Life and Limbs
A short, compact woman with graying blonde in a black pantsuit and grey silk shirt barreled toward Catherine and Annemarie as they made their way through the lab. Catherine heard Annemarie whisper, "Shit," under her breath as the woman blocked their way. "Annemarie, what's going on? And is this the person who was ordering around the PD on a scene earlier?"
Annemarie physically cowered in front of the much shorter woman. "Ma'am, Dr. Sidle was assaulted during shift by an unknown assailant and we are making every effort to..."
"Actually, we may have a very good idea of who the assailant is," Catherine cut in smoothly, stopping what she suspected was a long, disjointed, yet very proper, ramble on the part of the young CSI. "Catherine Willows. Las Vegas Crime Lab." She held out her hand, coolly taking over the conversation.
"Captain Mel Harris, SFPD." She shook Catherine's hand, visibly mulling over something Catherine had said. "Vegas, huh?" She jerked her head back, indicating Catherine should walk with her. "What do you mean, you have a good idea of the assailant?"
"Well, it's either an unknown, which is highly unlikely given she was abducted during a short visit to an active crime scene under the noses of at least two patrol officers, or it's the officer who threaten Sara about two hours before she was found. An officer..." "Phillips," Annemarie supplied reluctantly.
The captain stopped short. "He came here?"
"Yes, ma'am. Right before shift started. He had a verbal confrontation with Dr. Sidle regarding the incident last week, ma'am."
Harris glanced at Catherine. "And why are you here?"
"Dr. Grissom and I were up conferring with Dr. Sidle on a possible serial murder case involving our jurisdictions and examining a crime scene when the call came in." The captain nodded her head, and started to turn back to Annemarie when Catherine asserted, "Captain Harris. I think I should run the investigation."
"What?" She swung back to Catherine, dumbfounded by her audacity. "You're not even a part of this department."
"Exactly." Harris caught her meaning, but Catherine spelled it out anyway. "The chief suspect in the assault is one of your own, with the motive possibly work-related. I'm not involved in the departmental politics, so I have a fair chance of being seen as impartial."
"But you worked with Sara for several years, so I wouldn't call you impartial," she replied doubtfully.
"Nobody investigating the case at this point is impartial." Catherine shrugged. "But I'm a scientist, not a vigilante, and I'm far enough removed. Besides, you need someone on this investigation who can't be intimidated professionally by their lack of seniority in the department."
Harris's mouth twisted into a ghost of a grin. "I can see why Sara always talks about you with such respect, Willows." She glanced at Annemarie, considering. "Ok, you got it. I'll fix it downtown. You just find out who did this." She pulled out a holder and passed Catherine her card. "Keep me informed."
-------------
Gil was sitting in Sara's office, on the couch that Catherine knew was Sara's home away home on many nights, staring at the pictures on her walls. Catherine sat beside and took his hand. "Sara woke up for a few moments. The doctors are confident in her recovery." He didn't say anything, didn't even react to her presence, and Catherine cast a worried glance at him.
He finally swept a hand to indicate the pictures on her walls. A few were Ansel Adams prints, but there were many black-and-white photos of the desert and mountains surrounding Las Vegas. "Did you know she was into photography?" he asked, quietly, his eyes moving from one photo to the other restlessly. "For all the overtime she put in, when did she get the time to go hiking and take all these?"
She shook her head, sadly. "I don't know."
"I never knew her at all."
"Gil, she's going to be ok."
"All those years, I thought I knew her so well, but I never knew her at all. Beautiful, aren't they?" His expression was distraught as he contemplated the photos in another long silence.
"Gil. Do you want to go to the hospital and sit with her? You can pick up a crossword and keep her company while she sleeps." He smiled one of his distracted smiles, the one he gave to people when he was listening but thinking on much larger issues, and then nodded. She filled him in quickly on what else was going on, and she braced for him to tell her she overstepped, but he just whispered his approval as she directed Jeremy to make sure he picked up a crossword and got to Sara's hospital room before heading to the airport to wait for Greg.
She joined the other members of the team in break room and got updated on the case. Jerome and Kesha looked at her with suspicion as she took over the meeting, but she didn't have the patience to coddle them, so she settled for brusquely assigning them work, which consisted of running the prints through AFIS and going through Sara's clothes for any other trace elements.
Annemarie looked up from the trunk where she was lifting a print. "I'm going to run these up to Jerome," she said, indicating the many prints she had collected. Catherine grunted from where she was bent over the front seat, collecting hair from the headrest. Her beeper vibrated against her hip. "That's Greg. Can you bring him down here when you come back so I can fill him in?" She twisted back around in the seat and rubbed her temples wearily. They had collected a ton of trace from the vehicle, but she knew most of it would come up Sara's. And even a print from the car would only prove that Phillips had been in or around the car at some point, an easy assumption considering the car was issued out of a general pool. Even though she knew in her gut that Phillips had done this, proving it would be the hard part. Unless Sara could ID him, the evidence would have to put him in the car at the time Sara was attacked and make it airtight to put away a cop. Think, think, think, she commanded herself as she tried loosen the muscles in her neck.
Greg followed Annemarie into the garage, blinking in the harsh overhead glare of the fluorescents. The annoyance on his face drained as she related the entire story to him, to be replaced with anger. She related the difficulties it would take to bust another cop, and told him to get started on the fingernail scrapings first. "I think she scratched her assailant in the attack."
"Good," Greg nodded approvingly. "Do we have a sample from the cop to run against it?"
She shook her head. "No, not yet. I want to get something on him before we haul him in and tip our hand. Something concrete," she mused as something teased the edge of her mind. Suddenly her head snapped up, and she curled her mouth into a fierce grin. "Annemarie, he punched the wall. Do you remember where?"
"Oh yeah," she replied, grinning herself. "I'll go scrape some epithelials now." She grabbed Greg's arm and dragged him after her, "Come on, Greg, no time for dawdling."
Kesha appeared in their wake, reporting that some of the prints from the car, especially around the trunk area, were a match with Phillips and to deliver the crime scene photos. She nodded her appreciation of the young woman's efforts. "It's circumstantial at best since we can't prove exactly when the prints were left, but we'll bury him with evidence."
"Sid says that all the time," Kesha told her, as they spread the photos over the hood and looked them over. Kesha tapped the photos Catherine took of the bruises on Sara's back. "That's a weird shape. What do you think that is?" Catherine gazed at the vaguely familiar shape as Kesha suggested a pipe or wrench half-heartedly.
"Kesha? Why do you call Sara 'Sid'?"
"It kind of evolved into her nickname. Dr. Sidle was too formal, Sara, even though she insisted we call her that, was too informal. The PD called her Sidle, and we called her that for a while, but then Jerome started calling her Sid, and it stuck." She grinned sheepishly, "I guess it's no more formal than Sara, but I think she likes it." She glanced down at the photos again, and her eyes widened. She reached over and unsnapped her service sidearm, flipping it over to compare the butt plate to the impressions in the photos, before meeting Catherine's eye with an excited look.
Greg cleared his throat behind them. "And we have a winner in the epithelials sweepstakes. The DNA from under Sara's fingernails is a match to the epithelials from the wall. I, um, still have a lot more samples to analyze, but I thought you'd want to know."
Annemarie appeared in the doorway behind Greg. "Do we have enough?"
"Oh yeah," Catherine nodded. "Call the detective on the case and get a warrant. It's time we had a chat with officer Phillips."
-------------
"CSIs don't sit in on interrogations," the IAB detective protested angrily, as the union representative nodded his agreement and glared at her. Catherine surveyed the room, thinking to herself that there was the possibility of testosterone poisoning in this environment. Luckily, she knew how to handle herself in these situations, and she smiled sweetly, "I'm not sitting in. I'm simply collecting evidence as specified by my warrant."
"Evidence? What evidence?" The union rep demanded angrily.
She ignored him. "Officer Phillips, do you want your lawyer before we begin?"
"Lawyer? What for? I have nothing to hide," he sneered. He turned to his rep, "Who is this? She's not one of our CSIs."
"Special investigator brought in for this case."
Phillips sniffed in anger. "Another one of Captain Harris's bitches, you mean." He met her eyes and sneered again, to see her reaction to his jibe.
Catherine's smile grew even wider. "Actually, Officer Phillips, I'm your worst nightmare."
"Oh yeah? What's that?"
"I'm the bitch who's going to put you away for assaulting a fellow officer." She let her words register for a moment, before winking at him. "Now strip." The union rep sputtered as the IAB detective and Phillips looked outraged. She handed the warrant to the union rep. "It's right there in the warrant. I need a sample of his DNA, his sidearm, and a full body exam. With photos." As the rep and Phillips looked over the warrant for themselves, she snapped on gloves and pulled out a swab. "Open up." He balked at first, until the rep nodded. She then extended her hand and waved her fingers in his face. "Your sidearm." He made no movement to comply. "I haven't got all night. Your sidearm." He took in the rest of the table and saw no help on the faces of his fellow officers, so he sighed and unclipped his holster, tossing it at her. "Thanks," she said sweetly as she bagged it. "Now," she pulled out her camera and rested it on her shoulder, "strip." He finally looked defeated, and he started to take off his shirt. Catherine noticed the scratches on his forearm immediately, and as she photographed them, she noticed something embedded in one deep furrow. "Hold still," she commanded as she pulled a small piece of a torn fingernail from the groove, She swabbed the scratches as well, before telling him he could get dressed. She paused at the door as she was leaving, "Now, Officer Phillips, you might want to rethink calling your lawyer before I get back."
Barely fifteen minutes later, she knocked on the door and entered, grinning in triumph. She spoke quietly to the detective for a moment, before sitting down across from Phillips. "Remember what I said about your worst nightmare? Your DNA is a match to that collected from under Dr. Sidle's fingernails from where she scratched your arm. And that bit of fingernail from your scratch matches her DNA. A fiber taken from the butt of your gun matches that of Dr. Sidle's clothing, and there are traces of her DNA on your weapon as well. Your fingerprints are on the car where she was left for dead. And this is just what we have so far. We're still processing the remainder of the evidence."
He glared at her. "That's a lie. I know you have to send samples out to the lab, and there's a 48-hour turn around on DNA tests. You're trying to trick me."
"Ah, so that's why you didn't immediately clean your gun. I wondered about that. Actually, we had a DNA specialist working this shift with us. The results are real, although we'll be sure to double-check them through the usual lab," She nodded to the detective, who promptly informed Phillips he was under arrest for kidnapping and attempted murder, as she leaned back in her chair and smirked at him as he was lead out.
The IAB detective who had watched the proceedings with a mixture of disgust and grudging respect finally met her eye as the door closed behind Phillips. "Maybe it doesn't hurt to have a CSI in an interrogation sometimes."
A short, compact woman with graying blonde in a black pantsuit and grey silk shirt barreled toward Catherine and Annemarie as they made their way through the lab. Catherine heard Annemarie whisper, "Shit," under her breath as the woman blocked their way. "Annemarie, what's going on? And is this the person who was ordering around the PD on a scene earlier?"
Annemarie physically cowered in front of the much shorter woman. "Ma'am, Dr. Sidle was assaulted during shift by an unknown assailant and we are making every effort to..."
"Actually, we may have a very good idea of who the assailant is," Catherine cut in smoothly, stopping what she suspected was a long, disjointed, yet very proper, ramble on the part of the young CSI. "Catherine Willows. Las Vegas Crime Lab." She held out her hand, coolly taking over the conversation.
"Captain Mel Harris, SFPD." She shook Catherine's hand, visibly mulling over something Catherine had said. "Vegas, huh?" She jerked her head back, indicating Catherine should walk with her. "What do you mean, you have a good idea of the assailant?"
"Well, it's either an unknown, which is highly unlikely given she was abducted during a short visit to an active crime scene under the noses of at least two patrol officers, or it's the officer who threaten Sara about two hours before she was found. An officer..." "Phillips," Annemarie supplied reluctantly.
The captain stopped short. "He came here?"
"Yes, ma'am. Right before shift started. He had a verbal confrontation with Dr. Sidle regarding the incident last week, ma'am."
Harris glanced at Catherine. "And why are you here?"
"Dr. Grissom and I were up conferring with Dr. Sidle on a possible serial murder case involving our jurisdictions and examining a crime scene when the call came in." The captain nodded her head, and started to turn back to Annemarie when Catherine asserted, "Captain Harris. I think I should run the investigation."
"What?" She swung back to Catherine, dumbfounded by her audacity. "You're not even a part of this department."
"Exactly." Harris caught her meaning, but Catherine spelled it out anyway. "The chief suspect in the assault is one of your own, with the motive possibly work-related. I'm not involved in the departmental politics, so I have a fair chance of being seen as impartial."
"But you worked with Sara for several years, so I wouldn't call you impartial," she replied doubtfully.
"Nobody investigating the case at this point is impartial." Catherine shrugged. "But I'm a scientist, not a vigilante, and I'm far enough removed. Besides, you need someone on this investigation who can't be intimidated professionally by their lack of seniority in the department."
Harris's mouth twisted into a ghost of a grin. "I can see why Sara always talks about you with such respect, Willows." She glanced at Annemarie, considering. "Ok, you got it. I'll fix it downtown. You just find out who did this." She pulled out a holder and passed Catherine her card. "Keep me informed."
-------------
Gil was sitting in Sara's office, on the couch that Catherine knew was Sara's home away home on many nights, staring at the pictures on her walls. Catherine sat beside and took his hand. "Sara woke up for a few moments. The doctors are confident in her recovery." He didn't say anything, didn't even react to her presence, and Catherine cast a worried glance at him.
He finally swept a hand to indicate the pictures on her walls. A few were Ansel Adams prints, but there were many black-and-white photos of the desert and mountains surrounding Las Vegas. "Did you know she was into photography?" he asked, quietly, his eyes moving from one photo to the other restlessly. "For all the overtime she put in, when did she get the time to go hiking and take all these?"
She shook her head, sadly. "I don't know."
"I never knew her at all."
"Gil, she's going to be ok."
"All those years, I thought I knew her so well, but I never knew her at all. Beautiful, aren't they?" His expression was distraught as he contemplated the photos in another long silence.
"Gil. Do you want to go to the hospital and sit with her? You can pick up a crossword and keep her company while she sleeps." He smiled one of his distracted smiles, the one he gave to people when he was listening but thinking on much larger issues, and then nodded. She filled him in quickly on what else was going on, and she braced for him to tell her she overstepped, but he just whispered his approval as she directed Jeremy to make sure he picked up a crossword and got to Sara's hospital room before heading to the airport to wait for Greg.
She joined the other members of the team in break room and got updated on the case. Jerome and Kesha looked at her with suspicion as she took over the meeting, but she didn't have the patience to coddle them, so she settled for brusquely assigning them work, which consisted of running the prints through AFIS and going through Sara's clothes for any other trace elements.
Annemarie looked up from the trunk where she was lifting a print. "I'm going to run these up to Jerome," she said, indicating the many prints she had collected. Catherine grunted from where she was bent over the front seat, collecting hair from the headrest. Her beeper vibrated against her hip. "That's Greg. Can you bring him down here when you come back so I can fill him in?" She twisted back around in the seat and rubbed her temples wearily. They had collected a ton of trace from the vehicle, but she knew most of it would come up Sara's. And even a print from the car would only prove that Phillips had been in or around the car at some point, an easy assumption considering the car was issued out of a general pool. Even though she knew in her gut that Phillips had done this, proving it would be the hard part. Unless Sara could ID him, the evidence would have to put him in the car at the time Sara was attacked and make it airtight to put away a cop. Think, think, think, she commanded herself as she tried loosen the muscles in her neck.
Greg followed Annemarie into the garage, blinking in the harsh overhead glare of the fluorescents. The annoyance on his face drained as she related the entire story to him, to be replaced with anger. She related the difficulties it would take to bust another cop, and told him to get started on the fingernail scrapings first. "I think she scratched her assailant in the attack."
"Good," Greg nodded approvingly. "Do we have a sample from the cop to run against it?"
She shook her head. "No, not yet. I want to get something on him before we haul him in and tip our hand. Something concrete," she mused as something teased the edge of her mind. Suddenly her head snapped up, and she curled her mouth into a fierce grin. "Annemarie, he punched the wall. Do you remember where?"
"Oh yeah," she replied, grinning herself. "I'll go scrape some epithelials now." She grabbed Greg's arm and dragged him after her, "Come on, Greg, no time for dawdling."
Kesha appeared in their wake, reporting that some of the prints from the car, especially around the trunk area, were a match with Phillips and to deliver the crime scene photos. She nodded her appreciation of the young woman's efforts. "It's circumstantial at best since we can't prove exactly when the prints were left, but we'll bury him with evidence."
"Sid says that all the time," Kesha told her, as they spread the photos over the hood and looked them over. Kesha tapped the photos Catherine took of the bruises on Sara's back. "That's a weird shape. What do you think that is?" Catherine gazed at the vaguely familiar shape as Kesha suggested a pipe or wrench half-heartedly.
"Kesha? Why do you call Sara 'Sid'?"
"It kind of evolved into her nickname. Dr. Sidle was too formal, Sara, even though she insisted we call her that, was too informal. The PD called her Sidle, and we called her that for a while, but then Jerome started calling her Sid, and it stuck." She grinned sheepishly, "I guess it's no more formal than Sara, but I think she likes it." She glanced down at the photos again, and her eyes widened. She reached over and unsnapped her service sidearm, flipping it over to compare the butt plate to the impressions in the photos, before meeting Catherine's eye with an excited look.
Greg cleared his throat behind them. "And we have a winner in the epithelials sweepstakes. The DNA from under Sara's fingernails is a match to the epithelials from the wall. I, um, still have a lot more samples to analyze, but I thought you'd want to know."
Annemarie appeared in the doorway behind Greg. "Do we have enough?"
"Oh yeah," Catherine nodded. "Call the detective on the case and get a warrant. It's time we had a chat with officer Phillips."
-------------
"CSIs don't sit in on interrogations," the IAB detective protested angrily, as the union representative nodded his agreement and glared at her. Catherine surveyed the room, thinking to herself that there was the possibility of testosterone poisoning in this environment. Luckily, she knew how to handle herself in these situations, and she smiled sweetly, "I'm not sitting in. I'm simply collecting evidence as specified by my warrant."
"Evidence? What evidence?" The union rep demanded angrily.
She ignored him. "Officer Phillips, do you want your lawyer before we begin?"
"Lawyer? What for? I have nothing to hide," he sneered. He turned to his rep, "Who is this? She's not one of our CSIs."
"Special investigator brought in for this case."
Phillips sniffed in anger. "Another one of Captain Harris's bitches, you mean." He met her eyes and sneered again, to see her reaction to his jibe.
Catherine's smile grew even wider. "Actually, Officer Phillips, I'm your worst nightmare."
"Oh yeah? What's that?"
"I'm the bitch who's going to put you away for assaulting a fellow officer." She let her words register for a moment, before winking at him. "Now strip." The union rep sputtered as the IAB detective and Phillips looked outraged. She handed the warrant to the union rep. "It's right there in the warrant. I need a sample of his DNA, his sidearm, and a full body exam. With photos." As the rep and Phillips looked over the warrant for themselves, she snapped on gloves and pulled out a swab. "Open up." He balked at first, until the rep nodded. She then extended her hand and waved her fingers in his face. "Your sidearm." He made no movement to comply. "I haven't got all night. Your sidearm." He took in the rest of the table and saw no help on the faces of his fellow officers, so he sighed and unclipped his holster, tossing it at her. "Thanks," she said sweetly as she bagged it. "Now," she pulled out her camera and rested it on her shoulder, "strip." He finally looked defeated, and he started to take off his shirt. Catherine noticed the scratches on his forearm immediately, and as she photographed them, she noticed something embedded in one deep furrow. "Hold still," she commanded as she pulled a small piece of a torn fingernail from the groove, She swabbed the scratches as well, before telling him he could get dressed. She paused at the door as she was leaving, "Now, Officer Phillips, you might want to rethink calling your lawyer before I get back."
Barely fifteen minutes later, she knocked on the door and entered, grinning in triumph. She spoke quietly to the detective for a moment, before sitting down across from Phillips. "Remember what I said about your worst nightmare? Your DNA is a match to that collected from under Dr. Sidle's fingernails from where she scratched your arm. And that bit of fingernail from your scratch matches her DNA. A fiber taken from the butt of your gun matches that of Dr. Sidle's clothing, and there are traces of her DNA on your weapon as well. Your fingerprints are on the car where she was left for dead. And this is just what we have so far. We're still processing the remainder of the evidence."
He glared at her. "That's a lie. I know you have to send samples out to the lab, and there's a 48-hour turn around on DNA tests. You're trying to trick me."
"Ah, so that's why you didn't immediately clean your gun. I wondered about that. Actually, we had a DNA specialist working this shift with us. The results are real, although we'll be sure to double-check them through the usual lab," She nodded to the detective, who promptly informed Phillips he was under arrest for kidnapping and attempted murder, as she leaned back in her chair and smirked at him as he was lead out.
The IAB detective who had watched the proceedings with a mixture of disgust and grudging respect finally met her eye as the door closed behind Phillips. "Maybe it doesn't hurt to have a CSI in an interrogation sometimes."