Chapter I
In Search of Innocence
Innocence Parker cowered in the corner of the dirty,dank and disgusting room. Tears ran out of her blue eyes. She just wanted to go home. She couldn't believe she'd been so stupid. It had been late and she'd been partying…she knew better then to walk anywhere at night by herself. When the man had grabbed her she'd screamed…but no one had heard her. She'd kicked against him, but he'd pressed a rag over her mouth and nose and she'd gotten woozy and passed out.
She'd been in this God-awful room for two days now. She lived in terror. He was going to rape her, going to kill her. All because she'd had a stupid fight with her stupid friends. She sniffed and roughly wiped at her tears. She wanted her mother. Innocence was only fifteen.
The entire team was on the Innocence Parker case. Unfortunately, with 48 hours already on the clock, the hopes of finding the teenager alive were swiftly dwindling.
Sara was running over the slim amount of trace evidence again, trying to make her tired eyes see something that could break the case wide open. Her neck was cramped from sitting over a microscope for to long and her coffee had long ago grown cold. She looked up and over at the case-board they'd put together. Innocence Parker was only the latest in a string of cases. Kidnapped girls, none had been found yet. The cases were stringed together by MO and an unidentified DNA sample that they believed to belong to the kidnapper. They had manic parents demanding results, screaming for their daughter's return. The AMBER alert had died down, no one had seen or heard from the young girl since Friday night when she'd left a friend's party by herself.
She rolled her shoulders, trying to work out ever-present kinks from her too stiff muscles. She picked up her coffee cup and took a walk, stretching her legs as she went to the break room to get what might have been her twenty-fifth cup of coffee since she'd caught the case. She could see her fellow CSIs through the glass walls of the lab. Nick was looking at video-footage from an ATM camera on the girl's route home. In the DNA lab, she could see Warrick in deep conversation with Wendy. Catherine was standing in the door of her office, on her phone, most likely talking to or about Lindsey. The victim attended Lindsey's school and both of the Willows women were shaken by the kidnapping.
In the break room, she poured herself a cup of coffee, it was some supermarket brand and not Greg's forty dollar a pound brew. Sara sighed and took a drink, letting the caffeinated liquid slide down her throat. She closed her eyes and ran the specifics of the case through her head, trying to find that elusive little clue that would help them rescue a terrified and traumatized teenager.
The break came around four am. There had been a ripped piece of paper in the dashboard of a vehicle that had been abandoned out in the desert. It matched the description of the vehicle used to abduct one of the girls and they'd found hair in the trunk that was a DNA match to Innocence Parker.
Sara, since her specialty was trace and elements analysis, was working the paper. She had tested it for acid content and the ink for telling markers and pigments. She waited impatiently for the results. The font of the page number in the lower right hand corner was also unique and Sara couldn't help but feel that she'd seen it somewhere before.
Sara saw Catherine coming her way long before the blonde had arrived at her preferred out-of-the-way lab. "Sara, do you have those results yet?" Sara held back her smart remarks, it was tough, but she did it. She knew Catherine was shaken up by the case, but that was no reason to take it out on her...not that it made a difference to Catherine. Sara was her favorite lab scape-goat. Their work-relationship had never been...very stable and as to their personal relationship...Sara doubted Catherine trusted or liked her as far as the petite woman could throw her. Sara ran her hands through her dark hair, "Not yet." She saw the telling signs in Catherine's blue eyes, she was about to blow off some steam and Sara was a convenient target.
"Sara we're working against the clock, can't you work any faster? Christ, there's a little girl out there!" Sara's already frayed nerves wore down a little more, "You think I don't know that! I can't make the damn computer go any faster! I'll page you when I get the results, until then go pester someone else!" She turned her back on the woman who was technically her superior. She could feel twin blue lasers burning holes in her back, but the tell-tale heel clicks going down the hall signaled that Catherine had, for once, taken her advice and left her alone.
The computer spit out results and Sara began pouring through the scattered databases. The font of the number was nagging at her. It was like having a song stuck in your head but not knowing who sang it, the title or where you heard it.
She regarded the print outs in her hand. Considering the grade of the paper, the acid content, the ink pigments and the weight...they were looking at a magazine. She traced, through records and standards inspections to a small printing company in Chicago. From there, she got the exact title of magazine. The font had been the deciding factor. The magazine wasn't exactly one to keep on the coffee table. It could be bought, however in any local pornography store. Well, it had been in the eighties. The title of the sterling publication was 'Barely Legal'.
Sara pushed the disgust and panic down back into her throat. Acid churned in her stomach and her hands shook. She did the work, though, she tracked down the old office and through a series of phone calls between the CPD and a judge, she got the subscriber records. It was, she knew, a long shot. Had their perp subscribed to a magazine in the eighties and was the address he'd given still viable? Was she chasing a large rabbit around a maze-like dead-ended warren?
Fate, evidence or maybe just plain old dumb luck, smiled down on the Vegas Forensics team and they got a hit. They'd traced the names, a long a tedious process, down to three. One had died in 1995, one was serving a five year sentence in a New Mexico prison and one was a janitor at the school that all the missing girls...and Lindsey attended, Wallace Harris. The ink was barely dry on the warrant when the SWAT team saddled up to rescue Innocence and take down Harris.