Chapter 32

The apartment was modest. A large, open plan living room and kitchen, complete with a three-piece suite and dining table. Flat screen TV mounted on the wall opposite the three-seater sofa and a dark wood coffee table sat in the middle of the room.

There were bookshelves lining the opposite wall, filled with volumes ranging from crime thrillers to classic romance. Textbooks, and journals. Magazines were littered on the table and there were printed paintings hung on the wall. If he didn't know any better, Nick might have thought he was back in Grissom and Sara's old condo.

It was as if someone had taken their home and recreated it, with deliberate mistakes. Taking out anything that could have been Grissom, and leaving in everything that was Sara. It was creepy and, not for the first time, Nick wondered how they had gone so long without being invited into the doctor's home.

Jimmy had been to his place on numerous occasions, just as he had been to Gregs. But none of them had been here. Not one invitation in three years. Nick had never been more grateful. He had no idea how Sara would react to this, but he was glad she wasn't with them right now.

"This is weird," Greg said from the other side of the room, walking through a door which Nick guessed led to Jimmy's home office. "If I didn't know any better, I'd say Sara decorated this herself."

Nick didn't reply. Ever since he saw Jimmy's photo in the file, a thought had been growing in the back of his mind. Coming here only increased his dread of what the therapist might actually be doing.

"You know," Greg said, camera snapping photos of the office. "I remember the first time I went Grissom and Sara's. It was… strange." Greg looked up, grinning. "All of Grissom's entomology books crammed in next to Sara's crime thrillers. It was the most eclectic library I've ever seen, but somehow worked."

"Kinda like Griss and Sara," Nick put in, smiling a little.

"Yeah. They had this moth framed, pride of place in the centre of the bookshelf."

"That's not surprising, Grissom is the bug guy after all," Nick said.

"It wasn't Grissom's, it was Sara's. Apparently, he sent her the cocoon while he was on sabbatical. She framed it when it hatched."

"That's sweet… I guess," Nick said, not at all surprised Grissom thought of sending his girlfriend a moth as a romantic gesture. "I'd have gone with flowers, or chocolates, myself."

"Yeah, well, Sara and Grissom don't strike me as the 'flowers and chocolates' type of couple." Greg replied, moving around the desk to search the draws.

"Hang on, he didn't he send her those flowers when he was in Peru?"

"It was a plant," Greg laughed. "And about a week later, he sends her a dead dung beetle. I'm pretty sure Sara preferred the beetle."

"Yeah," Nick agreed. "Haven't those two heard of conventional romance."

"I don't think there is anything 'conventional' about Grissom and Sara. It wouldn't surprise me if we find they've disappeared for a few hours and gotten married again."

"Well," Nick said shining his torch over Jimmy's living room. "We can't have that."

"My guess, it won't be long."

Nick didn't say anything further as he wound his way across the room. Not because he disagreed with Greg, in fact he strongly suspected the younger man was right on the money. The couple had waited long enough, he knew they wouldn't wait much longer. Nick made a mental note to talk to Catherine, so, when his friends did decide to tie the knot again, they wouldn't do it alone.

The two men searched the apartment, tearing apart everything they could find. Nick took Jimmy's bedroom, while Greg stayed with the office.

There was nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing that could tie him to the bombing, or the fire, or any of the crimes that had hit them the last couple of months. Nothing to suggest that Jimmy was anything more than a respected psychiatrist and model citizen.

Nick swept the room. Methodically checking each nook and cranny. Emptying draws. Pulling out boxes from underneath the bed. There wasn't an inch of the room he didn't investigate. Just as he was closing the wardrobe door, something finally caught his eye.

Tucked away in the corner, hidden by Jimmy's shirts, was a blue dress. Knee length halter neck, with a plunging neckline. Simple and classy. It looked vaguely familiar, though Nick could not say why. Why would Jimmy have a dress, a single dress, hidden away in his closet?

Snapping a few photos, Nick reached in with a gloved hand and pulled the dress out. There was a dry-cleaning ticket stamped to the arm, dated a few months back. The name made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. Feeling a little nauseous, Nick lay the garment on the bed next to a black-wood watch box. The box was expensive, much like the watches that winked at him through the glass top.

All of the watches were perfectly aligned. All save one. Right at the end. It was only slight, something most investigators would miss, but there it was. On the edge. A gaudy Rolex, which was so ugly it had to be real, was tilted to the left. Nick was big on intuition, on following your gut. Something Catherine had taught him.

"Intuition doesn't always pan out," she said. "But it's always worth following, Nicky. Especially when you've been doing this job as long as I have." Nick had been on the job long enough. So far, his gut hadn't failed him.

He picked up the box and emptied out the contents. Turning the case over in his hands, Nick checked for any hidden compartments. Any other hinges. Draws.

Nothing.

Running a finger along the edge of the box and over the lining, Nick couldn't get the niggling feeling in his gut to settle. Even if the box seemed to be perfectly ordinary.

His finger hit a lump. There was something underneath the lining.

Nick took his pen knife out from his pocket and slid the blade along the seam. Cutting away the velvet fabric to reveal a metal underside. He almost dropped the box when he saw what was in it. Taped to the bottom, probably to stop the chain from getting tangled, was a necklace. A yellow sunflower dangling from a silver chain.

He put the box back down on the chest of draws and snapped some more photos in quick succession. Hoping his shaking hands wouldn't blur the pictures.

"Nick," Greg called from the other room. "You should take a look at this." There was something in his friend's voice that sent a bolt of trepidation down his spine. After bagging the necklace and dress, Nick dumped them by his kit in the kitchen before making his way over to the office.

His mind was running through all the different possibilities. Had Greg found more of Sara's possessions, squirreled away by the clearly deranged psychiatrist? Or maybe the missing explosives they were desperately trying to find.

As he entered the office Nick looked round for Greg, but he wasn't there. Instead, he found a bookcase swung to the side. Hinges disguised in the wood. It opened up into a small room, dark save for the beam of light emanating from Greg's torch.

"What have you found?" Nick asked as he approached, and Greg turned to him. He looked as if he was going to be sick. His face pale and his jaw clenched.

"Jimmy's dark room," Greg replied, his voice dangerously low. Nick flashed his torch over the room and what he saw made his entire body tremble with rage. On almost every inch of the walls, like some kind of sick shrine, were pictures.

"They look like surveillance photos," Greg said.

"Document it," Nick replied through his teeth. "All of it."

CSICSICSICSICSICSICSICSICSICSI

"Catherine," a voice called. Catherine paused in the hall and looked over her shoulder to see Lou rushing towards her. Her heart started racing at the sight of him, and she could feel her face heating at the memory of their last meeting.

It was all so innocent. But she couldn't get the feel of his lips off her cheek. Nor squash the desire that it had been another part of her face, her body.

"Are you alright?" He asked as he drew level with her, eyes taking in her slightly flushed face.

"Yes," Catherine replied, shaking her head to dispel the imagine of some of the other places he had kissed her in that kitchen. "What's up?"

"I did some digging into our victims," he said, opening up the file in his hand and holding it out for her to read. Catherine took a step closer, almost brushing his arm with hers as she read. "From everything that I've found, they're all fine, upstanding members of the community. Not even so much as a parking ticket. Kelly is the only one with a black mark, due to his gambling addiction. But nothing in his file to suggest anything aggressive or violent."

"So, how did they get caught up in this?" Catherine asked.

"Well," Lou said, flipping the pages. "We know they were all patients of Dr Jimmy. I did some digging on him too. That card Morgan found in Smith's bag?" Catherine nodded. "The practice doesn't exist, no surprises there. But it did suggest that Dr Quinn, aka Dr Jimmy, specialised in hypnotherapy."

"Mr Kelly told me her husband was using hypnotherapy with Jimmy, to overcome his gambling addition," Catherine added.

"Look, everything I've found on these people tells me they wouldn't be involved in something like this. Yet they've been linked to a dozen or so crimes the lab has worked on over the past couple of months. And the people closest to them have said there was a distinct change in behaviour that began after they started seeing Dr Thompson."

"What are you suggesting?" Catherine asked, frowning a little at him in confusion.

"I know it's a long shot, but nothing suggests that these people are criminals, and Thompson specialises in hypnosis."

Catherine just stared at him. She had thought that herself, after her interview with Mrs Kelly, but couldn't work out how he managed it. There was a big difference between making someone cluck like a chicken and bomb a casino. Hypnosis couldn't make a person do something against their moral code, their natural instincts would kick in.

You could no sooner hypnotise someone to rob a shop than you could hypnotise them to kill themselves…

"Liberate the money," Catherine said, her voice distant. The echo of a memory.

"What?"

"A few years ago," Catherine said. "I worked a case where a woman jumped off her balcony in a bikini. We found out that she was fired not too long before, for stealing from the bank she worked at."

"What has that got to do with this case?" Lou asked, confused.

"She was trying to lose weight, for her wedding, and went to a hypnotherapist to help. We found out that the hypnotist had another client. Another bank teller, who was also fired for stealing. We watched the surveillance; both the victim and the other client were caught on tape, handing out hundreds of dollars to a customer.

Long story short, we started to suspect the hypnotist. Neither woman remembered stealing the money, or even what had happened when the customer came in. We called in a specialist, someone who also works in hypnotherapy, and he told us; you can't hypnotise someone to do something against their moral code."

"So, how did the hypnotist get these women to rob the bank?"

"Because she didn't tell them to rob the bank, she told them to liberate the money. If someone was undergoing hypnotherapy, there would be plenty of opportunity for the hypnotist to plant a word, a trigger of sorts, which would induce a hypnotic state. And only the person who planted the word would be able to use it."

"So, Thompson could have planted this trigger into his victims, at any time in their sessions."

"And used it to make them do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it," Catherine finished for him. "It's just a case of using the right words. Phrasing it in the right way, so they wouldn't know what they were actually doing."

"The burglaries, the assaults, the bombings? All of it? All the crimes we've investigated over the last few months were committed by people who didn't even know they were committing them?" Lou asked, incredulously. "There could be hundreds of people out there, people he could use at the drop of the hat."

"No," Catherine said, shaking her head. "It would have to be people who were hypnotised by him on a regular basis. The longer they were with him, the stronger the trigger."

"That still leaves all of his clients."

"I don't think he would use his clients, not ones that could be easily traced to him. They would only be clients he had as Dr Quinn, and they would only be clients that could be linked back to Lady Heather."

"How do you know that?" Lou asked.

"He's gone through all this trouble to frame her, why would he risk that by using someone with no connection to Lady Heather?"

"Well, as far as I've been able to find out, Dr Quinn only saw three of Lady Heather's patients."

That was a small comfort. There may not be any more hypnotised patients out there, but there was still Dr Jimmy. Dr Jimmy and ton of explosives.