Sara was the only one who noticed when he cleared his throat the first time, and Catherine picked up on it the second time, but the boys were still lost in their game. Taking a seat, Grissom simply watched them impassively until Warrick rounded the corner and surprised Nick with a hail of bullets, washing his half of the screen in red and eliciting theatrical wails from the CSI.
This time, they both heard his harumph, and Nick turned quickly while Warrick hastily shoved the game system and controllers back under the television and flicked the power switch.
"So nice of you to join us," Grissom observed wryly. "Nothing new tonight, so we're all still on the Tolmen and James murders. I'd like to hear updates from everyone on where they stand in the investigation, starting with the Tolmen case."
They went around the room, and by the end of it, everyone was caught up to speed on everyone else's work. There had been so much coming and going over the past twenty-four hours that some things had slipped through the cracks, and each CSI learned something new from the others' work.
Nick, who had handled the bulk of the most incriminating evidence, finished off. "We would have enough to charge James, if he weren't dead. But either way, I think we can label it case closed."
Grissom nodded in agreement. "Any objections?"
There were none.
"I'll expect your final reports by the end of the week. Now, the James murder."
Once again, they went around the table, but the exposés took considerably less time. They'd been working the case for twenty-four hours less than Bianca's, and it stood to reason that there wasn't as much uncovered yet. On the other hand, they had more evidence to work with.
"Sara will be with me in autopsy. Catherine, I want you working on the blood spatter analysis. Warrick, the surveillance tapes. The PD should have been able to eliminate all apartment residents for you. I want you to return to the apartment, collect all the pictures you can, and start matching up faces. Use the photographs taken from Bianca's dressing room table, too. Nick - the clothes we found near the body. See if you can match the blood to James's, and find out everything you can about where they may have come from. Any questions?"
Once again, no one had anything to bring up, and Grissom nodded, standing to signal an end to the meeting.
Sara slid her arms into the lab coat and smock, pulling her hair back in a ponytail and sliding a ventilation mask around her neck. Outfit complete, she entered the autopsy bay to find Doc Robbins sliding the plastic bags off the corpse's hands.
"Just in time," he said, looking up to see her. "Grissom coming?"
"He had to check on his bugs," Sara said, setting the evidence kit on an empty table and taking out materials to begin digging under the body's fingernails for any skin that may have come off during a struggle. There wasn't much there - James had kept his fingernails very short, probably as a byproduct of having to wear latex gloves as a doctor. The same was true for any of the CSIs. "He'll be here soon, though. He said to get started without him."
Robbins shrugged, and began laying out his instruments as Sara printed James's hands - fingertips, fingers, and palms. That accomplished, she turned his hands in the light - it looked like there might be defensive wounds, but under the blood, she couldn't tell. Just in case, she swabbed each knuckle.
Grissom entered just as she had finished swabbing both hands and Robbins had begun to look more closely at the battered remains of the body's skull. The right temple was nearly entirely caved in, skin broken so that shards of bone were protruding.
Sara stepped back, capping the swabs off and labelling each one, and crossed her arms over her chest. Grissom leaned against the autopsy table next to her, his shoulder brushing hers, and she smiled up at him briefly before turning her attention back to the body in front of her as Robbins clicked on his tape recorder and began to talk them through the autopsy.
The first thing to turn up was a splinter of wood embedded in the skull wound, to be shadowed by three other smaller splinters in wounds that had also exposed bone - shoulder, hip, and kneecap. The vast majority of the wounds had also bled, leading Robbins to speculate that the weapon they were looking for was jagged, at least on the end that had connected with the body.
The catalogue of damage was impressive - broken ribs, ruptured organs, massive internal hemhorraging, and a shattered vertebrae. The severed nerves that accompanied that last injury, on the lower back, indicated that it had been a paralyzing blow, waist down.
In the end, Robbins was hesitant to say which of the injuries had actually killed James. Any of a half dozen would have lead to death unless they'd occurred practically inside an emergency room. The most likely culprit seemed to be the massive cranial fracture that Sara had noticed earlier, but it was possible that he could have lived a few seconds after that only to be finished off by the failure of an internal organ, or even of the heart as it struggled under the strain of trauma-induced shock.
A half-dozen of the injuries had been inflicted post-mortem, mostly weaker blows around the chest and stomach area. That, along with the faded lividity on the back, led Robbins to theorize that he had died on his back, and the killer had kept raining blows on the body.
It was, without a doubt, a rage killing, and an intimate one. They were looking for someone who had known James, and while neither Grissom nor Sara spoke their opinions out loud, it seemed clear that Bianca's death had been the trigger.
"Okay, first things first. The blood? It all matches the sample that was waiting for me when I got in to the lab. I slept very well, thank you."
Nick raised his eyebrow at Greg, who grimaced and continued.
"Right, so all of the blood on the clothes is James's. And it is James's. It matches the hairs Sara bagged from his apartment." The appropriate documentation was passed over, and Nick slid it into a file with the other bloodwork from the case.
"What about the material?"
"Nothing really interesting," Greg said with a shrug. "Typical synthetic mix."
"From the weave and the heft, I'd say we're looking at a polo shirt of some kind," Nick guessed, picking up one of the smaller pieces of bagged tan material.
"And your other sample is denim. Again, nothing really interesting. Jeans and a polo shirt." Greg shrugged. "Sorry I can't really help you any further than that."
"Wait a second," Nick said, standing up abruptly. He reached across for a q-tip and cleaning solution, and slid the piece of cloth out and onto the counter, wetting the q-tip and dabbing carefully at the corner of the material.
Slowly, slowly, the soot began to come off of the cloth and reveal tan material beneath. Greg practically hooked his chin over Nick's shoulder, fascinated, as the CSI discarded a dirty q-tip in favor of another, repeating the process as he slowly revealed more and more of the cloth that had been obscured by soot. To the casual observer, it had just looked like extensive charring, but there had simply been an abundance of black grit rubbed into that corner of the cloth.
When he had cleared away the area entirely, there was a quarter inch or so of black embroidery visible. Part of a design - a curve, some flowing ribbons, half of a quirked smile - and the letters LAS V.
"Comedy and Tragedy," Greg observed. "Symbols of theater everywhere."
"I wonder if the Las Vegas Reperetory Theater gives out staff t-shirts?" Nick wondered aloud, and smirked in satisfaction.
It was slow, awkward work, comparing the grainy enhanced photos from the surveillance camera against the photographs from James's apartment. So far, Warrick had eliminated three of the men and women whose faces who had been captured during the thirty hours James could have been killed, and who the apartment complex manager had not recognized. The fourth - a thin, nervous man with mussed blond hair - hadn't matched any of the pictures from the apartment, and Warrick moved on to the snapshots from the dressing room with a grim determination.
Still no match.
He set aside two more photos, and had one left to go, when Catherine entered and leaned her elbows on the layout table, leaning over to look at his work.
"Hey."
"Hey," he responded without looking up, and began to compare the last surveillance photo - a short, slightly overweight young woman with long curling dark hair. "How's the blood spatter analysis going?"
"It's going," she said with a sigh. "Just needed a break for a little while."
"I understand completely," Warrick muttered, and continued on down the next column of pictures, finally sitting back, blowing a frustrated breath out through his lips as he tossed the last surveillance photo aside. "None of these match."
"Well, we identified a void in blood pattern among the pictures," Catherine pointed out. "One of them was missing. I think we have to assume that our killer was in that picture, and took it with him."
"Yeah." It still wasn't an appetizing possibility.
Sara brought the bindles with the scrapings from underneath James's fingernails to Greg's lab herself. The lab tech was drumming the fingers of his left hand on the countertop as he completed a form with his right hand, humming out of tune to whatever was playing into his headphones.
She tapped him on the shoulder, and without budging, he held up the index finger of his left hand, asking her to wait for just a few seconds. He signed off on the form and dropped it into the OUT box, and hooked the headphones around to his neck. The music pouring out made her wince immediately at its sheer volume. "How may I serve you?"
"Some skin samples from our DB's fingernails, possibly from his killer. I need you to run them against the DNA samples from the theater workers."
"It's Carter James, by the way," Greg told her as he took the bindles and began preparing the samples. "Robbins sent me a sample first thing, and it matched both the hair you took from the apartment, and the blood on the shirt. And the swabs from the blood spatter in the apartment."
"Nice to have it confirmed."
"Hmmm. Anything interesting in the autopsy?" When she gave him an incredulous look - autopsy results were far outside of his normal purview - he shrugged. "I'm trying to learn all I can about being a CSI."
She shrugged. "Massive trauma. He was beaten to death at close quarters."
"Rage killing," Greg said, nodding. He got another incredulous look. "I pay attention."
"Apparently," she said with a smile. "I'm going to go see where Grissom's getting with his bugs - come get me when it's finished processing, okay?"
"Will do."
Grissom was leaned over his worktable, measuring a maggot with calipers with his left hand and taking notes with his right, and Sara leaned in the doorway, right leg hooked over her left, shoulders offset.
"I will never understand how you do that," she told him, voice full of admiration.
"I could teach you," he offered, his back still to the door as he finished making his notes. She entered the office and leaned a hip against the worktable, careful not to block his light. "It's not that difficult."
"That's why you're the entomologist in this relationship," she snarked. "Because you think that's easy."
"A statement like that, Sara, seems to indicate that an entomologist is a necessary component of a relationship," Grissom said solemnly.
She wasn't sure, but she thought he was smirking. He still hadn't looked up from the maggot. "Well, it is for me."
Now he looked up, and the expression on his face was priceless. A slow smile spread across his lips, and she congratulated herself on completely distracting him from his bug calculations, if only for a few seconds. "That doesn't give you much of a pool," he continued, still smiling. "There aren't all that many entomologists in this country."
"What can I say?" she answered. "I got lucky." Now it was her turn to grin at him, and they rested like that, content to just smile at each other.
Belying her earlier comments about its difficulty, Sara finally pulled up a stool to observe Grissom as he worked, and found herself understanding a great deal more than she'd thought she would have. Of course, she had always been a quick study, and she had read the entomology book Grissom had given her for Christmas cover-to-cover so many times he had jokingly asked her if it contained the secrets of the universe.
To which her response had been a gap-toothed grin. "No. Just to you."
He'd blushed at that, and Sara smiled at the memory as she rested her chin in her hand and watched him now, fascinated by his precise, agile movements in picking up the insects and measuring them, flipping the pages of the reference books, bringing over the high-powered magnifying glass to confirm observations.
She couldn't have said how much longer it was when Greg knocked at the door, startling them both out of the quiet intimacy. He cleared his throat, and by the acutely embarrassed look on his face, she could tell he thought he'd interrupted something. What, she wasn't quite sure - there were maggots crawling all over the worktable - but still he stood there and shuffled his feet.
"Yes?" she finally asked, prodding him into speech.
"Your DNA results."
"And?"
"Got a match."