Chapter 3 – Dead-ends and Dumbasses.
Disclaimer – I own CSI! I rule the Universe! Jorja Fox and Marg Helgenburger do lap dances for me every night! (Sounds of hysterical laughter gradually turn to sobs.)
Notes – Spoilers from no episode. This is basically a little comic relief. And a plot thickener."Okay, Sara, I'm trying to make sense of this, see a deeper reason for it, but nothing's coming. Help me out here."
Sara grinned and walked over to a bemused Greg. They were at the 419 location where a pair of enterprising young would-be armed robbers had decided to start their shining career. The result had been an unqualified screw-up that had left one bad guy dead and the other on the run.
Detectives Denver and Vartann were done taking the witness statements from the owner (some poor old Cambodian guy who looked close to collapsing), the customers and a guy across the street who saw the whole thing. Each account supported the other, so it wasn't likely that they were lying.
Apparently, both guys had arrived in a green Cadillac devoid of licence plates wearing ski masks and jumpsuits and carrying sawn-off shotguns. They had entered the shop, demanded the cash from the register, and one had promptly blown the other's head off!
The remaining guy had just stood there for a moment, then he'd taken off out the door and down Fremont Street. On foot. In a ski mask and carrying a shotgun. In broad daylight.
Meanwhile the vehicle they had arrived in remained on the side of the road, without licence plates and with the keys in the ignition. Hence Gregory's confusion.
"My guess would be, plain stupidity." Sara knew a moron when she saw one's handiwork.
"So, what, do we check the inside of the vehicle for trace evidence, or do we just wait for this guy to trip over a shoelace and blow himself in two?"
In answer, Sara shone her torch inside the vehicle. "Greg, what's that?"
Greg pulled on a pair of latex gloves and checked where Sara was pointing. "Well spotted, Sar. Let's see, it's a...oh, you have GOT to be kidding!"
"What? What is it?" Sara could tell from Greg's tone of voice that it was something good.
Smirking wryly, Greg pulled a MacDonald's uniform shirt from under the seat. The nametag featured a grinning Ronald MacDonald with a speech bubble that read 'Hi! My name is Paul!'
"Oh, yeah. We're clearly dealing with a couple of jeniuses here. Emphasis on the 'J'"
Greg was shaking his head, his expression somewhere between exasperation and amusement. "What kind of a moron gets changed for a heist inside the car, then leaves the car at the scene with the evidence inside?"
"The kind that shoots his own partner in the back before they've got the cash. Okay, while you check the local MacDonald's restaurants for a Paul who owns a green caddy, I will see if I can't ID our dead felon."
"Let me finish up inside the car first. You never know, they might have forgotten to wear gloves and left prints on the gear shift."
"Judging from what we've seen here, I wouldn't put that level of intelligence past these two bozos."
"Hey, Sara!" Vartann was yelling to get her attention. Sara walked over to him.
"Denver may have just found your murder weapon. Sawn-off shotgun found in the bushes over there, along with a ski mask."
"Ooh. Good for Denver. And great for me. Let's take a look."
Jaqui Franco, hailed throughout the Las Vegas Crime lab as the Princess of Prints, sat at her desk, waiting for AFIS to spit out a result. Catherine Willows, soon-to-be Day shift supervisor and Franco's best friend in Vegas, had given her fifty-three prints to run, and Franco was currently doing what she did best. Running them.
Franco was the best at what she did for two main reasons. Firstly, she knew by heart almost every technique for turning unviable prints into viable ones. She could use vacuum metal deposition on plastic bags in record time, she could identify the most obscure details on blurred or partial prints, she could separate any number of overlapping prints on a surface, you name it.
Secondly, she wasn't bored by the wait as AFIS examined her prints for her. Most lab techs could be driven mad by just standing around doing nothing as their machines did their ponderous work, but patience was one of Jaqui's virtues. She could wait for days for a print if she had to, eating and sleeping at the lab. What time she lost there, she made up for in spades later on...
The machine buzzed harshly. Jaqui was caught out by the unfamiliar sound. She leaned in to examine the screen, and frowned. "What the hell?"
Franco tried a few choice keys that had always helped her in the past, but five minutes and a slap on the mainframe later, the same result was present. Rubbing her brow in confusion, she headed off to find Cath.
She wasn't going to like this...
Sara and Greg were still laughing when Grissom and Catherine found them, holding their sides, their faces beetroot red, practically doubled over.
"Wow. What did we miss?"
At the sound of Catherine's voice, Sara pulled herself together as well as she could. "Grissom. Cath. Good, we-we wanted to tell you..." Sara broke of as a wave of hysterics broke over her. She swallowed and continued. "Okay, um, we wanted to tell you that we are done with the Robbery-Homicide case, and if you guys need backup on a real case, here it is."
"You finished up already?" Grissom was astounded. "How did you manage that?"
"Our guy was a few fries short of a happy meal." Greg broke in, his laughs reduced to the occasional giggle. "It wasn't exactly difficult to get him."
So Greg and Sara told Grissom and Catherine about the car with the shirt inside, and how one guy had accidentally killed the other. Sara told them how the tossed shotgun had in fact been the murder weapon. Bobby Dawson from Ballistics had confirmed a match between cartridge cases at the scene and cartridges inside the gun. Also, prints from inside the vehicle and on the gun had matched one Paul Metts from Utah. His prints were in AFIS for an indecent exposure charge three years ago.
Paul Metts had turned out to be a sullen, oily-haired little asshole, ugly as a bucket of crap and about half as intelligent. Greg had caught him at the fourth MacDonald's he came to, trying to explain to his boss why he was late for work and why he had turned up in a jumpsuit with blood splattered on the front. Detective Denver had nearly wet himself laughing when he made the arrest.
Then there was the interrogation room. Oh, they would not forget that for a while.
When the suspect had been brought in for questioning, Greg had asked him why the hell he had left his vehicle at the scene and hightailed it on foot. Metts' response was that he had forgotten which car was his.
At this point Sara had pointed out, slowly and carefully, as if she was speaking to a very dull child, that his car had been the only green Cadillac without licence plates for three miles. Metts, growing sulkier by the minute, had told her that he hadn't taken off the licence plates, his friend John (the dead guy) had, so how was he to know?
Greg had then chimed in with the further revelation that the Cambodian owner kept all of the store's income in a very large safe with a combination lock. Greg had been wondering, how had Einstein and Newton been planning to break into the safe without the aid of blowtorches, explosives or any other form of safe-cracking equipment?
Metts had explained to Greg, as if he had been the one who was talking to a doofus and not the other way around, that they weren't going to break the safe, just take it with them. In case that wasn't enough, Metts added a schoolyard style 'Duuuhh!'
An exasperated Sara decided to skip the obvious difficulties of two fairly skinny men trying to lift a two-ton safe out of a shop while still holding the entire place at gunpoint, and went straight to the blindingly obvious; that the safe wouldn't fit inside the Cadillac anyway.
"No problem, lady. We were gonna call a pickup truck." That had genuinely been the response of the increasingly stupid Metts.
Greg, now realising that they had planned to leave their vehicle behind all along, had tried to enlighten this perfect example of stupidity as to how such a course of action would have led to their arrest. Metts had looked at them craftily, about to reveal the really clever part of his plan; they were going to bribe the cops. Metts also asked the two CSI's if they were interested in a share of the money.
Greg had cupped his hands together and almost yelled "But you don't have the money!" Metts had the answer, as always.
"How about an IOU until I can hit that place again?"
That was all it took. Sara's head had thumped down onto the desk as her poor, tired brain tried to make some sense of what this certified idiot was saying to her, while Greg exploded into gales of laughter. Vartann, not without difficulty and through tears of mirth, led the suspect away to the lockup.
Having heard this story, it was all Catherine could do to look more than a little confused. "But...if he...wait a minute...his friend took off the...plates...but wouldn't he...have known...? Wait...maybe...I...I don't..."
"Don't tell me you're trying to find common sense in this?" Grissom was wearing an expression of wry amusement. It was not the first time he had dealt with morons; he had seen this kind of thing many times over.
But Catherine persisted. "And he went straight back to his workplace afterwards? In bloody clothes? I mean, was this guy not aware of the concept of forward planning?"
"I don't think this guy was aware of the concept of putting one foot in front of the other!" Greg was still howling.
"Wait, wait. This is the really amazing part. Greg found a fake shotgun in the car, and I found one at the scene. Apparently, our guys were planning on using the fakes to hold up the store, and were only going to break out the real one if it turned ugly. Paul Metts just picked up the wrong gun." Sara was beaming.
"I still don't get how this guy could possibly have mistaken a real shotgun for a plastic one, or how they were going to get out of the store if the owner found out they weren't really armed." Greg interjected.
Grissom held up his hand. "See, this is why I do bugs. I gave up trying to work out human behaviour a long time ago."
Sara got to the point. "Anyhow, we're free if you need any help with the Ecklie case. How is that going, by the way?"
Cath checked her watch. "Jaqui should be done with the prints soon. We'll know then."
"You'll know now." Franco entered the room looking about as pissed off as Catherine had ever seen her at work. At least, since she lost that bet with Greg...
Grissom cut to the chase. "What's up with our prints?"
Franco took a breath. "Okay, obviously I got Ecklie and his wife, Angela, their prints are everywhere, but I found another set on Ecklie's desk. Ran 'em through AFIS, and they came back Compliance!"
"Uh, oh!" Greg sat bolt upright, his earlier jolly look replaced by one of deep apprehension. A Compliance result meant that the prints belonged to someone within the department.
"That's not the worst part. When I asked for clarification, the computer told me the information was unavailable. I tried a break-in code that usually works when AFIS freezes, but the details just weren't there!" Jaqui looked mad as hell, and Grissom couldn't blame her.
If the prints were on file but there were no specifics, that meant only one thing: Someone had tampered with AFIS.
And now the entire crime lab had become one collective suspect!
Author's Note: Sorry about this chapter taking a while. I was low on ideas, and I had to get that Weeping Willows thing off my chest (see 'What I'm Here For'). I'll try and make the next one a little faster.
P.S. wdbydoglvr – If you're there, would you mind telling me, what is a Snickers challenge, what is an Unbound Improv response, and what is a C2 community? I'm probably being thicker than the guy I'm writing for this chapter, but I'm still new to this, and I'm curious. Please tell me? Thanks!