All in a Day
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 to wonderful beta readers. Also thanks so much to everyone who has reviewed this story. It means a lot to me.
I'm not good at waiting. Years of working as a detective have taught me patience, but still I'm not very good at waiting. It's worse when you don't even know what you're waiting for, whether you are waiting for something terrible or whether you're waiting for relief.
After hours of nothing happening, things had suddenly started to speed up. When the microphones had picked up another gunshot on the eighth floor, the decision was made to intervene, since, as Agent Richter told me, further dragging out the situation wasn't going to improve the hostages' chances of survival.
The scene had been officially secured now. The body count was high, too high. One dead agent, one injured. Not a good day for the FBI, not at all. Only two of the cultists had survived, four plus Daryl Marks were dead. Marks was found dead in his room, apparently as a result of his injuries. The FBI hauled off the survivors for questioning. The corridor looked like a battlefield. Blood, shells everywhere, bullet holes in the wall, the bodies were being removed. Amidst the scene, Gil Grissom was sitting on the floor, just watching what was going on, and wearing a blank expression. A paramedic was examining a wound on his upper arm. He didn't seem to be aware of her.
"Glad to see you again," I said, feeling decidedly uncomfortable in the situation. I'm not a man of many words.
"Yes," he simply said.
It bothered me a lot, to see Gil Grissom, who was one of the most distanced and cool professionals I know, so shell-shocked. I've never seen him like this before and never again afterwards. He's become even more removed from the emotional part of our work then before this case.
In spite of obviously suffering from a mild shock, he still asked me about the case:
"You cracked the case?"
"No, but we're working on it, Warrick's at a suspects' house right now. I'm gonna call him and ask what he found." I paused, not sure whether what I was about to ask was a good idea. Normally, I'm so much into sensitivities, but I could understand Grissom's situation, as I myself felt not really able to deal with the day's events. I went on.
"Gil, I hate to bother you with this right now, but was there anything indicating that they were planning something? Maybe something they said, or did?"
"Yes, this man, Marvin is his name; he was on the phone with someone. He was talking about a new world starting at sundown tonight."
"Good, at least we know when. I'm going to meet up with Warrick at the lab." Grissom was about to get to his feet, much to my dismay and to that of the paramedic.
"You stay here and have that wound taken care of."
He just nodded and gave in; probably realizing that he wasn't up to any more work right now. Unfortunately, Sara had a different take on that issue.
I was just about to head out into the parking lot, when a voice called me from behind. It was Sara:
"Hey Brass, wait a second." She walked up to me.
"What are you doing here, aren't you supposed to...?"
She interrupted me mid-sentence.
"I'm fine." Her tone was firm. She certainly didn't look fine. She had blood all over her wrinkled clothes. Neither she nor Grissom were seriously injured, I assumed that it was Greg's.
"Sara, you really are in no shape to be running around now. You should be on leave; you were involved in a crisis situation, which is still under investigation. Warrick and I are on the case. We can handle it."
I wasn't sure about the last part, but in her present condition Sara was at risk of making mistakes that could seriously compromise the investigation.
"It's a jurisdictional mess out there." She was probably referring to the reason why she wasn't on leave right now.
"I have to give my official statement tomorrow morning. But now, I need to work on this case. I have to do something. I can't just sit around and do nothing. I can't." Her tone was urgent, bordering on the desperate
Against my better judgment, I agreed to take her back with me to CSI, partly because she wasn't here with her car. But no way was she going to be out in the field again. If it hadn't it been for the time sensitivity, I would have dropped her off at her place. Of course, this didn't go as I'd had in mind.
I had trouble concentrating on the drive to CSI, I was simply tired. Now that the tension wasn't that great anymore, I started to feel worn out. After all, I had been on my feet for about thirty hours. If I think about it, I should have been more concerned by then, knowing that possibly hundreds of lives were in danger from the explosion planned by the cultists. But those were not people I knew and worked with. It wasn't as close to home, maybe that's why I didn't feel as tense then. Or maybe it was just exhaustion catching up with me. Sara didn't seem too tired, which struck me as odd, because after what she had been through already, she should be extremely tired. I didn't see it, why Sara was so driven. Normally I would have, I can tell when people are not telling the whole story. I could probably blame it on the really long and stressful day that I didn't pick it up with Sara.
At CSI the atmosphere was a strange mixture of gloominess and frantic work. Everyone was shocked by the day's events, two injured and one dead co-worker, and everyone knew by now what was at stake if we didn't solve the case.
Warrick was already there after his trip to Charlotte May's apartment. He'd had the computer brought in as well. The technician, who had worked on Marks' computer as well, explained the procedure to us.
"Doing a manual search takes far too long, since we are talking about several hundred Mbs of documents, that's tens of thousands of pages. The text files are ordinary word processor documents, not encrypted. That allows us to search the content for key words. If you understood Mr. Brown right, we are looking for a location. I've configured a search to filter out all words not part of the Standard English dictionary. That way we'll be able to find all proper names, such as names of streets, companies, and etcetera. I'm also running a search to filter out all sentences that contain specific key words. Your pick."
"Ok, let's see. It's pretty cryptic from what I've read, but try: fire, explosion, TNT, disease, sickness, sin, new world and sundown," Warrick said.
The tech scribbled it down. "Okay, I'll get started right away. While the search is running, let's have a look at the computer you brought in this morning. Most of the files were destroyed by a virus that was installed on the system. Whoever did this had at least some experience with computers. I could salvage two video files, but only partially, I'll send them over to the A/V lab. Other than that there was a database, numbers, in and out. They could relate to payments."
The database appeared on screen. "Wow, that's a mess," I said, confronted with the jungle of numbers. "It would take me days if not weeks to figure that out. But that's not my job."
"I think that's mostly your area of expertise, Sara," Warrick said, with a slight hesitation. Like I, he probably doubted whether Sara should be back on the case.
"Fine, I'll do it." Sara sat down and got to work.
Warrick and I went over to the A/V lab, where Archie was busy with the video files. "Hi. It's not much, but this is what I pulled from the first tape."
On screen was a blurry image of a group sitting in a half circle around Marks. It looked like it was shot from above.
"You find any cameras at the farm?" I asked.
"No, but you can put these up in seconds. It's really no big deal, everyone can do it. But we didn't find a camera among Marks' belongings either."
The group on screen was involved in some form of chanting, but no intelligible words. This went on for a good five minutes. Personally, religion isn't my cup of tea and never really was, not even before I became a cop. I've always taken the world for what it is. The whole concept of clamoring to some idolized entity is very dubious to me. I couldn't really understand how Marks and his likes, of which there are hundreds, manage to put people under their spell so completely, so that they will do everything on command.
Suddenly, one person, a woman got up from the circle, walking up to Daryl Marks. She had her hand raised above her head, eyes upward. The picture flickered.
"This is where the file has been damaged," Archie explained. "There is another segment from the same file." He brought that up. "I've enhanced the audio."
The woman was still standing, she was talking. "... has come to me and has let my eyes see what will unfold in front of all our eyes soon. The sun will set announcing the end for those you do not believe and do not honor the holy rules. The fire will consume them all." her voice was oddly monotonous, almost mechanical. "The path is clear for all life. Once the sinners have perished the new world will be able to rise from the ashes. Those of right faith will be rewarded for their suffering and will rise to their just place in the new godly kingdom. For that it is our task to bring about the end and the beginning. We are chosen and vested with divine power to carry out these tasks. We will know when the time has come for us to act and leave our silent refuge. The tools will be provided and we must not fear for all we need will be taken care of in due time. After..." That was the end of the recording. While it didn't reveal any new factual information as we had hoped, it made me fully realize that the cultists' motives were different than those of most other killers. They were acting out a prophecy that they believed to be real.
"Can you get a close-up of the speaker's face?" Warrick asked.
"Sure." Archie did as asked. Warrick pulled out a piece of paper with the copy of an ID card. He held it to the screen to compare.
"That's Charlotte May, one of the two missing cultists. With the pictures from the FBI we should be able to figure out who else is still out there. Wait, there are nine people in the video here, there are ten altogether, so there is one person not in the picture. I'll be right back." he hurried off. Warrick reminded me of Grissom in his ways of thinking. I couldn't help but feel slow. Before I figured out what Warrick had noticed he was back.
"I asked Ecklie who was working the scene with me. I remember the same thing. There are only eight beds in total on the compound. We saw two rooms with two beds, one room with three beds, all with no frills for the cultists. Daryl Marks lair had only one bed for him. Charlotte May lived off the compound and so must have someone else."
"And the people living outside the compound probably took care of the practicalities."
"Yeah, and Charlotte May got to be the oracle as well. Mark's must have approved that."
Sara came in. "Anything?" she asked.
"Not much, we know that we know even less than we thought we did."
"Well, I know something. The database is probably a record of money transfers. I cross checked it with Charlotte May's account. It's a match. She was getting the group the money they needed to buy their equipment. But we don't have the name of the original donor of the money yet. It came from a European account, from Ireland. It's registered to a financial service company." Sara lacked her usual enthusiasm. No wonder.
That was the end of the lucky streak for the next half-hour. The video didn't yield any more useful info. We were once again stuck. To me the whole case felt like we were treading water waiting for the waves to roll over us. No matter how hard we tried, we had never been able to keep up with the cultists. They had surprised Vega, Nick and Catherine. They had been at the hospital. So what was up next? I didn't even want to know.
Not having much to do but wait once again for tests to finish, Sara, Warrick and I returned to the break room, trying to brainstorm things together. It seemed just impossible to me. After I had called to see if the surviving cultists had said anything, which of course they had not, I grabbed another coffee to stay awake. It didn't taste like something anyone should drink.
"Ecklie loaned us half of his shift, they are at the apartment right now, examining every millimeter. But we are running out of time. Sundown will be at 5:50 p.m. today. Now it's 4:15 p.m., which gives us just one hour and thirty-five minutes to find the bomb. We need more manpower on this. It'll take us days to read through all the texts on the computers. The search engine does help but it isn't perfect. We still need to do a manual read through of as many files as we can. I had a fax copy of the layout plans we found and sent them to the building administration of the city. They didn't want to look into that at first, but we got a court order on it now. Still, they aren't fully computerized, it could take weeks." Warrick summed up just a few of the shortcomings in our investigation.
"We have to look into every lead we got. I've already called the sheriff once today about assigning more people, maybe a class of cadets or anyone else he can spare -so far nothing. We also need to pull all available info on Charlotte May. She has to show up somewhere else aside from her bank records, she must have been employed, paid taxes, done something."
"We also need to find out more about her child. Based on her reading and on all the web pages she'd looked at, it appears like she was researching hydranencephaly. I asked Doc Robbins before what he could tell me about hydranencephaly. Basically, it's a birth defect where the brain doesn't fully develop. Just the brain stem and the cerebellum form. There is no treatment. It's usually fatal within the first year of life. A baby with this condition may appear normal at birth, having reflexes and all. It's diagnosed using an MRI and CT scan. So, if her child has this condition and she knew, she must have been at a hospital or a doctor to find out. The disorder is rare. There's a chance that a doctor here in Vegas remembers the case."
"Maybe her motive has something to do with the illness of her child; you said that the violent turn in the cult started around the time her child was born. Did Doc Robbins say anything about the cause of it?" I speculated.
"It's not a hundred percent known yet. There can be a variety of factors, prenatal trauma, or abnormal development."
"So, it's not known. No hint there. That doesn't mean that she didn't find someone to blame. But that's just speculation."
"We know who the father of the child is?" Sara, who had been listening silently till now, entered the conversation.
"The tech is working on it," Warrick answered, his tone dark. For a moment nobody said anything. We were all thinking of Greg, who just this morning had still been working at this lab in the morning. This would have been his job.
Right then the computer technician knocked at the doorframe. "I've got the results of your document search." He handed Warrick several printed pages. I went over to have a look.
The first search, filtering out proper names, had yielded several first names including Charlotte, Tina and Marvin. Names of the cult members, they hadn't used last names as it appeared. There were more names: all of the Delaney family was there -evidence of a planned murder. Another name, not familiar: Dr. Kelly Frank. A Kevin Stein. The name Daryl Marks was no-where to be seen.
"I'm calling the PD for a check on those two." I pulled out the phone and left Warrick to examine the rest of the list.
Kelly Frank was a pediatrician from Las Vegas. In her office, nobody picked up, same as in her home. I dispatched a patrol car there to check up on her. Kevin Stein was the owner of a pharmaceutical manufacturing company located just outside Vegas. I called him and he admitted that Charlotte May had been one of his employees until her maternity leave.
Since Mr. Stein's address, both private and company, appeared as results of the address search which we had done, Warrick and I decided to pay him a visit. What did we have to lose?