PART THREE

Coroner Albert Robbins maneuvered through the darkened pathology lab as if he were an Arthurian wizard in his inner sanctum. His electrically powered sun shone on the skinny and white naked body of Kenny Groth on the diagnosis table for sacrificial analyzation to the gods of forensics. His chest crossed with stitches from his autopsy, Groth looked asleep while Robbins leaned over him tracing the lines of electrical current blasted through his nervous system. One line went down the young man's left leg while another followed the path of a carotid artery up the side of the head to the brain. A burst of light and Gil Grissom stepped through the doorway into the lab for an overview of the victims.

"Good eye on the electrocution…" Robbins looked up with his bearded Santa Claus features. "Each of the victims was hit with somewhere between two to five thousand volts of electricity. Groth looks like he was hit first…" Robbins now had names from their mug shots detained through fingerprints. "Thecurrent hit him straight to the chest and stopped his heart on impact. He was already dead by time he hit the ground."

"Well, drag marks at the diner show he was tossed into the back seat prior to the crash. His buddies must not known he was dead when they tossed him into the car." Grissom revealed. "What about the other two?"

"Identical COD." Robbins hobbled by cane on his good leg to the shelves holding the other victims. He opened the door on Frank Wise and pulled out the shelf with the tall, freckled and angular redhead laying on it. "Massive electrical current across the heart, but this time I think it was more or less indirect because the heart still struggled to beat before it quit at the point of death. Another thing I noticed, the amount of electricity that killed all three of them seems to have a bioelectric signature." He looked up wondering how Grissom would respond to that.

"Bioelectric…" Grissom removed his glasses. "But you said they were killed by up to five thousand volts of electricity. Bioelectric charges only register as high as a hundred amps."

"Well, the delayed rigor, lack of internal scorch marks and missing damage to the nervous system suggests they weren't hit by lightning or by any electrical discharge." Robbins started turning Wise's body over to show his back. "The amount of electricity sent through them passed through them instead of grounding itself."

"Sounds like lightning…" Grissom realized. "But it's not behaving like lightning. It's almost as if something was controlling it."

"Do you know anyone with a stun gun the size of a Buick?" Robbins suggested.

"Grissom," Nick stuck his head into the lab. "Got a minute?"

The CSI director and the pathologist shared another look on the body of Frank Wise and placed him back on to the shelf. Grissom replaced his glasses to his head and strided out to Nick in the hall with questions to the answers so far.

"Warrick and I finished processing the car." Nick hastened to keep up with him. "Forensics on the convertible show there was a fourth person in it. I checked files and discovered that one other person named Michael McKinnon usually rode with the other three. I've got Hodges running a search for his last known whereabouts."

"Good," Grissom slightly nodded his head. "Could be the person we have as leaving on foot from the murder scene." He started to march past the break room. Sara and Catherine were eating their late dinner and discussing the big case at hand and Warrick was looking for himself on the news. Local KTSP field reporter Shelly Jamison was at the site of the diner broadcasting the developing news on the murders taped earlier that night in front of a crowd of by-standers, the morbidly curious and the male fans obsessed with the tight sweaters of the attractive, blonde new reporter.

"Beloved diner matron, Ruby Hollander was struck down at the age of 72…" Jamison continued. "For fifty-seven years, her diner has been one of the most talked about eateries in the Greater Las Vegas area, but now the diner is gone. Her windows boarded up, the diner sealed and police tape across the parking lot and structure, the much-loved restraunt is gone – taken from us by an act of violence so heinous that human decency almost forbids me from going into details. The police have yet to go into details, but…"

"Wait a minute," Grissom reacted seeing something in the news footage that caught his attention. "Warrick, play that back…"

"What?" The handsome African heartthrob slowly reacted with the same distracted demeanor that kept him from making a supervisor status and rewound the computer-generated replay on the TIVO. "Did you catch something? What'd you see?"

"Freeze it there." Grissom hit the freeze frame button himself then looked up again. "Now, look at those faces, and tell me who doesn't belong. " He glanced at Catherine then to Sara and expected them to catch what he saw. Sara glanced to Warrick a moment and Catherine perused the faces of the myriad on-lookers and morbidly curious witnesses and then perused them again. Nothing really unusual, it was human condition to be fascinated by lethal tragedies. It was some curiosity factor that made the living want to learn from the errors of the dead and it had probably being going on for hundreds of years. In the crowd, Catherine slowly gasped at a busty beauty with long dark hair in a red dress.

"That's Tammy Felton!" She recalled the female psychopath. The girl had been kidnapped, raised by her abductor, the murderer of her foster father, and was a criminal mastermind all before the age of twenty-five. She had even deceived and absconded on her trusting birth parents. "That's impossible!"

"Isn't she supposed to be dead?" Sara shook her head trying to deny what her eyes were seeing.

"Maybe she needs to be reminded…" Catherine recalled the little psycho very well.