PART FIVE
"Lindsay," Catherine Willows tried to outwit her daughter from afar. "If your grandmother thinks you should wear a sweater to the movies, don't be calling me to try and over rule her. I'm on her side. Just wear the sweater, case closed." She rolled her eyes, clicked off her cell phone, shook her head trying figure out teenage girls and then briefly recalled when it was her arguing with her mother to try and remain acceptable by the narrow definition of being cool with her old friends. Those days sometimes seemed as if they were just yesterday to her. Sighing loudly, she paused at the trials of being a single mother and looked up briefly to Janice Hester, the pretty young blonde who handled the phone calls pouring into the police station. Catherine had just briefly turned away as Janice called her back.
"Mrs. Willows…" Janice's head barely poked over the top of her contained cubicle. "There's a Mrs. Marlowe on the phone. She's asking to talk to you."
"Marlowe?" Catherine took a moment trying to recall someone with that name and then somehow flashed back on Tammy Felton's biological parents. If Grissom could catch Monica in that that news broadcast about the murders at the diner, surely the Marlowe's could catch the same thing in any of the repeated broadcasts about the murder investigation. Gritting her teeth briefly, wondering what she was going to say and looking to Janice for mental support, Catherine nervously took the phone and wondered what she was going to say to a bereaved mother she herself had had the unpleasant task of formerly telling of the murder of her own daughter.
"Hello?" Catherine tensed up a bit.
"Mrs. Willows," It was the mother's voice. "This is Victoria Marlowe, Melissa's mother. I don't know if you remember me, but…"
"I recall you Mrs. Marlowe." Catherine rolled her eyes little anticipating what she predicted the bereaved mother was calling about. "How can I help you?"
"Johnathan and I were watching the news this morning and we saw…." The distraught mother revealed. "Well, we saw Melissa! She was at the site of the Mason Jar! You told us she was dead. How is this possible? Are you sure we buried our daughter?"
"Mrs. Marlowe," Catherine treaded lightly into this discussion trying to decide what she was going to say. "Right now, I can assure you that the team is covering every aspect of that case and have spoken to all the witnesses…"
"But Melissa! We saw her!"
"Mrs. Marlowe…" Catherine wished she could tell them it was her daughter, but she also had a responsibility to protect Monica's privacy. "The young lady you are speaking of is not your daughter. We already checked her out, and she is definitely not Tammy, er, I mean, your daughter, Melissa. We're positive of it."
"I know my daughter." Victoria Marlowe paced her home feeling pangs of a daughter she never knew and wanted back. "It has to be her. Can you be so positive?"
"Her fingerprints and DNA is not a match to your daughter. She's may look like Melissa, but she's not her." Catherine spoke with the bitter taste of the truth on her lips. She wished she could lie because she knew how the death of Melissa was still ripping apart the Marlowe's. When Tammy was found dead in that car trunk, they may have been reimbursed the bail they had spent to let her out of prison, but it was not much solace for a two grieving parents who had known she was still alive and had to find her again in the form of that little psycho named Tammy Felton. A sound of anguish came from the phone as Catherine listened. The truth was often a bitter pill and reality a cold sobering experience. Mrs. Marlowe just hung up the phone refusing to accept the death of her daughter and left Catherine Willows feeling the role of a harbinger of bad news.
Still sitting on the counter was the Monica Uchtman file. Waiting to be filed, Catherine perused it briefly once more. Born in Los Angeles in 1979, the busty brunette turned out to not have a stellar reputation herself. Monica Dawn Uchtman had once been arrested for horseback riding in the nude and for breaking into a boyfriend's house and trashing it; it was quite tame stuff compared to the murders left in Tammy's wake. Wanting to find something to connect Monica to Melissa, Catherine perused an arrest report from when the young beauty was a teenage wild child picked up for drinking and driving and then looked up to Gil Grissom wandering into her direction. A file concerning a body covered in cockroaches within a tenement held his interest, but before Catherine could get his attention, Nick Stokes rushed excitedly toward the both of them.
"Grissom," He had another file. "I got our unknown witness out of the diner. Ares Marshall, a soldier-for-hire out of Sparta, Texas. I lifted his prints off the menu and sent his prints to trace. Brass just sent a warrant on him."
"Soldier of fortune?" Grissom repeated Nick as if he didn't hear him the first time. In his hands, he had a copy of Marshall's FBI file for causing trouble in Third War Nations for selling weapons, inciting violence and stirring up trouble in Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Korea. Wondering how a figure like this could be running around loose and traveling the United States uncontrolled, he looked closely at the ragged dark-haired figure with the goatee photo then noticed the list of aliases. Among the names was one for Marshall Reason. Reason? Wasn't that the name for that family named after figures from Greek myth from the Jason Troy case? Marshall certainly had the record for a modern god of war. Grissom smirked a bit wondering just how far this odd scenario was going to continue to turn out.
"What?" Nick noticed the smirk.
"It's going to be interesting to get him in here." Grissom looked forward to meeting someone else in excess of a thousand years old then turned to Catherine.
"I just had a very heart-rending phone call." She gasped first and then continued. "I was just confronted by the biological mother of Tammy Felton wanting to know if we had made an error in identifying her daughter's body."
"She must have seen the news broadcast." Nick realized.
"Exactly," Catherine shifted nervously in her shoes. "I was thinking about paying Monica a visit and letting her know about it."
"Why?" Grissom responded matter-of-factly. "You don't think the Marlowes will trace down Monica, do you?"
"We did." Nick added.
"If we can recognize Monica's waitress uniform, certainly the Marlowes could. They never accepted losing their daughter after finding her again." Catherine played the role of a parent on their side, but she was also tempered by the boundaries of her job. "I just think I should have told Monica that…"
"Why don't you just wait and see what happens?" Gill advised her. "No sense getting Monica stirred up over nothing."
"You just want to stand back and see what develops." Nick figured out how Grissom was thinking. He and Catherine looked back to him with stunned reverence realizing just how he became fascinated by human behavior.
"If it happens, it happens…" Grissom tilted his head to the side.
Eventually it became the lateness of the dinner hour and Victoria Marlowe was trying to play the role of detective. The dress and style of the woman in the news broadcast she believed was her daughter certainly resembled the uniforms of the waitresses in photos for the Golden Nugget Restraunt fliers in the newspaper. Not quite so interested in the food but more for her piece of mind, she entered the cuisine-flavored aroma filled restraunt off the Las Vegas strip and found herself alone in a crowd of a hundred people. All the waitresses had that red dress and blue apron and smock combination. There were quite a few of the young ladies with brunette hair and even a token blonde. Looking out over the full dining room of restraunt patrons, she looked beyond the cash register with paying customers and over toward young men frying steaks and flipping pork chops. From out of nowhere, Monica Uchtman stood up from carrying dishes out and laughed with her fellow employees. Victoria's heart went out to her. This was the person her daughter was: jovial, friendly and out-going with a love for life and a rosy disposition for people around her. She was nothing like that cold, manipulative girl she had met. Moving to the register and picking up her pad, Monica stood up smiling before Mrs. Marlowe and welcomed her with a bright smile.
"Hello," She beamed ear-to-ear and stood proudly and eagerly to help. "Welcome to the Golden Nugget. Is this a party of one?"
"Melissa?" Mrs. Marlowe asked with her voice contained at almost a whisper. Her feelings and hope then took over and she stepped forward and hugged this young woman. This was her daughter; she knew it. Her heart told her so. She had finally found her!
Monica meanwhile just stood where she was and realized what was happening. Who was this woman and why was she hugging her? She looked to Lisa at the register for answers, but Lisa just grinned at her and left her to decide what to do next. Blinking her eyes a few times, Monica just sighed a bit and then patted this woman on the back to comfort her back.