In the middle of Sasha's interrogation of Sean Gentileschi, after Evan James Leigh, attorney-at-law, entered, a hand latched onto Breeze's shoulder and pulled her into the hallway. Marlena didn't even notice.
"Ouch!" she hissed and came face-to-face with Greg Sanders. "Greg! What'd you do that for? That was really important!"
"Sorry," mumbled the lab tech. "But this is really important. Here." He thrust a piece of paper at Breeze.
"What am I looking at?"
"It's a tox report for the pills Marlena took from Grissom's apartment. Did she tell you about them?"
"Yeah, she said she found over a dozen of little bottles of herbal remedies. What about them?" Breeze peered at Greg over the paper, raising her eyebrow.
"Did that hurt?" Greg pointed to his own eyebrow, referring to Breeze's pierced hoop, today silver with a little blue glass ball in the center.
"Yes," she replied coldly. "Don't change the subject, Greg. What about the pills?"
"Well, I finished processing them—sorry about the delay but Catherine came to me with something that I had to get out of the way first—and I found that all the pills in the bottle of pycnogenol were coated with your murder weapon."
"They were coated with strychnine?"
"Yeah. It's like someone put strychnine in the bottle and shook it up to cover all the pills. Strychnine has no taste—especially when it's swallowed—and no smell; it washes away with water due to the fineness of the powder, much like talcum. Following ingestion, strychnine is rapidly absorbed through all the mucous membranes especially the stomach and small intestines."
"So there's no way around it. Even though it washes away with water, he still swallowed the water when he took the pills, thus swallowing the poison."
"Yup."
"Okay then. Thank you very much, Greg."
Greg pulled the corners of his mouth down. "That's all I get?"
"Yup," Breeze flashed a smile and went back behind the one way mirror, folding the tox report into quarters and putting it in the back pocket of her blue jeans.
After Sean Gentileschi and his lawyer were gotten rid of and the team got an examination room to talk, Breeze revealed the tox report to Marlena and Sasha.
"Greg gave this to me while you guys were with Sean," she said, handing it to Marlena. "The strychnine was found on the pycnogenol, finely coated. Greg said it was like someone sprinkled the strychnine into the bottle and shook it up."
"We need to find strychnine on Gentileschi then, to nail him," Sasha said, reading the report over Marlena's shoulder.
"By the way, Sasha," Marlena said, "that was one of the most interesting interviews I've seen in a very long time."
Sasha chuckled. "Yeah. He was a pisser, that Gentileschi."
"Okay, kids, let's talk alibis," Marlena sat at the table and her team followed suit. "Breeze, you take Keil Anson, Sean's girlfriend. I'll take Layla, the secretary. Sasha, I'd like you to go to Grissom's apartment, see if there's anything I might have missed, just in case. Any more strychnine. If you find a mysterious white powder hanging around somewhere—any white powder—bag it."
"Gotcha," Sasha nodded.
"Breeze, you and I will meet up later at Sean Gentileschi's home to do a strychnine search. Before I leave for Layla Feldman's, I'll get a warrant just in case Sean puts up a fight."
"Which he will."
"I don't doubt it," agreed Breeze.
"Okay kids," Marlena said, blowing some stray hair strands away from her face. "Let's go."
Sasha was almost excited about going to Grissom's apartment but didn't show it. He was always fascinated by Grissom's line of expertise and had only briefly seen the creepy crawlers he kept everywhere. Marlena had told him about the butterfly collection and the Siamese scorpion but he had only heard about everything else.
He showed his ID to the guard who was safeguarding the crime scene and stepped under the yellow tape and made his way into Grissom's home.
Sasha stood in the living room for a few minutes just looking. The butterfly collection was as impressive as Marlena had said it was. A poster of a colorful diagram of the inner anatomy of a beetle was framed and hanging on the opposite wall. He didn't find any actual bugs until he entered the bedroom, where he found a display of terrariums containing Grissom's prizewinning cockroaches, fire ants, scarab beetles, the scorpion and a trio of tarantulas.
Sasha knelt and observed the tarantulas with wonder. "Whoa," he whispered, tapping lightly on the glass, which made one of the hairy eight-legged things scuttle from one side of the terrarium to the other at the sound of Sasha's beating. Sasha chuckled, chastised himself for fooling around and got to work.
He set his field kit on Grissom's still-unmade bed and opened it. Armed with a flashlight and gloved hands, he began to scout out everything. He shook out every article of clothing and got nothing more than dust particles. Sasha tried hard not to sneeze.
He threw the covers off the bed, sprayed the sheets with luminol, shut off the lights and dragged out the RUVIN, putting on the neon orange glasses that he always found fashionable. When he switched on the machine, he got what he expected, in abundance: vaginal fluids; semen…it looked like a hotel bed. Sasha grimaced and shut off the RUVIN, but not before he took pictures of his findings and taking scrapings.
Sasha then got on his stomach and lifted the dust ruffle of Grissom's bed to look underneath. The coldness of the hardwood floor seeped through Sasha's button-down shirt as he shimmied slightly underneath the bed frame to get a better look underneath. A button was digging into his lower abdomen, just above the navel. He shined his flashlight underneath the bed, hoping he would be able to see … something.
And he did.
He had to scootch under the bed frame more than he would have liked to reach it, the back of his neck drenched with beads of sweat and the button almost breaking the skin. When Sasha withdrew it and got a better look at what it was, he had to make sure he was in the right apartment.
It had been crumpled toward the center of the floor beneath the bed, as if someone had kicked it there, to hide it: a small pile of peach-colored silk and lace. A pair of a woman's thong underwear.
If he wasn't so serious, Sasha would have burst out laughing. He did giggle a bit as he bagged it.
Wait till the girls see this, he thought. Once bagged, he noticed the tiny letters HPJ stitched into the elastic band of the thong.
After finishing the search of the bedroom, he continued to the living room, bathroom and kitchen, where he took a scraping of the lipstick from the wine glass found in Grissom's sink, and some more lip prints found on the other wine glasses, one with dark red lipstick. The color looked familiar. Then he remembered it was because Marlena had showed him another glass with the same color imprinted on it.
Unless Grissom had some dirty little secrets, these lipstick prints definitely belong to a woman, he thought.
As Sasha left Grissom's apartment with the lip prints and the thong panties, he flipped open his cell phone and stretched out the antenna with his teeth, then punched speed dial three: Marlena.
"Reagan," came the tired voice of his now-captain.
"Hey," Sasha said, "what's soft, silky, goes up your butt and underneath Grissom's bed?"
A pause. "Sash, I really don't want to know."
"I found a pair of thong underwear. A woman's, obviously. I want to get them down to the lab and see if I can get them checked out; see if there's DNA on them."
"Most likely."
"Where are you?"
"Outside of the city, on my way to Layla Feldman's apartment, Sean Gentileschi's secretary. To get an alibi. Breeze is on her way to Indian Springs to get one from Keil Anson."
"Who?"
"Sean's girlfriend. It's the only way to clear Sean's name."
"Why do we want to clear Sean's name?" Sasha rolled his eyes and, after putting his field kit on the floor on the passenger side of the CSI Tahoe, leaned against the driver's side door.
"We want to clear only those who are innocent," Marlena replied.
"Almost everything points to Sean, Marlena."
Another pause. "Key word? Almost. Sash, we still have to pursue Lady Heather and Sara, okay? We already proved that Solange didn't do it due to lack of motive and not enough evidence and the only strychnine we found was used by her sister in her garden, her sister who didn't even know Grissom and—"
"Did you say Lady Heather?" Sasha interrupted.
"Yes. Why?"
Sasha flung open the Tahoe door and dug into his field kit and pulled out the bag containing the thong. "The thong I found," he said, "has initials on it: HPJ."
"HPJ?" Marlena dwelled on this for a moment before answering. "That's a monogram. Heather Jeanne Paruvski. Lady Heather's real name."
"We've already proved Lady Heather was in Grissom's apartment, right?" Sasha began to pace, the bag tucked under his arm. "Well, now we know what she was doing."
"Not necessarily. Did you find any fluids on the sheets?"
Sasha winced. "I got scrapings but they looked old. You know, looking for sperm on my ex-supervisor's bed is not the nicest job in the entire world."
"I won't hold it against you. Listen, Sash, I gotta go. Get the thong to the lab and the scrapings, too." Then she hung up without another word.
Sasha hung up not soon after and put his cell back into his pocket. He took the bag from under his arm and looked at the thong through the plastic.
"Lady Heather," he said, "you have a date with Greg Sanders."