Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Spoilers: Nothing specific, set mid third season.
A/N: Each chapter is told from a different point of view. I owe enormous thanks to M and J who are two wonderful beta readers.
MY FIRST IMPRESSION was that this was certainly an interesting case. The previous week had been filled with your standard cases: Drug deals gone bad, spouses who hadn't heard of divorce yet and a gang related stabbing.
What I really like about my job are the interesting cases; the real mysteries. They are the ones that challenge me to give all that I have to solve them. I've got all the tools, both scientific and forensic, at my disposal and I try to reconstruct what has happened based on the evidence. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It's the cases that I cannot solve that I have problems with. I know Grissom thinks I get too emotionally involved in them, and in an honest moment of clarity, I conceded that he is right at times. But only sometimes. We actually ended up solving the quadruple homicide, so you could say that it worked. We caught the bad guys and prevented a huge disaster. But still, in spite of our efforts we, the winners, were the losers in the end. There were no winners. In the end everyone lost.
Having finished the investigation of the crime scene, I felt elated and was downright excited to get started on the evidence that we had collected. I dumped samples of the blood spatter on Greg's desk, telling him to get to it, and gave Jacqui the prints that Nick and I had dusted at the scene. After having grabbed a reasonably fresh made cup of coffee, I started out to recreate a virtual model of the apartment which we would later use to reconstruct the events. I would have rather worked the glass shards from the scene, but Nick and I tossed coins and I lost. The re-creating of the apartment model went faster than I had expected and since Grissom and Catherine weren't back yet from the scene, I went over to Warrick to check what he was up to. He was up to shoe prints.
"How's it coming?"
"Not at all. I got this shoeprint here from the scene," He showed me the transparency. "But what is really strange: first of all, have you ever seen a shoe like this?"
"Let me see," I took a closer look. He was right. It really was quite peculiar. The print seemed to completely lack the profiling normally found on a shoe sole. "I take it that you already ran it through the database?"
"Yeah, I did. At first I was thinking like some kind of a slipper, but nothing. I checked out all the shoes at the apartment. Nothing like this. And it gets stranger. Take another look at it this," He handed me a magnifying glass.
"What is that?"
"That was my reaction exactly. Some kind of really fine grain pattern, not like any real profile. I have no idea what to make of it. Other than that I just ran a size comparison, came back as an 8. So we have either male or female. Without the model, there is nothing else to tell,"
I pictured the scene; the killer, wearing these odd shoes, stepping into the blood of his victims, creating impressions with it on the floor.
"Warrick, do you maybe have a cut out of the shoe print that I can use?"
"Sure, it's right here," He handed me a bagged rectangle of worn carpet. Squarely on it was the bloody shoeprint. I pulled out the magnifying glass. I found what I had been looking for. Two thin, long strands of material sticking to the blood. "I'm thinking maybe our shoe is made of a more unusual fabric, like moccasins or something. And I think that some of the fabric has worn/rubbed off and leaving it behind at the scene,"
"Wow, let's get that to Greggo,"
"He's gonna love that, I just told him to get working on my sample 20 minutes ago,"
"He'll live,"
Greg's ego seemed not to have suffered in the slightest from my rather curt treatment earlier. On the contrary.
"Warrick, Sara, I'm the best!" He beamed at us.
"What did you do?"
"I know what your killers are doing in their spare time,"
"Killers? As in plural?" I asked, ignoring the second part of the sentence.
"Yes, the samples you brought in show that apart from the family there's DNA of two other people,"
"Okay, so there is, but that could be from anyone," I got annoyed, even though there really was no reason.
"No, not in this case. You see, the blood from the kitchen is both from the victim and from an unidentified subject. The cells from under the fingernails of Gwen Delaney are from another donor, not someone of the family. So you got at least two killers," Greg was about the go on. But I stopped him. "Hold on, give me a second," I turned to Warrick.
"Your shoe prints show that the killer and Gwen were in the kitchen, right?"
"Yes, if someone else had been there, they would have walked through the blood. I could hardly move without stepping in it myself,"
"So, the second killer maybe was already in the bedroom with our Jane Doe,"
Greg interrupted me there. "Brass sent a fax. Your Jane Doe is known by Tina Rivers, Gwen Delaney's sister. DNA confirms the relation,"
I bit back an acerbic comment and went on. "But the fact that there was no struggle, means that the killer was either someone Tina Rivers knew, or he maybe had her at gunpoint, so she didn't resist. Gwen runs to help her sister, but the second killer follows her and gets her before she enters the bedroom,"
"Possible. Now, what else do you know about our killers?"
Again we were interrupted, this time by Nick.
"You paged me?" he asked Greg.
"Yes, I took a look at the substance you found on those glass shards. I ran it through the GC-MS, came back 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene, otherwise known as TNT,"
"Our killers have been handling explosives. Could these have been from industrial or military use?"
"Theoretically it could be, but TNT is known to cause anaemia and liver failure. Skin contact with it causes irritation. In the industry they'd use appropriate protection,"
"Any way of telling where it came from?"
"Maybe, there were no other useable trace elements. But since prolonged exposure to high concentration of TNT can be detected in blood, we might get something from the blood sample from the scene,"
"Well, do it then. We also found some fibers adhered to a bloody shoeprint,"
"And you'd like to know what it is, right?"
"You got it Greg,"
Figuring out that the killers had been handling explosives was puzzling at best at this point, but ultimately this piece of information would be critical to seeing the bigger picture. I should really have seen it earlier; how it all fit together. When I think back it's crystal clear -impossible to miss. But when you are really into a case, sometimes you just don't see it even though it's there staring you right in the eye. Maybe science didn't help us in this case. No, that's not right, science did help us get the bad guys -it was the human part, putting it all together that was too slow. But we did try our best when we went on to reconstruct those four homicides. It's just that sometimes the best isn't enough. It just confirms what I suspected for a long time. Science doesn't fail, people do. Knowing that is what makes me able to continue going to the lab each day and continue doing my job.
tbc