title: My Soul to Take
author: Wren Arnold
disclaimer: me no own CSI. box? clowns? yes.
rating: PG-13
spoilers: season three
summary: A burglary keeps the CSI team working hard to decipher the bewildering clues left behind.
Am I my brother's keeper?
Genesis 4,9
chapter two: My Date with Surly
*
9:37 AM
Las Vegas Police Department, Interrogation Room A
Sunday, June 15, 2003
Catherine Willows watched the McClanahan family carefully from across the table as Mrs. Shannon McClanahan and her three remaining children comforted each other and especially Mary. The dark-haired youngster had finished her loud, hoarse sobs and was now rubbing her eyes, choking on her own tears. This, however, Catherine didn't find interesting.
What she found interesting was the girl sitting next to Mary, close enough in resemblance to be the first teen's twin, who stared with oddly detached features into the double mirror of the Interview Room. Looking down at the papers in front of her for the first time, Catherine tried to put a name with the face.
Susej McClanahan, fifteen years old, was not, in fact, the twin of her sister Mary, who was three years her junior. Surprise, surprise, mused Catherine. Susej was the classic troubled teen, it appeared, with four suspensions from school in the past three years for fighting. Aggressive behavior ran rampant across the report. Catherine pushed it aside, waiting for the family to calm down.
Mary's papers were next, explaining an almost ideal child in a twelve-year-old. Apparently athletic, if one could tell by the various teams she played on each year, the youngster was a straight-A student. Her school transcripts showed glowing reports, but there was nothing to give the character of Mary.
A dull life, Catherine decided, and she's just gotten her first shock.
The youngest child in the room was not Mary but the little boy Joseph, aged seven. With brightly sun highlighted hair, he was the closest any in the McClanahan family could come to being call towheaded. His report was also much like Susej's, filled with notes from teachers and principals about his tendency towards destructive behavior. At the moment, little Joey didn't look the least bit antagonistic: he looked scared.
"Mary?" Catherine interrupted the girl's sobbing. "Mary, do you remember me?" She tried smiling brightly, but her eye caught a smudge of red near the child's hairline and the attempt faded. "I'm Catherine, Mary, and I want to know all about last night. It's going to be scary, but it'll be okay. Your mother is right here with you if you need help, okay?"
Mary nodded in the middle of a hiccough.
"Good girl," praised Catherine. "Now, can you tell me about last night?"
"Okay," whispered Mary.
10:45 AM
The McClanahan Residence
Sunday, June 15, 2003
"Is that all you got?" Brass asked. Sara glared at him from underneath the window, where she was checking for fingerprints.
There were no fingerprints, actually, which was peculiar in itself. The perpetrator had used some sort of cloth to smooth the surface, thinking himself clever. However, much to Sara's glee, there were was appeared to be minute fibers on the rough surface of the wood. Hopefully they belonged to whatever was used to wipe down the ledge and the lab would be able to find something of use with them.
Using her tweezers, she plucked the largest piece she could find off of the wood and placed it in a plastic bag.
"Yeah," Sara told him, "but don't be so heartbroken. We've got a lot of evidence here. These fibers I just pulled off of the window ledge, for example. We've also got a piece of fabric off of the rosebush, which is a real find. It's in the same area as the footprints, so a good chance is our perp snagged himself on the prickly flowers as he was rushing through." Sara held up a bag in which a good-sized piece of black or navy blue cloth was placed.
(- Sprinting through the bushes, the shadow got snagged on the bush. It grabbed the bushes and pushed them away from itself, leaving a piece of what got caught on one thorn and a miniscule drop of blood on another. -)
"Thick, it looks like it could have been a sweater or maybe a jacket. We're taking the surrounding bushes and spreading them out in about half an hour, trying to see if we have any blood or skin on other thorns if we're terribly lucky."
Brass looked through the window into the living room where the crime had occurred, which, though lacking several articles after Grissom and Nick had picked through it, looked to be in a complete disarray.
"Have you even stepped foot inside?" inquired he.
Sara grinned up at him. "I'm waiting for Stokes to get finished with his stuff so he can share the goods with me. I'm not gonna get all worked up over it until I'm certain that I have someone behind me. It's too much job for one CSI, too many little things can be overlooked. It's a duo or more that's needed." She winked. "Besides, won't you love to see Nick's face when he realizes I haven't done anything inside?"
Sara chuckled to herself as she labeled her bag.
11:04 AM
Littleton Park Elementary School
Sunday, June 15, 2003
Warrick Brown looked at the building in front of him and grimaced.
"Always hated school."
Next to him, a tech nodded. "Nerd?"
Warrick snorted. "Big time."
"Well, don't worry," the tech said comfortingly. "It's Sunday. No classes are in session at this location. Besides, it's an elementary school. There, it was cool to have the most happy faces on your papers. Or, ya know, your name not on the board for not doing your homework."
"You didn't go to public school, did you?" Warrick queried. The tech shrugged. "Ah, well, let's find the janitor to this prison."
At that moment, the door to the school's entryway sprang wide open and a petite Middle Eastern woman stepped out of the frame. Walking briskly toward them, she reminded Warrick of nothing so much as a small tornado. Her dark brown hair swept carelessly up, she exuded a whirlwind-like confidence all about her. Tiny in stature, her dark eyes and lips added something to her that Warrick could not place a finger on. Aside, of course, from the fact that he found her wildly attractive.
"Are you with the crime lab?" she asked, smiling. Warrick nodded mutely while the tech made inarticulate noises ("Wom..."). "I'm Miriam Prasad, the principal here."
He cleared his throat, self-conscious. "Warrick Brown," he stated, extending his hand. Her grasp was surprisingly firm.
"Good. I was hoping that you could come today. I would have waited ... but then it looked like this had some blood on it."
"Excuse me?" Warrick uttered, intrigued. He began putting on a pair of gloves, preparing to handle sensitive evidence.
"Here, let me show you."
No sooner expressed than action done, Miriam Prasad turned on her heel and began walking with a quick gait to the side of the school. Using his longer legs to good use, Warrick managed to keep pace with the vibrant woman. The tech miserably jogged behind them both.
"This garbage can," Principal Prasad explained, pointing to the top. She lifted the lid gingerly with the tips of her fingers covered by her sweater. Warrick hastily offered his gloved assistance. "I was here late last night, cleaning up after a PTA meeting and trying to get some paperwork done. I always feel like I work best here, away from the distractions of my smoothie machine and TV just feet away in my home."
Warrick beamed rather stupidly at her.
"It was about ten forty-five when I heard the noises. At first, I was scared out of my mind. We've had some trouble here in the past. Wannabes have their own initiation ceremonies, and they're sometimes held here behind the baseball field. You can get twenty ten-and-eleven-year-olds together throwing some kid through the gauntlet, though, so I stormed on out of here with a flashlight, not minding the rain which had just started. Of course, that scared whoever was out here, and the lid thundered down."
She pointed to the open lid again as if to reinforce her point.
"Well, it's pretty easy to tell the difference from left and right, so I turned towards where the sound was coming from. I managed to get here just in time to see a thin figure running as fast as they could on the slippery concrete." She looked at herself. "So, um, yeah. It wasn't a junior gang."
Warrick digested the information. "You mentioned blood?"
"Oh, yeah," the principal said. "Right. Well, there's a sweatshirt in there. I just thought maybe some kids were having some fun or something, so after I filed the report this morning at home I came here to wait. My curiosity got the better of me and I figured I'd take a look and see what sort of present they left me. When I reached down to see what they'd done I found that --" and she motions vaguely at a pile of shadowy cloth -- "and it had some stains on it that certainly looked like blood to me, but they could be ketchup."
The tech already had the materials Warrick needed, and as he gingerly arrange the sweatshirt, looking for the blood, the tech was gathering them together, ready for him. There was indeed a splatter pattern on the shirt, hard to see at first. Warrick carefully took the scissors from the tech and snipped a piece off of the dark fabric of the sweatshirt. Dropping the clipping into a clear tube, Warrick took a few drops into the spigot and let them fall in also. The water glowed.
"Presence of hemoglobin," he told the principal grimly.
"Indicator of blood," replied sage she.
12:20 PM
Las Vegas Crime Lab
Sunday, June 15, 2003
"Hey," Nick called to Sara, frowning, as they walked up the stairs to the building, "that wasn't funny back there. I walked in the room expecting it to be processed and you bounce on over with that happy little grin of yours, like you just did the world's funniest thing."
"It's threatening to rain," declares Sara not at all petulantly. "I had to get the outside as thoroughly handled as possible unless I wanted all my evidence washed away. Even you would have done that, Stokes."
Nick stared at her. "But," he added to her words, "I would have done it much quicker."
"And not half as comprehensively as I."
"Well..." admitted he.
"Hey, you two," Grissom called as the two walked down the hall, "come in here. Sara, you noticed something pretty odd indeed over at the site."
"You mean aside from the fact that there was a terrible lot of evidence there was a terrible lack of evidence?" Sara asked.
"Even better. Look at these footprints and tell me what you see. Or don't see."
"Well," began Nick matter-of-factly, "I don't see any markers indicating the sort of show it is. The ridges and indentations that are normally in a footprint are missing in this one."
"Already found and noted," Sara said with no little relish. Nick rolled his eyes.
"Do you see anything else?" Grissom prompted.
Sara furrowed her brow. "Well," she hesitated, "it all sort of looks very uniform. This is left and this is right --" here, she pointed to the relevant footprints, "-- but aside from that it's very hard to tell the difference between them. They're exactly the save size and almost perfectly shaped like a foot, all of them."
"Precisely," Grissom cried.
"Oh, really?"
"Yes," Grissom explained. "It's all, as Sara so aptly put it, too uniform. The depth is even all around. No curving: flat."
"So our perp," Nick was really getting warmed up to this idea, "didn't manage to find himself a pair of brand-less shoes but managed to make his own pair."
"I'm thinking more than that, Nick," Sara said. "Or, rather, less. Think it through. What's easier? Making your own shoes, or making a bottom for your shoes?"
"Right," Nick exclaimed. "So he or she could have just put something on, like a piece of wood, and that would have been the bottom of their shoe."
"Meaning," Grissom stated grimly, "that we have no idea what shoe size our perp wears. These could be modeled around exactly to the size of the perp's shoes."
"But if our perp was smart enough to make these bottoms he was smart enough to make it a couple of inches larger," Sara sighed.
"Right. So we have our work cut out for us." Grissom clapped his hands together briskly. "Ready?"
*
Up next, chapter three: The Dutch State