PART FOUR
Nick Stokes turned his brown eyes up to the floor plans of the diner posted on the board. The lay out was quite simple. The Mason Jar Restraunt really had once been a train dining car at one time in its existence. In fact, it was once called the Box Car Restraunt, but it was Ruby and Jack Hollander that had made the place work. Eight booths lined the side of the restraunt down the left from the entrance while four lined the left side up to the counter area and five stools at the counter. The kitchen had been an add on afterward in order to keep from squeezing a limited amount of eating patrons to a limited number of tables, but the wait had been more than enough for a taste of Ruby's broccoli casserole or her German chocolate cake. Realizing he'd never taste Ruby's exquisite seafood salad or her mouth-watering tuna salad sandwiches, Nick used the schematic of the diner to trace the paths and velocities of the spray of bullets in the lost landmark. Red lines came from Kenny Groth and came left to right toward the kitchen while Frank Wise had fired the blue lines right to left and took out the customers scrambling for their lives. Joey Vasquez must have taken out Jerome Howard trying to get out behind him. Based on the groove patterns of each gun, it was becoming obvious who had shot whom.
"Very good job, Nick." Grissom applauded his excellent work.
"Well, Warrick got me started." Nick looked up briefly. "It was a group effort. Now, Groth obviously shot first going by the witness testimonies. They were firing a spray pattern as if they were shooting ducks at the carnival with shots going everywhere and ricocheting into the wall behind them."
"Bullets don't ricochet off aluminum walls." Grissom was quick to point out.
"You see my problem." Nick beamed like a little kid with a secret and turned with a juvenile step to the electron microscope. "Check out the bullet fragment." He continued talking as Grissom lifted his glasses and looked down through the microscope upon a fragment of bullet with fabric on it. "What you're looking at it a partial of calfskin leather, and not just any calfskin leather, but very old calfskin leather. It hasn't been processed like that in over fifty years."
"Leather isn't processed from calfskin very often either." Grissom restored his glasses and folded his arms as his mind subconsciously processed the data. "Looks like one of our victims was almost killed in an antique jacket."
"Almost killed is right," Nick folded his arms before him briefly. "But Groth was firing with copper-tipped bullets. These suckers do a lot of damage, and the damage on the bullet is consistent with somewhere wearing a flak jacket at thirty feet."
"Sounds like someone was expecting to be shot." Grissom couldn't believe how the evidence was turning. This new evidence was taking the murder scene into another direction. "All these ricochet shots are on an area of two feet in the aisle. Do you have a name to this person?'
"I was afraid you'd ask that." Nick turned to the board again. "I've cross-checked the victims with their locations, shooters and blood types." He made references to the gruesome crime scene photos used to determine placement of victims on the victim placement map. "Jerome Howard, tourist, 43, left of entrance…" He listed the eleven deaths.
"William and Prue Pryde, parents, 34 and 33, third booth left side…" Nick referred one by one to the photos of the victims. They had been shot in the head, neck and upper body.
"Truck drivers, Chad Kandros and Derek Brown, 28 and 31, fifth booth left side…" They were shot in the head and chest.
"Joyce Sandsmark, schoolteacher, 43, seventh booth left side…." She had been shot twice in the chest.
"Laurence Morris, salesman, 51, first booth right side…." He was shot in the head.
"Richard Lyle, dishwasher, 18…" He was also shot in the head.
"Jack and Ruby Hollander, owners, 75 and 72…." Multiple gunshots….
"Charity Hollander, 17, waitress…." She was shot in the back as she raced for the back door.
"Eleven bodies, all identified," Nick showed the results of his hard work. "No one was wearing a leather jacket over a flak jacket."
"We're missing a body." Grissom and Stokes shared a look over this puzzle. They hated missing pieces - especially ones that could walk away from murder scenes. Ever inquisitive, the fourth-dimensional reasoning skills of Gil Grissom starting marching with his deductive intuition, and his eyes starting darting back and forth with the photo and crime scene chart. He glanced from photo to the chart, to the angle of bullets and then back to the ricochet point the bullets were deflecting from in the diner. In his mind, he was standing in that spot like a Kryptonian comic book hero watching the murder scene happen as an illusion around him, but instead of looking at his shooters, he looked to the counter and noticed something in the photos.
"You based this from the layout of the bodies." Grissom realized.
"Yeah…" Nick confessed.
"How about from the dinner settings?" Grissom pointed to the photo of the second counter seat from the door. It had a place setting of silverware and an abandoned menu. "Who was sitting here?"
"No one…" Nick answered then rethought his answer. "No one who suffered a gun shot and died as a result." He realized his error in thinking. "I'll head back to the scene. Maybe I can still get prints off the menu or silverware."
Catherine Willows and Sara Sidle meanwhile headed side by side to the Golden Nugget Restraunt, but they weren't interested in the food there. The family style restraunt on Audrey Street was known in this world for steaks, seafood dinners and Italian-style spaghetti dinners and in the next world for being the location of an old slave cemetery. Since 1953, over seventy employees and customers had reported everything from voices at night, shadowy figures sitting at tables and water faucets that turned on by themselves. None of the current employees believed the stories, but every so often a door opened by itself or the security system registered someone inside after closing. All the waitresses wore red uniforms with blue aprons like the young lady in Catherine's photo. Strolling in past happily fed patrons, the two lady criminologists smelled first the aromatic odor of steaks tinged with spaghetti sauce and then noticed the western-style décor of the interior. Sara felt herself gaining five pounds from just looking at the food around her.
"Yes, do you have a reservation?" Lisa Uber, a pretty brunette waitress, turned to seat them.
"No, we don't." Catherine led the investigation as Sara felt herself fifteen pounds heavier from all this food around her. "We're from the crime lab. We're trying to identify this young lady." She held up the photo from the news broadcast the previous night. Lisa looked over the image of people and recognized the waitress uniform on the busty brunette in the picture as one of her co-workers.
"Yes, that's Monica Uchtman." Lisa answered. "She works the night shift."
"When does she get in?" Sara asked coldly professional.
"She's in back right now waiting to clock in." Lisa answered without anything to hide. "Is she in any sort of trouble?"
"We're just talking to her." Catherine answered, but she really meant she didn't know yet. Sitting in the back dining room reserved for parties, she and Sara could talk to this Tammy Felton doppelganger in private without the risk of causing a scene. Just seeing Monica in person almost had Catherine wanting to pull her gun. She had seen Tammy dead in a car trunk with a gunshot through her chest and in the pathology lab; seeing her alive in the form of this friendly and exuberant waitress was more than she could take.
"Hello," The busty brunette beauty reacted quite unlike the late Tammy Felton. She seemed to have a sparking vivacious personality and open, friendly demeanor. Dressed in her red waitress uniform with her blue apron and smock combination, she looked as if she had stepped out of a television carton series for adults. "I'm Monica, Lisa said you wanted to see me. Am I in any trouble?"
"Is it Uck-man or Ucht-man?" Sara asked for the right pronunciation.
"Uck-man." Monica answered.
"Mrs. Uchtman," Catherine turned forward a computer-printed screen capture from the news broadcast. "Is this you?"
"Oh my god," Monica lightly beamed. "My grandmother said I was on TV. You see, I live with her on Canyon Road and I pass by the diner every day. I went to school with Patience and Charity Hollander and they often give me a discount on dinner there." She paused respectfully to recall both of them then looked up afraid. "You don't think I had anything to do with their murders, do you?"
"Actually, only Charity was murdered in the shoot out." Catherine reported freely. "Patience survived, but she's still in a state of shock." She paused as Monica gave a brief of relief for small favors and shed a tear for lost friends taken cruelly from her.
"Miss Uchtman," Sara pulled out another picture, but this one was a black and white portrait with numbers. "Have you ever seen this person before?" She turned the picture round for Monica to see it. As her eyes reflected the picture to her mind, the young woman reacted confused and upset. It was her and it looked as if she had a criminal record. She didn't have a memory of having a picture like this taken of her. She might not have lead a stellar life, but she had never been arrested or picked up by the police.
"What is this?" She reacted with fear that she was being framed for Charity's murder. "How did you get this? What kind of cruel joke are you trying to pull here!"
"It's not a joke, Miss Uchtman." Catherine lightly tossed her hair out of her eyes. "Actually the girl in that picture is one Melissa Marlowe, but she actually went by the name Tammy Felton. She had been kidnapped from her biological parents and raised by her abductor who she later murdered. Last year, she was found dead after holding up a casino on the Strip."
"We'd just like to confirm your identity to be sure." Sara spoke up taking out a fingerprinting kit. "With your permission, we'd like to take your fingerprints to compare against Miss Felton's." Sara paused. "It's strictly voluntary, of course."
"But I'm not being arrested?" Monica asked.
"Only if you've done something to be arrested for." Catherine replied as Monica held her hands out to prove she wasn't this female psychopath. In a routine she had done several times, Sara took the young lady's fingers one at a time and starting putting them in dye and making prints from her girl's fingers.
"Please tell me this washes off!" Monica griped out loud over this humiliating circumstance. She then leaned back in her seat at the sight of the next thing the criminologists pulled out on her.
"What's that?"
"We want some DNA." Catherine announced as discreetly as possible.