"Dusted in the petals. Greg just ran the swabs Robbins sent us from her nose and mouth, and the sample from her nose was full of the stuff. My guess, she got them, took a deep whiff, and after that..." Nick left the sentence hanging.
"We need to find out who ordered those roses." Grissom rounded the corner and pushed the doors to the parking lot open.
"Already started. Vega is going back through the statements from everyone who was at the theater that night to see who brought them to the dressing room. They had to have been delivered during the production itself to get there with the right timing. I'm headed down to Ronnie right now to see what he can tell me about the card."
"Keep me posted," Grissom ordered curtly and shut the phone, lost in thought on the way to the Tahoe. Even if they did find who ordered the roses, it still wasn't the smoking gun they needed. Presuming they'd arrived by the front door, someone would have had to have been in the lobby to carry them up to the dressing room, and then after that, anyone passing by the room could have poisoned them.
Then again, if they could match match class evidence - the shoeprints, the sawdust - to someone in the cast, it would give them an idea. And, of course, if they could find the paraphenalia used to make the strychnine, then they would have a much stronger case.
Conceivably, they would be doing that right now. Warrick jerked his chin in greeting from where he waited next to the Tahoe. "Hey. I got your page."
"Brass is meeting us there with the warrant," Grissom told him.
On the car ride to Richard Ellory's apartment, the entomologist filled him in on the details about the roses, and Warrick returned the favor by telling him about the time spent with Archie analyzing the answering machine tape.
"We've got a positive match to the twelve calls. They're all the same person. We also got ahold of the phone records; all of the calls were placed from Carter James's apartment. Hopefully Sara and Catherine can get an exemplar from his apartment to prove that it was him calling. The other two calls were from Scott Loring; he's already admitted as much. The last call was from the local library, and phone records confirm that. Completely innocuous. We also pulled her cell phone records, and she made two calls that day: one to her home answering machine, to check messages, and one to Scott Loring, probably confirming the dinner date."
"I wonder why her James didn't call her cell phone?" Grissom mused out loud.
"Maybe she didn't tell him she had it. She only signed up for the plan two months ago. Her brother said that things had been starting to go sour between her and James, so maybe she was trying to put some distance between them."
"Possible. Anything in her cell phone voice mail?"
"Nothing. She'd erased everything that morning."
They were silent for a few minutes, and then Grissom broke the quiet abruptly. "Where is her cell phone?"
"What do you mean?" Warrick frowned as he applied the brakes so as not to rear-end the expensive rental car in front of him. Tourists.
"We didn't log a cell phone into evidence. Where is it?" Grissom's voice rose in agitation. "We completely missed a piece of the puzzle."
"It could be nothing," Warrick felt obliged to point out.
"Or it could be everything. We need to find it." There was really no arguing with that, so Warrick nodded in agreement.
The rest of the ride was accomplished in silence as Grissom brooded and Warrick tried to wrack his brain to think of all the places a small cell phone could have gone missing. It looked like they were going back to Bianca's apartment sometime soon.
Richard Ellory's apartment was more of a townhouse, situated in a quasi-residential area that had all the signs of an upper middle class neighborhood. Few of the lights were on in the buildings around them, and they were the only moving car on the street as they pulled to a stop behind Brass's nondescript Taurus.
He answered the door himself, wide awake and twirling a glass of wine in his fingers. "May I help you?"
Brass held up the warrant with a smug grin. "We have a warrant to search these premises."
For a moment, Richard's eyes grew cold and hard. "I don't lie, officer, Mr. Grissom. I told you that I had nothing to do with Bianca's unfortunate death, and I meant it."
"Don't take this personally, Mr. Ellory, but I don't believe you," Grissom said bluntly. "People lie. I put my faith in the evidence."
"You won't find any of that here," Richard rebutted.
Grissom shrugged. "I'd like to look anyway."
Tension hung in the air for a few seconds, and Richard stepped back from the door, holding it open for the three men to enter the townhouse. When the door swung open further, it revealed Mallory Smith standing behind Richard, her face tight with anger, another wine glass in her hand.
"Ms. Smith," Brass greeted her. "Imagine seeing you here."
She merely acknowledged him with a frosty nod, then turned her back to them and exited the room.
"Help yourself," Richard said, spreading his arms. "I have nothing to hide."
He was either an innocent man or a very good liar, Grissom reflected, and then chided himself for listening to the people before the evidence. "Warrick, shoes. And if you could please show me to where you keep your boat, Mr. Ellory."
Richard indicated the direction of his bedroom with a hand wave, and the CSI departed in that direction. "Follow me, Mr. Grissom." He led Brass and Grissom down a hallway that led out to a spacious two-car garage - something of an oddity for such a small townhouse, but judging by the car and the boat taking up the space, a needed addition.
It wasn't very far along; more than half the ribs were bare under the weak light of the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Rounding the frame carefully, Grissom knelt to the floor and scooped a small amount of sawdust from a pile left under the bow into a bindle. "How often do you work on this?"
"Whenever I can. Sometimes I can't touch it for a week, and others I work on it for five hours a day. Properly made boats take months of constant work to finish, and with my sporadic schedule, it's going to be years yet before I finish this." Richard's voice floated over from the garage door, and the pride in it was evident. "Is there anything else you need in here?"
Because he got the sense that Richard was trying to hurry them along, Grissom deliberately slowed. "Nothing in particular," he answered honestly, but made sure to take a stroll down to a cabinet. Inside were carefully arranged jars of nails and screws, hanging hand tools, and a few buckets of primer and lacquer. Only one was opened, but judging by the layer of dust across the top, it hadn't been touched for weeks. There was nothing else that suggested strychnine or any of its components.
Brass just watched him, knowing that if the criminalist found anything, he would say so. Eventually, Grissom finished his circuit of the garage. "Thank you for your cooperation," he said simply, with an ingratiating smile. "If we could just have a look around the rest of your apartment, we'll be out of your way."
A muscle in Richard's jaw twitched, and Grissom took a perverse enjoyment in cracking the man's perfect demeanor. Apparently the actor hadn't anticipated being confronted on his own turf, and was reacting badly to the invasion of his privacy. "If that's what it will take to convince you I didn't do this, you're welcome to."
Mallory was sitting on the couch in the living room when they re-entered after taking a side trip to the small laundry room off the garage hallway, and she refused to look up at any of the three men from where she sat, instead pretending absorption in a magazine.
The furnishings were classic, exposed wood and embroidered upholstery, and the walls were decorated with prints of eighteenth-century art; skinny horses and hunting dogs and garden parties. Behind a glass-fronted bookcase were leather bound volumes of literature. Grissom leaned over to study the titles; Marlowe, Moliere...alphabetical order. Out of curiosity, he skimmed down to Shakespeare.
"You know, Bianca Tolmen had these same editions in her dressing room table," he commented, opening the cabinet with a gloved hand to confirm his suspicions.
"They were a gift to the this fall's cast of A Midsummer Night's Dream by an anonymous benefactor," Richard said smoothly. "I didn't give them to her, if that's what you're asking."
"No, but you did give her something," Grissom rebutted, replacing the book and closing the cabinet door. "We found a card addressed to 'my Hippolyta' stuck in one of the books. A florist's card."
"Opening night," was his response. "I purchased a bouquet of mixed wildflowers for every woman in the production. Mallory and Josephine both received similar cards."
"Similar. But I doubt the sentiment was as intimate."
"I've already told you that we became good friends over the course of the production."
"So you have."
The kitchen showed signs of recent cleaning, and there were dishes drying on a towel next to the sink. A bottle of white wine was breathing on the counter, and Grissom bagged a salt shaker and a sugar bowl.
"You think I'd leave poison out on my kitchen counter," Richard said flatly.
"That would be a theory, Mr. Ellory. I don't work theories. I work evidence. And at this stage of the investigation, everything is evidence."
There was nothing else that could double for strychnine in the kitchen or in the bathroom, and coming out of the bathroom Grissom met Warrick, leaving from the bedroom further down the hall.
"One match," the younger man said, holding up a bagged pair of dress shoes.
Grissom swiveled on his heel to confront Richard. "You were in Ms. Tolmen's dressing room within twenty-four hours of her death."
"Yes. I wished her good night the night before. She was already ready by the time I arrived that day, hence no need to go in her dressing room then. I imagine quite a few people were in her dressing room over those twenty-four hours. It was only a private area in theory. If you checked my dressing room, you'd probably find her shoeprints in there."
He did have a point. And there was no way to tell how old the print was; the dressing rooms were vaccuumed every other day, and the day Bianca had died had been an off day, so anything on the floor could have been just as easily from the day before.
Grissom and Warrick searched the study together, once again coming up with nothing, while Richard waited for them in the doorway, arms crossed, and Brass studied the few personal photographs that hung on the walls.
"Is that Steven Spielberg?" the detective asked, indicating a particular photo with a finger.
"Yes. I worked with him on White Heat when I was in Hollywood."
"Never heard of it."
"That doesn't surprise me. It was a small, independent film. The director was a friend of Mr. Spielberg's."
"And there's our sheriff."
"Brian and I were good friends in college. We still are." He left unspoken the fact that as soon as Sheriff Mobley learned that they were searching Richard's townhouse, he would come down on them, hard. It had been no small feat to keep the news from him even in the few hours it had been since the warrant had been approved.
Just then, Grissom's cell phone rang, and he made an annoyed moue as he stepped into the hallway to answer it while Warrick continued searching the desk drawers.
"You went behind my back, Grissom."
"I did not," Grissom pointed out to the sheriff. "I'm doing my job. Telling you my every move is not part of my job."
"Richard Ellory is innocent," Mobley huffed. "You're wasting our taxpayer's valuable time and money by pursuing him. From what I hear, the fiancé is a much more viable suspect."
Grissom thought about pointing out, as he had countless times before and already several times that same night, that at this stage everyone was a viable suspect. "CSIs Willows and Sidle are at Carter James's apartment right now."
There was a huff on the other end. "I'll be waiting for you to come see me as soon as you return to the lab."
Grissom was left with dial tone, and he folded his phone back up and returned to the study to see Warrick finishing the desk. "Thank you for your time and cooperation, Mr. Ellory. We'll be in touch."
"So, Ronnie," Nick said, rounding the corner into the QD lab and clapping his hands together. "What've you got for me?"
The tech looked up, startled for a moment, and then seemed to collect himself. "Not much, I'm afraid."
"Oh, don't tell me that."
"Sorry, nothing I can do about it." He scooted his chair over to a display area, where both florist's cards were suspended in glass. "On the first one, that Sara found in the dressing room, the water had degraded the card too badly to do much with it. By itself, it wouldn't hold up in court. But with this other one..." his waggled fingers indicated the second florist's card, from the copy of Shakespeare's comedies, "things get a little clearer."
He pushed backward and brought up a computer screen. "I reconstructed the writing and did a handwriting match." The words morphed, became less blurred as the pixels realigned and reconstructed the Bible quote. "Now, like I said, it probably won't hold up in court, but I can tell you that my professional opinion is that these two cards were written by the same person. Also," and he flicked a switch, now back at the display case, "the ink's flourescing at the same wavelength, and the thickness of the letters changes in the same area." Taking a pen and indicating what he was talking about as he spoke, he continued. "See the lower-case 'o's in Hippolyta and love? The thick dot there - probably where your writer started and ended the letter. And the ink's bled through to the other side of the card slightly. A felt pen, and one that was starting to run out by the time the roses card was written - he had to go over 'drown' twice."
"Anything else?" Nick asked. Ronnie had been right. There wasn't much. It was interesting, but it wasn't helping them to build their case.
"They're of the same brand of card," and here they rounded to the other side of the vertical display area and Ronnie once again indicated a portion of the card with his pen. "Besides the fact that they're the same size and material, here's the company's mark."
"Vernon Paper Products," Nick read. "Never heard of 'em."
"They're small, and local," the lab tech supplied helpfully. "I've had a few things from them come through before. Some specialized stationary on a kidnapping a few years ago, for one. I bet they don't supply too many places."
Nick clapped a hand on Ronnie's shoulder. "Thanks, man. That was a big help."
He left the QD lab and was on his way back to find a phone book and a quiet corner to call Vernon Paper Products with when he passed by the DNA lab and Greg gestured wildly for his attention. Frowning, he entered.
"I've been running all the samples the PD collected at the theater yesterday," Greg explained. "Everyone gave a voluntary swab after they were interviewed."
"And?"
"And I've identified our one-time donor on the bedsheets," he responded triumphantly and passed the sheet over. "Scott Loring."
"Scott Loring?" Nick asked incredulously. "He lied to us. Dammit, I had him figured for completely out of this."
"It's a match. Sometime in the past two or three days, he was at Bianca Tolmen's place doing the horizontal mambo. And since Doc Robbins sent me down a DNA sample to match, there's no longer reasonable doubt about with whom. All vaginal fluid on the sheets matches her." Greg shrugged. "Dunno what to tell you, but this baby does not fool around." He patted the instrument with gentle affection.
"Right," Nick muttered, looking at the paperwork in his hands. "Good work, Greg."
"Thank you." He positively beamed. "Oh, and the other samples. The middle samples on the sheets belonged to Richard Ellory, as did the stains Grissom lifted from the chair in the dressing room."
"No surprise there. He admitted as much. Thanks anyway. Cath and Sara will bring us a sample from the fiancé, and maybe we can eliminate the rest of the samples."
A rap on the door brought both their attention to Detective Vega. "I may have some good news for you. We have a statement from one of the actors - a Violet DuMarne - who says she saw Mallory Smith bringing a vase with a dozen roses from the lobby toward the dressing rooms during the production."
"Reaallly." Nick drew out the word. "Then I guess I'm going to go see if Jacqui could lift anything from that vase."
"And I'm going to go have Mallory Smith brought in for questioning," Vega added.
"And Scott Loring," Nick told him.
"Loring? Why?"
"He left his DNA on Bianca's bedsheets. We have a signed statement that he never had any sexual relations with her."
"Little lie, big lie," Greg piped up from behind Nick.
Vega just stared at the lab tech, and then seemed to shake himself. "Right. Well, I'll have them both in here."
"Beep me when they get here. I'll be in fingerprinting," Nick said, and Vega nodded and left. "Good work, Greggo," he tossed off before heading out in the direction of fingerprinting.