PART SEVEN
Greg Sanders preferred working in the field to being in the lab. He didn't hate the lab, but he was started to feel constrained by its limits. He'd had a taste of field work after the massive bus crash and while using his knowledge of coin-collecting to catch a killer and now he was hoping for a replacement to take his place once he earned the right to go on cases instead of sitting on the sideline and watching cases float through and past his limited scope of the evidence. He wanted the experience of being smart and the thrill of catching criminals. He didn't want to be famous; he didn't have the ego for that, but a little notoriety would have been nice.
"Greg," Warrick wandered into the room eager for the results on his case. "Please tell me you got my stuff."
"You make me sound like a drug dealer." Greg took offense.
"I do?" Warrick chuckled at him. "Just give me the stuff; what is it?"
"Ask me what it isn't?" Greg lifted his analysis of the residue. "Pure blood plasma, human sweat, liquid bone marrow, bone calcium, seminal fluids, lymphatic tissue, human enzymes, synaptic fluid and a whole host of other goodies that makes us what we are."
"My god," Warrick read it himself. "He really did melt…." He looked to Greg again. "Can you prove it's all from William Danvers?"
"Can't." Greg answered. "The cells are in lysis; there's no genetic material to test." He paused, thought a second and wondered out loud. "Uh, if he did somehow melt, where's the other hundred pounds of him?"
"Good question." Warrick asked. "What about prints?"
"Mother, son and one partial." Greg clicked computer on to the CODIS site for matching fingerprints. "No matches, but then there wasn't enough to match. The owner of those prints burned their prints off."
"Great…." Warrick marched out with the test result and caught Gil Grissom in a darkened office by a solitary light reading a book about World Mythology. Ares Marshall Reason had been released to his own recognizance and the FBI had reminded him that he was still under observation. It was almost as if they wanted to contain him, but knew they'd never be able to keep him under wraps. The whole conspiracy with the FBI and the Reason family possibly being who or what they seemed to be plied Grissom's mind over and over. According to the book, Amun Ra was the Chieftain of the Egyptian Gods and Nyambe was ruler of the Orishas, the spirits still worshipped by the tribes of Africa. If they still existed with the Olympians, just how much further did the scope of this immortal lineage reach? Looking up from his section about animistic gods and figures that revered insects, the celebrated bug man looked up while Warrick stood over him ready to challenge his fourth dimensional thinking.
"Grissom, read that and tell me what you think." He sailed the file over as Grissom caught it under his right hand and adjusted his glasses. After a few seconds, Grissom looked up with concern.
"This is human sludge." He answered.
"What would do that?"
"Well, being churned in a giant blender or being dead for a long time in an air-tight compacted space." Grissom reflected on known cases and scientific data. "The human body is mostly water and it tends to turn to liquid when the moisture can't escape. Is this from the Danvers case?"
"This kid was left at home for less than ten hours and his mother found that in his bed on her return." Warrick hated cases that took the lives of kids. They often hit him personally. "I checked the mother's alibi and she was at work for the entire day except a trip to the drugstore on the way home and the druggist recalls her there. This is not a murder or a case of neglect. That kid seems to have melted into less than ten percent of his body weight. I'd hate to think where the rest of him is. Now, there was evidence of a possible third person, but those could be left over from a best friend or… "
"Head back to the house." Grissom suggested. "Check it inside and out. Maybe you and Nick missed something."
"I'm on it." Warrick turned back the way he had come. As he crossed the conference room, he noticed Brass and Willows talking to Michael McKinnon. The punk had been caught loitering in the basement of the old abandoned Clark County Methodist Church. He was known for frequenting with both Kenny Groth and Joey Vasquez and his prints had been in their car. His shoe prints also proved he had been at the diner watching the shooting from outside.
"You and your idiot buddies have made being difficult a hobby." Brass did not hide hating this punk. "Speeding, felony evading, shop-lifting, burglary, theft, assault and battery, vandalism… but you've never killed anyone before." He reacted superficially to McKinnon's presence. "Where did you guys get guns?"
"Kenny's brother left them behind in a closet." McKinnon answered finally realizing the mistakes that brought him here, but he also seemed scared straight and wanted to explain why. "Joey wanted to get even with Sadler and Kendall for shooting our ride."
"You're too late." Catherine lifted her head. "Someone else got them a few days ago. " She watched as McKinnon reacted unexpectedly to the news.
"You want to tell us what happened at the diner?" Brass lifted his head up. "And be careful what you say, because I'll know if you're lying."
"Joey had a chip on his shoulder with Sadler…" McKinnon started with his voice straining. "He'd worked himself into making a hit, and this guy on the cycle really ticked him off. He had to get him and we followed him up the road to the diner…" McKinnon flashed back upon that night. It was as if it had just happened. The power of fear, the taste of blood spraying and the fear of what they had unleashed. He had never lived through anything so close to a war before and he didn't want to relive it. Joey wanted to kill something that night; he wanted to take something out of his life that annoyed him and he didn't care if it was a person. That motorcyclist was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
"Hey, is that your hog out there?" It was a few days earlier and Joey Vasquez sneered with disrespect to the cyclist. "You cut me off at the crossroads."
"You should have stopped at the sign." The motorcyclist now known as Ares Marshall Reason answered.
"You telling me how to drive?" Vasquez was backed by Kenny Groth and Frank Wright, two other high school dropouts under the deluded notion that a high school education was a waste of time and fear and intimidation was all they needed. Behind them, McKinnon stood stealing French fries from one of the customers.
"Hey," Jack Hollander called through the order window at the pieces of human trash. "I don't want you punks harassing my customers."
"Shut up old man or else I ventilate your stupid freaking diner!" Vasquez shot a look of human disrespect and turned back to his new source of hated. "How bout it, biker-man? You got what it takes?"
"I'm giving you one chance to walk way." The biker sipped his soda as Ruby waited fearfully to give the man his sizable dinner. "You don't want to go there. How about you do something smart for a change because if you mess with me, you won't see another day."
That was the wrong thing to say in a volatile situation with a teenage youth wanting to die in a blaze of glory. Striking the glass of soda from the man's hand, Vasquez reached to his back as Groth pulled out his choice of a problem-solver in the form of an automatic .38 revolver. Prue Pryde hit the floor under her table as her husband shielded her and their kids. Howard tried to bolt for the door and one of the truckers backed by his peers rushed for the teenage gangster wanna-be. Joey fired face first into the biker's fast and he flung backward fast to the floor and Ruby Hollander dropped a plate to start screaming at the person being killed before her. There were a lot of witnesses to what had happened and after killing one person, Joseph Geraldo Vasquez did not think against killing one more. How bout two more? First, he shot Ruby to stop her from screaming and Kenny Groth opened fire as well to plug the biker one more time, but his gun went off too early and hit the trucker with a spray of blood. Frank Wright shot Jerome Howard thinking he was being attacked. Not even looking at where he was fired, Vasquez closed his eyes and continued pressing the trigger until his chamber was empty. When he partially opened his eyes, the figure unknowingly named Marshall Reason had lifted up off the floor amidst the spray of bullets, broken glass and electricity crackling from the destroyed lights and stood pulling on his jacket against the bullets embedding themselves against his impervious flesh.
"Why don't you idiots ever listen!" He roared losing his temper. "And I was really feeling good about myself!" He pulled his arm back and hurled a volley of electrical bolts and then another volley from his left hand as if he were hurling weapons. Vasquez was struck by the lightening first and flew backward hard between Wright and Groth and knocked McKinnon out of the way. Still refusing to deny what they were seeing, Wright and Groth started firing on Reason, but the shots didn't even faze him. Standing impervious to bullets bouncing off his body and passing through the aluminum shell of the diner, Reason fired with electro-static bursts in the form of lightning bolts firing from his fingertips. Watching from the safety outside the diner, McKinnon watched as Groth sailed backward fast and hit the concrete parking lot first. Another burst of electrical light crackling in the diner and Wright smacked into the wall above the entrance before falling to the floor and landing face first out to the exterior steps. Kenny had had enough. Shooting innocents was one thing, but he was not going to be fried by a bulletproof superman firing lightning bolts from his fingers. Firing his few last shots into the diner, Reason took out the last flickering light and the motorcycle by the entrance. His shot took out its gas tank and sprayed gasoline over the ground. With Frank dragging Joey into their car, Frank stumbled to the driver's seat and started the vehicle with his hands shaking. Watching his buddies leave without him, McKinnon was now left behind and he only heard plaintive crying from someone hiding inside. Also surveying the damage, Reason looked around the ruined interior, the dead bodies and multiple bullet holes and groaned upset and distraught.
"The old man is really going to have a conniption about this!" He told himself. He started for his cycle, saw the gas tank blown open from the hail of bullets and sneered his lip back. "I loved this thing too." He whined over material possessions and sighed out loud. As McKinnon watched, there was another burst of light, and Reason vanished inside it as if he wasn't bound by the rules of this world and just possibly belonged to another. McKinnon just watched the vision of his disappearance, heard the plaintive cries of wounded survivors inside the diner and then tore away from the site in his size eleven sneakers.
It was now a few days later again and Catherine Willows and Jim Brass just stared at McKinnon over his story. Even the attending officer chuckled out loud at the crazy story. Behind the mirror, Sara Sidle just mumbled to herself.
"You have got to be kidding." She silently asked herself. Brass meanwhile looked up at McKinnon while Catherine dropped her jaw looking for something to say.
"Were you on anything during the shoot out?" She asked.
"I knew you'd ask that." McKinnon dropped his head and pulled his fingers through his sandy blonde hair. "I wasn't high. Joey wanted us clean when we took out Sadler! It really happened."
"Really?" Brass looked to Catherine with a bemused grin then back toward the wayward youth. "Make me believe it."