Warrick looked up in surprise; he'd assumed the other man hadn't heard him, and he'd been prepared to just let it go. "What do you do now?" he followed up.
"I'm in Reno, working for a company that designs new computer gambling applications. Mostly variations on electronic blackjack, poker, that kind of thing." He finally ate the fry.
"Sin City enters the digital age," Warrick observed, and was gratified when Sam snorted.
"Yeah, I guess. I didn't want to go far, y'know? Vegas is home. And if you want to stay in Vegas, that means you're probably involved in gambling somehow."
"True." Even as a CSI, gambling still played a large role in his life. No larger than he let it, he chided himself silently, and decided to change the subject. "We probably had some of the same professors, then. First-year calculus at least."
"Professor Throckmorton," Sam answered easily with a ghost of a smile. "And that ridiculous hat."
Warrick snorted. "I bet he was still using the same transparencies when you went."
"Wouldn't surprise me. They certainly looked old enough to have been around since the sixties, at least."
"Yeah, he was, then."
They fell into silence for a few seconds, and Sam twitched his fingers, fidgeting with the paper napkin, ripping the edges into strips. "So when can you arrest Carter?"
Warrick leaned back. "If we find enough evidence linking him to the poison, then we can present it to the DA and ask for an arrest warrant. But right now we barely have enough for a search warrant, and in the interests of good public relations, we need to at least make contact with him first."
"He's not answering you, either?" Sam scowled. "He's probably gone."
Any further information provided and he could be accused of compromising the case, so he kept silent. "I really can't talk about it."
"Yeah. Sure. I understand." Sam leaned back in his side of the booth and looked out at the dusty parking lot. It was patently obvious that he didn't understand, but he kept quiet anyway.
The waitress came and they confirmed that they were not interested in dessert; she filled out the bill for them right there and they pooled money in the middle of the formica table to pay for their meals.
"I'll drop you off at your hotel - where are you staying?" Warrick asked. He'd driven them here; Sam had taken a taxi from the airport.
"I'd planned on staying with Bianca," Sam answered. His lips twisted and he looked away again.
"Her apartment is still a crime scene," the CSI said as gently as possible. "I know a good place not far from the Strip. I'll take you there."
"Yeah, thanks. That would be good." Sam had once again faded into the distance, operating on rote reaction.
"Anything else for me, Greg?" Sara asked, leaning in to the DNA lab.
He bobbed his head in what she thought was an affirmative until she noticed that he had headphones on. As she watched, he shoved himself off and sent his chair gliding across the lab to another machine - and the headphones stayed with him. No cord. She wouldn't put it past him to be wearing them as some sort of fashion statement, but he hadn't heard her. There had to be music pumping through them somehow.
Intrigued, she stepped forward until she was right next to him and pulled up one side to talk directly into his ear. "Greg?"
He jumped, and threw the headphones down on the lab table. "Don't sneak up on me like that!"
"I've been here for at least two minutes," she pointed out. "New toy?"
"Aren't they great?" Greg crowed, passing over the headphones and pointing toward what she assumed was a broadcasting station over by the boombox. "Wireless, baby."
"Nice," she said appreciatively. It was handy - he would be able to move freely about the lab and still listen to his music as loudly as he wanted without disturbing anyone. "You're going to blow your eardrums out."
"Life is short," he countered as she passed the headphones back to him and he hooked them around his neck.
"Right," she said dryly. "Anyway, do you have anything else for me? I'm on my way to a team meeting."
"Ah. Yes." Another push with his feet sent him sailing behind her to retrieve several more printouts from a lab table across the room. "Routine stuff. I confirmed that the pills were, in fact, folic acid. The blood on the blanket was a match to the the vaginal stains on the victim's sheets. And," he held up a finger, "I also ran the stuff Grissom collected from the chair in the dressing room."
"Really?" She blinked. She'd very nearly forgotten about that evidence. "Good work, Greg."
"Yeah, well," he said modestly. "Mostly, you've got some food stains. Peanut butter, chocolate, orange juice. Then we've got the semen stains." He stood and reached into a file cabinet at the end of the lab table. "Just in case you didn't have the results I gave you earlier on you. I also went back and looked at the bedsheet stains and arranged them in order of oldest to most recent." He spread them out in that order. "It goes something like this - four stains, same person, all at least six months old. Two stains, same person, from the last month or two, the newest dating from a week and a half ago. One stain, one person - obviously - two to three days old." He pushed them forward and laid out the new printouts underneath them. "From the chair, four stains. All belonging to the second time period - the last one to two months." He pulled those sheets from the first pile.
"Match," Sara breathed. "She slept with someone from the theater in her apartment at least twice."
"Exactly."
"Very good work, Greg," she praised, and he beamed.
"Sorry I'm late," Sara apologized, breezing in to the layout room, and Grissom nodded in acknowledgement.
"Let's get started," he began, and the CSIs around the table straightened slightly, fingertips on the manila folders full of evidence in front of them. "Sara, you were doing background."
"Right," she confirmed, and began to sketch out Bianca Tolmen for them. She talked about her days at UNLV - Warrick providing a sounding board for various on-campus references - and brought them up to when the young actress had joined the company.
"I can take it from there," Warrick said. "I talked to her brother at the hospital. She became engaged to Carter James in her freshman year, but by senior year, they were having difficulties, mostly due to disagreements over his increasingly conservative stance on religion. Apparently about a week ago, he tried to forbid her to continue acting. She called her brother, and he was scheduled to fly in this weekend anyway, to mediate possibly."
"Her first major role was as Hippolyta in Midsummer Night's Dream, opposite Richard Ellory as Theseus. She auditioned for and won the part of Hero in Much Ado About Nothing over several other actresses in the company who had been there longer than she had, among them Mallory Smith and Josephine Calvert," Grissom continued.
"The same Mallory Smith who has been seeing Richard Ellory for nearly five months now. We know that Ellory and Bianca had a short-lived affair that ended approximately a week ago," Nick interjected. "I don't like Mallory for it, but we did hit a nerve when we questioned her about Ellory. She turned right around and fingered Calvert. Said they hated each other."
"Who is a slippery one," Catherine picked up, a wry grin on her face. "I can see her doing it, but I don't see enough motive. She's secure in her position. She's not going to let someone like Bianca worry her."
"We have several witnesses attesting to bad blood between Bianca and Calvert," Grissom reminded her. "Moral differences."
Catherine seemed to consider that for a moment, and then shook her head. "I still don't see it. Like I said, she was confident. She has it all and it would take a lot more than an upstart actress to make her lose it."
"They wouldn't be competing for the same roles anyway," Sara put in. "Different age brackets."
"True. Who else?"
"The fiancé," Warrick said without hesitation. "Someone left twelve messages on her answering machine. I'm going to have Sam Tolmen come in and do an ID. After that, we'll run it through for voiceprint comparison. But that says to me he was seriously jealous. If he found out about her affair with Ellory..." He left the sentence hanging.
"We can't afford to assume anything," Grissom reminded them all, unecessarily. "Ellory himself is just as likely a suspect. She broke up with him, not the other way around, and we have an eyewitness who overheard heated words between them."
"And what does he have to say for himself?" Catherine asked.
"He admitted to the affair and the heated words without even hesitating. Even cooler than Calvert." Grissom tapped a pen against the table. "Now, what do we have for evidence to tie any of our suspects to the crime?"
"No poison," Nick said in frustration. "Greg and I went over every single bit of food and makeup that she might have come into contact with. Nothing."
"The autopsy is scheduled for an hour from now," Warrick said. "We'll know more about how she came into contact with it then."
"Here's something we didn't get from any eyewitness reports," Sara said triumphantly. "I think she was pregnant. She had prescription folic acid in her bathroom, and I just got the confirmation from Greg that the contents are in fact folic acid."
"Whoa." Catherine blinked. "The question is, who's the daddy?"
"Semen stains on both her bedsheets and the chair in the dressing room suggest at least three lovers within the past six months. We'll have to wait for the autopsy to see how far along she was. Either way, the most recent stain dates from within the past two or three days and is the only occurence of that DNA, so it's not him." Sara paused in thought. "That points to either the fiancé - Carter James - or Ellory. Maybe she threatened to tell Smith."
"I don't think he would have cared," Grissom said carefully. "He didn't seem particularly concerned with how she would react to news of his affair. It doesn't appear that he takes the relationship very seriously."
"Motive for Mallory Smith," Warrick pointed out.
"They say poison is a woman's weapon," Nick mused, and both Catherine and Sara pinned him with a glare. "But, uh, it can also be a man's, of course." He withered in his seat.
"It is true," Sara admitted. "It's the most popular choice for premeditated murder among women," she added softly, and looked up to see Grissom watching her intently. She gave him a half-smile to let him know that she'd put it behind her, as much as she ever could, and he nodded slightly in acknowledgement.
"Archie and I went over the tape of the performance," Warrick said, breaking the few seconds of silence. "If you ask me, they're all guilty. There was no way anyone within five feet couldn't tell something was seriously wrong with her."
"The show must go on," Grissom stated, and Warrick grimaced.
"Yeah, that's what Archie said."
Nick picked up the thread of conversation. "Fibers found on the chair in the dressing room. The white has a triangular weave - probably from a carpet - and the black is matted, finely woven wool. My guess is from a coat."
"There was white carpet on stage," Catherine realized.
"Well, then, I'll go get a sample tonight," Nick said with a smile in her direction.
"The white powder from the chair turned out to be powdered sugar, so dead end there, unless we can find someone whose identifying characteristic is that he eats powdered doughnuts," Sara said with a smile. "But the beige residue that we've been finding everywhere - dressing room, onstage, and bedsheets - is a little more interesting." She set the printouts into the middle of the table for everyone to read. "The residue found in the theater is sawdust from a wood typically used in set building. It doesn't give us much, but someone involved in the set building was in Bianca's dressing room that day. The sawdust from the bedsheets is a different kind - more specialized. Greg says it probably had to be ordered."
"I took a sample from the clothes of the prop manager, a Neil Meadows," Grissom said. "Greg should be working on it right now. We'll see if it matches the residue found in the theater. And as it turns out - Richard Ellory is an amateur boat-builder."
She grinned at him, lips curling back to reveal her teeth. "Why don't I find out if this kind of wood is used in boats?" For a moment, it was just the two of them in the room, and then she ducked her head to pull the shoeprint matches out of her folder. "I've got more than half of the shoeprints eliminated, but none of the fingerprints matched."
"Fingerprints and DNA samples of everyone in the cast who submitted voluntarily - and there were only two or three stagehands who refused - should be on their way back with the officers who were doing interviews. Tonight we'll start to eliminate. The shoeprints are only class evidence - when we get warrants, we can use them to strengthen a case, but we can't build a case with them." Grissom tapped the ever-present pen against his lips as he recited the Crim 101 information almost to himself.
They were all silent for a few seconds, letting the information sink in.
"Brass should be working on warrants for Carter James and Richard Ellory's apartments," Grissom finally said. "When they come through, Catherine, I want you and Sara to go to James's apartment. In the meantime, you'll be in the autopsy with me, and Sara, I want you to work on the paper trail. See if you can get Bianca Tolmen's medical records released and find out when she knew she was pregnant."
"Joy," Sara muttered under her breath, and offered him a sweet smile when he raised an eyebrow at her.
"Warrick and I will search Ellory's apartment. Until that warrant comes through, I'll also be in the autopsy and I want you on the answering machine tape, Warrick."
"What about me?" Nick asked.
"You need to find that poison," Grissom informed him, and was inwardly amused when the younger CSI fought to suppress a groan.