He paused between returning the compact to its evidence bag and reaching for another. "You don't think it's weird? Grissom and Sara?"
"I try not to think about it," Greg said, his back to Nick as he slid the sample in the lab machine. "It's been a while now, anyway."
"Yeah." Nick still made no move to take the tupperware. "Still, though...I dunno."
Silence reigned for a few more minutes, and Nick rested his chin on his fists as he leaned forward and frowned in thought. Greg finally turned from the machine to sit opposite him and changed the subject. "Found a new hack for GTA4 the other day."
"Yeah?" Nick asked, instantly curious.
"It's under the suspended bridge in the San Francisco course." He began describing the route to take to discover the hidden vehicle, and continued talking even when the chromatograph beeped a negative response. They chatted like that for a few more minutes, and then fell to silence again.
Nick pulled over the next carton, and reached in to take out a paper bag that was significantly larger than the other evidence bags they had been dealing with. And, wonder of wonders, it was the last thing in that carton. "I think we're done. We've only got whatever this is left."
"Nice," Greg said, as the chromatograph once again beeped a negative. "Because we're out of options. Process of elimination..."
Nick reached in and pulled out the roses. "What the..."
They both sat and stared at the flowers.
"Uhm, I'm going to guess she neither ate that nor used it as makeup," Greg finally ventured. He paused thoughtfully. "Although you can, you know. They put candied rose petals on pastries, and I was at this club once where this girl was wearing - "
Nick interrupted hastily. "They must have gotten mixed up." He slid the roses back into the bag. "I guess I'll let Grissom know that it doesn't look like it was oral. I don't know how else then. Needles? Could have been injected by someone on the scene. But you'd think she would have noticed that."
"Hey, that's your job to figure out," Greg pointed out. "Mine is not to wonder why."
Nick snorted and picked up a carton of food to put it back in a refrigerated evidence locker.
When they return to the lab, Warrick and Sara parted, Warrick to check with Archie on progress on the tape from the theater and to give him the new answering machine tape, and Sara to the layout room, where she spread Bianca's pale lavender sheets out across the backlit table.
Flicking the lights off and rendering the use of the backlight null and void, Sara began to examine the sheets inch by inch, swabbing each semen stain and marking it. There were a fair number, and soon she had a half dozen swab boxes piled up. She was about to set that sheet aside when a bit of brownish-beige dust near the hem caught her attention.
Frowning, she tapelifted it and held it up to the light. To the naked eye, it appeared to match the residue she and Grissom had lifted from the dressing room. Now that it was starting to occur in preponderance, that made it a high priority. If they could divine properties specific to the material - whatever it was - then they could begin to link it to a specific suspect who had been in both Bianca's dressing room and her bed.
Then again, it could also belong to Bianca, but Sara told herself to think optimistically.
Sheets duly swabbed, Sara set them aside and began the tedious job of comparing the shoe prints she'd made at the apartment to the prints she'd lifted from the crime scene. Twenty minutes later, she had identified two of the seven prints from the crime scene as coming from shoes Bianca herself owned - a pair of knee-high chocolate brown leather boots and a pair of high-end jogging sneakers.
Two of the prints from the crime scene were from the same pair of shoes - a right and a left - which meant that they were only looking for four more types of shoes. At least two of them were very definitely masculine, probably dress shoes, a third was distinctly feminine with a thin, spiked heel, and the third was an ambiguous sneaker tread. Sara cleaned up the layout table and set the electrostatically lifted prints aside in a pile. When she'd returned the sheets to their paper bag, she balanced everything in her arms.
A trip to the evidence lockers disposed of everything except the lifted shoeprints and the fingerprints, and humming, Sara set out to apply herself to the mindless task of running prints through the appropriate databases. It was numbing work, but there was a certain satisfaction in getting it out of the way and being able to narrow the focus of the case, winnowing through the evidence until they had the piece of the eventual puzzle that would tell them what had happened to Bianca Tolmen.
"Of the twenty-five people who are in this production, twenty were onstage when Ms. Tolmen collapsed," Brass read from his notes. Catherine was still learning against the back of the row in front of him; Grissom had wandered off to examine the stage for himself, but was keeping an ear open to their discussion. She was trying not to be offended by the fact that he felt the need to review the scene personally.
"We've interviewed three of them so far - Josephine Calvert, Colin Amberly, and Joe Mountebank. The only people left who were close to Ms. Tolmen who are left to interview are Richard Ellory, Scott Loring, and Violet DuMarne."
"And how many had access to the dressing room?" Grissom asked from where he stood, hands in pockets, looking up at the window of the light and sound booth high above the audience.
"According to Ms. Keller, anyone who had access to the backstage," Brass said, flipping back a few pages. "Actors, production personnel, ushers, other theater staff, even a few guests, as long as they were with someone who did have access." Before Grissom could ask, he added "We're working on a list of who that is. Beat cops will be out first thing to interview everyone and find out if they had any guests, and if they noticed anyone looking suspicious."
"What about the people we've already interviewed?" Catherine queried.
"None of them saw anything out of the ordinary," Brass said. "Something interesting, though - two people said that Bianca Tolmen had gone out with Scott Loring for dinner that night, and that they arrived together."
"Strychnine shows symptoms within fifteen minutes to a half hour. The poisoning occurred somewhere within this theater," Grissom dismissed.
"Still, motive," Catherine pointed out. "Any news on the fiancé yet? Maybe he's the jealous type."
"Not a word," Brass replied, shaking his head. "We only know his first name and the fact that he existed - which is apparently more than most of the people here knew."
"We need a name," Grissom said irritably, stating the obvious as he descended the steps.
Catherine considered pointing out how cranky he was all of a sudden, and asking if it had anything to do with his interrupted date, but decided it would be safer to keep quiet for now. Hopefully by the next shift he would be in a better mood.
"Well, either way, it's going to take us the rest of the shift just to get back to get back to the lab, with all the morning rush hour traffic. We'll see how the analysis is going, call it a night, and hope that the interviews during the day turn up something more interesting." Not to mention she wanted to get home before Lindsey had to go to school and make sure she was well enough to go. She'd been well enough that Catherine had been able to leave her at the night care, but still complaining of a tummy ache.
Grissom took one last look around, and nodded in agreement.
"Wait, there," Warrick said, pointing to the screen. "This must be the beginning of the scene where she fainted. Looks like a wedding to me."
Archie shrugged. "I'll slow it down."
Claudio inched across the stage as he made his entrance, as he accused Hero, and as she fell backward into Beatrice's arms with an almost comical slowness, and there the tape was paused.
"How much resolution can you get?"
"Depends on if I can find the right algorithm," the A/V tech murmured, his fingers flying across the complicated controls. The view on the screen lurched, zoomed in, and pixilated almost indistinguishably. After a few seconds, Warrick watched as red bars began to sweep the screen, restoring the image to a semblance of visibility.
"If?" Warrick prompted.
"I worded that badly," Archie clarified. "I'll find the right algorithm, but I don't know if it'll be right enough for you. There's only so much you can do with tape of this poor quality and a recording from that distance."
The bars continued to sweep the screen, and slowly, Bianca's limp body became visible, taking up the entire area where she was draped across Beatrice's - Josephine's - knees. Her face was slack, and there was no doubt by the way her dead weight hung that she was truly unconscious.
"Okay," Warrick said slowly, thinking aloud. "Back up to right before she faints. I want you to follow her as she falls - I want to be able to see the irises in her eyes."
"I can't work miracles," Archie objected, but the tape was already in slow rewind. Bianca's limbs returned to life, and she staggered forward instead of backward to stand once more in front of Claudio, the coronet of flowers that had been knocked off in the fall zooming back to rest on her head.
"All prior evidence to the contrary. C'mon, man, this should be a piece of cake for you."
Archie snorted, but didn't deny the praise. It was true that he was exceptionally good at what he did, and he proved it as he cleaned the image repeatedly, applying algorithm after algorithm to coax more and more detail out of the tape.
Finally, they were able to see Bianca's face smiling at Claudio in perfect clarity. Archie had enhanced the tape so much that the design in the lace from the collar of her dress was visible.
"All right, now advance at one-quarter speed," Warrick instructed, and Archie flicked a switch.
They watched in silence as the smile plastered on Bianca's face remained unchanged for a few seconds, and then her eyes began to flit rapidly; presumably, she was looking from person to person onscreen. But there was something entirely too quick about the way her eyes focused and unfocused, as if she were trying to take in everything at once. She blinked, rapidly.
"Sensory overload," Warrick theorized. "First symptoms of strychnine poisoning." It was obvious that the actress was trying to fight the impulses of her own body. Something to her right caught her attention, and her turn to address it was just a shade too fast. She turned back so that she was once again fully facing the camera - it had only been a split second onstage, but with the slowed tape speed they could see every step that led to her turn back around. Now her lip was caught between her teeth ever so slightly, and while the smile was still on her face, it seemed painted on, as if she were smiling only by dint of incredible effort.
"Pause," Warrick said abruptly, and leaned forward. "What do you think - is she sweating?"
"Could be," Archie said. "Or it could be reflected from the stage lights. Anyway, even if she is sweating, it wouldn't be that unusual. Have you ever been on stage under full lights? It gets insanely hot."
"You've done theater?" the CSI asked in surprise, curious. Out of all the lab techs, Archie was of the last one he would have imagined acting.
The other man huffed out a soft snort. "Sort of. My girlfriend freshman year in high school got cast in the school musical, and they were short on help. She had me volunteer to be a techie." There was a slight smile of fond remembrance. "They stuck me on the sound board. It was how I got into doing all this."
"And the girl?" Warrick asked, smiling.
"Eh, she left me for the senior who played the lead. I got over it pretty quickly." He patted the side of the video board.
Warrick stared for a second, and then shook himself and turned back to the screen. Archie followed suit and set the video in motion once again.
There was only so much that could be done with the simple VHS tape, and the blurring caused by the movement of the computer focus as it tried to follow Bianca's fall made details negligible. They could recognize Bianca's face, but only barely. Within a split second after she landed, however, the focus and pixellation had readjusted and they were once again able to see her unconscious face in clear detail, and the tape continued to run. The only movement was the occasional shift of her head as Josephine's shoulder shook underneath it.
"What can you get me of that?" Warrick asked, tapping at a small white square of pixel that appeared at the edge of Bianca's lips.
Archie shrugged, and the computer once again zoomed in, but only slightly. "That's it."
The CSI craned his head. "Could be foaming."
"Or it could be an impurity in the tape," the tech pointed out. "With this quality, I'm not making any promises." He let the tape run for a few more seconds to see if anything changed. If the white pixel had disappeared, it might have been evidence in favor of a fault on the part of the recording.
Something shifted, slightly, but Warrick couldn't put his finger on what. He looked from the white spot down to her jaw and found it - the muscles were clenched tightly. Lockjaw, another early sign of strychnine poisoning. "Back up so we can see her whole body."
Once again, they looked at Bianca's body cradled in Josephine's arms. There was a marked difference in the posture from the first time they had seen it - they were now nearly at the end of the scene. Whereas before the musculature had been limp and supple, as befitted a body in an unconscious state, now it was markedly stiff. It wouldn't have been apparent to anyone even five feet away, and definitely not to anyone as far away as the first row of the audience.
But from his privileged seat made possible by state of the art computer technology, Warrick was able to tick off another sign of strychnine poisoning - bodily stiffness. The poison was beginning to interfere with the nervous system's responses. What would very soon be violent and uncontrollable flexions of the skeletal muscles was now evident only in the involuntary contraction of sufficient muscles to freeze limbs.
"There is no way they didn't notice that," he said angrily. "Stiffening after fainting is a huge red flag for a more serious problem."
Archie merely shrugged. "The show must go on."