PART FIVE

"Willows," Jim Brass noticed her walk past him and hastened to catch up with her. "Here's the report from the police in Cheyenne, Wyoming where Alicia Braddock lives." He handed her a file faxed from the out of state police. Catherine slowed to read it while Brass thrust his hands into his pockets. "She confirmed your suspicion."

"She knew her brother was a cross dresser?" Catherine couldn't believe it.

"She encouraged it." Brass sounded like he got a kick out of hearing the odd idiosyncrasies of other people. "She didn't seem to like having a brother, but she loved turning him into her little sister." Brass chuckled out the corner of his mouth. "However, she did remark that she thought he was trying to break that bad habit."

"Could be when the girlfriend came into the picture…" Catherine started thinking. "Transvestites only dress up to fulfill a sexual change or gratification, and when Short entered his life, he might have decided to put an end to that little fetish. However, the experience might have confused him more than he was ready for, and he might have snapped."

"Sounds like your case got interesting." Sara glided up to Catherine and Brass.

"It just turned south." Catherine remarked. "How about yours?"

"I got three dead people." She replied unimpressed. "I know how they died, but I can't find a trace of another set of killers in the corporeal sense."

"Still missing evidence?" Brass asked.

"Missing?" Sara rolled her eyes. "More like non-existent. Warrick and I have traced Sadler and Kendall from Troy to the cemetery, but we can't trace anyone from the cemetery. We've talked to the caretaker and morticians and mourners from the last known funeral, and we're getting nowhere. I'm waiting on a ground analysis from Greg and Warrick and Grissom are checking the cemetery for sinkholes."

"Sinkholes?"

"Do you have a better suggestion?" Sara asked perplexed and bewildered.

"An open grave?" Brass thought out loud. "I recall stories of people getting tapped in those things caving in all the time."

"I already ruled that out." Sara shook her brown locks out of her face. "Usually when someone is inside a grave that caves it, they get completely covered in soft earth; the weight of the dirt presses them to their feet, but in this case, the vics had to have been held suspended as the grave caved in around them, but we ruled that out because it was stable soil and an intact lawn and there was no contact on their ankles. The only contact was on the upper arms and shoulders as if they were…"

"Dragged head first…" Catherine had heard a lot of really good ghost stories, but this one beat them all.

"That's not the only thing." Sara fumbled with a file. "The first DB has an extra chromosome, but no record of Down's syndrome or trisomy. In fact, he was highly gifted, extremely healthy and a fully contributing member of society."

"Well," Catherine looked to Brass enjoying this meeting of the minds. "Trisomy depends on which chromosome has been duplicated."

"Not duplicated…" Sara liked repeating this tidbit to freak out her peers. "A twenty-fourth chromosome unlike the first twenty-three."

"But the human body only has twenty three chromosomes, right?" Brass recalled his high school biology as well, but he was also interested in activity going on in the direction of pathology. Grissom had been rousted from his cockroaches from another case and Doctor Robbins was speaking down to Jeremy his assistant. The morgue was suddenly very active as Grissom put aside thoughts of his Blattus domesticus species and emerged into the heart of the predicament. He and Brass turned to Robbins for his account of another problem in a current case.

"There's a body missing." Robbins revealed.

"Who? Which one?"

"Jason Troy." Robbins answered. "He wasn't in cold storage where I put him."

"Well," Brass raised his left eyebrow. "He didn't walk away now, did he?"