Sheldon Hawkes shined his flash light around the basement of Alex Davis' house in Queens. The place felt like a tomb. The walls were stark gray and the room only had one small window, covered in grime, which kept any sunlight from filtering in.
There was an old water heater in the corner and one bare bulb hanging from the ceiling in the center of the room.
The air still held a very faint wisp of bleach and as far as he could tell there was nothing in this stark basement that was going to help them.
His thoughts drifted to the crime scene photos of Rachel and Julie's bodies. This cold, depressing place was the last room that those two little girls had seen. He shuddered. It was a hell of a way to die.
Sheldon reached up with his glove covered hand and pulled the cord to turn on the light. The dim bulb illuminated the area closest to the stairs but the rest of the room was left in darkness.
The rest of the house hadn't been any better. It had been clean, which surprised him, but the whole place was decorated in a way that reminded him strongly of his grandmother's house as a boy. There were doilies everywhere and the whole place was furnished with sofas and chairs sporting the plastic covered, puke green floral motif popular with people in the late forties early fifties.
In short, it was the house that time forgot. It was also damn creepy. Sheldon heard a noise at the top of the stairs and turned to shine his flashlight at the doorway.
Stella Bonasera held up her hand to block the glare.
"Care to tone down the flood light, Hawkes?"
He grinned and lowered his arm. Stella gingerly made her way downstairs while balancing both her kit and her flash light.
"Dracula is missing his crypt," she commented and Hawkes cracked a wan smile.
"I don't know how we are going to find anything here. There's nothing but concrete," he said and gestured across the room.
Stella smiled. "Come on Hawkes; we're CSIs. We specialize in haystacks and needles."
He shot her a rueful grimace. "Needles I can do, but I have yet to perfect miracles."
Stella placed her kit at her feet and knelt down to open it. She took a pair of latex gloves out of their compartment and snapped them on her hands. She then stood and gave the basement a once over.
"Then we better get started on parting the Red Sea."
Hawkes chuckled and shook his head, while he shined his light over in the far corner of the room, so he could play it over the wall. He knew that Danny and Lindsay had walked a grid in here, and was thinking that maybe he and Stel should do the same, but at a smaller ratio. He suggested as much to Stella and she agreed.
They set it up using a smaller grid of squares, and meticulously walked the grid inch by painful inch. They were looking for anything, a fiber, a hair, a foreign substance, anything. What they found was a room so clean it would make a hospital chartreuse with envy.
Frustration mounting, they met in the middle of the room and played their flashlights over the grid again.
"Okay, maybe we are approaching this all wrong. What should we be doing different?" Stella asked. Hawkes shook his head, not sure.
"Let's reconstruct the crime. I'll be Davis."
Stella nodded. "I'll be the girls."
Sheldon took another look around. "All right. I planned this crime. I looked for the girls, stalked them, got a job at their school, kidnapped them and brought them here. I set this room up in advance, which means I must have planned to keep them for more than just one day. When did their parents report them missing?"
"Three days before they were discovered in the park," Stella replied.
Sheldon pressed his palms together and brought his fingers to his lips.
"And according to Sid they hadn't been dead for more than twelve hours, when they were found. I obviously planned to have then for a few days and I would have kept them down here. There must have been something down here for them to sleep on, because I wouldn't have wanted to rape them on the cold stone floor."
Stella picked up the thread.
"Ok I'm Julie and Rachel. We are both terrified, probably cold. We don't know why we are here and we just want to go home. We might have looked for a way out, tried the door, the window, anything, but there was no way out. So we huddle together on the floor and wait."
Sheldon paced over to the stairs and then turned to face the room.
"All right, I'm going to want them accessible and submissive. That's probably why I kidnapped two of them, but how do I control them both while I'm raping one of them? What if one of them decided to do something foolish, like try to run?"
Stella walked over to the stairs and stood next to him.
"Maybe you told us that you would kill us if we didn't do what we were told. Maybe you tied one of us up while you raped the other one. Too many maybes," she said, frustrated.
"They were found bound so at one point I did tie them up, but Danny and Lindsay didn't find any fibers in this basement. Could the bleach really have gotten ride of all the fibers? Even if there was nothing for them to lie on, they still had uniforms. The bleach would have gotten ride of any biological evidence, but couldn't have washed away fibers."
Stella ran her flashlight over the room again, a frown of concentration furrowing her brow. Hawkes made a good point. Davis should not have been able to remove every single fiber from this room, especially if the girls were here for a couple of days. The rules of transfer where against it, unless. The thought was too horrible to even contemplate.
"What if they were naked?" She whispered.
Her partner shot her a horrified glance but he couldn't deny the ring of truth her statement held. The crime scene photos flashed through his mind once again, along with snippets of Sid's autopsy report. He shuddered and said softly.
"That would explain it, but we're still missing something here, Stel."
She nodded.
"Okay, we are naked, possible bound, and probably with nothing to sleep on but the bare floor, because if not there would be fibers from whatever we slept on. The concrete is rough and any sort of fabric should have snagged on it."
She frowned and continued, slipping back into the third person.
"So how did he rape them? He would have hurt himself trying to do something like that on this floor. Not to mention that it would have made things very difficult."
Hawkes walked over to the middle of the room and knelt under the light bulb so he could run his hand over the floor.
"You're right, this surface is rough. A grown man holding down a girl would have scrapped himself, unless."
Sheldon raised his head suddenly, an epiphany causing his expression to light up.
"He didn't rape them here. He took them up stairs one at a time and raped them."
Stella started nodding, a slow smile alighting on her features.
"Which means we have a secondary crime scene."