Warrick's voice called his attention to the small television in the corner of the green room immediately as they entered, and they could see Catherine pacing off a small section of the stage. "Ah." He turned to Jessica Keller, who was standing in the doorway. "Is this recorded?"
She shook her head. "Almost never. It's a closed-circuit television system so that the actors taking breaks between scenes can see what's going on onstage and know when to be in the wings."
"Almost never?" Nick prompted, the query in his voice obvious.
Jessica shrugged. "The system does have recording capabilities, but it's only engaged during rehearsals, as a learning tool, and during special performances so that we can then sell the tapes."
"Was it engaged last night?" Warrick asked, watching Catherine kneel down and photograph the floor of a constructed wedding altar onstage.
"I doubt it."
"But you're not sure."
Jessica narrowed her eyes, and any semblance of the ditzy woman who had greeted them disappeared behind the flint of her eyes. "I may be the director, but I don't know every single thing that goes on in this theater. No, I'm not sure."
"Where would the tape be, if it existed?" Warrick pressed.
"In the lighting box. The television system is controlled by the same system that regulates the sound for the pickup mikes." She frowned, and twitched her shoulders. "Yes, I'll bring you there."
"You all right here, man?" Warrick asked Nick, who nodded in answer.
"It's just bagging and tagging the food, nothing too complicated. See ya."
When Warrick and Jessica left, Nick turned his focus to the fridge, and slipped on gloves to begin the task of sorting through. Conceivably, Bianca could have come into contact with anything inside, so he began to enter food items into evidence.
Lean Cuisine dinners were side by side with cartons of leftover takeout, a few two liter bottles of store brand cola and cans of specific brands. Some of the tupperwares in the back smelled bad enough to kill by food poisoning, let alone any other chemical aid, and Nick left those where they were. No sense in bagging something Bianca would never have touched. Similarly, he left any unopened frozen - or semi-frozen, after a day in the fridge - meals. The rest, even if it was marked with someone else's name, went in bags specially insulated to transfer perishable frozen items.
Though, Nick reflected, if the poison turned out to be in someone else's dinner, then their case had just gotten a whole lot more complicated.
When he had finished with the fridge, he began going through the cupboards and bagged salt and pepper shakers. Not much else of interest in the shelves; the assorted mismatched dishes that collected in any community area, a few boxes of plastic silverware, heavy on the spoons.
His heart skipped a few beats when he pulled a bloodstained knife out from behind an old Looney Tunes jelly jar, but a closer examination showed that it was a stage knife, blood painted on the blade. When he pushed the plastic tip against the counter, it retracted into the handle easily, and he chuckled. Apparently he'd been the target of someone else's practical joke. With a grin, he replaced the knife where he'd found it in the cupboard.
Turning, he noticed for the first time that there were points of disturbance in the corner of the room - several chairs had been knocked over, and there was a blanket spread on the floor. Jessica hadn't said anything, but that had to be where they'd brought Bianca once she began to convulse. Retrieving his camera from its case, Nick began to take locator shots, sliding behind a table to get another angle on the scene.
"Hey."
Nick jumped, nearly overturning the table he was behind. "Dammit, Warrick, don't sneak up on me like that."
"Sorry," Warrick said, but his smirk indicated he wasn't sorry at all. "Look what I found." Between his index finger and thumb, he held up a VHS tape. "She swears she has no idea why the performance tonight was taped."
"Now that's convenient," Nick mused aloud. "Insists there's no tape, and then when one turns up, has no idea why it exists. I smell a rat."
"I don't really see what the point is, though," Warrick commented, pulling out an evidence bag to drop the tape into while Nick finished photographing the corner and folded up the blanket on the floor. If Bianca had indeed convulsed there, there was a good chance she had salivated and left amylase that could then be tested for strychnine, giving them an idea of dosage and manner of ingestion. "Five hundred people, including Grissom and Sara, saw her go down on stage, and didn't think anything of it. She didn't start seizing until she was backstage."
"And Sara?" Nick asked, jerking his head up to look at his friend from where he was bagging the blanket. "Whoa. That's weird." When Warrick shrugged, Nick stared at him. "You don't think that's weird?"
"Not really," Warrick said curtly, putting an end to that line of discussion. "You set in here?"
"Yeah," Nick responded, trying to push the image of his almost-sister and his boss out of his mind. He'd been able to deal with the theoretical, but the reality was...something else. "There's blood on this blanket. We'll get it tested, but it's probably hers, from biting her tongue or cheek during the seizure. We looking for anything else back here?"
"Dunno," Warrick said, spreading his hands, and leaned over to put the tape bag in the box with the other evidence Nick had collected from the green room. "I'll go check with Grissom."
"If not, I'm going to head back to the lab, give Greg a head start on all this." Nick's gesture took in the boxes of food. "Either way, I'm going to start bringing it out to the Tahoe."
"Cool. I'll give you a call if there's anything else for us to do."
Catherine followed Brass down the narrow hall and up a back stairwell. They emerged to a sight Catherine remembered from a hundred childhood dance recitals: the wings of a proscenium stage. They threaded their way through the ropes of the counterweight systems for the curtains, past sandbags and brooms and the occasional hanging clipboard to emerge onto the stage itself.
Even with the house lights on and a dozen angry theater personnel in the seats instead of a cheering public, there was something magical about being on stage. The heels of her boots clicked across the hardwood floor, sending an echo through the empty theater, and she had to repress the urge to spin around in sheer delight. It was the same ghost of a feeling she'd chased dancing around poles, only a thousand times more intense on a stage with this much grandeur.
Brass, unsurprisingly, was entirely immune, and pointed to stage right, where an impressively detailed wedding altar blended in with the background cloth, painted to resemble an Italian villa in springtime. Plastic vines trailed up columns, and a slight ramp led up to a carpeted landing. Arrayed diagonally toward the back of the stage were benches, placed so that the audience wouldn't be looking at a ninety degree angle at the wedding guests, but at more of a hundred-thirty degree angle, showing three quarters of their fronts. It was a forced optical illusion typical of theater set design that permitted actors to stay true to the rule to always keep their front to the audience, especially when working on a proscenium stage.
"She fainted there, right on schedule," Brass said, interrupting Catherine's memories of high school theater class. "Only she really fainted. She missed two lines, and they had to carry her off stage. At first, they thought she was just getting into the role, but as soon as they brought her downstairs, she went into seizures and they called the ambulance."
"I'll check it out," Catherine told him, and set her evidence kit down beside the raised platform, hooking the camera strap around her neck and snapping photographs of the wedding altar. When she'd taken shots from several angles, she set the camera down and began to examine the surface of the platform. It was short, tightly woven white carpet, designed to muffle the sound the actors made walking across it and yet still blend in with the rest of the set.
After twenty minutes of searching, Catherine had found almost no evidence at all save for some beige powder that she theorized was entirely innocuous. It was more or less as she had expected. Bianca Tolmen had been poisoned offstage; only her collapse had taken place onstage. It was still considered part of the crime scene, but it was the least likely location for anything that would help to advance the case.
Straightening, she brushed the white fiber from the carpet from her knees and made a moue of annoyance when it clung stubbornly. It wouldn't exactly be prudent to use the lint roll from her evidence kit to get rid of it, so after a few more ineffectual swipes, she resigned herself to its presence and descended the stairs in the middle of the stage to join Brass in the interviews.
Sara slid open the bottom left drawer of the dressing table and realized she was going to have to abandon the chair for the floor if she wanted to avoid getting a crick in her neck and do a proper search of its contents. Unfortunately, moving from the chair meant giving up Grissom's warm pressure against her right thigh as he sat on the floor, searching the contents of the right-hand drawers. She doubted he was conscious of the touch, but it had kept a small smile on her face through the past half-hour of quiet, monotonous searching.
Small sacrifices. She shut the drawer and dropped down to the floor where it had just been, reopening the drawer into her lap. Grissom had a theory that the lower you went in a desk, the more personal stuff got. She'd threatened to test that theory out once, applying it to his desk at work, and had relented at the horrified look on his face. In any case, she'd taken his reaction as confirmation.
So far, the theory was holding true for dressing tables, too. The first drawer had contained old theater programs, ticket stubs, pens and scrap paper, odds and ends of makeup that had all probably been there before Bianca had taken possession of this room for the duration of the show, and would more than likely have been left behind if Bianca had lived to move on - for there was no doubt that she was brain-dead, and would succumb to her coma within the next forty-eight hours at the latest.
The second drawer had been deeper, and had contained objects and supplies specific to this production; a tattered script, a worn-through garland of fake roses that Sara remembered from the wedding scene, a few cards from well-wishers congratulating her on opening night, the official playbill and a few professional photos taken for publicity purposes that showed Bianca in her white Renaissance dress, ribbons streaming through her hair, looking adoringly at the handsome young man who had played Claudio.
And finally, the third drawer, deeper still, which contained a white suede purse with four inch fringe. It wasn't something Sara would ever have picked out for herself, but she had to admit that it made a certain statement. Catherine, if she'd been so inclined, could have pulled it off. She set the purse aside for now and continued through the drawer. There was a worn and aged leather-bound copy of Shakespeare's complete comedies, and a jewelry box of the size typically used to hold necklaces. The purse had taken up the majority of the space.
She closed the drawer and opened the purse to begin to set its contents out on the floor. A pocketbook, with a driver's license, credit cards, a gym membership card, a few of the plastic gift cards - one for Border's, and one for a clothing boutique on the Strip. A frequent customer card from a coffee shop Sara recognized as being not far from the UNLV campus, a few receipts for gas, groceries, a run to CVS for toiletries. It was entirely and completely innocuous.
Bianca Tolmen apparently hadn't been the type to keep photos of friends and family in her purse, so they had no further clues as to who the mystery blond man might be. In the meantime, Sara pulled out a keychain and identified at least two apartment-type keys on it, as well as a bronzed Mickey Mouse and a short UNLV lanyard.
A small notepad with a fresh sheet of paper on the top; she'd send it down to Ronnie when they got back to the lab and see what he made of what had been written on it previously. Several pens, a few condoms and tampons, ticket stubs to movies and plays across town, another Luna bar, a small bottle of water, a bottle of antibacterial gel, and the purse was emptied.
"I haven't really got anything probative here," Sara announced, replacing the contents of the purse and entering the entire bag into evidence, then reaching for the necklace box while she talked. The twin masks of Comedy and Tragedy hung from a thin golden chain, and when she moved the box, something rattled. Prying up the cardboard liner, she found a diamond engagement ring. "Wait, no, I take that back. Looks like he was a Bible-quoting rose-sending fiancé. Whoever he is."
"Carter," Grissom supplied, holding up several envelopes. "Love letters," he added in explanation.
"She kept them here?" Sara screwed up her face in confusion.
He shrugged in response. "Maybe they gave her confidence before she went onstage." His tone suggested that was a shot in the dark. He wasn't really the kind of man who understood why you would write a love letter in the first place, much less keep and reread one.
"Yeah. Maybe. Anything else?"
"More of those Luna bars, a volume of Shakespeare's tragedies and a volume of his histories. She was missing the comedies, though."
"Aha," Sara said with a smile, holding up the evidence bag with the book she'd found. "They were on this side."
"Glad to know she had the complete collection," Grissom said with a slight smile. "That's all that was in this drawer, though."
"Besides the comedies and the jewelry, I have her purse, but there's nothing really telling in there other than her home address and the fact that she was probably a UNLV grad." She shrugged. "Like I said, nothing probative, but I bagged it anyway."
"Right." He pushed himself to a standing position using the chair, and she winced when she heard his back crack.
"Grissom," Warrick called from the door. "Nick and I finished in the green room, and I pulled a tape of the performance. Apparently we got lucky - it's not usually taped. Anything else back here?"
Grissom swiveled to take in the entire dressing room, seemingly lost in thought. "Brass should have a warrant for her apartment by now. Have an officer meet you there with it, and take Sara. I'm going to stay here and work with Catherine."
"Nick said that if you didn't need him, he was going to start transporting stuff back to the lab," Warrick suggested.
Grissom nodded. "Good idea. Sara - "
"I'll make sure he takes our evidence, too." She smiled saucily at him. "One step ahead of you, Griss. Warrick, this will just take a few minutes."
"I'll give you a hand," he suggested, and Sara loaded his arms with the bags of makeup and other items from the drawers and trash can, all to be tested for traces of the strychnine that had poisoned Bianca.
"Thanks," Sara said, and began to fill her own arms. "We'll call if we find anything," she promised, and gave him one last lingering smile before she exited the room.