Sara turned slowly, overwhelmed and nearly unsure of where to start. "This is like a textbook on mingled blood spatter. No way can we tell where one starts and the other begins."
"Oh, we can," Catherine corrected, kneeling down and squinting. "It'll just take time."
"Right." Sara blew an exasperated sigh out through her lips. "I'll start photographing, then."
There was no body. Erin had continued, gun drawn, through the rest of the spacious apartment and the CSIs had followed her while Levinson queried them in a shaking voice from the door. They'd instructed him to stay where he was and stay quiet, and after a few minutes of whining he seemed to have gotten the idea. After they had verified that the apartment was empty, Erin had left with Levinson to get the records for all visitors to the building, and to call in the new crime scene.
Whatever it was, it had started in the bedroom - probably the first blow had been struck in sleep. There was blood on the sheets and one of the walls, and then handprints and and long dragging marks that led out to the living room, where the rest of the blood was. At some point he'd managed to wrap a bloody palm around the front door; Sara's intuition was telling her that it had happened early in the struggle, and had perhaps been the catalyst for the explosion of violence that followed.
Two feet to the right of where Catherine was kneeling the blood had soaked deep into the carpet. Whoever had died - Carter James, or someone new to make this case even more complicated - had rested there for some time.
There was no doubt that their unknown victim was dead. Possibly, he or she had still been alive on leaving the apartment, but the sheer amount of blood indicated injuries that would have been fatal anywhere outside of an emergency room. And whoever had beaten the victim had obviously not been intending to make the ER his next stop.
Sara adjusted the focus and knelt down to take a closer shot of a partial footprint in the blood from the bedroom. Catherine - who was much better versed in blood properties than she was - had tagged the scuff marks as knee-marks from crawling on the first walkthrough, so the shoeprint must belong to their killer.
For a moment, she lowered the camera and it hung from her neck. She felt her gorge rising again, briefly, as she drew her attention back to senses other than vision and the copper scent filled her nostrils. It brought back memories of the Collins murder, and young Brenda. Grissom would be unhappy, but Sara resolved at that moment to check up on the girl at the earliest opportunity. She had been remanded to state custody after her young mother had been sent to jail, but after that, Sara had been distracted and Brenda had disappeared into the system.
Shaking herself, Sara stood again and refocused to begin shooting every foot of the room. They would probably do most of the analysis here, but they would need the photos for posterity and for court.
When she reached the ledge over the faux fireplace - there was only a switch beside it to activate the electric flames - she paused for a moment and let the camera fall again to bump against her sternum. "Hey, Cath, take a look at this."
The blonde came up behind her and looked over her shoulder. "Void."
"Yeah. Something was here."
Framed photos were arranged along the ledge; Carter and Bianca in Venice and in Disneyland - copies of the same pictures stuck in Bianca's dressing room mirror - and a half a dozen others, mostly of Bianca or Sam. At least one was of a group of young men and women smiling and giving each other bunny ears, and the printed-on caption read "UNLV Pre-Med Club, Class of '03."
But two of the photos, more toward the back, were only halfway covered in the long dripped line of blood that blanketed all the others. Sara brought up her hands and framed the space with thumbs and index fingers. "I'm thinking it was positioned horizontally. Why would our killer take it?"
"Well, if James is our killer, and this is someone else's blood, maybe he's fled and that's one he wanted to keep with him."
Sara slanted an incredulous gaze at her fellow CSI. "The blood starts in the bedroom - in the bed, even. You don't think it's Carter James's?"
"I won't tell Grissom you said that," Catherine joked. "I'm just playing all the possibilities."
"Okay. So in the possibility that this is James's blood, why would the killer take this picture with him?"
"Maybe it represented the reasons he was being killed."
"Or, maybe he's in the picture." Sara seized on the idea, and continued excitedly. "This is an intimate killing. There's a lot of rage in this room. Whoever did this knew Carter James, and hated him."
"And the even bigger question - is this connected to Bianca's murder, or is this just a bizarre coincidence?"
"Why don't we see what the evidence tells us," Sara said with a grin.
Grissom hung up the phone, and Warrick frowned at the look of complete shock on his supervisor's face. "What?"
"That was Catherine. She and Sara are at James's apartment - we have another crime scene. Apparently it's covered in blood."
Warrick turned that over in his mind for a few seconds. "I'll head over and meet them there as soon as we get back to the lab."
"No." Grissom's abrupt refusal startled him, and he did a double-take. "You're going to see if Sam Tolmen has an alibi."
"He's been at his sister's bedside since he got here," Warrick objected.
"Are you sure?"
The two criminalists looked at each other for a moment, and Warrick was the first to look away as the light changed to green and he was able to turn onto North Trop Boulevard. Silence reigned, and when Warrick pulled into the space, he turned off the car but made no move to unbuckle his seatbelt right away. "I'll call him. We need him to come in anyway to confirm the fiancé's voice on the answering machine. I really don't like him for this, Griss."
"You're letting the human element cloud your judgment. You said yourself that Tolmen hated James." Grissom's face was impassive.
"I did. He does," Warrick confirmed, and slammed the heel of his hand against the steering wheel before leaning over to unbuckle his seat belt. "Right. I'll keep you updated."
"Hey, yeah, I'm calling from the Las Vegas Crime Lab," Nick said, taking his feet down from where he'd propped them up on the table. "I was just wondering if I could have a moment of your time to help out in an ongoing criminal investigation."
He'd been on hold for the past twenty minutes, and had used the time to create spiderweb maps of what they knew so far about the case. Victim, suspect, crime scene. Evidence linked to evidence, that led to dead ends or more possible suspects. Bubbles with names inside of them stretching outward, connected by more names, spawning lines to bubbles with pieces of evidence in them in a reciprocal dance.
He would probably throw it all away when he was done, but it was something he liked to do when he had a few spare minutes. It helped order cases in his mind, especially ones that kept twisting.
Nevertheless, twenty minutes was a little bit too long to hear "Seasons in the Sun" replaying over and over again, and his frustration level had risen with each subsequent repeat. So he'd had to stretch to make his tone polite and his words conciliatory when District Manager Charlie Holden finally picked up on his end - but the stretch was worth it. If there was one thing Nick had learned about interacting with the public in an official capacity, it was that they loved to be made to feel like their participation was invaluable, no matter how trivial the lead.
"Of course you may. Vernon Paper Products is glad to be of service to those who keep our beautiful city safe," Holden answered, and Nick mentally tagged him as someone who tended to be above and beyond the normal helpful citizen model.
"I'm glad to hear that," and he tried to keep the dry tone out of his voice. "I'm looking at two examples of florist's sentiment cards that are pieces of evidence, and we've been able to isolate your company's mark on the back. I need to know what stores in town you would have distributed this particular type of card to."
"Could you describe them for me?"
"They're both two inches by three inches, stiff white paper. Both are blank with decorative borders; the first one has a ribbon in blue and gold, and there's a woman in..." Nick squinted "in, uh, a blue dress, sort of looking backward over her shoulder."
"Midnight Renaissance. A very popular design. And the second one?"
"Flowers. Roses, light pink, with a thin gold ribbon; they go along the top and right side of the card. The whole thing's kinda faded."
"Classic Sentiment," Holden identified. "Another very popular design. If you can hold for just a moment, I will be able to call up a list of stores that received deliveries in the past six months."
Nick opened his mouth to beg him to just set the phone down on the desk, but closed it again on a slight moan when "Season in the Sun" began again.
He was intensely grateful when sometime in the middle of the second repetition Vega knocked on the door. "Scott Loring should be arriving in about five minutes."
"I'll meet you there," Nick said, shifting his shoulder so that the detective could see the phone wedged between his chin and shoulder.
Vega nodded and left, and Nick started a new piece of paper with Scott Loring in the middle of it. Line, bubble: "Affair - 2, 3 Days" Line, bubble: "Motive?" Line, bubble: "Dinner." Line, bubble: "Hiding something..."
"Thank you for waiting," Holden's voice inserted itself right after "but the wine, and the song, like the seasons..." and Nick set the pen down and pulled a new sheet of paper over. "I have a list of five shops here in town who placed orders for both those cards within the past six months."
He set the pen down. "If you could fax it, that would be great."
"Of course. Is there anything else you need?" Holden's voice was full of repressed eagerness. No doubt he would go home that night to watch a true crime series on the Discovery Channel and feel proud of himself for greasing the wheels of the Clark County justice system.
"That's all for now. Thank you for your help, Mr. Holden." Nick read off the fax number and hung up the phone, rolling his head to rid himself of the crick in his neck. He slid the papers he had been doodling on into a pile and set off for the interrogation rooms.