"Ms. Keller," he replied with a smile. "This is my job."
"Of course," she acknowledged with a hand wave, pulling her hands away from Grissom's. It was obvious she had settled on the idea that Grissom had personally decided to respond to her distress. "Such a terrible thing, such a dear girl, such a logistical nightmare. Have you applied for your refund yet?"
Warrick shifted on his feet, and decided on suspect number one. Theater was a financial nightmare, he knew, especially in a city where culture took a second place to spinning roulette wheels. But to have the company director more concerned about the logistics of refunds than about the imminent death of one of her actors?
"We went directly home," Grissom was telling Ms. Keller. "May we see the backstage area, please?"
We. Warrick swiveled on his heel to look at Sara where she was standing very close to Grissom. She caught his eyes and nodded slightly, confirming his unasked question. Huh.
"Of course," Ms. Keller said, waving her hands again, and Warrick began to wonder if it was a nervous habit or a learned affectation to make her look more theatrical. Either way, it was incredibly annoying. "But I'm sorry, where are my manners? I'm Jessica Keller, the theater director."
Each CSI nodded in turn, and then Jessica turned with another flourish of her hands and led them through the lobby and down the loges, then through a set of swinging double doors. The decor instantly became more austere, concrete floor and eggshell white walls, with spare track lighting.
Sara hung back and Warrick adjusted his stride to come up next to her, nudging her shoulder to jar her from her thoughts. "Even on a date, huh?"
She furrowed her brow as if she didn't quite follow him, or could follow him and didn't like where he was going, but finally shrugged and grinned wryly. "Apparently."
He chuckled in return, and the mood was lightened considerably. He hadn't expected her to offer up more than that; while the entire team knew about Grissom and Sara's relationship in theory, in practice none of them except perhaps Catherine had ever been able to glean a single detail, and she was guarding those details ferociously.
"Her dressing room," Jessica gestured.
Brass was already standing by the open door, and jerked his chin to acknowledge them when they arrived. "I've got all the remaining actors and other personnel in the auditorium. Dressing room is all yours."
"Remaining?" Grissom queried, sounding distinctly displeased.
"We didn't know Bianca had been...poisoned...for some time," Jessica explained as she waved her arms around, and Warrick had a completely irrational desire to grab her hands and hold them still. "Several company members asked to leave, and I saw no reason not to grant their request."
Grissom grunted in response, and leaned to poke his head in the dressing room door over the crime scene tape. "Divide and conquer. Catherine, you go with Brass. Treat the stage as a crime scene and interview anyone who was in the scene the victim fainted in." Catherine nodded and Brass held out his arm for her to precede him down the hall. "Nick, Warrick, the green room."
"Green room?" Nick asked.
"Why would you need to see the green room?" Jessica asked, a hint of irritation showing through.
"Bianca Tolmen was poisoned. We'll need to collect any food she may have had contact with and bring it back to the lab for testing." Turning to Nick, Grissom added "The green room is the place where actors rest in between scenes."
"Got it," Nick replied.
"Where is it?" Warrick asked, turning to address himself to Jessica. She fluttered her hands again and he repressed a sigh.
"This way. I'll take you."
"Here we go," Sara murmured, slipping on her latex gloves with a satisfying snap.
Grissom leaned forward to push the door fully open, revealing a small easy chair that had been hidden. Other than that, the room was tiny enough for them to see all of it from the door way.
Sara picked up the heavy camera and snapped a few locator shots. Besides the easy chair on the right wall, there was a battered dressing table with a mirror against the back wall, a wooden chair pulled up in front of that, and what looked like a small trash can in the right hand corner. She stood up on her toes and confirmed that - a small wire mesh trash can, of which she could just barely see the edge.
To the left were two pegs on the wall, a pantsuit and two costume dresses hanging from them, and left of the pegs was a coat stand with a long sweater jacket and beret hanging off the pegs.
"I have a closet bigger than this room," Sara observed, tracking her flashlight across the dressing table. "There's some kind of liquid on the surface of the dressing table."
Grissom pulled his gloves on in turn. "Shoe prints," he instructed her, and Sara nodded. The carpet was thick and low, and she flipped open the translucent aqua top of her kit with a practiced gesture, sliding out the necessary equipment. Lifting prints electrostatically was mindless, simple work, and Grissom stayed silent at the door while she proceeded square by square. Within twenty minutes she had finished the first half of the room and lifted five separate useable prints.
"Some kind of residue powder over here," she called out from where she was on her hands and knees by the coat stand. Grissom ducked under the crime scene tape and handed her down some tape. Sara pressed down firmly on the carpet, picking up the light beige powder, and closed the tape up again, passing it up to Grissom.
Fifteen more minutes and Sara had two more prints and an aching back. She straightened slowly. "Done," she informed him, even though she was well aware that he had been watching her the entire time.
Grissom was swabbing the spilled liquid on the table. "Water," he said, sounding slightly disappointed. He capped the swab and slid it back into the box anyway.
"It's been what, five, six hours since she fainted?" Sara theorized aloud. "There must have been a lot of it to evaporate and still leave some."
His only response was a low "hmmm."
She continued to think aloud. "Did the hospital say how she was poisoned?"
He shook his head. "All they knew is that it was strychnine."
"Could've been oral," she offered, leaving his side to snap a picture of the trashcan and then to lean over and pick it up. "Grissom, take a look at this."
Within seconds he was looking over her shoulder, as close as physically possible without actually touching, and Sara hid her small smile. "Roses?"
"Looks like a dozen," Sara said, tilting the trash can so she could count. "No, two dozen. Wow, some guys really know how to make an impression."
He turned his head toward her, and looked so adorably confused that Sara had to resist the urge to kiss him. Instead she settled for smiling broadly at him and then turning back to the trash can. "Of course, if that's your thing. I've always been more of a plant girl, myself. Cut flowers die quickly."
His warm breath pushed aside the hair at her neck, and she nearly jumped, finally deciding that this innocent flirtation had gone far enough. Setting the trash can down, she knelt beside it on the carpet, beginning to photograph and catalogue each item, still speaking aloud out of habit.
"Makes you wonder why a girl would throw away two dozen roses, though. And the vase. Oh, that's going to be a pain to fingerprint." She turned the heavy, faceted crystal vase around in her gloved hand, admiring its craftsmanship and the way the drops of water still clinging to the inside refracted the light.
"Fiber on the chair," Grissom announced from a few feet away where he was tape lifting the surface of the easy chair. "Black and white strands, and it's not the same material."
Sara pulled the roses out of the trash, careful not to catch her gloves on the thorns, and tipped them up so she could take a closer look. "These are definitely fresh, probably got them tonight. I wonder who sent them, that she didn't want them?"
Grissom didn't answer, and Sara slid the roses into an evidence bag and moved on to the next level of trash. Below the vase of roses was a crumpled piece of cardboard. Unfolding it carefully, Sara read the inscription aloud. "For love is as strong as death... Many waters cannot quench love, nor can the floods drown it." Still no answer, and Sara decided to prod Grissom a bit. "Now, see, there's a sentiment."
"It's plagiarized," Grissom commented from where he was examining the seams of the chair. "Song of Solomon."
"So you were paying attention." She sat back on her heels and watched him dig white powder out of a seam and into a bindle.
"I always pay attention," he chided her. "No name?"
"Nope. It's hard to read, even. The water from the flowers has blurred the words a lot. I'll get it straight to Ronnie when we get back, he should have fun with it." Continuing with the trash can, Sara bagged a tissue with lipstick and other makeup residue, a Luna bar wrapper with a little bit of peanut butter still stuck to it, and an empty mascara tube. "Nothing really out of the ordinary besides the roses and the card. You got anything?"
He didn't answer, and she shrugged and pulled the chair out from the desk to sit down and began sorting through the objects lined up on the clear plastic placed on top of the wooden top. Underneath the plastic was a charming and random collage of old photos of actresses in color-tint and black and white, copies of vintage theater posters, and dried flowers. But lined up on top of the plastic-trapped collage, Bianca Tolmen had more makeup than Sara had ever owned in her life. With a long-suffering sigh, she began to mark each tube of lipstick and each case of blush into evidence. "Greg is going to scream bloody murder."
"Let him," Grissom said easily, coming up behind her and shining his flashlight on the pictures suck into the frame of the makeup mirror. "Do you think that's our Bible-quoting rose-sender?"
The picture in question showed two people in Mickey Mouse ears in front of Cinderella's castle, arms around each other's waists, smiling for the camera. Bianca Tolmen was on the left in a white tank top and khaki shorts, dark hair loose and down to her waist, a carefree grin on her face. The man beside her could have posed for GQ in his carefully pressed gray polo shirt and pleated khaki pants. Whereas the Mickey Mouse ears looked as natural as such a hat could look atop Bianca's head, the man wore his awkwardly atop tightly curling blond hair, and his smile was one of abashed chagrin. His arm rested possessively on Bianca's waist, though, and she leaned into him.
Sara slid the picture out from the frame and read the back. "'Disneyland, '99.' No names." Next was an aged snapshot of an older man and woman who looked enough like Bianca to be family - probably parents. Bianca, it seemed, took after her father and showed evidence of a Native American heritage: striking cheekbones, dusky olive skin, and luxurious dark hair.
There were other pictures, one of an unidentifiable group of people mounted on mules at the Grand Canyon, one of a gray tortoiseshell cat craning his neck up at the camera, and one of Bianca and the same man from Disneyland in a gondola.
"That's not the Venetian," Sara said matter-of-factly.
Grissom tapped a bridge clearly visible in the background of the photo. "The Bridge of Sighs. That's really Venice."
"So our mystery man is loaded," she said wryly, putting the photo in another evidence bag. "I don't know much about theater, but I know that you don't do it for the money."
"Very true," Grissom agreed. "Especially not in Vegas. Someone with as much talent as Bianca Tolmen showed on stage could very easily make her way as a showgirl and earn a lot more money than doing Shakespeare."
Sara frowned at the picture for a moment, and then continued searching through the drawers of the desk.