Disclaimer: I own neither CSI nor Frank Miller's Sin City (seeing as I'm not Frank Miller)
A/N: It helps to have seen the movie, which is gory and fantastic, especially if you're trying to picture what's going on. I'm trying my hand at film noir, so hold on to your mouse and feel free to click the 'review' button and tell me what you think.
CHAPTER I
The house smelled like the devil's own morgue, too clean and too matter-of-fact about the horrors that went on there. Whoever the corpse belonged to, he was a tidy kid, living out here on the farm with that pet wolf of his. Two of a kind, they were, since the only evidence in the main house that whoever lived here wasn't OCD were the canine hairs all over everything.
Even the kitchen table.
On a hunch, Sara and I sprayed some luminol over the surfaces in the kitchen, wondering if perhaps the butchery at begun in the house. When the lights flipped off, I saw something I hadn't seen since the old days in Old Town - the whole kitchen was lit with the remnants of blood, its swipes and spatters and particular swirls telling a story all their own. Too much blood - layers and layers of it, the sickly-sweet smell of fountain-bound pennies - it couldn't all be the kid's. Sara and I shared a look, and we followed the luminol where it led us.
That's when we found the Room. Tiled from floor to ceiling and all over the walls, it was a room that stank of fear and despair and some unholy hunger that raged through the air.
Not to mention the sheer shock of the mounted heads.
"Stay in Sin City long enough, and you'll see everything," Sara again, her light remark masking the smoldering anger in her. The heads were all women, frozen in time and placed on the wall as macabre trophies. I raised an eyebrow at her; it was something I'd said four and a half years ago, when she accepted my offer to stay here full time. Honest cops don't last long in Sin City, not without brains, though Holly Gribbs had set a record in CSI. She'd been too young and too naive - not Sara's problem. Sara's problem was the same thing that kept her going: that flare of anger, the heat of the chase. Sara - she was my problem, and on too many days, she was what kept me going as well.
"Grissom."
Well-oiled and right on time, the slippery voice of my very own worst enemy slid into the room and made itself at home. That Ecklie didn't seem out of place in this house of horrors almost made me laugh. "Ecklie. Come to fetch your master's slippers?"
Sara stood back, knowing full well she didn't want to get noticed by the slimy day-shift supervisor. Women have it hard in Sin City, and Sara's association with me wouldn't help her. She didn't leave, though, I'll give her that. Anybody else would have - I tend to scrape by political suicide, which in Sin City is too often physical suicide as well.
"The Roarks don't like cops off their beat on their farm, Grissom, you know that. Senator Roark has requested my shift take over the investigation. You understand."
It's not a case of not understanding, Ecklie. It's a case of understanding too well.
"Don't begrudge Doc Robbins the autopsies, Ecklie, he'll get a kick out of them. Watch your heads."
It's corny but I can't resist rattling Ecklie's cage as Sara and I make our way out. Even he doesn't like being watched by the glassy eyes of the dead girls. I wonder how he'll explain everything. Roark may have a fall guy all set up, but it'll be interesting to see how Ecklie spins the tale. After all, that's what cops do in Sin City, right? Sing songs and tell tales.
"So what do you think?" Sara's looking at me intently, her eyes strong and clear. We may not always be on the same page, but at a crime scene, we synch like nothing else. Everything else in the world goes away, color bled out of it by the evidence and the look in her eyes. She's something else, is Sara, not that I can ever tell her.
I slam her door and walk around the Denali to mine - what do I think? The crime scene was bloodier than the remains of a rapist in Old Town, and far more confusing. At least in Old Town, Cath could put two and two together and get four. All the farm was adding up to was a lot of nasty business.
"I don't think much of anything - yet," I reply, a non-answer and she knows it. But it's a classic evasion on my part, so she just sits back and sets those eyes of hers on the road ahead. "We wait till we know more. Robbins can tell us how everybody died."
I drive, and keep one eye on Sara, like always. There's even now another crackle on my radio, and it breaks the CSI-III from whatever she was thinking. She unhooks the ancient piece of equipment and Brass's voice snarls out our next destination. No rest for the wicked.
Going on twenty minutes and as many heated looks later, I pull the car over on the side of the crime scene. The sky is threatening rain, and I want out so we can salvage as much of the crime scene as we can. If I know homicide like they know me, this one will be something I can solve. Standard procedure after raising an honest man's hackles: distract 'im, give 'im something else to think about. It works better on cops than CSIs.
"Wife's inside, with her husband's blood all over her. Don't look too good on her part, but it means you can get a sample from our dead guy without disturbing the corpse. The assistant coroner's delayed in traffic; everybody else is out at the Roark farm."
Sara and I exchange a glance. Brass is a good guy most of the time, but we both know he'll play his cards in a predictably Sin City way. Discretion is the better part of staying alive, so we keep our mouths shut about where we came from.
"She confessed?" I ask, as though I don't know the answer. Brass plays along as he leads us under the garish yellow tape that marks the arbitrary edge of the crime scene.
"Yeah. But it doesn't look to me like it's as open-and-closed as it first appears."
He gestures for us to proceed him, and I take the lead, Sara between us. On a normal day in Sin City, we might not have even been called down. The wife would have taken the fall after her confession, gone to jail for a while and been forgotten about. But there's something else going on here, and tonight is my lucky night. To distract me from the bigger terror of the Roark farm, homicide and whoever holds the leash tosses me this to solve. It's the only way I know to get any kind of justice in this town. They know that I know that they know, a complicated series of unacknowledged agreements, but it gets both sides what they want. I get to do a little bit of justice for the people of this town, and they get to bribe their way out of whatever sick game they're playing. Or at least, bribe their way into changing the rules.
Blood spatter, still somewhat fresh, greets us with its full coppery tang as Sara and I enter the room. The husband lies on his belly in a pool of blood on the bed, the trails of spatter from whatever caved his head in making an almost artistic scrawl over the walls and ceiling. Sara picks her way closer, head cocked in scrutiny even as she snaps pictures of the scene. The flashes, like the floodlights back at the farm, give the scene a sense of lurid surreality. "Had to be multiple hits, or the blood wouldn't have sprayed everywhere . . ." Sara comments absently as she takes a close-up shot of a pair of crossed blood trails.
"Anger, adrenaline, vengeance - they all lend strength to the blows. Repetition finished him off, though, barring contradiction from Doc Robbins." I pull on my gloves, the latex slapping at my wrists, pick up my kit and go to work.
We process in silence and in synch, working around the coroner when he gets there to tell the world the obvious: the husband is dead. Sara immediately pounces on the corpse, sifting through the blood and remnants of hopeless rage in an effort to find an answer.
"Hey hey, all, the cavalry has arrived!" Greg Sanders swings in, all messy hair and enthusiasm. He's our cub CSI, this one, though I'm hoping he lasts longer than Holly Gribbs. His face is all lit up, and the clang of shifting tools in his kit is almost as loud as his announcement.
"Turn around and interview the survivors. Collect every bit of physical evidence you can - from the wife and anyone else who was here. Do the perimeter search when you're done." I see him sulk for a moment out of the corner of my eye, but he knew that was coming. Last one on the scene gets stuck doing the interviews, which he knows but doesn't like.
"Yeah, Brass said something about a kid?"
Sara and I freeze in the same instant, like a pair of puppets strung to the same hand. She tries to mask her shock while I turn my head to look at Greg. "A kid?" I repeat, slowly enough that he gets there's something wrong.
"Uh - that's what Brass said."
I wonder what it means that Brass told Greg and not us. He knows all my buttons and exactly when to push - that's the problem with old friends in Sin City. The wrong kind can get you in all sorts of trouble. "My order stands," I confirm. "Interview and collect evidence. Even from the kid." Greg mock-salutes and strides out, leaving Sara and I to the crime scene and whatever thoughts we dare.