Author's notes: Hi, I'm finally updating! I moved into my own apartment this week, so things were a little bit crazy there, but hopefully I'll be updating regularly again! Yeah, sorry about Willy, but they had to tell him eventually...

Willy Wonka's unexpectedly extreme reaction to the death of his apprentice caught the two investigators momentarily off-guard. They had seen the gamut of grief in their years in the LVPD, from numb shock to enraged disbelief, and a much smaller spectrum in cases where an employer was informed of the loss of an employee. To say that Wonka's tears fell outside the latter boundaries was an understatement.

Something about it that Catherine could not quite identify sparked her natural maternal instinct and, even though Wonka was easily ten years her senior, she moved to put a comforting arm around his burgundy shoulders. Abruptly, she found herself blocked by Doris, the two-foot-tall valkyrie who, sensing her employer's distress, had immediately moved to prevent any further upset and put herself between Wonka and Catherine, glaring at the latter in silent reproach.

"It's okay," Catherine told her experimentally, "I'm a mom, and… right now he looks like he could use one."

Doris narrowed her eyes suspiciously at Catherine, and then ventured a glance at her boss, who was still inconsolable. She gave her one last warning glance – You be careful with him, woman – and stepped aside. Catherine offered the gesture of comfort again, putting her arms around Willy Wonka and letting him weep onto her shoulder until the sobs subsided into hiccups and then into silence – though she did notice that he kept his arms folded up between them as if to protect himself from her.

"What's this I hear about Charlie being dead?" Doris accused Grissom, "You said he wasn't in the blast!"

"And he wasn't," Grissom replied, feeling a little queasy after observing what the news had done, "He was killed a few days before. I'm very sorry for your loss, Doris. And yours, Mr. Wonka."

Wonka straightened up from the damp spot on Catherine's shoulder. Though his eyes were very red, his voice betrayed no evidence of the previous display of emotion. "Oh bother," he said sharply as he quickly removed his latex gloves, tossed them over his shoulder, and tugged on a fresh pair (these were apple green), "You do realize that my candy is going to taste absolutely hideous now. I hope you two are satisfied."

Grissom arched an eyebrow at this abrupt change in demeanor.

Wonka levered himself back upright on his brilliantly colored walking stick, forcing the investigators to get up as well.

"And Charlie was going to help me with a new type of cinnamon candy that would let the little ones breathe little fireballs – not too big, mind you, wouldn't want to set the drapes on fire – that he'd read about in a Harry Potter book," the candymaker rambled on, like a truck with no brakes.

"Mr. Wonka," Grissom said.

"He has the most amazing ideas for new candies, you know. He has a mind for candy, you see. He has what the Loompas call 'chocolate in the heart', which of course is the highest compliment that they could pay to anyone…"

"Mr. Wonka?" Grissom repeated patiently.

"Since he started on at the factory he's come up with 35 new flavors of taffy, do you know that? Oh, I can tell you that Jelly Belly raised a bit of a stink about that, but there wasn't really anything they could do, because we came up with buttered-toast-flavored before they did—"

"Mr. Wonka!"

"You hush up!" Wonka retorted, as sharply as a whip, "Can't you see I'm electrocuting here?" There was a strange silence then, during which Doris closed her eyes and shook her head, then tugged at Wonka's trouser leg. He crouched down to her level, and she whispered something in his ear. He popped up again like a jack-in-the-box. "Allocuting. I'm allocating. My bad."

"Actually, allocution is when you confess to a crime in front of a court," Grissom said calmly, "And in this case Catherine and I just need to ask you a few questions that might help us find out who killed Charlie."

Wonka quieted immediately, appearing to search for a compromise between extreme high and extreme low. He settled on polite helpfulness, and offered the investigators a queasy smile, but appeared not to have the heart left to make it dazzle as before.

"I'm also going to need to tell his family," Catherine said, "Do the Buckets still live in the factory?"

"They live in the tilty little house in the Chocolate Room," Wonka informed her quietly, and the absence of his previous energy was almost heartbreaking, "Doris can show you, but you must promise not to take or publish any pictures or descriptive accounts of what you see in there."

"I need to write a report of the investigation," Catherine protested.

"Then make something up!" he replied, as though this were a completely obvious and perfectly acceptable option and she was a dunce for not knowing about it.

Catherine gave Wonka an exasperated look she usually reserved for particularly willful children, but followed Doris down the hall.

"Can you think of anyone who might want to hurt Charlie?" Grissom asked Wonka, who turned back to him suddenly as though the CSI had only just now dropped out of the ceiling.

"Oh, I can think of lots of people," Wonka said distractedly, but failed to elaborate.

"Anyone in particular?" Grissom prompted.

"Well, I'm sure lots of people want to hurt you every day."

"Mr. Wonka, I work in law enforcement. You make candy. There's a world of difference. Now, if we could return to my question—"

"Well, I could name a couple likely people, but that would be slander unless I had evidence to back it up, which I don't, so I won't."

"Actually, it isn't slander unless you directly accuse someone."

"Which I've never done even if it was obvious what they'd done!"

"Is that why you closed the factory, all those years ago?" Grissom asked, raising an eyebrow.

Wonka looked at him sharply, and Grissom could see, behind the veneer of almost childlike petulance, the first signs of… something else?

"People were jealous of your success, stealing your ideas?" he pressed, "But you didn't accuse anyone because you had no evidence. That would be at best mean-spirited and at worst illegal. Right now, our crime lab has evidence that we can't make sense of yet."

"Well, why not?" Wonka asked briskly.

"It's come to my attention that our lab is woefully undereducated in your world – whatever world that happens to be. Naturally, in the interests of this investigation, I have quite a few questions I'd like to ask you."

"Actually at this point you probably have more answers than I do," Wonka replied.

"Why do you say that, Mr. Wonka?"

"I've found that answers are useless without first understanding the questions they go to. Unless you figure out the question, the answers won't make a bit of sense." Grissom raised an eyebrow, considering that this was either the deepest thing he'd ever heard, or the most insane thing he'd ever heard – and he'd held a deep philosophical conversation with a drug-induced schizophrenic. "To that end," Wonka continued, "perhaps you could share some of your answers with me?"

"Fair enough, I suppose," Grissom conceded, "What would you like to know?"

"How did he d…" Wonka gagged slightly on the word "die," but Grissom got the idea.

"We believe Charlie was attacked inside the Wonka Emporium and ultimately drowned," Grissom summarized.

"But Las Vegas is in the middle of a desert – how could he drown?"

"We found chocolate in his lungs. Did you send along some of your melted chocolate to use with the emporium?"

"Well, of course I did. I'm not giving him stale chocolate to sell to the children – my Loompas will only work with the b…" He broke off, then looked sharply at Grissom, as though expecting Grissom to ask about the Loompas.

"The other employees are safe," Grissom reassured him. "Nigel, Oliver, Maxine, Gertie, Betty, Nadine, Elmer, Michael, Alyssa, Andrew, Patrick, Matthew, Arthur, Donna, Samuel, Melissa, Judy, Gabriel, Nathan, and Godfrey all say hi." He noticed that Wonka appeared to be marking off each name on a mental list as Grissom named them, and after he reached Godfrey the chocolatier finally relaxed. "And how did you ship the melted chocolate?"

"It's complicated," Wonka deflected the question with a wave of his hand, "You're all scientific so you probably wouldn't understand it. But it stayed melted and mixed the whole way. Took me a year to figure out how to do that – it's just so hard to ship an entire waterfall like that."

"A… waterfall?" Grissom asked cautiously.

"Well, of course I didn't ship my waterfall – that would be silly. But I made up a little waterfall for Charlie to take along with him."

"Of course," Grissom said, feeling a few parts of his brain shutting down in self-defense.

"Oh… my… God," Catherine breathed after Doris unlocked the tiny door at the end of the hall and pushed open the entire wall, door and all, to reveal the most astounding thing she had seen in her life.

It was a vast indoor garden like a scene out of a children's book, all vivid colors and whimsical shapes that overall looked as though Lewis Carroll and Edward Gorey had decided to take up landscaping. More Oompa Loompas – hundreds of them, Catherine thought – trotted through the whimsical scenery, occasionally stopping to harvest something or other from this or that plant, gathering them into baskets and carrying them off. The entire place smelled like sugar, in its various permutations, but the most overwhelming smell was chocolate, the origin of which a brief search revealed to be an entire river of chocolate, complete with a roaring chocolate waterfall.

This was the only factory she had ever heard of that mixed its chocolate by waterfall… and probably the only such one in existence.

Doris tugged at her pant leg. "Let me tell them first," she said, "They'll want to know."

Catherine nodded, and Doris reached into the scarlet throat of a flower, emerging with a microphone. She started speaking into the microphone in a series of clicks, yelps, and trills that Catherine supposed was a language as it echoed out from dozens of giant pink bell-shaped flowers.

The hive of activity slowed to a stop at Doris' announcement, and it was not long before two hundred pairs of eyes were focused on Catherine. Finally there was absolute silence in the Chocolate Room, and Catherine realized that Doris had finished speaking and was offering her the microphone.

"I've told them about Charlie," Doris said, "And that you'd help. Tell them."

After a moment's hesitation, Catherine took the microphone which, upon inspection, appeared to be woven out of licorice, though it was obviously fully functional. She tapped the mouthpiece and was rewarded with an echoing boom.

"My name is Catherine Willows," she said into it, "My partner and I are working as hard as we can to solve this case." She looked out at the patient stares of the Loompas. "As this point, any information any of you have that might be relevant to this case would be greatly appreciated. In the meantime, could you please point out the Bucket residence?"

Two hundred index fingers indicated a single point on the surreal landscape.

"Thank you. I appreciate it." She handed the licorice-microphone back to Doris, and made her way along a path made of sugary flagstones towards the indicated direction.