Chapter 25

I could feel Sara on my heels as I wound through the busy halls of the lab. Sara was helping me carry our evidence to the layout room, her wine labels mixed in amongst all the evidence I had to process. Setting one box down on the layout table, Sara grabbed four bottles of wine before she and I separated. I took out the rest of the evidence and laid it out, each piece still in its individual evidence bag. Then, I took a step back and stared at it for awhile.

I was still staring at the evidence when Catherine strolled into the layout room. She glanced around the table, arching a brow. "You found all this?"

I jerked a nod.

"Great work," Catherine said. She fingered the bag with the syringe in it. "I noticed that Sara has set herself up in front of a computer."

"Yeah," I said, pulling on a thin pair of plastic gloves. "She's researching a wine, Italian label, Tuscany, something called Nettare di Mattare. We didn't recognize the label, but Sara said that you'd found a bottle of the same wine in our dead torcher's purse and you'd thought you'd recognized it."

My eyes were on Catherine, waiting for her to respond. She frowned. "Nettare di Mattare?"

I nodded.

Catherine jerked a slight nod. "Yeah, it looked like a bottle Sam had on display. I remember looking at it and wondering why Sam would put a wine on display that I'd never heard of. It wasn't your normally trophy case bottle. The bottle was a 2000. The one I'd pulled from Camille Vanasse's purse was a 2003."

"Did you process it?"

Catherine cocked her head to the side. "Sure, but it was uncorked. It just looked like she had it in her bag to take home."

"Any prints?"

Catherine's brow pinched inward. Her eyes were looking left in recollection. "Vanasse, Fava, and the bartender, Johnny Mathers, but nobody else. There were a few smudges, unusable."

I jerked a nod. Catherine gave me the up and down. "Why is Sara researching the wine?"

My eyes ranked over Catherine. She was watching me, waiting for an answer, still left in the dark as to what we'd found. I leaned one elbow on the layout table and looked at her. "We found shelves and cases of the stuff in a cellar below Ric's."

Catherine watched me. Her blue eyes glinted in the light of the room. "Really?"

My mouth twisted up into a grin. I jerked a nod. "Maybe a thousand bottles of the juice, the vintages from 2000 to 2003."

"The same label?"

"The very same." I stood back up under Catherine's stare and let off a shrug. The presence of the wine and what it meant to our case was still as much a mystery to me as Catherine. I gave her the eyeball. "So, how did the rest of the interrogation go?"

Catherine's brow wrinkled in a frown. "Not well. Brass and I tried to corner Vito Fava with his far-fetched financials, but Fava managed to ease his way out of that corner."

My eyes narrowed slightly. I thought about what I'd witnessed from the observation room. My narrowed eyes watched Catherine. "So you and Fava go back?"

Catherine let out a snort. "Not really. His dad and Sam used to pal around a bit. I used to see him around."

"But you've never been to the club?"

Catherine shook her head. "Not until last Thursday, Greg. Hanging out with Sam in back alley clubs was never my scene."

I watched her for a moment and nodded. Catherine was a woman who liked to be where the action was. I wasn't even sure why I'd bothered to grill her on that again. She'd given me a pretty adamant answer earlier and Catherine was known for her brutal honesty about nearly everything, her mixed-up past included. She could give a guy the runaround for awhile, but she was one broad who was almost always on the level. I gave her the up and down and cocked my head to the side, a slight smirk on my lips. "So, are you going to give a guy a hand?"

Catherine smiled. "What are we doing?"

"Prints, DNA, tox, and then sending this stuff off to trace."

"You swab for DNA and I'll print?"

I nodded. We began working, setting up an easy rhythm. I pulled a piece of evidence, swabbed it for DNA and handed it off to Catherine to print.

Pulling the syringe, I swabbed for DNA, took a sample for tox and handed it off to Catherine, watching as she carefully printed the small piece of evidence, gently wrapping tape around the slender tube. Peeling back the tape off the small surface, she lifted an almost perfect print.

Catherine was a wonder with prints. Powder floated upon the surface of every piece of evidence she printed as though it knew where it needed to land. Her delicate fingers lifted prints with an elegance only a woman could aspire to. I enjoyed watching Catherine print, almost as much as I enjoyed watching Sara. I might give Catherine the slight advantage, but watching Sara's hands…

I lost myself in the rest of the job. Soon, we were finished. I took back the empty bottle of Bordeaux and tipped it upside down until a trickle of wine dripped out. There were a few more drops inside, but that small sample would be enough to do. Swabbing it for tox, I took the swab and placed it next to the swab I'd taken from the interior of the syringe. Catherine gathered up the little envelopes of swabs and prints. "I'll drop these off while you take this stuff to trace."

I frowned. Dropping off evidence to trace was at the very top of the few things I didn't like about this job. It was a job I'm sure all of us would pass onto someone else if the opportunity presented itself. I looked at Catherine and realized I was stuck with it. Catherine's raised brow told me that asking for a switch would be a mistake I might not want to make. I felt the disappointment land on my shoulders, the weight of it heavy. Catherine got to stop by the print lab and drop off prints with Mandy, swing by tox and drop off samples with Henry, and then move onto DNA, where Wendy was always something to look at. Meanwhile, I was the sucker that had to hit trace and put up with the unending trap of David Hodges.

Hodges, the trace tech, was a piece of work. Self absorbed might be a more accurate description. Hodges worshiped the Holy Trinity and I didn't mean the religious one. It wasn't Grissom's trinity of evidence either. No, Hodges's trinity was the three people he thought should be sainted, his mother, Grissom and himself. Hodges was daffy over himself and he was daffy over Grissom. He could talk about girlfriends and being into women, but if he had to choose one person to be stuck on a deserted island with, his choice would be our boss. If Grissom was around, Hodges puffed up like a peacock, showing off his colors. If Grissom wasn't around, Hodges still puffed up like a peacock, but it was more of a pride thing. He believe that he and Grissom drank from the same cup, that he was closer to Grissom than any of the rest of us, even closer to Grissom than Catherine, who was Grissom's right hand. He talked down to the rest of us, like we were a bunch of dumb mugs and I was at the bottom, all because I'd traded the crime lab for the neon streets. Catherine, Warrick, Nick and Sara all had a way of putting Hodges in his place, and they'd even grown to not mind him so much, but I'd yet to accomplish either of that. Maybe with time, but for now, he was the gee who was about to tout himself a hero and act as if he was the case breaker, all because I was about to bring him a piece of evidence to process. Letting out a bit of a sigh, I boxed up the evidence and headed to trace.

I looked inside the trace lab to see Hodges playing the "Six Million Dollar Man" board game all by himself. He looked like he was hard at work, playing that vintage board game, but it wasn't a real surprise coming from Hodges. He liked those old games. Over a year ago, he'd roped me into a "Dukes of Hazzard" game. For someone who liked to sing him significance, Hodges also liked to shirk the work. Years ago, I worked trace and I knew for a fact that Hodges was taking a little longer to process things than needed.

I set down the box of evidence, letting the box drop the last couple of inches so that it would make a loud thud as it landed. Hodges's eyes snapped to me. I gave him the eyeball. "I need you to pull trace."

Hodges smirked. He stood up. "Is it important, or did they just leave you with the scraps?"

I let the remark slide. "You tell me."

"Are you looking for me to break your case?"

"Don't flatter yourself," I said. "Just take a look and see what you can give me. Start with the cork."

Hodges pulled out the cork. "You want to know what this is composed of?"

I shrugged. "If it's relevant. I want you to see if you can match it to the bottle."

"If there is trace of the cork in the bottle, which there often is, I can. I could also try to match the wine from the cork, if the bottle hasn't been rinsed out. Otherwise, I would need to compare the cork to an identical bottle of the same vintage."

"There's wine left in the bottle, so if you can't find any trace of cork, use that."

Hodges nodded. He lifted the cork up before his face and studied it. He took a sniff, frowned, and then sniffed again. "Is this from a homicide?"

I jerked a nod.

"What did your victim die of?"

I frowned. "Heroin overdose."

"You should get an expanded tox panel."

My head angled sideways. "Why?" I asked.

Hodges handed me the cork. "Do you smell that?"

I took a sniff. "All I can smell is oxidized wine." I handed the cork back to him and watched as he took another sniff. He shook his head. "No, it's not wine. It's kind of a bitter almond scent."

"Let me see that." I grabbed the cork back and took a long, deep sniff. "I don't smell it."

"That's because you don't have the nose." Hodges tapped the side of his schnozzle with his index finger.

I scoffed. It was right on Hodges's line to believe his nose was superior. What made his beezer any better? "Yeah," I said, "what makes your nose so special?"

Hodges looked at me. A self-satisfied smirk was playing at his lips. "It can detect cyanide."

If he'd given me any other line, I would think he was slinging a story, one of the fictitious kind. Years of working in the lab gave me pause. I knew that certain people had a genetic disposition that enabled them to smell cyanide. I shook my head. Hodges just had to be one of them.

Taking the cork from him, I held it in the air. "Nevada gas?"

Hodges jerked a nod. "If it was in the cork though, then it is probably liquid form." He gave me the eyeball. "Who makes a cork with cyanide?"

"Nobody." I placed the cork on a tray and dug out the baggie with the syringe in it, pulling out the syringe. I handed it to Hodges. "Smell this."

He frowned. "Why?"

"Pretend I'm Grissom and humor me."

Hodges lifted the syringe, leaned forward and took a good, dramatic whiff. "Cyanide."

"Confirm it," I said, plopping down the cork before him. Before he could say anything, I turned out of the lab and headed off to tox. I was about to pile more onto the already full plate of Henry Andrews. There were samples to test for cyanide on top of heroin now, but an expanded tox panel was priority.