A/N: Sorry it took so long to update. I guess I got caught up in other things. Hey everyone, congratulate me on a good-looking person liking me! It totally made my day.
Madds
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"Got a hit off the print from the body," Maddy said. She'd been filling in as a print analyst as well as her usual post as lab technician and CSI for the latest case. "It matches a Janet Green."
"Thanks, Madds," Warrick said, taking the paper. "You found her on AFIS, what was she busted for? She works someplace that takes prints?"
"It wasn't AFIS. On a hunch, I ran the print through VICAP. Our suspect has been missing for four years."
Warrick grinned at her, despite the perplexity of the case. He hurried off down the corridor to find Grissom. When he arrived at his supervisor's office, however, he found Brass there as well.
"We finally got a warrant for the victims' houses," he said, waving a paper at Warrick and sighing. "Their various family members were very stubborn about letting us have a little look around." He frowned.
"Well, what are we waiting for? Let's roll," Warrick said, turning on his heel and heading off to get his kit and tell the CSIs that they were going on a trip.
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Sara took the photograph down from the mantle. Maddy had mentioned, when she found out that Sara would be canvassing Victoria Anderson's house, that there had been a suspicious woman in the picture with the eight victims. She stuck it in an evidence bag and crouched to the ground to pick up something that had caught her eye.
A small piece of glass lay on the hardwood floor. "Maybe this is from the window," Sara thought, picking it up with tweezers and putting it in an envelope. "But that would mean the killer came back here after she, or he, committed the murders."
Going with her gut feeling, she stood up and turned back to the mantle, noticing that it was covered with a thin film of dust. She saw that where the photograph she'd taken had been, there was a void in the grime that had built up. She scanned the small ledge above the fireplace, looking for similar voids. At the very edge of the shelf she found a small, circular shape in the dust. It was relatively dirt-free, indicating it had been taken somewhat recently.
Holding her camera to her eyes, Sara snapped a few pictures. "Looks like it could be a vase or some kind of award…"she said out loud, trailing off. "Maybe the base of a candlestick holder?" she asked herself. Taking one last picture, she turned to the rest of the house.
"Anything I can help you with, ma'am?" the police officer standing guard said politely.
"No, thanks," Sara declined. "Unless you're trained as a CSI, that is. We have eight houses to process and only eight analysts, so we're all working solo today."
The officer nodded sympathetically. Sara turned from him and began to examine the rest of the house. Nothing more was of much interest, though she managed to bag a bra that looked like it matched the panties Nick had found at the crime scene. "This is nice," she thought, holding the lingerie up to her chest, though not close enough to transfer. Even her interest didn't come before her immaculate CSI instincts. "Maybe I should invest in a set."
At that moment, the officer walked back in. Spotting Sara, he turned around and walked quickly out of the room, leaving her, hiding her embarrassment, to bag the bra while trying to maintain the oncoming fit of giggles.
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Pamela sat up and stretched. She had just woken up from a nice, long nap and was feeling considerably better. "Maybe I'll stay home today and go back in tomorrow," she thought, already scheming. She picked up the pictures from the crime scene and studied them for the umpteenth time, her sharp eyes searching for some missed detail, some neglected piece of crucial evidence.
Looking back over some pictures Natasha had taken of the room she'd processed alone, she noticed a void in the dust on the floor. It was small and circular, next to a shoe print that Tasha had tapelifted. She saw it all in her mind.
Natasha crouched on the ground, all her equipment in her hands. She used the electrostatic print lifter to recover the footprint, taking a few photos beforehand to insure that they would have the print, no matter what.
Standing up, she turned, barely registering the circular hole in the layer of dust. She turned to the rest of the room, sighing at the work to be done, and moved on, leaving the void untouched, undisturbed, unrecorded.
Pam took out her cell phone, dialing Grissom, who was doing a perimeter on a house. He picked up the phone on the second ring. "Grissom," he said briskly.
"Hey, it's Pam. I think I found something in the crime scene photos. There's this space in the dust next to an unidentified footprint. I think our killer was walking, saw it, and crouched down to pick it up. Whatever it was, it was important enough to delay the culprit long enough to grab it."
"Good work, Pam," Grissom said. "Give that to Nick, or fax it to the lab. We'll have some people working on it soon."
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"Hey, Gris, who was that?" Maddy asked. She was at the same scene as Grissom. He'd called her in to help him process the mansion that had belonged to one of the victims, allowing the small, dirty house she'd been investigating to wait.
"Pam, she found something," he said nonchalantly, turning to his younger colleague. The sun beat down on the two of them, who were both thankful they'd finished the outside.
"You want to take this in the house?" Maddy asked, winking.
Grissom rolled his eyes and followed her into the house. "Let's work from the top," he said, indicating the long flight of stairs. Grinning, Maddy hurried over, pulling the booties over her sneakers to keep her footprints off the carpet. Grissom followed suit, snapping on a pair of latex gloves as they ascended the staircase.
"Oh my God, I love this bedroom," Maddy said as they entered the suite. A king-size bed was the focal point. Resisting the urge to sleep on it, Maddy began to dust the footboard. In response to Grissom's questioning look, she smiled. "You know what Catherine says about guys and leverage. I want to see if Marie Duval was seeing anyone on the side. It could be a suspect, you know." Marie Duval was the wealthy wife of a prosperous businessman, and now she was the victim of a murder case, lumped together with a bunch of poverty-stricken nobodies and middle-class wage-earners. Hardly the kind of people she was expected to associate with.
Grissom inspected the top of the bed-side table, noticing a circle in the shiny surface, as if a maid had cleaned around an object that usually stood there. Remembering what Pam had said, he took a few photos and moved on. He pulled open a drawer and took out a pair of handcuffs. He held them up for Maddy to see. "Kinky," he said, bagging them.
Sighing, Maddy returned to the tedious job of tapelifting the prints from the bed. "Toys aside, these people were busy. Look at all the prints down here!" She grinned as Grissom let out an uncharacteristic laugh, wondering just what had gotten into him to make him so damn cheerful throughout the case.
"Here, let me get that," Grissom said, taking a tapelift from Maddy's gloved hand and pulling a print off the footboard of the bed. Maddy left him to go inspect the shelf under a bow window that had once been a window seat. It now held photographs, mostly of the Marie Duval with her husband. One picture in particular caught her eye. She had to move a wallet-size photo of the husband that was resting on the edges of the frame, and what she saw both shocked and amazed her.
Miss Duval of the lovely mansion was strolling along with two friends on the midway of a traveling carnival. A woman with black hair was to the left, waving at the person holding the camera. "She looks a lot like the woman from the picture on Victoria Anderson's mantle," Maddy thought. She inspected the man to the right of Marie, who was one of the victims; William Terrence. His fingers were entwined in Marie's in a way that suggested a little more than friendship.
Maddy noticed a flesh-colored spot on the corner of the photograph, a finger. "Grissom?" she called to her supervisor. "What do you know about taking pictures of fingerprints?"