly, as hollow as he knew the words must sound, and reached forward to lay his hand on her forearm and try to calm her down.
She hissed suddenly and jerked her arm away from his hand, slopping coffee onto the table. "Dammit," she snarled, the coarse word at odds with her careful appearance, and he offered her napkins from the dispenser at the end of the table, concerned.
"Did you hurt your arm?" he asked, watching her soak up the coffee with the napkins, a slight frown on his face.
"No. You startled me," she snapped back, crumpling the wet napkins into a ball and pushing them further down the table. "You were right, this was a bad idea." She slid out of the booth and stood to go, nearly knocking the approaching waitress off her balance as she rushed out of the coffee shop.
The perky woman raised an eyebrow, and Nick had no doubt that he and Constance would be back room gossip by the end of shift.
"Can I get that to go?"