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.
NORMALLY WORKING with Ecklie would be impossible, ending endless bickering and territorialism. But on our particular case, none of us made the usual snide comments or questioned the other's competence. We, Ecklie and me, worked the scene at the "Heavenly Path" estate in silence, acutely aware of what had taken place there. I have no idea what Grissom said to him on the phone, but whatever it was it must have worked wonders.
It was clear that the cultists had left their lair without the intention of returning to it. Everything was cleaned up. There were no books, no paper or anything else found in the entire building. They had calculated with the possibility in mind that the compound could be searched and had aimed to destroy all evidence of their plan. But time had obviously not allowed them to get completely rid of everything. It was the first and maybe only lucky break of the entire case. In the backyard, behind the barn was a huge smoldering pile, a cloud of reeking smoke coming from it. Someone was trying to burn the evidence.
Flames are tricky. One can't allow them to continue eating away the evidence, but pouring water on to usually destroys what the fire didn't. Fortunately, the fire was not burning, merely smoldering away. No need to call the fire department. What I still don't get is how the police could have missed that when they went in after Catherine's 911 call? They could have saved a lot of the evidence. But that's just one of the little mistakes that were made during the investigation. But little mistakes do add up. In the end that makes it so difficult. It's easy when there is one person to blame for things gone wrong. But when there isn't, one is always left with doubts about one's own faults. That's the worst thing for me.
Most of the pile had been paper, books, and loose paper, a lot of it burnt beyond recognition. But I knew that even when it looked hopeless to the naked eye, there was still hope of finding out what had been on the original document. But that would take time. And I already had the feeling that time was the one thing we didn't have.
The surprise lay beneath the pile of paper -a body. Most probably that of a man, but his severely burnt state made it impossible to tell anything else. Resigned I called the coroner again.
"Brown, come over here," Ecklie called from inside the building.
He was in a room opposite the door. The room was different from the very simple other room. It had better furniture and there was a computer along with a laser printer. Comparison with the note would later show that this was the printer the letter found in the Delaney's apartment had been printed on. We didn't touch the computer, knowing to better to leave that to the experts.
"It would surprise me a lot if they had gone to the trouble of torching all the stuff and then leave the computer intact," I commented wryly.
While I had worked the outside, and Ecklie had taken a look at Marks's room, which was the only one that gives access to the backyard, we now moved into the corridor. Before, my mind had been able to write it off as any other crime scene, but the blood in the corridor reminded me that Nick and Catherine had been shot there.
"Police take their guns?" Ecklie asked, having noticed that there were no guns to be seen.
I had noticed the same thing. "No, and at least one of them must have gotten their gun out to shoot Marks with. Besides, if the scene was not fully secured then they would have had their guns out anyways. So where are they?" The case was becoming more puzzling the deeper we got into it.
"Marks couldn't have taken them. So he wasn't alone,"
"If someone else was there, why didn't they kill Nick and Catherine, or try to help Marks for that matter?" It was hopeless, no matter how hard I tried; I just could not fit all the pieces of this case together. Every time I thought I had figured it out, something else popped up, destroying my theory.
When I thought things could really not get any worse, I got the call which really made my day. It was from Brass. There had been a hostage situation at the hospital. Suddenly the cult group had turned up, taken several people hostage. There had been shots fired and at least one person killed. I knew that Grissom, Sara and Greg had driven over to the hospital to talk to Daryl Marks and to see whether there were any new on Catherine and Nick. My mind immediately connected the dots, and I knew that they were in this screwed up hostage business. I don't really believe in psychic ability and all that stuff, I'm all fir had facts and science, but I just knew, I can't explain it. I told Jacqui to keep me posted and call me the minute she got anything and hurried to meet Brass at the hospital. It's a miracle that I didn't get stopped for speeding on the way there. When I got out of the car, there were already legions of officer's from what appeared to be at least ten different law enforcement agencies. Brass is waving at me, his face grimmer than usual.
"We know next to nothing. They won't admit that," He pointed in the general direction of a cluster of suit-clad people. But they don't know how many of them there are, or where exactly they have holed themselves up. There was a shooting on the eighth floor, where Daryl Marks is, at least two dead. They won't let anyone on the floor. We think they might be in there,"
"Oh shit. Any word on Grissom yet?" My bad feeling had intensified since getting here.
"No, I don't want to try his cell just yet,"
That was when a typical FBI style guy came over to us, introducing himself as Agent Richter from the FBI.
"You have been on this case since this morning?" he asked.
"Yes, we got called to a murder scene. As far as we have figured one of the cult members get cold feet and didn't want to go along with some sacrificial ritual they had planned for today. We traced a vehicle back to a farm owned by Daryl Marks the cult leader. At the farm an officer and two CSIs got into a shooting, the officer Detective Sam Vega was killed, Marks and CSIs Stokes and Willows were injured" I tried to give as an objective run-down as possible.
Agent Richter nodded. "Unfortunately we have no information on this cult. We have a department tracking cultist activities in the U.S., but we suspect that a number of small groups, which never had legal trouble and have small membership slip through the system,"
I was amazed at an FBI agent freely admitting flaws of the system.
"We confiscated a number of documents from the farm, along with a computer. Most of the documents were burnt, but we are working on them. As far as we know the members perceive themselves as pure and worthy, the outside world is full of impure sinners. As far as we could piece together, they see it as their task to sacrifice themselves to wake up the world and cleanse it. But most is rather unclear. The computer has some sort of encryption on it, we are working on it now. It looks like it was Daryl Marks' own computer, as the rest of the farm is all low-tech,"
Agent Richter then showed us over to a room on the ground floor of the hospital. They had sat up a small command post there. The FBI really does not lack funding, that was evident from the impressive display of technology. I just hoped that technology was enough to get them out of there safely, if it was not already too late for that. Just after we had come in, an agent called Richter that the video system was all set up.
"On this screen we have to current video feed, from all six cameras on that floor. We are only receiving feed from on of them. She pointed to a rectangle in the right corner of the screen. The pictured showed a door labeled storage,"
"On this screen I've set up the footage up to the point when the cameras stopped transmitting. Here we have the presumed cultists,"
She fast forwarded the switched to normal play. Three men, in dress similar to Marks, exited to elevator and headed down the corridor out of the range of the camera. The agent switched to another video feed.
"Here we see them ask the nurse. Unfortunately the camera is video only, no audio,"
One of the men was talking to the nurse, an argument started. Suddenly, one of the other men, who had kept in the background, pulled out a gun and shot the nurse.
It had come unexpectedly, and shocked me. I think that before, I could not really picture the situation, but now it hit me just how bad it was. They had no hesitation what-so-ever. I turned back to the screen. The men left the nurses station and entered a room to its left.
"From the layout plan, we know that this is Dr. Hellman's office, she's Marks physician. There is no camera inside so we don't know what's going on. Only one of them exits the room again before the feed stops," She fans forward again. "Here, he exits. At first, we paid no attention to the two women here, but look at what they are doing," She switched to another part of the footage. Two cultist style dressed women exited to the elevator. They looked up directly at the camera then it went blank.
"The women were disabling the camera's," Richter summarized.
"Yes, it's the same for all of them,"
"Is there a camera trained on Marks's room?" Richter asked.
"I was getting to that," the agent explained. "Here it is,"
The same guy that has come out of the office, his gun drawn and was approaching the officer posted in front of Marks room. The officer saw him and fired before the cultist did. The officer was just about to reach for his radio, when he was gunned down from someone off screen. One of the women entered the picture and took out the camera. "Until then I had merely listened, but I got an idea,"
"Can you maybe it go back further in the video, showing us who went into the doctor's office before the cultists entered?"
"Sure,"
She clicked keys and a few seconds later, we were watching the rewind of the corridor's surveillance. I saw it in the rewind already, but it became painfully clear when she switched to normal play. Grissom, Sara and Greg went into the office, presumably to talk to Dr. Hellman. They didn't come out again.
'Oh shit,' was all I was thinking.