Disclaimer: I don't own it, I don't pretend to own it, and I don't mean to offend anyone's sensibilities.
Thank You: Stelmarta for being there! Mom because I love her!
Chapter Two
Long before the woman in the Wells Fargo exploded, Sara Sidle decided that she was having a bad day. Her computer caught a virus and needed to be purged, her hot water tank mysteriously went cold after ten minutes, leaving her wet and shivering by the time she was done, her car needed gas, and she ran out of cash and needed to charge her one dollar sausage biscuit, not to mention she'd overslept to begin with.
That, in and of itself, wasn't really a travesty, she was on time to work, but she was usually an hour or so early. The only problem with this was that Nick had been waiting, early, for her to go over the lab results for a 412 vehicle crash. They'd found the owner, but had yet to determine if the ten pounds of crack cocaine was his or the perp's as he claimed.
The evidence proved that the dope was the owners', but that was beside the point. Nick had begun the evening teasing her relentlessly for being 'late'. On top of her day, it just wasn't right. Grissom, getting into the swing of things, arched his eyebrows in an impossibly 'Griss' gesture and asked, quite attentively, if she was all right. Sara really hadn't meant to growl quite that much, or snap quite that sharply, but when Catherine went ahead and teased her about it she overloaded. Scowling over her coffee she declared that she'd overslept, not that it was anyone's business, and unless it started to affect her job she didn't want to hear about it.
As a result she was in a bit of a funk when Grissom fetched her out of the lab for an emergency 405, 445A and a 420. How they could have a bomb, a suicide and a homicide escaped her, but as they walked into the scene it quickly became obvious what happened. It was a suicide bombing that killed a passer-by.
What a charming way to start a shift.
"Sara, look at this" Catherine, lovely, immaculate and perpetually on time Catherine, motioned for her to come over. Sara squeaked across the floor, marred by bright red blood, lumps of reddish pink tissue, and hundreds, if not thousands of footprints.
"What is it? Sara stepped over the suspended strings, each marking out one square foot of space on the massive Wells Fargo entry.
"I think it's a piece of the explosive." She picked up her tweezers; in between the tines was an impossibly miniscule fragment of metal.
"Great, now if we can only find the other twelve million pieces of bomb, that is if no one carried them out on their shoes, then we might be able to possibly begin to jigsaw them back together." Sara leaned down on her haunches, "this is impossible. Even if the crime scene hadn't been completely compromised by the crowd, where the hell would we get the man power to get this crap up?"
"Well we'll certainly get the manpower for it." Grissom held up his cell phone "The Feds just called Brass, ATF and FBI should be here within the hour."
"Wonderful" Catherine placed another bloody lump into a collection bag. "That's just what we needed, the power of the Federal government."
"Catherine, naughty, naughty, remember the 'office of homeland security'. We need to be aware of potential terrorism within the US." Grissom dripped so much sarcasm Sara thought it would fall to the floor in a puddle.
"Potential terrorism? Grissom, we have a white, possibly female, possibly male, individual, who may well have been working alone, a few lumps of organ tissue, and a pair of dead bodies. No nails, no ball bearings, no shrapnel of any kind. If this was a terrorist act it was pretty pathetic. An idiot could have offed at least a hundred people, all this did was mess up the floor." Sara slid towards him "There is way more to this than meets the eye."
"Agreed, unfortunately we have to bow to the powers that be." He snapped the cell phone shut, "However, I have Nick working with Judge Parker at this very moment. With any luck we can get a confirmation of our local jurisdiction and a restraining order within the hour. No one but a CSI or police detective registered, licensed and employed by the Las Vegas sheriff's department should be crossing that line." He motioned to the yellow tape strung across the door.
"Is that legal?" Catherine stood back up, stretching out the muscles in her back that were stiff from the prolonged crouching.
"I don't know, I think so, I hope so." He sighed, "In any case it ought to keep them off of our backs long enough to get most of this…mess… cleaned up."
"Wonderful." Sara stepped back to survey the, well, the mess for lack of a better term. "Hey Griss?"
"Yeah?"
"We still got the metal detector in the van?" Not waiting for his answer, she started to squelch her way to the yellow tape in search of the CSI van.
"Good idea, we can find as many of the bomb fragments as possible." Grissom moved to a fresh row, next to the orange strings delineating Sara's section. "Why don't we get the camera back out? Sara, grab the camera out of the van as well as the metal detector." He called out over his shoulder.
"Sure, what do you want with it?"
"I got an idea." He motioned her over to one of the squares filled with blood spatter. "Get up close, no closer, yeah. Make the picture one negative of one square foot of the area. Then we can get a, a spatula, I guess and scrape the contents of one of the squares onto this." He held up a Ziploc baggie full of unidentifiable reddish material. "Run the metal detector over it first and put little markers over the spots. Do the same thing with the footprints. That way we can re-create the crime scene back at the lab without compromising it any more."
"Good idea, but what about the distancing? We need to get precise measurements of the spatter locations." Catherine, her speciality blood spatters, looked a little worried. Sara answered for Grissom.
"Yeah, but with the markers each one foot long we can just scale it down. We'll know how many feet the blood flew and we can get everything from there."
"Sounds good," Catherine grinned, "And fast, we'll get this scene cleaned up in no time if we do it that way."
"That wouldn't be our problem would it?" Grissom deadpanned.
Sara painstakingly took the camera and photographed each and every square foot of the Wells Fargo building, including the walls and vaulted ceiling. Catherine ran the metal detector and set up the portable rulers for footprint identification. Grissom walked behind them, with half a dozen kids from the police academy, scraping the remains off of the floor and into little Ziploc baggies. They worked in a circle, centring on the main scene: the bodies. Or at least what was left of the bodies.
With a practiced physicist's eye, Sara watched the scene unfold from behind her camera lens. Estimating the explosive size, weight and composition, based on the rough measure of the maximum spatter, Sara mentally figured the epicentre of the explosion and the approximate height of the explosive device.
"Hey Grissom?"
"What is it?"
"I haven't really measured anything, but I'd put the middle of the damn thing right about square 16 H."
"So the bodies blew out wards form the explosion?"
"Yeah, sort of, look I don't have everything precise, but I'm thinking it was the female with the bomb and the male presence was …incidental?"
"Collateral damage?" asked Catherine, "He was just a passer-by?"
"Yeah, I guess so. We won't know until I get the official results done, but I'm thinking that it was strapped to her right around here." She made a gesture around her lower abdomen, "Like a belt or something."
"That would be consistent with the physical damage. The female's body is in more um, pieces." Catherine blew some hair out of her face, "And the spatters seem to indicate that whatever it was, the explosive was pretty damn powerful."
"Whew!" Nick's voice carried over the scene, "This stinks."
"Yeah, well if you'd spent the past three hours scraping someone else's guts off of a marble slab, I'm sure you'd think it sucks too." Sara sniped. She still hadn't quite forgiven him for teasing her that afternoon.
"Well good morning to you too, Sunshine." He blew her an exaggerated kiss, and winked. Sara sent him the requisite dirty look back.
"Nick," Grissom warned, he got up off of the floor and snapped off his surgical gloves. "Have you got the restraining order?"
"Yeah," he reached a paper out of his coat pocket. "Judge Parker says it'll probably hold for about an hour after the Fibbies get a hold of it, but that ought to give you enough time, right?"
"With any luck we can have most of the evidence away in the lab, then they can't try to claim Federal jurisdiction, not without compromising the chain of evidence." Grissom tucked the sheet of paper back into his Forensics jacket.
"Y'know, had it ever occurred to you that having the Fed's in on this might be a good thing?"
"Nick, can it. We've got the best damn crime lab in the nation. No way do we need some two bit Federal agent telling us what to do and where to look." Sara stretched, sore from hunching over marble and rose briefly all the way up to her tippy-toes, holding the camera in one hand.
Nick couldn't help but take a moment to admire a very attractive specimen of woman, but as soon as her eyes snapped back down to earth he turned his head away.
Sara wouldn't appreciate being admired like that. Ladies man he may well be, but he always prided himself on making the women around him comfortable. With Catherine he knew that if he sent an appreciative eye her way she'd take it in the spirit for which it was intended, simple admiration. He had done so, on occasion and in a strictly friendly manner, and she'd just grinned back at him, proud that she'd caught a roving glance. Sara'd probably deck him if she ever caught him staring, and she'd never relax around him again. I'd be awkward; she'd back out of assignments to avoid him and he could forget ever staying alone in a room with her.
Sometimes he wished she wasn't so damn sensitive. She knew how to have fun, but still, anything remotely personal was strictly off limits. He knew that was just the way Sara was; she just didn't accept personal contact too frequently.
Now if he could only convince himself to quit looking at her on a regular basis he'd be a made man. She was attractive though, in a long-legged kind of touch-me-not sort of way. Ribbing her was fun, half the fun of the job. He couldn't quite remember what it was like before Sara joined the team. It must not have been too much fun.
"What?"
She sounded a bit disgruntled and slightly concerned, Nick looked up again and Sara was now staring at him.
"Nothing" he said quickly, too quickly, 'damn' he thought to himself. She'd never give up on him; tenacity had nothing on this woman.
"You just don't want to look at me, is that it? I'm not that ugly, Romeo." Great, now he'd hurt her feelings.
"No, I um," he thought quickly, "I just, it bothers me, sometimes…the blood and all that…stuff." He made a vague gesture towards the now red colour marble laid out behind her.
Apparently that had been the right thing to say, not that the horrific scene hadn't bothered him, but her eyes went soft and she got that sympathetic look on her face, usually reserved for animals and dead people.
"I know, Nick. It sucks. We'll get him, though, that's our job, and we'll get this bastard." Her voice was a little thick, and she looked away from his eyes.
"Yeah," he said, almost nervously. Her hand came up and she made as if to pat him on the shoulder, but it was still covered in a plastic glove and was a little red. It was an awkward moment as he moved and she moved at the same time, but it passed.
"Well I gotta get back, Warrick's got a 406 up in North side he needs some help on." he grinned, "and guess who's the best man for the job."
"Someone's doing some expensive shopping, north side's the rich district." She turned around and squeaked back to her crime scene. "And you're not the best men for the job, Nick, you're the only one!"
He ginned, that was the Sara that Las Vegas CSI knew and loved. He climbed back into his Tahoe with more of a spring in his step. Warrick was waiting by a pile of broken glass; one thing Sara'd been right about, north side was the rich district. In Vegas, rich was really rich.
