Chapter VI
Evidence or Lack There Of
Catherine stood over the body on the ME's table. The girl's throat had been cut and she'd bled out, like an animal about to be slaughtered. Postmortem, the killer had washed the girl and redressed her. The body still had the slight scent of baby powder and Johnson's Tear Free Shampoo. It struck Catherine as odd, the careful treatment of the body after death. She filed that away for later. The dress and Mary Jane shoes were new, but they were unremarkable. The dress could have come from any number of Department stores and the shoes could probably be found at every Wal-Mart in the nation. Catherine had sent the white ribbon from the girl's blonde hair to the print lab.
In the eerie lighting of the Autopsy Bay, Nadine Winters looked very much like Lindsey Willows and that scared Catherine down to the very core of her soul.
Sara was bent over the white dress and Mary Jane shoes. Just as Catherine had said when she'd dropped the clothes off, they were nondescript. Sara tape lifted a light powder from the crevice in the heel of the shoe's sole. She carefully labeled it and looked at the white dress. It was pretty without being frilly, youthful without being babyish. It was, she supposed, a staple in every little girl's wardrobe.
Sara scowled at the clothes, she'd done everything she could to lift some kind of clue or idea from them. All she had was a so-far unidentified powder.
She pushed her hair back behind her ears one more time and blew out a sigh. There was nothing else there to find. She rested her head in her hands and tried to go through the steps. If the physical evidence wasn't there, they'd go for witness accounts and circumstantial. What did they know? Nadine Winters had been a normal little girl and was, by all accounts and observations, happy. Sara sighed. Where to start? The school, she'd last been seen at her school. She looked at her watch, schools didn't even start until nine o'clock and it was three in the morning. All she could do was wait. Sara hated waiting, it was the worst part of her job. Waiting for results, waiting for a confession, waiting for the next case. Patience had never been one of her virtues.
She looked around. The lab's glass walls allowed her a glimpse into all of the other labs. Catherine and Wendy were bent over something in DNA. Sara had to smirk, those two were about as subtle as a bright purple Sherman tank.
In the trace lab, Hodges was bent over his microscope. In one of the other layout rooms, Nick and Warrick were going over their own case, which was not as sensational as theirs, but it was solvable. She knew that Greg was combing the databases, looking for matching cases and Grissom, Grissom was holed up in his office doing whatever it was he did.
She sighed and carefully rebagged the clothes. She would put them in the evidence locker and hope that someone else had turned up something.