"See, people think the internet is anonymous," Archie said, waving a stack of papers in her direction. "But nothing you do online is invisible."
Sara waited impatiently for Archie to finish telling her what she already knew. It had taken three days for the warrant to come through and the dating site to comply with it, and she was ready to have a name and a face to put to this Ben C. spector.
It hadn't taken them long at all to positively ID the body in the mineshaft as Lucy Wong. The prints on file with her Pharmacy Technician license were a perfect match. A review of the security footage from her apartment building's lobby showed her exiting the building dressed for her date at 7:13 in the evening Friday, and hours of reviewing the footage from the rest of the weekend showed no sign of her return, which fit perfectly with what the bugs were telling them – Lucy Wong had been dead for a week when they pulled her from the ground. It was small comfort to her guilt-stricken roommate, but even if she had reported Lucy missing as soon as she returned from her weekend with her boyfriend, it would have been far too late. Lucy had already been dead for two days by the time her roommate returned home.
Cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the back at relatively close range. The bullet, a standard looking nine millimeter, had been retrieved and was sitting in the evidence vault waiting for a match. The sexual assault kit had turned up nothing. There were no signs that Lucy had been assaulted or had engaged in consensual sexual activity prior to her death.
While they had waited for the warrant to go through, Sara had spent long days attending the autopsy, re-interviewing the roommate, checking on the status of the warrant, and meeting with Lucy's older brother, George, who had been on a ten-day business trip to Tokyo, and had only discovered Lucy's fate when he had called to tell her he was home and reached her roommate instead.
According to George, their parents had returned to China two years earlier, after both their children graduated from college, to care for their elderly parents. After they left, Lucy, who he described as painfully shy, had followed her older brother to Vegas. There, at ten years her senior, he had served as a sort of pseudo parent, helping her get settled and checking up on her regularly.
Sara and Nick, along with Brass, had spent hours with the man the day before unsuccessfully looking for clues in his previous conversations with her that might reveal the identification of Lucy's killer.
They had the body, the time of death, and the manner of death. What they didn't have was an ID on the suspect.
Sara had gone over the chat logs with a fine-toothed comb. The victim and suspect had messaged back and forth for weeks, and in that time "Ben" had revealed plenty of identifying information – he owned his own dentistry practice in Summerlin, he owned a condo ten minutes from his office, he grew up in California and graduated from Dartmouth. Like Lucy, his parents were immigrants from China, and he talked at length about how much he appreciated their sacrifices to give him a better life and more opportunities.
Their messages ended a week before Lucy went missing, when he had finally suggested they move their conversations to the telephone and she gave him her phone number.
Nick and Greg had spent two days following those leads, but despite their best efforts, they had come up empty handed. They had checked every dental office in Summerlin to no avail. They ran into dead ends at Dartmouth. And the photos from his profile turned out to be stolen – the man in them was identified as 32 year old Henry Lu, an accountant from Seattle who had never been to Vegas or used a dating site. The photos were posted on a class reunion website for his high school, and had obviously been stolen from there. But the reunion website was public and anyone could have found and stolen the photos.
Their searches were getting them nowhere. They needed the IP address and billing information from the dating website, and now that it was within their grasp, Sara had to bite her tongue to keep from snapping at Archie.
Finally, he sat the stack of papers on the table between them. "Your Ben C. is actually Christopher Vogel. Twenty seven. Address is in Green Valley. House is owned by his mother. He's got a work card on file for the Bellagio – in the restaurant – but he hasn't been employed there for years."
"Thank you, Archie," she said, grabbing the papers and shuffling immediately to the work card. A pimply faced white man in his early 20s scowled up at her. She thought back to her initial assessment of Ben C.'s profile and shook her head ruefully. Definitely too good to be true.
"Am I too late for the reveal?" Brass asked, poking his head in the AV lab.
Sara waved a hand over the papers. Brass stepped in and shuffled through the papers, spreading them over the table. He gave a snort at the image of the work card. "So much for the handsome doctor."
"Dentist," Archie corrected immediately, and Brass glared at him.
Sara ignored them, continuing her search through the paperwork. "He paid for his website subscription with his mom's credit card," she said.
Brass shook his head. "All right, let me call for a warrant and grab some uniforms and we'll be on our way."
"House and the car," she interjected quickly. "He didn't walk home from that mineshaft."
Brass gave her a look that clearly said this wasn't his first day on the job.
"Sorry," she said with a grin and a shrug, and he shook his head affectionately. "I'll meet you in the parking lot. I'm going to update Grissom, and grab Greg on the way."
It was Nick's scheduled day off, and she knew he would be disappointed when he came in the following day and heard they finally got the ID, but it wasn't worth calling him in.
She found Greg in the DNA lab going over the results of the swabs from inside the shaft. Unsurprisingly, all of them were a match to the victim. The results from Trace earlier in the day hadn't turned up anything useful either. The plastic shards were a common composite that could have come from any number of household objects. Similarly, the button was nondescript, and Mandy had been unable to lift fingerprints from either the button or the coins.
Sara filled Greg in on the information yielded by the warrant as they walked, pausing in Grissom's office doorway. The room was dark, and she realized he must still be out at the scene he was working with Warrick. She shot him a text telling him they had an ID and were on their way to the suspect's house with Brass, as they made their way to the parking lot.
It was a quick drive. Away from the strip, in the middle of the night, there was minimal traffic, and Sara followed Brass and the uniformed officers in their marked cars through downtown to an older working class neighborhood on the south side of the city where single family homes sported peeling paint and dirt lawns.
The cars in front of them had begun to slow as the officers looked for the house number on the warrant, when a buzzing sounded from the console where Sara's phone sat in the cup holder.
Greg picked it up and glanced at the caller ID. "It's Grissom. Want me to put it on speaker?"
She hesitated, then shook her head. "I'll call him back when we get there. Let me focus on finding this address."
Greg raised an eyebrow, but said nothing and watched the cars ahead of them park along the road in front of a white house with two older model cars in the driveway.
Sara put the car in park, and she and Greg climbed out. Brass was already out of his vehicle, his hand extended toward them. "Stay here. We'll let you know when it's clear."
She nodded and watched him jog to catch up with the uniformed officers who were on their way to the porch.
"I'll call Grissom back," she said, flipping her phone open and taking a step away as she dialed.
"Hey," Grissom said when he answered. "Are you on your way to the suspect's house?"
"We're here," she said. "Brass is knocking now. How's your suspicious circs?"
"Suspicious," he said drolly, and she turned away from Greg to hide her smile.
"Is Greg standing right there?" he asked quietly when she didn't say anything else right away.
"Something like that," she said cheerfully.
"I've got a budget meeting at ten that I totally forgot about. Catherine just reminded me. So I'm going to be stuck here late. But you're having breakfast with Brass anyway, right?"
"We'll see how this shakes out, but that's the plan," she said. After her rocky period last year, she and Brass had forged an unexpected friendship. Despite her initial anger when he reached out to her during that dark time, he had continued to check in with her, offering her support and friendship without prying or trying to force her to talk about her feelings, and eventually she had warmed to him. Once she was doing so much better, they continued to meet regularly for coffee or breakfast once a month or so, and she was surprised by how much she looked forward to those mornings.
"Okay, I'll come over after I get out of my meeting. Whenever that is."
"Sounds like a plan," she said, darting a glance at Greg, who was focused on the porch. There was a sudden ripple of movement in the officers, and the door swung open. "Hey, we've got movement. I gotta go."
"Okay," he said. Then he hesitated for a second before continuing more gently. "Be careful, Sara."
"Will do!" she said, forcibly brightening her tone to hide the tenderness she was feeling toward him.
After a brief conversation with a middle aged woman in pajamas, the officers disappeared into the house while Sara and Greg leaned against the Denali, waiting impatiently.
Ten minutes later, they emerged again with the suspect in handcuffs. The sullen man looked about five years older and fifty pounds heavier than the photo on his work card, but the resemblance was unmistakable.
Brass stood on the porch and jerked his head toward the door, their sign to enter.
"We're clear," he said as Sara and Greg approached, kits in hand. "His room is at the top of the stairs on the left. Good luck."
Sara had only a minute to wonder what he meant by that. As soon as they ascended the stairs and turned, she knew exactly what he was referring to. The room was disgusting. A thick layer of trash lined the floor and dirty dishes and cups covered every surface.
"I don't suppose you have a shovel," Greg muttered, shaking his head.
Sara's eyes drifted from the mess to the walls, which were covered with posters of scantily clad and naked women, realizing slowly that all of them were Asian.
Greg followed her gaze and let out a slow whistle. "I guess that explains why he posted as a Chinese guy."
"Let's get started," she said, biting back a comment about the dehumanizing fetishization of Asian women.
They started by recovering Vogel's computer and all related harddrives and storage disks. Sara sent Greg back to the lab with them, eager to get them in Archie's capable hands, while she arranged to have the suspect's car transported to the lab.
When Greg returned an hour later, she had moved on to looking for physical evidence of the crime in the suspect's bedroom, and he shot her a sympathetic look before diving in to help.
After three hours, they were still sifting through the detritus, and Sara's back was starting to ache from so much time bent over sorting through garbage. She had finally reached the closet, and she stood for a moment, confused, staring at the empty laundry basket. In a room where the floor was littered with six months of pizza boxes and fast food wrappers, it seemed awfully odd to find an empty clothes hamper.
"Greg," she said slowly. "I'm going to go check out the laundry room. I'll be back."
He mumbled his assent as she picked her way from the closet back through the room.
She wandered down the hallway first, finding an empty guest room that looked like it served as a storage room, a hall bathroom that was clearly Christopher's domain, and a tidy master bedroom with a queen bed and shabby but matching bedroom furniture.
There was no sign of a laundry room, so she trekked downstairs and through the living room and then the kitchen, where she finally found a small laundry closet just big enough for side by side machines and a small shelf with detergents.
As she approached, she could see a full basket of dirty laundry sitting on top of the washer, evidently ready to be washed in the morning.
"How's it going?" Brass asked, approaching from the living room where the suspect's stunned mother sat crying on the couch.
"It's going," she said. "That room is…."
She trailed off, unsure how to finish that sentence, but Brass nodded knowingly.
She looked closer at the basket of laundry, satisfied to see it was full of a mix of women's and men's clothing, confirming her suspicions in the closet upstairs that his mother had collected his laundry.
Her eyes narrowed as she looked more closely at the button down dress shirt on the top of the pile. Brass followed her gaze to the rust colored stains soaking in stain pre-treater and let out a low whistle. "Those blood stains are a real bear to get out."
Sara reached out and pulled the shirt from the pile, lifting it and looking it over.
"The DNA is going to be compromised by that stain treater," Brass said.
But Sara only smiled, and turned the cuff of the right sleeve toward Brass, revealing a frayed thread where the button should be. "Forget the DNA. I know exactly where to find this missing button."
Brass gave her a congratulatory grin.
"Sara!" Greg called excitedly, his footsteps quick and heavy on the stairs.
"Kitchen!" she called back.
Greg skidded to a stop in the kitchen doorway, a grin on his face. "Look what I found," he said in a sing-songy voice, dangling an evidence bag in front of him. Inside the evidence bag was Glock 19.
"Nice!" she said. "Where was it?"
"Under the mattress. What you got there?" he asked.
She lifted the sleeve, and Greg's smile widened. "Game, set, match," he said.
