"I remember that," Catherine said behind him, and he jumped, sending the scroll careening wildly. Heart racing, he clicked again to stop it.
"Dammit, Cath, don't sneak up on me like that," he snapped, and then smiled up at her to take the sting out of his words. She returned it, resting a hand on her shoulder as she leaned forward and scrolled back up to where he'd left off.
"I brought Lindsey, and she played with a little girl who had leukemia." Catherine looked away from the screen abruptly and straightened. "She died a week later." They were both quiet for a few minutes, and then she seemed to shake herself. "So, anything new in the case?"
"Oh, yeah. How'd the parent-teacher conference go, by the way?"
"Could've gone better," she shrugged. "Could've gone a whole lot worse, too. Lindsey's not turning in some of her homework assignments."
"Looks like she's inherited your love of paperwork," Nick quipped, and ducked under her glare. "Anyway, the case. The roses that were used to poison Bianca were ordered that afternoon by Carter James, and the man who delivered them to the theater fits James's description. Mallory Smith - who took the roses from the front door to the dressing room - claims not to have any idea what strychnine is. PD's working on a warrant to search her apartment now. Grissom and Sara are still out with that other body, Warrick's tracking down the people on the surveillance tape from the apartment building."
Catherine seemed to roll the new facts over in her head. "Right. I'm going to start pushing through the evidence from James's apartment. I need to finish the blood spatter analysis and start running the prints Sara lifted."
"I'll let you know if anything particularly interesting comes up with this," and he gestured toward the computer screen, "but so far it's looking like his life was the hospital, his church, and a little bit of his fiancée. Nothing that jumps out."
"Did you check his web browser history?" she suggested.
"Did I what?"
She leaned over him again and took the mouse from his hand, opening Internet Explorer and clicking on History. A new window popped up, and Nick groaned audibly at the long list of websites.
"Thanks, Cath, this is going to take me the rest of the day."
She relinquished control of the mouse and smirked at him. "You're lucky Grissom's at a crime scene. I'll be in the print lab if anyone needs me."
He muttered an acknowledgement and turned back to the browser list, clicking on "Yesterday" and beginning to check the links listed. They seemed to be mostly either medical review sites or bible study message boards by what he could tell of the names. In the folder dated a week ago he found a sub-folder dedicated to the website of the Las Vegas Reperetory Theater. Following the pages visited in that site, it seemed that James had been looking at the showtimes for Much Ado About Nothing. Had he been researching a possible time to drop the flowers off?
But it was the entries of two weeks ago that jumped out in glaring relief. Clicking on the very last day available in the browser's history turned up an extensive listing of webpages describing strychnine.
"Catherine, hey!"
She spun in her tracks at Greg's voice, and saw him gesturing for her to enter the lab. "Yes? Shouldn't you be home?"
"Hey, authorized extra overtime. I'm all for it. Anyway," he continued, "I ran the blood swabs from your apartment. It's all the same person. Then I matched it up against the razor Sara took from the bathroom. It's Carter James's blood."
"Grissom and Sara are out on a hiking trail with a DB that may be the rest of him," Catherine informed the tech, who nodded.
"This much blood, there'd have to be a body somewhere. I've also got the matches to the sawdust Grissom pulled from Ellory's apartment. It's a match to the sawdust found in Bianca's bedsheets."
"Unfortunately, that doesn't give us much. He freely admitted they were having an affair. And Nick's working on evidence that may prove that James was the one who poisoned his fiancée." She shifted her weight and leaned her hip against the lab table as she picked up the two evidence printout sheets and tucked them into the manila folder she was already carrying.
"Oh." He seemed deflated. "But wait, now James is dead? Revenge killing?"
Catherine shrugged. "We don't know yet. We don't even know if they're linked."
"Right." Greg's tone was full of disbelief. "Okay, well, then I'll work on backlog until Grissom and Sara get back from the dump site."
Catherine nodded in acknowledgement and left the lab, continuing down to the evidence lockers, where she checked out the prints Sara had lifted from Carter James's apartment, as well as the photograph of the bloody shoeprint. To be thorough, she also checked out the shoeprint evidence Sara had gathered from the dressing room - if they could match any of them, it might mean that someone from the theater had been involved in the murder.
Pulling up a stool next to Jacqui, who acknowledged her with a silent nod, she settled in for a long monotonous stretch of print checking. It wasn't her favorite thing to do, but she had to admit there was a certain sense of accomplishment in logging the prints and slowly but surely chipping away at the evidence.
Twelve of the prints were eliminated as Bianca Tolmen's, mostly the ones Sara had lifted from the entry area and any surfaces the killer had been likely to touch, perhaps for leverage - coffee table, mantelpiece, nightstand. Still she continued scanning and entering. In between searches, she compared the shoeprint against the examples from the dressing room.
She matched the bloody shoeprint at the same time as AFIS beeped that it had found a match. It seemed someone who wore the same nondescript cheap sneakers had been in both Bianca's dressing room as well as stepped in the blood at Carter James's apartment.
AFIS concurred. One of the fingerprints that Sara had labeled as "Mantelpiece - Living Room" had matched against an anonymous print from the dressing room.
So how did this fit in? Their main suspect right now was Sam Tolmen - and Catherine made a mental note to call Warrick as soon as she had finished to find out how that part of the investigation was progressing. Had he been at the theater within twenty-four hours of Bianca's death, and had then traveled to James's apartment to kill him? Hadn't Warrick said that Sam had only arrived from Reno after being informed of his sister's death?
Still, nothing prevented two people from wearing the same type of shoe and even the same size. They couldn't eliminate Sam from the suspect list until they proved or disproved his alibi. But the class evidence was now beginning to stack up against their likely suspect.
Someone from the theater, then? Bianca had been well loved. Was there anyone among her fellow cast members who would be enraged enough to commit murder? Faces flashed before Catherine's eyes. Richard Ellory, who had been having an affair with the young actress. Colin Amberly, who had given all the impression of a father figure. Scott Loring, who had taken her out to dinner the night she died and had slept with her just a few days before that. Or anyone else that had been interviewed who had been close to Bianca.
"You going to get that?" Jacqui asked, and Catherine blinked and looked over at the fingerprint tech before realizing that the computer she'd been working on was beeping a negative response.
She shook herself and clicked through, picking up the next print. "Sorry about that. Got a little distracted."
"Warrick?"
"Uhmph," was all he could manage, as his throat was currently constricted by the cushion wedged underneath it. Pushing feebly with his arms against the couch, he flopped ungracefully over, and blinked repeatedly to clear his blurry vision. Slowly, Vega's face came into focus.
"Sorry to wake you," the detective said apolgetically.
"No...s'okay..." he mumbled, and rubbed a wide palm across his face, wincing when he touched the sore patch that had been pressed into the rough material of the couch. "What's up?"
"Warrant just came through on Mallory Smith's apartment - thought I'd let you know in case one of you CSI-types wanted to come with."
The cobwebs of sleep weren't fully receded - two hours' sleep, he noticed, give or take a few minutes. It took him a few more seconds of blinking to figure out why exactly they were searching Mallory's apartment. "Right. Okay. Any news on Sam Tolmen?"
"Conroy told me he wasn't at his hotel room, but he was still checked in. He's not a flight risk. It's more than likely he's just out in the city. They're going to keep checking back." The detective offered his hand to Warrick, which the CSI grasped and pulled himself to his feet.
"Give me time to shower and change clothes, and I'm there."
True to his word, he met Vega in the parking lot a short while later, sunglasses on against the late-afternoon light. He kept himself from thinking about Sam's involvement until he pulled down a residential street after Vega in his department Taurus, and then his mind finally began turning over the events of the past few hours.
No matter how much Grissom insisted on following the evidence before all, Warrick could never entirely disregard the human element. He supposed it came from spending too much time around Catherine. And in this case, every instinct he had was screaming at him that Sam had nothing to do with Carter James's death.
But then, there was the evidence. He had no alibi for an hour and a half period during which James could have been killed, and they had strong evidence pointing toward the fact that he had been at the apartment complex during that hour and a half. Had it been enough to kill James - in such a violent way? He'd seen Catherine's crime scene sketches and calculations. And there was the matter of getting rid of the body. The dump site was a half hour's drive away.
The logistics could make sense, but only barely. Had Sam lied when he'd said he didn't have a rental car - or had he been forced to abandon it somewhere, soaked with blood?
He was letting his sympathy for Sam overwhelm him, and in the back of his mind, Griss was shaking his head sadly. The point was, Sam had opportunity and motive to kill Carter James, and there was evidence putting him at the crime scene. End of story.
Warrick had nearly convinced himself of that when he opened the door, pulling his evidence kit out after him.
"What is the meaning of this?" he heard Mallory say. Hers was a ground-level apartment with a small terrace, and it was the terrace that Vega had approached upon noticing that Mallory was standing with a water can in hand, obviously poised to begin watering some marigolds that seemed to be fighting a losing battle against their situation in direct desert sunlight.
Slipping sunglasses on, Warrick decided the most sensible place to be was standing a few paces off while Vega explained that they had a warrant to search her apartment for traces of strychnine.
"Look, I already told you, I don't even know what the stuff is." She crossed her arms tightly; she was wearing spandex exercise clothing, and had obviously just come back from a jog. Doing the calculations in his head, Warrick figured that she would probably be leaving for the theater soon for the night's play. Now that Bianca was gone, she would be playing the role of Hero. "I don't have time for this."
"We won't be long," Vega lied through his teeth.
She set the watering can down and stood, one hand on her hip, looking at them suspiciously, and then relented. "Fine. Do whatever you need. I'll be in the shower."
This was where he needed to step forward. "Ah, if I could just check the bathroom before you get in. Wouldn't want to inconvenience you later." That was another little white lie. His real reason had nothing to do with inconveniencing her and everything to do with making sure she didn't have the opportunity to hide anything incriminating before he was able to search the bathroom. If it had the side benefit of making her life easier, then that was an unintended bonus.
Mallory didn't say anything, just turned and re-entered the apartment via the sliding glass doors. Vega followed her, and Warrick followed him after reassuring himself that there was nowhere on the small patio that she could have hidden strychnine. The apartment complex was a new one, and the walls around the terrace were a ugly poured concrete instead of brick. A quick flexing of his knees into a squat eliminated the possibility that she had taped a package to the bottom fo the plastic table and chairs, and a shake of the table umbrella revealed nothing hidden inside the folds.
She was waiting for him when he entered, and pointed a finger toward a door leading off the main room. It was a small apartment, living room cum dining room with a small kitchen tucked into a far corner and a door next to the one he was now approaching that most likely lead to the bedroom. Obviously the space's appeal lay in the access to the admittedly forgettable terace.
Strychnine was white and didn't take well to dye, so he was able to eliminate most of her makeup cases immediately. Mallory was not given to the more subdued bases that Bianca had been. A quick check of the drawers revealed nothing out of the ordinary, and he shook the box of condoms to be sure there was nothing hiding behind the small circular packages that only filled half of the cardboard box.
Likewise, there was nothing in the shower or the medicine cabinet, and nothing suspended in the back of the toilet.
"Why would I hide something there?" Mallory demanded angrily from the door.
"Just doing my job, ma'am," he reassured her, and set the lid back down.
Vega had already started on the living room/dining room; there weren't many places to hide things, and the warrant wasn't all that extensive. By the time Warrick heard the shower start, he'd moved onto the bedroom, checking through the nightstand and opening the drawers in a cursory search. Nothing. When he met Vega in the kitchen; the detective was holding up a salt shaker.
Warrick shook his head. "No. No one would leave something that poisonous just laying around in an open container like that. Bianca died from inhalation - if the strychnine were in the salt shaker, something as simple as knocking it over and breathing while cleaning it up would kill you."
"Right." Vega shook his head in disbelief and replaced the salt shaker. They searched together in silence, and when the water from the shower stopped, Warrick was examining the final items in a mostly empty trash bag.
"Are you finished now?" Mallory asked coldly, wearing jeans and a t-shirt and towelling off her hair.
"We are. Thank you for your time." Vega stepped forward and gave her a business card. "If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me."
"Oh, I won't," she promised him as she led them to the door.
"Break a leg tonight," Warrick offered in one last gesture of peace as she slammed the door shut in their faces.