I had to lol at your offer of pizza, Gib, hehehe! I actually don't work, so you'd think I'd have more time to just sit around and write, eh? ;-)

Beaujolais, sorry to hear you've been under the weather. Coincidentally, I'm fighting a lousy head cold right now too. And writing helps me to sneak away from reality and forget my misery for a while.

Thanks for the continued readership of this story. Cathy.

Chapter 38

Catherine stared at the computer screen in disbelief. Cecilia, who had been standing beside her chair, stopped talking in midsentence, as she watched CODIS bring up the results of the search the criminalist had ordered, using the DNA sample that Greg had been able to successfully process. Catherine looked up at Cecilia wordlessly, then reached for her cell phone.

"Brass," the familiar deep voice answered at the other end.

"Jim, it's me. I'm at the lab. I've got something you need to see," Catherine told him slowly.

Brass didn't press for details. "On my way."

CSICSICSICSICSICSICSICSI

Jim was entirely unprepared for what Catherine had discovered. When he walked into the lab and Cecilia had turned at his arrival, he had noted immediately how pale she looked. She had both arms crossed at her chest, her hands gripping her upper arms tightly, hugging close against her body. There was fear and confusion in her beautiful, dark eyes. Catherine pushed back a bit from the computer and crooked her head to look at him as well. The thin set of her compressed lips, the tightness in her jaw, and the uncertainty in her gentian blue gaze, made his footsteps slow.

"I got a CODIS hit," Catherine said, but there was none of the jubilation in her tone that he might have expected. Instead, her voice was thick with foreboding.

She wouldn't, or couldn't, say more, waiting for him to get near enough to the screen so that he could see her discovery for himself. Catherine pulled another chair next to hers...Cecilia seemed to prefer to stand...and Jim settled himself next to the criminalist. Taking a deep breath, Catherine touched the keyboard, and the results of the CODIS search flashed up on the screen.

Jim read silently to himself. Feeling the bile rise in his gorge as he worked his way backwards, starting with the most recent entry of unsolved cases.

December of two years ago. Los Angeles, California. Sexual assault. Female victim bludgeoned to death. Pubic hair recovered from the scene, matched the DNA from the scrapings taken from Beth Marchison's nails.

February of that same year. Spokane, Washington. Another female victim. Again, a sexual assault. Killed by a blow to the head with a heavy, blunt object. Semen recovered from the scene was a match to the Marchison sample.

July, three years before that. Tacoma, Washington. Female, raped, beaten to death. DNA extracted from epithelials taken from beneath the victim's nails, matched those recovered from Beth Marchison.

Two years before that murder, November, Chicago, Illinois. Female victim. COD was blunt force trauma to the head. Sexual assault. DNA testing matched it to the Marchison case.

In the last nine years, four women had been sexually assaulted and killed by whoever had left his DNA on Beth Marchison. Their serial killer had stopped murdering women in Las Vegas. But he hadn't stopped killing.

"We got a memo from the Feds about this guy," Brass said huskily. "After the Spokane murder. Notification of an unknown serial. Not much evidence to go on. Nothing to tie the victims. No viable suspects." He paused, the muscles in his right jaw working furiously. "We let the bastard walk away, and he killed again."

While others pay the price for your failure. The words from the recently received note taunted Jim.

Cecilia reached a hand to touch Jim's shoulder, before realizing what she was doing. She let it remain just briefly, savouring the contact, his flesh warm and solid beneath the shirt.

Jim closed his eyes for a moment as Cecilia's hand rested on his shoulder. He'd been craving her touch since she had walked out of his apartment the other morning. He wanted to reach up and take her fingers in his hold, and clasp them tightly. Taking sustinence from her caring. He couldn't, of course, he had to keep her at a distance. Jim was afraid that if he let her back in again, even for a moment, it would weaken his resolve. And above all, he had to protect her. To keep her safe. Nothing mattered more to him than that.

Catherine watched Cecilia reach for Jim, then let her hand fall away again. She hadn't had a chance to talk with the writer yet, to ask her about she and the detective. They had returned to the lab from breakfast, just as Greg had been about to page her. Their priority had been to enter the data in CODIS, on the off chance that they might get something interesting. Catherine had been stunned at what the search had turned up, and the full import hadn't quite hit her yet. Grissom was in a supervisors' meeting, with Ecklie and Helen Chang, and as yet was unaware of this latest discovery.

These were just the cases where there had been a DNA match, Brass knew. That didn't mean that their guy hadn't killed more women. Just that they hadn't been able to link him to other crimes. How many unsolved murders in other, smaller towns, where the department might not even have a CSI unit, or where the killer had just gotten lucky and not left a DNA calling card, could also be attributed to the same man? Or how many cases had there been when the cops had made a mistake? Focused on the wrong suspect? Convicted an innocent man? Just like had happened with Todd Juneau.

All these years, Brass hadn't given another thought to the Holiday Murders. Even when the FBI memo had crossed his desk. He'd read it, made a mental note to watch for any similar cases that should surface in Vegas, then filed it. Never dreaming that there was any connection to the deaths they had attributed to Juneau. Never realizing that his ineptitude nine years ago had let a killer go free.

"Did the FBI memo say anything about the police receiving a letter from the killer after the murders," Catherine asked. Jim shook his head. "That's different from the Vegas cases."

"Changed his MO maybe," Brass shrugged. "Didn't want us to link him."

They had let the wicked go free. And after claiming at least four more victims, the killer had made another switch. He'd begun to go after the detectives involved in the botched Vegas case. Takei first, in Los Angeles. Starting with Joe because the killer had happened to remain in California after the murder of the co-ed?

"We're going to need everything we can get on these other cases," Brass intoned.

"While we were waiting for you, I made some calls." Catherine told him. "We'll have to notify the Feds too," she continued hesitantly. "Co-ordinate our efforts."

Brass frowned. "I'll take care of it."

CSICSICSICSICSICSICSICSI

By the time Gil was finished his meeting, just after noon, the reports had begun to come in. Catherine had commandeered a table in his office, where she organized the information they were receiving about the other murders. CODIS contained only minimal information about the crimes.

The most recent of the cases, was the one from December, two years previously. The half-naked body of a twenty-year old college student, attending UCLA, had been discovered in a park three blocks from her dorm. Jennifer Hales, caucasian, red-haired and blue-eyed, moderately overweight, had been sexually assaulted and bludgeoned to death. A hickory baseball bat had been recovered from the scene, and hair and blood matched the victim. There were no prints on the murder weapon. Pubic hair recovered from the victim's body, matched the DNA from the scrapings taken from Beth Marchison's nails.

Initially, Hales' ex-boyfriend had been a suspect, since there had been a recent break-up following a volatile relationship. But the DNA excluded him, and indicated that the killer was responsible for three previous murders, two in Washington, and one in Chicago.

February of that same year, the body of a thirty-year old female factory worker, Debbie Lutz, was found in a wooded ravine behind the building where she worked in Spokane, Washington. Lutz was caucasian, a brown-eyed brunette. She had been sexually assaulted, and killed by a blow to the head with a heavy, blunt object. The murder weapon was never found. A small semen sample, recovered from leafy debris beneath the victim's partially clad body, turned out to be a match to another suspect from another Washington state murder three years before. The same suspect was also wanted in a Chicago killing two years prior to that.

Pending DNA analysis, there had been no suspects in Lutz's murder. Other than the DNA link to the other murders, police had nothing to identify the suspect.

Kaleigh Dupre, a twenty-eight year old waitress, in Tacoma, Washington, had been found dead in her home by her boyfriend on July 5th, after she had failed to meet him at the home of a mutual friend the afternoon before for an Independence Day get together. Concerned that Dupre had not called to cancel, and was not answering her phone, the boyfriend had gone to her home the following day. Looking through a bedroom window at the rear of her bungalow, he had seen Dupre's body prone on the floor. He had called 911 and police had arrived at the scene. The coroner had placed the time of death within the previous twenty-four hours; the victim had still been in rigor. Dupre was caucasian, a petite, grey-eyed blonde.

Dupre had been raped and severely beaten. As in the Marchison case, epithelials retrieved from scrapings of the victim's nails, had been entered into CODIS, and a hit found with a similar murder in Chicago two years beforehand.

It was the third week of November that the nude and frozen body of thirty-four year-old, married bank teller, Claire Delsordo had been discovered by teens who were taking a short cut through a wooded area, to an outdoor skating rink at a municipal park in Chicago, Illinois. Delsordo was Latina, tall, with dark brown hair and eyes. Based on when she had last been seen, and taking into account the weather and mean temperature, the time of death was estimated to have been within twenty-four to thrity-six hours before she was found. Foreign saliva recovered from the victim's mouth did not match that of her husband.

A neighbour with whom Delsordo was having an on-going dispute, and whom she had gotten a restraining order against, was brought in for questioning. In addition to his having an alibi, his DNA was not a match for that recovered from the victim. The husband as well had been briefly investigated and deemed not to be a suspect. Further investigation into the possibility of Delsordo's having had an affair, which the foreign saliva might have indicated, failed to turn up anything. Eventually, as leads petered out, the investigation went into the cold case files.

Cecilia had read about the cases with mounting horror. What kind of animal was doing this? This was the same man who had murdered the three detectives? The one who had just sent the letter to Jim, and was targeting him next? He was like a ghost in the wind, no one knew anything about him. There were no clues, no leads, other than that he had left behind a piece of his DNA at the scenes. But all that did was tell them that the same man had committed the murders. It didn't offer up anything at all about who that man might be, or point them in even the vaguest direction so that they could begin to track him down. They knew it was the same killer. But other than that...they had nothing.

"Other than the victims being adult female, I don't see any pattern," Gil remarked curiously. "There are differences in age, marital status, general appearance, body type, hair and eye colour, and even ethnic differences."

"So how is he choosing his victims?" Catherine queried aloud. "Totally random? Based purely on opportunity?" She shook her head. "I can't see him just wandering around until he chances upon some woman who just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"Either the guy travels, professionally or for vacation, or he's moved around in the last nine years," Brass stated. "Nevada. Illinois. Washington. California."

"The length of time between the murders would tend to favour vacation travel, rather than business travel," Grissom suggested. "It seems more sporadic."

"Yeah, but who vacations in Chicago in November?" Catherine asked wryly. Then to Brass, "Did you ever find a connection between the vics in the Holiday Murders?"

Jim tilted his head. "We figured the commonality was probably the supermarket. Juneau knew Hegel from there. Marchison lived a few blocks away from the store, and even though none of the staff remembered her as a regular, there was a good chance she might have stopped in before, for bread or milk or something, and Juneau might have noticed her then.

"Miller, we couldn't find a connection for. We figured she was just random, a trial run, and because she was a pro, she was an easy mark." He sighed heavily. "Of course, if Juneau wasn't the killer, than I don't think the supermarket was the epicentre. And other than that, I don't recall if there were any other similarities between the vics. I'll have to go back over the files."

"There's a connection," Gil asserted, "we just don't see it yet. There's a reason he chose all of these women. Something brought them to his attention." He rubbed his chin.

Brass' brow furrowed. "So the guy leaves Vegas nine years ago, or stops killing here, and picks it up again two years later in Chicago. He kills Delsordo. Two years after that, in Tacoma, Washington, he murders Dupre. He waits another three years, and then Lutz turns up dead in Spokane. Ten months after that, Hales is killed in L.A. He's escalating again.

"Then, he takes another break, for two more years. Until he goes after Joe Takei, also in L.A. Then several months later, he's back in Vegas. Denny Martens is killed in an apparent hit-and-run. A month later, Elliott Keeth gets incinerated in Laughlin. Escalating again. Only now his vics aren't women anymore, they're the cops who investigated the Vegas murders nine years ago. Why?" The crevices in Brass' forehead deepened.

"Maybe he wants the killing to stop," Catherine suggested. "He wants to get caught."

"I don't think he wants to get caught," Grissom disagreed. "He made the murders of Takei, Martens and Keeth all look like accidents. He stopped sending letters after the Vegas murders nine years ago. Altered his MO. But he started sending letters again, when he began killing the cops. But just to the individuals, not to the force. He didn't take credit for those three murders, but it's as though he wanted them to know. Except he was so vague, none of them understood the connection with the Juneau case."

"There's nothing in CODIS prior to the Vegas murders nine years ago," Catherine observed. "Do you think this is where it all started?"

"It probably started long before that," Grissom commented. "Way back in childhood when something happened to damage his psyche, or even some chromosomal blip before birth. And there was probably the usual progression. Cruelty to animals. Abuse and torture leading to killing neighbourhood pets. Possibly sexual assault as a teen against a friend, neighbour, or younger, weaker family member. The first murder might have been in Vegas. But that wasn't the start of things," Gil surmised.

"And now he's blaming the detectives who worked the first cases, for not catching him before, and is punishing them for it?" Catherine asked uncertainly. "Why? Is he feeling remorseful or something?"

"We don't have enough yet to make too many conjectures," Grissom said. "It'll be interesting to see what a profiler has to say."

"We thought it was Juneau," Brass said woodenly, "but we had no solid evidence to support that. And we let the real killer walk away. And now seven more people are dead." He looked up, his face slack, as though unable to absord that reality. "We had the evidence then, that there was someone else, but we didn't do anything with it." He shook his head.

"Juneau was a good bet," Catherine consoled. "And he was a creep. We know now he'd sexually assaulted his own sister, and at least one other young woman. At the time, he was stalking Marilyn Hegel. Fantasizing with increasingly violent porn. He was a viable suspect, and I think he eventually might have killed Hegel, or at least attacked and raped her, except that someone else got to her first. He wasn't some choir boy, Jim."

"He ran from police, which was highly indicative of guilt. And after Juneau's death, the killings here stopped," Grissom added pointedly. "There was every reason to believe Todd Juneau was responsible for those murders."

Brass looked at the supervisor, his dark eyes clouded. "We should have questioned the O positive epithelials. You would have."

Gil looked uncomfortable. "From a forensic standpoint, there wasn't enough to convict Juneau. It was up to the CSI investigator to interpret what evidence there was." He hesitated. "Jim, while the science is always exact, our interpretations aren't. Sometimes we draw the wrong conclusions. We make errors. It's happened to all of us. I've gone to trial with evidence that I believed was clear on culpability, and that a jury interpreted the same way. And while the evidence, as it was, was sound, the reality was that the accused was innocent. We're not omnipotent. We can only do the best we can with what we have."

"Hell of a lot of good that does to the families of the initial victims who thought they'd gotten closure. Or the four more women who've been killed in the last nine years, whose loved ones haven't seen justice done. The four that we know of. And a hell of a lot of good it does Amy and Christian Martens, or Elliott Keeth's sons or his girlfriend Dana Asmundsen, or the sister of Joe Takei." The bitter words poured out of Brass. "The thing of it is we didn't do the best we could with what we had? Did we?" The self-recrimination hung heavy in the air.

"Nikki Giovanni said, 'Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to error that counts," Grissom quoted the African-American poet, essayist and lecturer.

"Wow, that's really profound. Maybe I can get that engraved on the headstones of those three dead cops," Brass countered with deceptive lightness. "Or maybe I'll just save it for my own epitaph." He gave a humourless chuckle. "Sorry Gil, I guess I'm just not in the mood for your little snippets of wisdom. I think maybe I should go for a walk." He spun on heel and stalked out of the office.

Cecilia wanted to go after Jim. To say or do something to take away the anger, the suffering, and the self-reproach. She wanted to assuage the bitterness and the guilt. It hurt her, with a physical ache, to have to watch him trying to deal with all of this on his own. But Jim neither wanted nor needed her intervention, he had made that clear.

Grissom stood there looking confused. He glanced at Catherine, not knowing how to proceed.

"Just...give him some space," Catherine advised wearily.

CSICSICSICSICSICSICSICSI

Brass' walk didn't take him far. He found himself in Conrad Ecklie's office, before he had even consciously determined that he wanted to go there. He strode briskly into the room, where the dayshift supervisor, seated at his desk, looked up with mild curiosity.

"What can I do for you, Detective Brass?" Ecklie asked with cool formality. Ever since the sheriff had told him that Brass had reopened Martens hit-and-run, deliberately shutting him out, Ecklie's animosity had been building.

"The Holiday Murders. Juneau wasn't the killer," Brass began without preamble. "And whoever killed those women nine years ago, has killed since. We put the case to bed, but we had the wrong guy."

Ecklie's dark eyes glinted. "Really?"

"You were the lead crim on the case," Brass stated, and Ecklie wasn't sure whether or not there was an accusation in the deep, even tone. "There was something we all missed."

"And what was that, detective?" Ecklie asked.

"The last vic, Beth Marchison, the one who was killed in her home. You took a scraping from her fingernails. Identified it as type O positive. But Juneau was type A positive. That was the first real forensic evidence we had to point to the killer. But it got buried," Brass said with disgust. "How could that have happened? How could we not have realized what that might have meant?"

Ecklie's eyes shifted guiltily.

Brass felt as though he'd been sucker punched in the gut. "You did realize it was important," he whispered hoarsely. "You knew we might have the wrong guy, and you didn't say a damned thing." The words rang out, cold and accusing, while Brass' eyes narrowed.

"I had given that report to your partner Keeth," Ecklie retorted. "But you were all so convinced that Juneau was your guy. You went ahead and issued that arrest warrant, without even running it by me. Based on the circumstantial evidence you'd taken from his home, and the fingerprint I lifted from Hegel's car. You detectives interpreted what that meant. You weren't looking at any other suspects, as far as you were all concerned Juneau was your guy!" Ecklie's cheeks had reddened, and he raised his voice in protestation.

"You should have said something!" Brass insisted, his anguish coming out as anger. "You knew about the blood type discrepancy. You knew what it might have meant. You should have said something!"

Ecklie rose from his chair now, his hands splayed on the desk in front of him. "What did I know, Brass? That Beth Marchison had someone else's skin under her fingernails, and not Juneau's? Even that didn't prove a damned thing! That didn't necessarily mean that someone else was her attacker. It could have belonged to a boyfriend, or some one night stand she'd picked up, might have been normal transfer during an act of passionate, consensual intercourse. It could have meant a lot of things." Ecklie stared back at Brass. "Takei took Juneau down and then it was all over. The killings stopped.

"If any one of you had come to me, just once, and said that you had some question about whether or not Juneau was the guy, I would have pressed further on the epithelials," Ecklie continued. "But you didn't. And the suspect was dead. And the killings stopped.

"Do you know how many cases this lab processes over the course of a year? You were supervisor here at the lab, before you screwed up the Gribbs thing," Ecklie reminded with malicious pique. "You know what kind of pressure there is. We had a solved case. Do you know how many other unsolved cases I had waiting for me after that? Every one one of them just as important to the people involved? We work on one case, then we go on to the next, there's no time to dwell over each and every little detail. You know how it works.

"I'm not going to be the fall guy here!" Ecklie's face contorted. "We all did the best jobs we could. If there had been any doubt about Juneau's guilt...if there had been a single other killing here in Vegas like the Holiday Murders...I would have pressed about the unknown epithelials. I didn't bury anything. I didn't know what that evidence meant. Yeah, I might have wondered, initially. But just like you, Martens, Keeth and Takei, once Juneau was dead, I believed we had the right guy." Conrad considered what he had learned about Brass re-opening the investigation into Denny Martens hit-and-run. Did that have something to do with the old Juneau case? It had to be more than a coincidence. Martens had worked that case, nine years ago. Brass has questions about Martens' recent death. And now Brass was relooking into the Holiday Murders.

Ecklie paused drawing breath, trying to calm himself. He looked out past the windowed wall of his office, to where two lab workers stood, watching the confrontation between he and Brass. Conrad lowered his voice, and sat back down. "If you're feeling guilt about the way you handled the case, that's yours to shoulder," he said firmly. "If Juneau wasn't the killer, if someone else was, and if he did kill again, then I'm sorry to hear that. Sorrier than you'll probably ever know. But I'm not going to beat myself up about the way I did my job nine years ago. And I'm not going to let you beat me up about it either." Ecklie's chin jutted determinedly.

Ecklie's right, Brass thought grimly. Even if Conrad could have done things differently, the forensic scientist hadn't been negligent in his handling of the case. Everything he said was true. And it wasn't going to help Brass carry the weight of his own guilt, to browbeat anyone else into feeling culpability too.