Sins of the Past: Part Three
Greg Sanders was in a good mood when he arrived at the Crime Lab that night. While it was admittedly a rare occurrence for him to be in a truly bad mood, or at least a bad mood of any real duration, he found his current high spirits to be particularly pleasant. The previous afternoon he had been the high bidder for a 1960 Gordon & Smith surfboard -- mint condition no less -- on eBay; the price so low that it almost should have been illegal.
As though that hadn't been enough to secure his continuing good mood, he had then gone out to a club and met the girl of his dreams. She was tall, blonde, slender, had legs longer than any woman should have a right to have, and she had graciously parted with her phone number after he bought her the second drink. A quick and not entirely unethical computer check had been enough to assure him of the number's authenticity.
And so, caught up in his own good fortune, he was entirely unprepared for the tense silence that greeted him as soon as he entered the lab. He blinked in surprise as his private bubble of happiness dissolved around him in the face of the almost tangible tension that permeated the building.
Heading directly to the break room, he cornered Sofia. "What's with them," he asked, tilting his head sharply towards the door in an attempt to indicate everyone. "Who died?"
He meant it light-heartedly, a bit of a joke because, well, in their line of work a day didn't go by where they didn't encounter "someone who died." At the strained look on her face, he immediately regretted his attempt at humour.
"You haven't heard," she said cautiously.
Now that was the one answer you never wanted to hear to a rhetorical question like that. "Wait!" he gulped. "You mean someone did die? Who?"
"No!" she said quickly. "As far as I've heard, there's no solid evidence that he's dead."
"Who!"
"Nick. He's missing."
The air rushed out of his lungs and he sank into a chair. Nick was missing. It just didn't make any sense. Nick's a great guy: nice, easy going, the kind of guy that bad things just didn't happen to. Well, except for the time that he'd been suspected of murdering that call girl, and the whole thing with that stalker, Crane... So maybe bad things did happen to guys like Nick, but this... "Wow," he said softly. "I just don't believe it."
"Yeah," she said, casting a worried glance out the door. "Everyone's pretty upset."
"No shit," he said. "Do they have any idea what happened?"
"I just found out myself. I think they're still collecting evidence, but I heard something about blood spatter, so it doesn't look--"
"It's too early to make any kind of assumptions about that case," Grissom said sharply from the doorway, "and talk like that helps nothing. There are already three CSIs working Nick's case, leave the conjectures to them. If you two are ready to get to work, I have a case that needs your attention."
"Of course, sir," Sofia said, looking only somewhat ashamed.
Greg gave Grissom a sympathetic look. He knew that Nick and Grissom were close, and he had suspected for a while now that they were more than just friends. Not that it was any of his business. "You ok, Boss?" he asked cautiously.
"Fine," Grissom said shortly, handing over a case file. "This should be fairly cut and dry, a Homicide Detective was found handcuffed to his bathroom sink. He's not pressing charges, apparently it was some kind of lovers quarrel, but the officer in charge thinks there's more to the story and wants us to take a closer look. Get it done, and get back here, we're shorthanded tonight."
When they arrived at the scene they found an embarrassed looking Detective talking to a couple of uniformed officers. He renewed his protests that an investigation wasn't necessary but Greg reassured him that it was just a formality and that they would be out of his hair as quickly as possible.
They collected the evidence, and a bloodstained sheet found in a laundry bag, allegedly from a nosebleed, but were stalled briefly when the Detective refused to offer a DNA sample for comparison. Eventually he consented to the mouth swab, but Greg's suspicions were aroused. They hurried back to the lab to get the evidence processed before moving on to the next case already awaiting their attention. It was going to be a long night.
When Catherine arrived back at Nick's condo, Sara and Warrick had almost finished processing the scene. She waited until they had packed up their kits before hitting the lights. The blood spatter they had found was a fine spray and blended in too completely with the wall colour for her to be able determine the origin just by looking at it. The blood began to glow ominously as she sprayed the wall with luminol.
"Ok, it's definitely not cast-off from a weapon, or arterial spray," she said, trying to focus on the evidence before her without dwelling on the fact that this blood most likely belonged to Nick. "I've seen spatter like this before, usually in assault cases. Multiple blows to the head. Probably the first one broke his nose, started bleeding. I count three separate blood spray patterns. Judging by the height and angle of the droplets, he was still standing for the next two blows, but by the third he was on his knees."
She took a steadying breath before continuing. "The downward angle of the droplets suggests that the attacker was taller than N--the victim. Probably at least six-three." Taking a step back she began to spray the luminol on the floor. The bloodstain that appeared was several feet from the wall and had been smeared in a circular motion across the floor, over a two foot area, when it had been cleaned up.
"That's a lot of blood," Sara said quietly.
"Yeah," she said, still staring at the glowing swirls. "A lot of blood. Not enough to indicate that the attack was fatal though, probably less than a pint. There are no drag marks, and that suggests to me that he walked away from it. There's no way one person could move a hundred and fifty pounds of dead weight without leaving drag marks behind."
"If he walked away," Warrick said, "then where the hell did he go?"
She picked up her camera and prepared to photograph the evidence. "That's what we have to find out."
Back at the lab, Warrick took Nick's answering machine to the sound lab for analysis while Sara processed the DNA and fingerprint evidence they had collected at the condo. His shift had ended hours ago, but he wasn't going anywhere until someone forcibly kicked him out. They had already lost days on this case, and the more evidence they found, the less certain he was that they would be finding Nick in one piece.
The answering machine was an old model, cheaply made, and the tape had been reused too many times, distorting the voices and overlaying them with static. There were ten messages on the tape. Three of them were from Grissom, though he hadn't left his name and Warrick had to listen to the messages several times before he recognized Grissom's voice from the low quality recording. The last of those messages was from a week and a half ago and it sounded concerned. Apparently Grissom had been worried about Nick long before he found out he was missing.
"Find anything?"
He turned and saw Greg standing at the door. "Yeah, but still not enough to know what happened. There was blood at the scene."
"I heard. Do you think..." Greg paused, obviously reconsidering his words. "Is Nick still alive?"
"I hope so, man. I really hope so." He looked back at the answering machine. "I'm hoping that this will get us somewhere; there's seven messages on here from some guy, and he doesn't sound friendly. As soon as we get Nick's phone records in, I'll check and see if I can find out who left them. The thing is, I know I've heard that voice before, but I can't place it." He pressed a button on the machine and listened to the final message again.
"Nick, you better come see me, and I mean soon. You know what will happen if you don't, and I know you don't want that. Ignoring me won't make this go away, and my patience won't last forever."
"That's definitely a threat of some kind," Greg said. "Why does it sound so distorted?"
"Tape's bad. I might be able to clean it up a bit, but it won't be enough for any kind of a voice match. Hell, I listened through three messages from Grissom before I even figured out they were from him. Can't see why he calls Nick so often."
Greg gave him an incredulous look. "You're kidding, right?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Greg stared at him searchingly for a moment, then shook his head. "Nothing, just that they've been friends for a while now. I can't believe you haven't noticed. With the way Nick's been acting lately, it makes sense he'd call to check on him. Anyway, play that tape again. The voice did sound sort of familiar."
They listened through the message one more time, but Greg just shook his head. "I really can't tell," he said. His pager went off and he glanced down at it. "My DNA results are in, I've got to go. Hopefully you'll find something in the phone records."
He set to work trying to clean up the tape; one of the messages had some background noise that he thought might be useful if he could filter out everything else. He had barely gotten started, however, when Greg rushed back in.
"I think I know who's voice that is on the tape."
"Who?" Warrick asked, surprised.
"Fredrick Henderson, he's a homicide detective."
Warrick frowned, trying to place the name. "Big guy, brown hair? Looks like he should be a pro-wrestler? Yeah, he was on that case Nick and I worked on Friday, double murder. It does sort of sound like him, now that you mention it, but why would a detective be threatening Nick?"
"I can't prove that's him on the message, but he was found handcuffed to his bathroom sink earlier tonight, and he wasn't being very cooperative about it. I found a bloody sheet in his laundry and brought it in for testing." He held out the lab results. "That blood matches Nick's DNA."
Gil looked exhausted, but Catherine knew that it would be useless to try and convince him to go get some sleep. She was tired herself, but there was no way she was leaving before they had more answers. Officially she knew that Gil couldn't have any involvement with this case, but she had spent the last twenty minutes going over everything that they had found. She felt that he deserved that much at least. "The blood spray pattern is consistent with a single attacker," she said, reaching the end of her list of facts.
"Do you have any suspects?" he asked.
"Not yet," she said, "but I promise that I'll let you know as soon as we do."
There was a knock at the door and they turned to see Greg and Warrick standing outside. Warrick lifted a stack of printouts. "We've got something."
Catherine nodded for them to come into the office. "Ok, what have you got?"
"The case I worked earlier tonight," Greg said, glancing over at Grissom. "Detective handcuffed to his sink? Well, I found a bloody sheet at the scene. The blood's Nick's."
Grissom looked up sharply. "Did you find anything else at the scene?"
"Not really," he said, looking uncomfortable. "The case wasn't high priority and the Detective's story seemed to check out."
Grissom turned to Catherine. "You need to get that Detective in here for questioning now, and send a team back there to see if there's any more evidence at the scene."
"I'll get right on it," she said grimly. Looking back to Greg and Warrick she asked, "Got anything else for me?"
"Yeah," Warrick said. "DNA results from Nick's condo, I haven't had a chance to look at them yet." He flipped through the printouts. "DNA from the blood we found is definitely Nick's, but that's not really a surprise."
"No," she said, "unfortunately it's not."
"DNA on the second toothbrush matches the DNA from the condom that was in Nick's trash. Same donor on both." Warrick frowned and looked at the paper again. "Wait a second, same male donor. Nick's gay? I wouldn't have figured him for that. He said himself that he's a 'ladies man.'" He shrugged. "Guess you never know. I'll run it through the system, but I doubt we'll get a match..." He looked up to see both Catherine and Greg staring uncomfortably at Grissom. "Something I'm missing here?"
Grissom turned and grabbed a DNA swab from a box behind his desk. He swabbed the inside of his cheek before recapping it and handing it to Warrick. "You'll need to run this for comparison purposes, but I think you will find that it's a match."
Warrick stared at the swab for a long moment before looking up at Grissom, his eyes wide with shock. "Wait, you mean, you...and Nick? Damn it! I just knew I was going to be finding out more about Nick's sex life than I wanted know. No offence, man, but that is so not the way I like to find out about things like this."
"I'll keep that in mind," Grissom said stiffly. "Now, if you have nothing more to report, I would like the use of my office back."
Warrick just stood there, stunned, until Greg grabbed his arm and steered him out of the office. "Come on," Greg said, "let's go see if Sara has anything. All right?"
Catherine waited until the door shut behind them before turning back to Grissom. "Don't take it personally," she said. "Warrick would have been just as freaked out to learn that Nick was sleeping with Sara. It's just been a long night, and we're all on edge."
He smiled wryly. "I would have been rather disturbed to learn that myself; I don't think Sara is Nick's type."
"You know what I meant," she said. "But that brings us to another problem. You do realise that they're probably in there telling her right now."
"Yes, well at this point I don't really think--" he broke off and frowned worriedly. "Oh."
"Yeah, 'oh' is right. You're going to have to talk to her."
"Damn it, Catherine. I can't deal with this right now too. Sara is just going to have to work through her feelings on her own."
"Sara is professional enough to keep her feelings to herself until this is over with, but once we find Nick -- and we will find him -- you're going to have to talk about it. But for now..." her face hardened, "I think we need to have a little chat with Detective Henderson."
Gil stood at the observation window, watching the man who sat in the interrogation room. Detective Henderson looked far too calm as he sipped his coffee and lounged easily in the purposely uncomfortable chair. No one, cop or not, had any right to look that calm after being called in for questioning at two in the morning. Either he was an extremely skilled actor, or he had nothing to hide.
Either way, it made Gil nervous. This was the only lead they had so far. "I'm going in there with you," he said.
"You know why that isn't possible," Catherine said cautiously.
"That wasn't a request, Catherine," he said firmly. "I'm going to be in there when you question him."
She sighed and shook her head slowly. "Ok, but don't make me regret this. Are you sure you can handle it?"
He didn't bother to reply, simply turned to the door. They had left Detective Henderson waiting for as long as they could. Evidence aside, professional courtesy still had to be extended, even to a suspect. When they reached the interrogation room, Gil stepped back and allowed Catherine to enter first, she would be taking the lead in this.
"Detective Henderson," she said as she took a seat. "Thank you for coming in so quickly. I'm Catherine Willows, and this is Gil Grissom, we have some questions for you."
The man smiled widely, but the expression didn't reach his eyes. Setting down his coffee, he propped his elbows on the table and leaned forward slightly, tilting his head to one side. "I don't suppose I need to ask what this is about."
"Probably not," she agreed, pulling a photograph of the bloody sheet from the folder she was holding and dropping it onto the table. "One of our CSIs is missing, and that's his blood on your sheet. You want to tell us how it got there?"
Gil gritted his teeth as he looked at the photograph. He had already seen it, but it still made him mad. It might not be much blood, but it was Nick's blood.
Detective Henderson glanced at the photo and shrugged. "Not much to tell. Nick bled on it."
"You know Nick, then," Catherine said cautiously.
The detective smiled coldly, a silver crown on his front tooth flashing briefly in the fluorescent light. "I don't often let complete strangers bleed on my good sheets." He gave them both a long look before continuing. "If you'd looked at my service record, you'd know I know Nick. He was my partner, back on the force in Dallas."
Catherine frowned, the news obviously taking her by surprise. In their rush to question Henderson, they had not had time to go over his record in detail. "You transferred here a month ago, is that right?"
"That's right," he agreed, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms lightly across his chest. His right hand was wrapped in a gauze bandage.
Tapping the photograph and coming back to her original line of questioning, Catherine asked, "Why was Nick bleeding?"
"Never did get a straight answer out of him," Henderson said, shaking his head and frowning slightly. "Nick showed up at my door, early Saturday morning, probably around two, two-thirty. He'd had the crap beat out of him. Said he was in a bar fight, but I didn't believe him."
"Why not?"
"He wasn't drunk, for one thing. Didn't smell like smoke, either," he said. "You can't spend any amount of time in a bar and not smell like smoke. Besides, I know Nick. I might have lost touch with him over the years, but you can't spend three years as a guy's partner and not get to know him. Nick isn't a drinker, and he's certainly not the kind of guy who gets into bar fights."
Catherine nodded. "Ok, so you didn't believe his story. What do you think happened?"
"Now that, I can't tell you," he said with a shrug.
"What happened to your hand?" Gil asked, earning a warning look from Catherine.
Henderson blinked and glanced down at his bandaged hand. "I spent twelve hours chained to my bathroom sink. Most of that I was bangin' on the wall trying to get someone's attention. Bloodied most of my knuckles before anyone got around to calling the police." He pushed up his left sleeve to display the chafe marks around his wrist, where the handcuffs had dug into his skin.
"And how, exactly, did you find yourself handcuffed to your sink?" Gil asked.
"Listen," Henderson said with a sigh. "I don't want to get Nick into any more trouble than he's already in."
"You told the responding officers that it was a lover's quarrel," Gil pressed. "Lying in a police investigation is a crime."
Catherine tensed, obviously wondering how to take control of the interview again.
"I may not have told them everything, but that doesn't make it a lie," he said with a cold smile. "You want me to lay it out for you? Okay. Nick crashed at my place all weekend; I think he was hiding from someone. As beat up as he was, I was betting on hired muscle. Drug dealer. Loan shark, maybe. Nick never struck me as the type to get involved in that kind of thing, but after moving to Vegas, who knows.
"Woke up Monday morning and he was still there. I suggested that he might want to get some help of a more official nature. File a report. Much as I like the guy, he couldn't keep hiding out at my place forever. He flipped out, grabbed my piece, made me cuff myself to the sink, and then he took off. End of story." Henderson narrowed his eyes and frowned at Gil. "Grissom, is it? Yeah, Nick mentioned you. Maybe I was looking at this the wrong way. Maybe Nick's troubles were the kind found a bit closer to home. Mind showing me your hands, Doctor Grissom?"
Gil stood and placed both his hands flat on the table, leaning in towards Henderson. "If I find out you're lying to us, I'll have your badge," he said in a low tone. Straightening, he turned towards Catherine. "You can finish up in here, I've got work to do." He strode quickly from the room before he could give in to the urge to say anything that he might later regret.
Jim Brass met him in the hallway, his face disapproving. "I was watching, Gil. You never should have been in there."
"I know that," he said shortly, not slowing his pace as he walking angrily towards his office. "I don't believe his story."
"The evidence backs him up, and from everything I've seen and heard, Henderson is a good detective." Brass sighed and grabbed Gil's arm, dragging him to a halt. "Gil, you can't work this case."
"You want me to stop looking for Nick? I'm not going to do that."
"No, I want you to see that you're too close to this," Brass said. "I want you to let the rest of us do our job."
"Henderson is still hiding something."
"Yes," Brass agreed. "I think he is. But is he hiding it to protect himself, or to protect Nick?"
TBC
