PART TWO
Someone finally turned off the electricity to stop the sparks from the bullet ravaged light fixtures. Warrick Brown tagged and photographed everything as bodies were removed one at a time from the diner while he stepped around possible evidence. He had filled one roll of film, and was now starting another. At last count, Sara had fifty-three known bullet holes and twenty-two scattered .38 caliber shells and still had several more.
Katherine looked up as the body of Prue Pryde was carried out after being uncovered by her husband's corpse. Those two little girls outside had lost both their parents and her role as a mother wanted to hold them and tell them things would be okay. Grissom meanwhile stood transfixed by the blast marks in the diner. The blue walls had been marked with odd warped areas of scorched metal as if they had been blasted with lightning.
"I know one thing." Warrick announced standing up straight. "This entire diner doesn't have enough power to leave impressions like that."
"Could be lightning strikes from the outside in." Grissom tilted his head with a quirky little grimace. "Lightning causes ozone in the air by electrifying oxygen molecules."
"Gunshots to the electrical system could have sent short circuits up to the pole and caused discharges to hit the diner on the outside." Warrick theorized.
"But the burn patterns are inside suggesting in to out." Grissom challenged Warrick to think fourth-dimensionally. "What do we have in here that can create enough electricity on the level of a lightning bolt?"
"More pictures." Warrick turned and snapped a photo of the counter top covered with plates of abandoned dinners. Another camera clicking pictures of the exterior of the dinner hung around the neck of Sara Sidle marking bullet rounds with numbered tiles. Her head turned up from her work the Pryde girls being taken away by human resource officers. She was their age when she was taken from her parents. She hadn't seen her older brother, Matt, in years, and times like this made her wonder if he was still alive. Brass stepped into her line of vision as the girls were taken away in a white van.
"Father pushed his wife and children to the floor to try and save them." Brass hated this part. "Only the little girls survived." He shared the pain as a parent with Catherine Willows. Her hair was a bit mussed and her once clean jeans were now covered in traces of blood from the victims.
"Did you catch this?" She pointed to the dirt ground under the windows of the diner.
"Yeah," Sara snapped a second photo of the sneaker imprints in the loose dirt. "Nick just took prints. Someone walked from the scene. Hopefully a person who saw and can identify the shooters." Her head turned to the person sneaking up behind her from across the police line of reporters and the morbidly curious. Catherine turned her head up as well and recognized their lab tech standing out of place in their crime scene.
"What are you doing here?" Catherine noticed Greg Sanders standing by her about as obvious as a tourist in the Kremlin.
"It's my night off." Greg announced in shock at the murders. "I heard about the shoot out on the news and came to get a look. Did Ruby make it?"
Sara, Catherine and Brass slowly shook their lowered heads in unison.
"I loved her baked catfish!" Greg grieved the talent of a culinary maestro.
"You show up..." Grissom walked over and handed Greg a pad. "You go to work. Follow Warrick and take notes." Grissom then turned to Brass. "What are the witnesses saying?"
"Not much," Jim turned from the informal huddle of minds and flipped open his pad with a professional gesture. "Haven't had a chance to talk to the people who left by ambulance, but Ruby's niece, Patience, was washing dishes in back just before the murders. She testifies to three young punks harassing a motorcyclist just before the gunshots started. She dived under the counter and didn't come out until the shooting stopped, but get this, while she was hiding, she said she heard explosions."
"What kind of explosions?" Gil Grissom narrowed his eyes as he tried to decipher the way people described things. Sometimes loud pops were explosions or sometimes gunshots were crackling noises. Just what the niece heard was going to be a challenge to explain.
"Explosions." Brass added to the mystery with a wry look over witness credibility. "Like fireworks."
"Could be from the overhead lights exploding." Grissom theorized, but even he knew it wasn't likely.
"Now, a car did pull in trying to help after the fact." Brass flipped down to a third page of indecipherable witness testimonies he had written in haste. "A witness who stopped to help describes seeing a blue convertible mustang racing away…" Brass turned briefly to uniformed Officer Bruno Hess. "I've got all points for all cars matching that in the…"
"Captain," Hess looked up with Slavic features. "We do have a blue convertible mustang about five hundred feet up the highway. It ran off the road with three bodies in it; state police are about to…"
"Don't let them touch it!" Grissom stood up straight quick enough to realize this had to be the shooters and he didn't want another officer tainting a connecting crime scene. Brass felt that way as well. Grabbing his kit, Grissom was on his way without his team to secure the scene and evidence with brass leading the way. The scene was just as expected. Fifteen feet down an incline off the road, there was a mismatched blue convertible trashed in a gully. One figure was dead lengthwise across the back seat while the other two slumped forward in the front seat. Brass called the officers to stand aside as Grissom pulled on fresh gloves to avoid cross contamination and then analyzed the driver. First thing he saw was the fixed lividity of the driver as he sat slumped over the car laying lengthwise forward. That wasn't unusual considering they might have fled the diner in the last twenty minutes, but Grissom smelled something else. The tall driver with the curly red hair had burn marks in his clothing as if he'd been on fire but hadn't burned. Both his passengers had the same burn marks in their chests.
"These guys have been electrocuted." He spoke out loud for Brass to hear. Acknowledging that realization, the seasoned officer turned his head upward to the overhead electrical cables.
"Maybe God got to them before we did." He made a comment.
"Can you get him for questioning?" Grissom asked.
"Is that a challenge?"