Grissom awoke in the dark. He had no idea how long he'd been asleep. Looking at his watch would do him no good as he realized he had no idea what time he'd laid down.
He debated rolling over and trying to go back to sleep, but the air cast made it difficult to lie on his side. Besides, he felt pretty good. He was used to catching short naps to sustain him through double and triple shifts. He pulled himself up to the edge of the cot and let his eyes adjust to the dark. The only light in the room snuck in from under the closed door.
He limped to the door and emerged to find everything pretty much as he had left it. Warrick had found a deck of cards- did he carry them with him? -and was playing solitaire over at the desk. He looked up when Grissom entered the room, and checked his watch. "Not bad, Gris. You slept for two hours. How you feeling?"
He rubbed his face and wiped the sleep out of the corner of his eyes. "Not bad, thanks. Any word?" he asked, nodding his head in the direction of the exam room. Operating room.
"Not a peep. That's good, right?"
"I would think so, no news being good and all that," he sighed. "Any word from Sara? Any idea where she could be holed up?"
"She asked Green for the keys to the sheriff's office. Probably using his computer there. You know, she's not good at dealing with …stuff."
Grissom nodded. He was well aware of Sara's means of dealing. Or not, as the case may be.
"Gin rummy?" he asked his friend.
"Please. I hate solitaire. C'mon over. Pull up a chair and take a load off."
The two men sat playing cards, trying to take their mind off things for a while, when the object of their earlier conversation entered from outside.
"Hey, guys. How's it going? Grissom, shouldn't you be sleeping?" she asked.
"I grabbed a couple hours while you were gone. What have you been doing?"
"I took the stuff the boys gathered from the scene and sent it back to the lab for Cath and Greg to run with. Got some interesting results. Where's Nick? He'll wanna hear this," she said, her smile dying as she realized he wasn't out with the other two.
"He's still in back. In surgery." He brought her up to speed and gave her a minute to digest the bad news.
"What results did you get?"
"Well, the scene was littered with prints, no attempt to hide them. I had Cath run them through AFIS. We got back hits on all three men. The first was…" she said, pulling a small notebook from her pocket, "a Marcus Chang. In the database as a former Chinese National, now a taxpaying citizen of San Francisco, California. The second came back to a Ronnie Hawkins. He was in the system for multiple arrests for poaching, and an aggravated assault several years back. His last known address is Klamath Falls, Oregon."
"And the third…?" Grissom asked, impatience slipping into his voice.
"Well, Grissom. I hate to break it to you, but your friend is unequivocally not Saint Francis of Assisi. In fact, his name isn't even Francis. It's Terrance." She consulted her notebook again. "Terrance Polk. And he is in the database for several reasons. This is where it gets interesting. I had Greg dig deeper and get some background on our Mr. Polk. First time he pops up on the radar is in East Aurora, NY, near Buffalo. He had a set of fingerprints taken at the family's request when he was five. Seems the Polk family was a pretty big deal. Old money. Apparently, they were worried about kidnapping. The next time he pops up is when he's arrested at a college in upstate New York. He took part in a PETA raid on the college he worked at as a biology professor. Let the PETA people into the lab in his own department to free all the lab animals. Three years later, Mr. Polk is now at a smaller college in Pennsylvania. He's now a theology professor, arrested for attacking a guest speaker who had just completed a speech on …'The Merits of Animal Vivisection' or something like that.Let's see…next is an arrest at the Saint Louis Zoo. He assaulted a staff member, and tried to free some animals. His next arrest is in Omaha at a cosmetics company. Assault again. His most recent arrest was two years ago in Denver. The Zoo again. Ditto on the assault."
"He's been moving west for years now. And lucky us, he chose to stay a spell here in Nevada," Warrick observed.
"Hey, did you guys ever get a look at what was buried in the grave?"
"Yeah. A black bear. A female, I think. Not really up on my ursine anatomy. She had an obvious traumatic fracture to her hind leg and she'd been gutted." Warrick went on to describe to Grissom what the sheriff had told them earlier about the rash of poaching they'd been troubled with.
Grissom felt that unique pleasure he got whenever a case fell into place, or he had finished the last word on his crossword puzzle. "Our Mr. Polk must have come upon the two who had just finished killing the bear and removing her pancreas. Mr. Chang has connections in China. Mr. Hawkins has a propensity for poaching. Mr. Polk is not pleased with the death of 'the innocent' as he termed it, and decides on some biblical retribution." He pictured Polk burying the dead animal while the men were tied to the tree, bear traps on their legs; recalled the pile of stones he had placed there as a makeshift tombstone.
His pleasure was short-lived, however, as he looked up to see Gene Lawrence enter the room, new blood layered on the old on his white coat. The doctor's face was grim and Grissom's gorge rose in his throat, threatening to bring up Doris Green's famous chicken soup.