Grissom sat there, looking at the printed results of her fingerprints. He couldn't explain it. The evidence was there, he just couldn't seem to find it. He watched Mrs. DeMonte sleeping for a long time, still hooked up to medical equipment. After a lengthy sigh, he spoke.
"You have no fingerprints Mrs.DeMonte," he started. "Even I'm not good enough to explain that."
"Grissom," she recognized the voice instantly. She was alertly awake the whole time he was sitting there, her eyes closed. Her eyes opened slightly as her head turned to look at him.
His neck prickled. Her eyes frightened him. The uncertainty of what he was actually looking at frightened him. They were cold, haunted and seemingly hollow. It was as if he asked her to be anyone, she could.
"You shouldn't be here. Tonight I am being transferred into 'witness protection'," she said.
"But why do I have the distinct feeling you don't need it," Grissom's voice was soft.
Her lips smiled slightly, even though she looked as if she was sleeping. Her eyes had closed again. "Because you are good at what you do."
"What I don't understand is why you're pretending to need all of this care."
"I'm protecting you, and your team."
"Getting a member of my team fired because you asked him to keep your secret is not protecting my team."
She opened her eyes again and looked at him.
"You're so protective of your people, they love you for it, you know that? Nick will be fine. Your people don't deserve to be in danger because I screwed up."
"What are we talking about?" Grissom asked curiously. "I don't understand where this conversation is going."
She could tell him why he needed to be protective, but they were all in more danger than they knew. She had gotten sidetracked, lost in the shuffle of DeMonte's life and cameras and bodyguards, waiting for the right time, watching the routines so she could safely carry out her task. She had played the doting wife to get closer, lost her control to a drug habit.
Had she enjoyed being punished? Penance for her crimes? Did she feel guilty about who she was and what she did?
She had really screwed this one up.
She sighed, the air moving softly from her nose.
"Catherine is a mother… the rest are sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, loved. You don't deserve to be swept into this just for doing your job."
"Are we in danger?" he pressed.
"Everyone is always in danger."
"Nick lied for you Mrs. DeMonte," he said shortly. "From what I understand you didn't do a lot to keep him out of danger."
"Nick lied for himself. He lied because he wanted to."
Grissom met those haunting eyes again, this time with a wall built up behind his own; a wall between his people and her, whoever she was.
Her eyes tightened slightly around the corners. "I care about what happens to Nick. Nick will be fine."
"How do I know you're telling the truth? We don't know anything about you."
"I've always been on your side," she said under her breath as if the very walls were listening. "My shortcomings have fallen on your doorstep, I do not take my failure lightly."
"Who are you Mrs. DeMonte?" he asked point blank.
"A loyal casino owner's wife," her eyes closed and she sighed again.
He got up carefully, to leave. "If Nick gets hurt, I will find you."
"Nick was born to hurt, even I can't keep him from that."
Grissom stopped, listening intently to the Irish lilt creeping back into her voice. On purpose? Was she baiting him? Giving him answers to his unspoken questions?
"Nick is a hero at his very core. Someday that will be his undoing," she said.
"Nick is a good man."
"Even good men can make bad step, even die for their convictions," she said softly. "because to them 'heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right'…"
She was baiting him. He waited a long moment, pulling the words together before speaking slowly, like he was speaking in code.
"…'and although a different breeding, different religion, or greater intellectual activity would have modified or even reversed the particular action, yet for the hero that thing he does is the highest deed, and is not open to the censure of philosophers or divines'."
She smiled slightly, kneading a distinct scar on her elbow, pulling a blanket up to cover her arm,
"Ralph Waldo Emerson," he said, closing the door behind him.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
"So what do we have?" Catherine asked, lifting a folder as she took a swig of water from her bottle and divvied up the Chinese food order in the break room. "This one is too good to pass up."
"Murder of a senator. Only two people close enough to see what happened are the husband and wife. Wife is covered in wine, the senator's blood and her blood," Sara started.
"We know neither were the shooter because the shot broke the wine glass in her hand. It had to have come from behind. All guests were questioned, nobody saw anything, and nobody was in the vicinity of the trajectory," Warrick picked at a pint of Chinese food with a plastic fork. "No footprints, no forced entry."
"No motive to kill the senator?" Catherine asked.
"None that we can see. None of the guests had any interest in the senator's work except DeMonte," Warrick finished.
"Someone doesn't want a senator to support DeMonte's expansion, could still be a motive," Catherine said.
"Unlikely though," Sara said.
"Don't discount it yet," Grissom thought out loud. He was unusually quiet, still thinking about the results of Kara's fingerprinting, their exchange, her quotes of poetry, her hidden words, and errantly jotting them down on a napkin. Nick, however, was at the forefront of his attention.
"Wife was sent through a plate glass door shortly before the party, all evidence cleaned up by the housekeeper and the rest of the staff. An attempt on the wife's life in the hospital by an unknown assassin," Sara continued. "Bullet from the senator matches bullet from the hospital. Same gun. Not registered."
"So the senator wasn't the target." Catherine said.
Grissom looked up at the comment, and then went back to the chicken scratch he had written all over his napkin.
"Here's my theory, I still think the wife tried to have the husband killed and the shooter missed." Warrick asked. "Then when she's in the hospital, the assassin finishes the job."
"But that doesn't explain the husband's murder, and the matching bullets. The assassin she hired tries to assassinate her?" Sara said.
"Maybe she skipped on payment," Warrick dug into his lo mein. "I don't trust her."
"Get this," Sarah flopped a folder down on the table. "I don't want to throw another wrench in the works, but I think Warrick is right."
"Thank you!" he said.
"Before Nick left for the hospital, he asked me to run a background check on everyone in the room. Everyone checked out, nothing unusual. The Mr. had low rent criminal charges, everything expected. Now the wife… was a different story. Nothing. No credit, no financial history to speak of. I worked a couple of different angles, mail order brides, and green cards. I checked DeMonte's financial records, found nothing."
Warrick raised a brow. "That is weird. We didn't find anything at the house either, other then the Mr.'s financial works and stuff."
Sara continued. "So I went a different direction. No close relatives. The deeper I went, the less there was. People that didn't exist, living at addresses that didn't exist. Birth Certificate isn't authentic. I don't think our Mrs. DeMonte IS Mrs. DeMonte. But I've still come up with nothing. It's like she's a ghost."
"The same weird nothing," Grissom said particularly to himself as he put a period at the end of a sentence on the napkin he was writing on.
"What are you doing?" Warrick picked up the napkin and looked at it.
"Merely a method to the madness," Grissom said quietly. "Sara, would you do a search on those words?"
"I'm on it," she said. "This case has got me hooked."
"This looks like a bunch of jibberish," Warrick handed it to Sara, who was balancing several white pints and a fork, almost running into Nick on the way out the door.
"Hey Nick, how ya doing?" Catherine asked.
"Fine," he said quietly, he held his ballcap in both hands, unconsciously smushing it. "Grissom can I talk to you?"
"Sure, Nick." Grissom started, Catherine picking up on Grissom's glare.
"Care to share?" Catherine picked up on it. "What's with you Gil, you're on an entirely different planet."
Nick stepped out of the way as Greg knocked gently on the doorframe, handing a folder to Grissom and scamming a pint of rice from Warrick. Warrick frowned at him, pulling his lo mein closer to him as he glowered again at Greg.
Grissom opened it, wiping his lips on a clean napkin and getting up. "Did you say anything to Ecklie?" he demanded of Nick.
He shook his head, "I just got here."
Grissom left quickly with the folder. "Don't talk to anyone," he said to Nick as he left. "Wait in my office."
"What was that about?" Catherine asked Greg, who hadn't followed.
"You're going to need to ask Ecklie."
"Ecklie?"
"Um yah… I kinda peeked at the folder. All of us are supposed to surrender any and all information and evidence we have right now," he started. "We've been pulled from the case," Greg finished.
Grissom walked down the hallway. Sara had a set of headphones on, listening to something she was clicking on the computer.
She looked up, sliding one of earpieces off.
"It popped up pretty quickly. I did a quick search on those word combinations you wrote down for me," she ate a forkful of something.
"And?"
"It's German. Old German," she said, sliding off the other earpiece.
"Old German, like old English?" he looked intrigued. "German Shakespeare?"
"Kind of, it's used mostly in classical music manuscripts, Beethoven for example. The words you gave me popped up in different combinations from some of the classical composers."
Grissom's grin was subdued, but priceless. "Where would someone learn something like that?"
"Well, some of this stuff is professional level, nothing a high school could perform unless they were awesome. So college, professional. This is some pretty heavy stuff."
Grissom was punching in numbers on his pager.
Warrick's head appeared at the door within several moments, still chewing on a mouthful of lo mein.
"I have a music question…" Grissom started.
"About?"
"Mrs. DeMonte's musical influences."
"Hey, Ecklie just pulled us from this case," Warrick said. "I need to process samples from a dead hooker case. I'd like to get back to that and keep my job if you don't mind."
Grissom frowned. "Remind me to have a conference with our 'peeking' tom Greg."
"What? You let me work on this knowing we'd been pulled from the case? Are you trying to get me fired?" Sara protested.
"The gibberish on my napkin, has turned out to be a classical composition," he looked pleased, ignoring the objection from both of them.
They were silent.
"I'll take the heat, I need your help on this," Grissom said seriously.
Warrick sighed, thinking a moment through skeptical eyes, "Where'd you get the words from from?"
"Mrs. DeMonte's obsessive compulsive mantra. They're lyrics."
"So she knows a classical song, you know how many people know classical music?"
"Enough to have been helping someone rehearse it?" Grissom asked. "She was counting off, like a conductor, or repeating what she'd heard as a student."
Warrick nodded slightly. "I'm listening."
"We're looking for musicians who have sung this piece or performed it in an orchestra."
"You know what a long shot that is?" Warrick said. "Thousands of schools and ensembles across a hundred countries."
"But not all of them have daughters. One of the main causes of her disease is severe emotional trauma. Cross-reference all of your findings with traumatic events of the members. Start with a twenty year span and narrow it down."
"This is a needle in a haystack," Sara said. "It's an impossible task."
"Maybe not," Warrick said, moving to the computer.
Sara slipped a mini-disk out of the computer, getting up for a moment. Warrick leaned over the computer, clicking the mouse slowly.
"Every professional organization keeps a running record of their performance literature. We find the organizations that have performed this piece within our time frame; let's say her childhood, then cross reference our criteria within those findings."
"Well maybe a pencil in a haystack," Sara scowled. "How come Nick isn't in here? We have to do this drivel alone?"
"Because he isn't. Is this for me?" Grissom pointed at the mini-disk.
"Um, yah, this is a recording of your masterpiece, the title is on there," Sara said, handing it to him. "You do realize how hopeless this is?"
"No, I don't," Grissom said seriously. "We've solved cases with less."
"This isn't our case anymore," Warrick said.
"We know nothing about this woman, and we have no definitive evidence on three murders, and you're sending us on this wild goose chase, " Sara clipped.
He held up the mini-disk. "We know one thing more than we knew yesterday." He paused. "And run a background check on our dead cop."
"Why would you push this when Ecklie wants us off?" Warrick asked.
"Is Nick in some kind of trouble?" Sara asked quietly.
Warrick's eyes flicked to Grissom.
"That is yet to be seen."
"You should have told us Nick needed our help in the first place," Sara said, slipping the headphones back on and resuming her research.
Grissom left with the disk pinched carefully between his fingers. Arriving in his office; Nick was sitting there patiently, still smushing his hat. Grissom sat down, placing the disk in his computer and putting on headphones, listening a moment.
"I know you told me to stay home but,"
Grissom put a finger to his lips listening to the lengthy classical composition. He let the sound slide over his brain as he thought, swirling the pieces of the puzzle in his head. Orchestra and choir, sad, sung in German. Brahms. No birth certificate, no history, quoting poetry… obsessive compulsive for order, victim of two attempted assassinations… murder… scars… his mind flashed on a passing glance to her elbow.
Scars!
Grissom handed the headphones to Nick, who listened for a moment. "What is this?"
"Our Rosetta Stone," he grinned, getting up pay a visit again to the infirmary.
"Sorry to interrupt," Catherine knocked quietly on the doorframe. "Ecklie wants us all in his office, right now."