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Flack looked at his watch for the fifth time in as many minutes. Dispatch had already been contact, help was on its way, but it still felt to him like they were wasting precious time. He knew that cutting a new hole in to the bunker would not be easy; it would be time consuming and slow paced and it would have no margin for error.
Thoughts of his friends' running out of air and dying, trapped on that blasted hole, circled non-stop inside his head. 'Think positive, Don. This is the twenty first century. They won't have to dig their way in… I hope'.
He would be the first to admit that he'd slightly panicked for those first few minutes before Mac contacted him. Divided between the knowledge that he would have to leave the scene to call for backup and gut wrenching need to determine if the others were still alive, the detective hadn't heard the thumping sound at first.
The hollowed metallic sounds reaching him from deep inside the floor had sounded surreal at first, like something straight out of Poe's Tell-Tale Heart, beating under the floor boards. Then he noticed the sequential cadence and rhythm of the bangs and finally recognized it.
The coded letters formed the sweetest sentence Flack had ever heard, telling him that everyone was ok.
He'd hastily banged a reply back at them and hurried outside, to get a rescue team on the way. Playing it on the safe side, he had taken the victim's cell phone with him and had called the bomb squad, just to be sure that there wouldn't be any more surprises.
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"Help is on its way," Mac informed the others as he joined them on the floor. "We might as well make ourselves comfortable… this will take a while."
Stella looked around, remembering why they had gone down there in the first place.
"I don't think we'll get bored."
Deciding to make the best out of the whole situation, the team of CSIs started to process the room, starting with the ladder's hand grips and swiping the whole place in overlapping circles.
With only one kit' supply for the three of them, each took charge of a separate task. There were prints to be found and dusted, every piece of furniture and surface had to be carefully analysed, in searched of any possible trace left behind by the killer or one of his victims.
Mac had stopped at the four chairs, keeping with him a large supply of evidence bags. If this was where the killer had restrained the victims, this was where he would find traces of them. The killer might've been careful enough to wear gloves and clean any trace of his person, but the victims wouldn't.
Crouching next to the first chair on the left, Mac's gaze fell on the parka coat beneath the table. Something bulged from its middle. Taking his cell phone from his pants, the CSI quickly snapped a shot of his finding, before sliding the grey material closer to him.
The sound of metal tingled from inside the folders of the coat.
"Think I found something," he warned the other two.
Aiden and Stella joined him as he opened the coat and revealed a car's antenna and a small portable fire extinguisher. More shots were taken, this time with Stella's phone.
The antenna's tip had been relieved of its flat point and a rusty coloured substance covered almost half of its length. Aiden already had a swab in her gloved hand, ready to determine if the substance was blood.
The linen portion of her swab turned bright pink when it reacted with it.
"It's blood," she concluded. "If this matches the Emmerttons DNA, we have our stiletto-like weapon."
"From the tip's configuration and radius, I say it might be," Stella said, grabbing the fire extinguisher. The blunt end of the powder bottle was dented.
Holding her flash light closer to the indentation she asked for a pair of unused tweezers. Closer to the kit, Aiden bagged the bloody antenna and passed the tweezers to Stella, who, biting the flash light between her teeth, was soon holding a dark curly hair between the plastic pincers.
"And if this matches Ramirez's DNA, we have our blunt object," she added with a smile.
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