Catherine nodded. "The hospital reports strychnine based on blood tests soon after admittance." At Grissom's sideward glance, she raised an eyebrow at him. "We'll confirm, of course."
"Already done," Robbins said. "Her system tested positive for massive amounts of strychnine. I've sent it to the labs, but based on the concentration in the blood, I'd say it's not available over the counter. You're looking for someone with access to raw poison, not the weakened substance they use in pesticides now."
"It's not especially difficult to come by," Grissom pointed out. "Ranchers used it for years. Anyone with the right connections could get their hands on it."
Robbins shrugged. "All I can tell you is what was in her body. Head to toes," he began, gesturing. "Severe bruising and lacerations around the back of her skull. Based on symptoms of strychnine poisoning, I'd say she hit her head while seizing. The wounds certainly seem to be consistent with that time frame."
"Nick collected a bloody blanket from where they had her lying down. They said she thrashed a good deal," Catherine confirmed, and Robbins nodded.
"Petechial hemorrhaging. Again, not uncommon in suffocation victims. Her lips and tongue were cut up as well - the marks are consistent with her own teeth." The sheet was moved aside as they continued down her body. "Multiple bruises on her wrists, shoulders, and ankles, all inflicted within the past twenty-four hours."
Grissom angled his arm and without touching, was able to spread his fingers to match up with five finger-shaped bruises on her right shoulder. "They were holding her down."
"Makes sense. She would have been suffering from repeated grand mal seizures." Robbins shrugged. "I haven't found anything yet to indicate that there was any foul play - other than the poison, that is. I haven't opened her up yet, but the hospital's cause of death was brain-death from lack of oxygen caused by repeated and severe seizures. There's nothing on her body at odds with that - no bruising that I wouldn't expect to be there, no foreign chemicals aside from the strychnine."
"How far along was she?" Catherine asked softly.
"Excuse me?"
"We have reason to believe she was pregnant when she died. A prescription for folic acid was found in her bathroom," Grissom brought the coroner up to speed.
The sheet came down further to reveal a perfectly flat stomach. "Not far. She's not even showing. I'll be able to tell you more when I open her up."
"What about how she was poisoned?" Catherine asked.
"That is a bit of a mystery. No needle marks anywhere on her body, so it wasn't subcutaneous. I heard that all the food and makeup tested negative?" At Grissom and Catherine's nods, he shrugged. "That leaves respiratory. I'll swab her nose and mouth and send it to the labs."
"Respiratory?" Grissom asked in surprise. "I thought strychnine was only an ingested poison."
"Usually, it is. But it can be inhaled," Robbins explained as he carefully swabbed Bianca's left and then right nostril. "And with the concentration we're dealing with here, even one deep breath would have been enough to kill her if the symptoms weren't recognized and treated immediately."
"They weren't. She was onstage for at least ten minutes after she fainted." Grissom's voice was full of suppressed anger.
"Well, we'll never know if the extra ten minutes are what killed her, but they didn't help her. And whoever poisoned her intended her to die, there's no doubt about that."
"All right, Greggo," Nick said, clapping his hands together. "We need to go over everything that might have come into contact with Bianca Tolmen last night."
"You're kidding me, right?" Greg asked, staring blankly.
"I wish." He hefted the box off his hip and set it on the lab table. "Everything in this box was in the dressing room. She went right from the dressing room to the stage. Strychnine takes effect within fifteen minutes to a half an hour. Ergo..."
"She was poisoned in her dressing room." Greg scowled at the cardboard box.
"Exactly." Nick pulled out a swab from the box. "First things first. This is a sample of what was believed on the scene to be water, found on her dressing table. Run it through and give me good news."
"Your wish is my command," the lab tech snarked, and spun his chair around to begin preparing the swab.
Nick laid out the rest of the items on the table. Three books. Her purse, and its contents. The water bottle had already been tested, but he frowned at the bottle of pale aqua antibacterial gel. Anything was possible, he told himself, and set it aside for Greg to test next. The contents of the trash: roses, empty blush container, tissue with makeup stains, Luna bar wrapper. The wrapper went next to the antibacterial gel as next to test.
"Like I said," Greg told him with a smirk, coming up behind him and handing him a printout. "Here's the part where I make your wish...come true."
Nick's jaw dropped as he read the printout. Faint traces of C21H22N2O2 - strychnine. "But that's probably not enough to kill a mouse, let alone a human being." He dropped the printout and returned to the contents of the dressing room where they were spread out along the table. "But what was in the water?"
The roses.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," Greg said in disbelief.
Nick took a swab and picked up one long-stemmed rose, wilting now from its time in the brown paper bag. Carefully, he swabbed the stem and passed the sample to Greg, and then using tweezers, he pried apart the petals of the flower.
White powder fell out and onto the counter.
"Bingo," he muttered. "Oh, no one is ever going to believe this."
"It's like something out of a lame movie," Greg agreed, and kept the bindle at arm's length as he walked it over to the machine.
They watched the GC/MS hum and whir and click, arms crossed against their chests, and Nick jumped when the printer whirred into life. He snatched up the printout and gave a low whistle. "That is some concentrated stuff. No wonder it killed her."
"Shouldn't we, ah..." Greg gestured at the roses nervously.
"Right." Moving slowly, Nick slid the roses, stem first, into a large hazmat bag and sealed it off carefully, and then disinfected the counter where the strychnine had spilled out from the rose petals. Materials for cleanup were available in every lab - they dealt with potentially dangerous substances too often for safety precautions to be anything other than an arm's length away.
"Yes, I know what doctor-patient confidentiality is," Sara explained, wondering if the secretary on the other line could hear her grounding her teeth. "It doesn't extend after death."
"Then we need a copy of a death certificate," the man said pompously.
"Listen - I'm sorry, what was your name?"
"Paul."
"Okay, Paul. She died in your hospital about three hours ago. She was murdered. Why don't you help me out a little bit here, and make a call to your records people?"
"You have to understand, if I make an exception for you, I have to start making exceptions for everyone - "
"She was murdered. This is an active criminal investigation. Make an exception." She slammed down the phone, feeling childishly glad at the vehement gesture.
"Well." Catherine said from the doorway. "I think you got your point across."
Sara winced and blushed slightly. "Yeah, that was a little over the top."
The other woman shrugged. "It happens. I know I've wanted to do it before." She took a few steps into the room. "I have something that might make your night a bit better, though." She held a slip of paper between two fingers and waved it enticingly.
"The warrant for Carter James's place," Sara recognized. "Bonus."
On the way across town, Sara perused the PD's background check that had come with the warrant. "Carter James, twenty-three, attending UNLV Med School. Graduated with honors, biochem major, pre-med track. Originally from Los Angeles, California - big money family. Apparently he's benefiting form a trust fund. That must be how he took her to Venice. Uhm...nothing else really outstanding. Only child, mother died last year. According to witness testimony from Bianca's brother, they've been dating for almost five years now and engaged for two."
"Motive," Catherine supplied. "Warrick talked to the brother, and he's pretty convinced that James is our guy."
"Right." Sara wrinkled her nose. "The religion thing."
"The jealousy thing," Catherine corrected. "People do things for their own reasons. Religion is just his own flimsy excuse to be more controlling. It happens more often than you'd think."
"You sound like Grissom," Sara muttered back, suitably chastised.
That brought a tight smile to the other CSI's face as she turned the wheel to pull into the parking lot of Carter James's apartment complex. They parked in between a BMW and a Lexus, in front of a carefully groomed garden area that had no doubt been very expensively irrigated. Catherine let out a low whistle, and Sara raised an eyebrow in appreciation as they exited the car to find Detective Erin Conroy waiting for them at the entrance.
"About time," she teased good-naturedly. "That guy in there's been giving me the fish-eye for the past twenty minutes." Erin had been elsewhere in Vegas when the warrant had been approved, and it had fallen to the criminalists to bring it with them to meet her there.
Sara leaned over slightly, beyond where Erin's body was blocking her view, to see a prim and stiff looking young man in a suit standing just inside the double glass doors. "Traffic," she replied by way of explanation, leaning back to address the detective again.
Erin rolled her eyes at the criminalists. "Shall we?"
Catherine gestured with the hand holding her collection kit. "After you."
The bellhop opened the door, letting them into the first part of the doubled glass door entrance. The air conditioner was pumping away, and while it would have been a welcome relief to have entered into the chill air had they been visiting at high noon, in the middle of the night it was mildly annoying and Sara shivered involuntarily.
"May I ask on the part of whom you are here today?" he asked pompously, and all three women stared at him.
"Carter James," Erin said, and Catherine handed over the warrant. "Seen him lately?"
"I have not. I will ask you to return at a later date, when Mr. James is at home to answer your request."
"The warrant doesn't say he needs to be there," Sara said, angry, and reminded of the hospital secretary she had been wrestling with earlier. "Let us in." She hesitated a beat, and then added, "Please."
After an agonizing five minutes where the bellhop - he couldn't possibly be more than nineteen - examined every word of the warrant, he pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and dialed, handing the warrant back to Catherine but not taking his eyes off them as he spoke. "Mr. Levinson? It's Mark. There are three police officers here who say they have a warrant to search Mr. James's apartment. Yes, sir. Yes, I understand." He closed the cell phone. "Mr. Levinson will be with you in a moment."
"We're not police officers, Mark," Catherine pointed out. "Ms. Sidle and I are criminalists. Detective Conroy is the police officer."
He just looked at them with distaste, and there were a few minutes of silent stand-off before the inner glass door opened and an older man dressed in a carefully tailored suit entered the small outer area, which had not been designed to hold five people at once, and there were a few seconds of hasty shifting to allow for more comfort standing there. Sara found herself directly underneath the air conditioning vent, and groaned inwardly even as she pulled the light jacket around her more tightly.
"Arthur Levinson," the man introduced himself, holding out his hand to shake each of theirs in turn. "What can I do for you this evening?"
Evening was a relative term, Sara reflected. It was nearly one o'clock in the morning.
"We have a warrant to search Carter James's apartment," Erin explained, taking the paper from Catherine's hands to give it to the manager. "The Las Vegas Police Department would appreciate any assistance you provide in this matter."
As Mark had before him, Levinson studied every word while Sara was fairly sure she was losing feeling in the hand that was curled around the handle of her evidence kit. The other was stuffed firmly in the pocket of her jacket.
"I see." He rolled the words around in his mouth as if they tasted sour. "Please follow me."
She allowed herself the sigh of relief as Levinson led them throught the second door and into a thickly carpeted hallway area, tastefully accentuated with pale wood panelling. They rounded a corner and entered an elevator, taking it up to the fourth floor, and exited onto a hall that looked exactly the same as the one they had just left.
"This is Mr. James's apartment," Levinson explained as they stopped in front of an oak door with "43" in brass lettering. He knocked briskly, and they all waited a few seconds. No answer.
"Please open the door, Mr. Levinson," Erin instructed, and unbuttoned her holster to take her service revolver out.
"There is no need to draw your weapon - "
"Procedure. Please open the door."
His movements jerky, Levinson pulled a ring of keys from his jacket pocket and fumbled with them for a few seconds before fitting one to the lock on the door and pushing it open. The interior of the apartment was dark, and Erin shouldered the door open, gun held at the ready. She took two steps before stopping and calling back to Catherine and Sara, "Am I okay to turn on the light?"
There was no reason she wouldn't be, so Catherine answered in the affirmative.
"Something reeks in here - " and the sentence was broken off abruptly as Erin found the light switch. "Oh my God," she breathed, and Sara tried desperately to see around the only halfway open door. "You need to get in here."
Catherine was closer to the door, but Sara was close on her heels as they pushed open the door the rest of the way, Levinson hovering worriedly behind them.
The instant Sara stepped inside the apartment, the odor alerted her as to what she would find. The thick, acrid smell of copper hung in the warm air, and she pressed the back of her hand against her nostrils briefly to relieve the scent, shaking her head to clear it and then taking a few more steps forward, the nausea vanquished by force of will.
Blood, everywhere - the living room of the apartment was like a psychopathic Pollock painting in 3D. It was almost dizzying, the sheer amount sprayed on the walls, soaked into the carpet, spattered and dripped across every surface.
"I think we have a new case," Catherine murmured as behind them, Levinson emptied his stomach into the hallway.