Nick moved to stand next to the other CSI and passed him over a manila folder. "Jacqui lifted one print from the vase. It's smudged, but she's got a partial match to Mallory Smith."
"Why isn't she here?" Grissom asked mildly.
"Vega was going to bring them both in. I don't know why he got to Loring before Smith," Nick said defensively. "I don't think Loring is a suspect - we just need to find out why he lied about having an affair with Bianca Tolmen."
The entomologist nodded slowly. "And the QD results?"
"Tentative handwriting match on both cards, and they were manufactured by the same company. I just got off the phone with their District Manager, and he faxed us a list of florists in Vegas that use the cards. It's in the folder."
Grissom opened the folder and looked at the list, and smiled faintly.
Nick shifted from foot to foot and manfully repressed the urge to ask him what was so funny, in the end deciding that he didn't really want to know.
"I'll call them first thing in the morning. They had to transfer me to the district manager's house to get this information. The shops won't be open for another five hours at the earliest."
Grissom nodded slowly and shut the folder. "Good work, Nicky."
"And now I'm going to go see why Scott Loring lied about having an affair with Bianca Tolmen." For a split second, he wondered if that was why Grissom was here - to interview Scott. It would have been within his rights as a supervisor to lead the interrogation. Nervously, he added, "We've already established something of a working bond."
Grissom rested his chin on his knuckles, and Nick left the room, circling around to enter the interrogation room and reflecting on the fact that the charged air of the interrogation room was somehow less intimidating than sharing space with Grissom had been.
"Nick. Hey." Scott sat up with a painfully trusting smile on his face. "I don't get it, I thought I answered all your questions?"
Vega entered the room and took up a position behind Nick, shifting his weight to lean his shoulder against the wall, eschewing the second seat next to the CSI.
"We just have a few more," Nick said, and opened up a second manila folder, sliding two sheets of paper out so that Scott could see them. "These are DNA test results. You see these bars here? They're what we call markers. There are thirteen of them. The paper on the right is from a sample that was collected from Bianca's apartment - seminal fluid from her bedsheets, actually. It's about two days old." Nick tapped the other sheet. "This one here is the sample you gave us the other day."
Scott looked between the two papers and then back up at Nick. "They match."
Nick didn't confirm the obvious. "Help me out here, Scott. Why didn't you tell us you were sleeping with Bianca?"
He flushed a deep red, equal parts anger and embarassment. "We weren't sleeping together. We...there was one night, and..." He clamped his lips shut. "Do I need a lawyer?"
"Do you think you need a lawyer?" Nick parried gently. The more he talked to Scott, the more he became convinced that the gentle actor would have nothing to do with a murder that had required planning and vicious hatred.
"I didn't do anything!" he blurted out. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you about Bianca and me. I thought, she was dead, there was no need to...to smear her reputation like that. She had a fiancé. It was just once, though. She was so...I was lonely, and..."
For a second, Nick was deathly afraid that Scott would start to cry. He leaned back, well out of the younger man's personal space, his posture an easy and comforting one. "Hey, man, I understand. It just would've been better if you'd told us right away."
"I didn't know you could do things like this...DNA matches..." Scott's fingers twitched on the sheets of paper.
And here, Nick reflected, was Charlie Holden's exact opposite. Scott truly had no clue about what forensic science could do. In Nick's mind, that made him even less of a likely suspect, but Grissom was watching from the other side of the two-way mirror, and Grissom would be hasty to remind Nick, just as Erin had, that Scott acted for a living.
"Did anyone else know about this?"
Scott shook his head vehemently. "No. No one. Not even my sister. Bianca and I agreed we needed to pretend like nothing had happened. She didn't want Carter to be angry with her, and I didn't want him to be angry with her either."
"Okay," Nick reassured, chalking up another mark against Carter James.
"Is there anything else you left out of your initial statement?" Vega asked from behind Nick, and Scott jerked his head up to look at the detective.
"I thought you were calling me here because of Bianca's cell phone," he said, and his hand came up from his jacket pocket to set the object on the table. "She left it in my car that night. I found it when I was driving home, and for a second I thought I would just give it back to her at the next performance, but..." He pressed his lips into a thin line and looked away even as he pushed the small phone across the table toward Nick.
Pulling a latex glove out of his pocket, Nick picked up the phone and noted that it was turned off - though whether that was because the batteries had died or because Bianca had turned it off when she'd left it in the car, he had no idea. It would be something to add to his spider web sketches.
"Thanks, Scott. Is that all?"
"That's everything. I swear. I would never hurt Bianca, she was a friend. And if I did anything stupid like that, no one would take care of my sister. She's sick, she needs me to look after her." Scott's eyes were shining now. "I'd never just abandon her like that."
Actor, Nick reminded himself. "You're free to go, then. You'll just need to sign a new statement - one with all the details this time."
"I will. I'm really sorry." He bobbed his head, and Nick had flashbacks to the Lab puppy he'd had as a child - all overgrown limbs and limpid brown eyes that swore eternal innocence.
Then again, they'd sworn eternal innocence even as tiny puppy teeth shredded through a prized baseball glove.
Nick nodded to Vega, collected the DNA results, and left the room.
Sara ducked carefully under the thin red string and set the handful of swabs on top of the rapidly growing pile by the door. Catherine was sitting cross-legged in one of the few areas of carpet that didn't have blood on it. Every so often she looked up and squinted and then looked down again to scribble something on the kneeboard that was balanced precariously in her lap.
So far, there was nothing outwardly incriminating besides the blood. Sara had bagged a razor from the bathroom for a DNA comparison to see if this was in fact Carter James's blood, and several stains on the bed sheets had fluoresced as bodily fluids. The footprint in the blood had been photographed and catalogued, every bloodstain had been swabbed and marked and entered into evidence, and still Erin hadn't returned from the downstairs office.
By mutual unspoken agreement, Catherine had concentrated exclusively on the blood spatter. It was, after all, her area of expertise, and Sara was more than willing to leave her to it. While the correct analysis of blood spatter was pure trigonometry, the interpretation of such extensive patterning was best left to someone with experience and a feel for the higher art behind the science.
So, the living room was now criss-crossed with colored strings. It would be some time into the evaluation before Catherine would be willing to make the call on which stain had occurred when, but in the meantime she'd developed her own system of colored strings based on the spread of the drops - there were both medium and low velocity impact sprays, cast-off patterns, and at least one transfer pattern where the victim had stumbled into the wall across from the bedroom door on his way out to the living room. Each type of spatter had its own string, and so far half of the patterns had colored strings stretching outward to designate their directionality.
"It's hard to believe no one heard this," Sara commented to the air, not really expecting Catherine to hear her.
"We'll have to ask Levinson when he gets back. But in a housing complex like this, it's mostly working professionals - depending on when it was done, they may not have been home," Catherine replied absently, and twisted her wrist around to add in another detail on the piece of paper before looking up and squinting across the room. "And never be surprised by what people are willing to ignore as long as it doesn't directly interfere with their day to day life."
Even though she knew it was true, Sara ground her teeth in frustration. Careful to avoid the splotches, she made her way across the carpet to where Catherine was sitting and looked over her shoulder at the diagram and number crunching. For a few minutes, she watched in silence over the curve of the other woman's hunched shoulder, studying the notations and looking up to see which spots of the room they corresponded to.
"Cath? Sara?" Erin stood at the door, and Sara made her way back across the carpet and around the couch to meet her.
"Any news?"
"Some." The detective held up a paper bag. "Tapes from the surveillance camera that monitors the entryway, two days' worth. I also interviewed our friend Mark downstairs - he only works the night shift, and he hasn't seen James for some time, but that's not unusual. I've got the name and address of the day shift and swing shift doormen, and I'll talk to them next."
"But as of now, we have no time of death," Sara followed her thought. "Until we know when he died, he's still a suspect in Bianca's murder."
"Without even a body, that's going to have to come down to outside factors," Catherine chimed in from the other side of the couch. "Pull phone records, credit card and bank records, anything that would give us a clue as to when this happened."
"There was a laptop in the office," Sara said. "I'll see what information I can get out of it."
"Aside from that, nothing remarkable. Paid his rent on time, never any noise complaints. Most interesting thing on his record is that one of the burners on the stove went on the blitz about six months ago and they had to order parts to fix it. He's been in this building for about five years now, since he started at UNLV. Moved into this apartment from a studio two floors down when he graduated.
"There are studios in this building?" Catherine asked in surprise.
"Hey, I'm just reading what I was told," Erin defended, spreading her hands wide, the pages of the steno pad fluttering with the movement. "So anyway, I'm going to go back to PD, start the warrants for the records, and then by that time I figure I'm good to wake up our day shift doorman a little early and keep our swing shift doorman up a little late. I'll keep you posted."
Sara nodded to her and turned back to the apartment. Catherine had begun stringing another pattern, starting just right of the television. It looked like she was almost finished, so Sara ventured a question.
"Any thoughts?"
Catherine was silent until she'd tacked the string to a corner of the couch. "Somehow, our guy gets inside. At some point he had access to the keys, maybe made a copy for himself, maybe already owned a copy." She ducked under the strings to head toward the hallway, and Sara followed her. "He gets his first blow in in the bedroom - head wound, based on the extent and concentration of the blood soaked into the pillow. Obviously, it woke James up. He lurches, comes down on his hands and knees; probably took the assasilant by surprise. Perp spins - " her hand gesture took in the line of blood against the wall on the other side of the bed - and James crawls out, moving quickly, sloppily. Manages to get himself to his feet." They exited the bedroom and were face to face with bloody handprints on the wall across the hall. "Glances off this wall, turns, heads for the living room. This is where it gets complicated."
They took the few steps and stood with a clear view of the living room. "We've got at least five different patterns in here, with five different origins and directionality vectors. He was still moving. Cast-off pattern along the mantelpiece, the couch, and the TV. Transfer patterns on the rug, the couch, and the wall next to the TV. And at some point he got his hands on the doorknob. I can see it happening any number of ways, frankly. He was getting the shit beat out of him, and he was fighting for his life. He kept moving, kept trying to dodge, but he probably had a concussion after the first head wound. He never really had a chance."
Sara shivered. "Weapon?"
"Something blunt, possibly lengthy; he swung it four times. Baseball bat, pipe, anything like that. I would say fire poker, but they're all still there and the blood pattern shows they haven't been disturbed." Catherine shook her head. "It takes a lot of hatred to do that to someone."
"I wonder if Sam Tolmen has a solid alibi," Sara thought aloud.
"Sam, over here."
The young man spun from where he had been studying the Officer of the Month plaques, and smiled when he saw Warrick. "Hey. I got your call."
"Thanks for coming in." Warrick shifted uncomfortably. "Why don't you have a seat?"
Sam looked at him oddly, but sat down on the black plastic seats in the hallway. The CSI joined him a second later, taking the seat next to him.
"Listen, Sam..." Warrick trailed off, and looked down at his hands. "Two of our CSIs went over to Carter James's apartment earlier, and they found blood. Lots of it. There's no body, but we're working from the assumption that he's been murdered."
Sam twisted in the seat to stare at the CSI. "You think I did it."
"It's not what I think that counts," Warrick rebutted. "You told me yourself that there had been...difficulties."
"I don't believe this," Sam spat out, and stood up to whirl on him. "I just got here this morning, and you've got me leaving my dying sister's bedside to kill her fiancé?"
"I'm not saying anything," Warrick returned, and stood himself, gripping Sam's arm just above the elbow. His outburst had attracted attention. "Calm down. If you didn't leave Bianca, then you're all set. I'm just warning you, man. They're going to be questioning you."
Sam jerked his arm from the other man's grip. "Whatever. I thought you were cool."
"It's not my job to be cool," and Warrick's voice was hard. "I need you to verify the answering machine messages. Are you still willing to do that?"
But Sam seemed unwilling to let it go. "I'll do whatever it takes to find who killed my sister. And yes, I think it was Carter, and yes, I want the bastard dead. But I didn't do it. I wouldn't."
"Just as long as you have that alibi," Warrick reassured him. "Let's go listen to those tapes now."
Archie was busy with the surveillance tape from a convenience store robbery when they entered, but Warrick was familiar with the A/V equipment, and the tech waved him toward the corner of the room with the tape player. The CSI cued up the tape, and looked at Sam to make sure he was ready. At his nod, he pressed play.
"Bianca, hey, it's me. Just wondering where you were."
"That's him," Sam said immediately.
"Let's play a few more, just to be sure," Warrick cautioned.
"Bianca...uhm...still wondering. Give me a call when you get this."
"Okay, this is starting to get weird. Why aren't you picking up?"
"Where the hell are you, Bianca? You're not answering at the theater, you're not answering your home phone. Why are you avoiding me?"
Sensing the tension in the younger man beside him, Warrick pressed the stop button after that.
"I'm still sure. It's him."
Vega rapped at the door. "We're ready for you now, Warrick. Mr. Tolmen," he acknowledged, with a cool nod of his head.
The interrogation room was just like any other, but the instant they crossed the threshold, Sam's entire demeanor changed. He looked at Warrick suspiciously, fidgeted, tensed his muscles and hunched his shoulders.
"Why don't you walk us through your activities form the time you arrived in Vegas," the detective prompted, as Warrick leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms over his chest. He didn't have the heart to take the lead in this interview.
"I got here around eight in the morning, from Reno. Red-eye flight, as early as I could catch it." Sam drummed his fingers on the table.
"Flight number?"
"I don't remember. I've got the ticket in my bag at the hotel, though."
"We'll want to see it later."
Sam stared blankly. "Fine. I got off the plane, got into a taxi, went to the hospital. I was there until...until Bianca died, and then your CSI friend here took me to a hotel. I checked in, put my stuff away, went out for dinner, went to bed. Got woken up about an hour ago, and now I'm here."
"Is anyone able to vouch for your presence at the hospital?"
"Sure. I guess. I don't know. I mean, I was there all day. Nurses checked in and stuff. I went downstairs to eat lunch, but I was only gone for twenty minutes. I may have gone to the bathroom once or twice, too. I don't really remember. Ask them." Now he was openly hostile.
"And after you checked in?"
"Like I said, I went out to dinner."
"Where?"
Sam huffed in frustration. "Some diner."
"How did you pay? Credit card? Remember your waitress's name?"
"What's with all the questions?"
"We're trying to help you out," Warrick finally joined in. "Give us someone who can corroborate your story."
"I paid by credit card, actually," Sam relented. "My waitress was Wanda. Tall, redhead. White shirt, blue apron."
"Okay." Vega nodded. "Is there anything else that you haven't told us?"
"Yeah, you want to know what I had for dinner?"
Investigators and suspect stared at each other across the table, and Sam broke the eye contact first.
"We'll be in touch," Vega said, and Warrick watched sadly as Sam stood quickly, the chair grating against the floor, and tossed look of thorough betrayal in Warrick's direction before stalking out of the room.