Chapter 1: Birthday Girl
The day started just like any other day. On that perfectly warm early spring morning, the sun was shining, and the birds were chirping. Kids were running around and screaming with excitement.
A girl of thirteen was staying with her friends. Her father was serving overseas, and her mother was killed. Her thick straight red hair had been pulled back into a tight ponytail. She was small for her age but deceivingly strong.
Her vividly bright green eyes were dancing with anticipation since she had been looking forward to this day for two months. Wearing her black cotton t-shirt, Olive Drab green camouflage cargo pants, and black leather combat boots, she was quite a tomboy.
Some of the girls in her class made fun of her because she didn't care about the latest fashion she wore what she thought was comfortable.
She really got along better with the boys in her class since they weren't into drama. Most of her friends were boys. Only two girls in her class were her friends. The two girls in her class that were her friends were only her friends since their dads were also Marines serving overseas.
Her best friend from preschool Max Mason and she were meeting some other kids down at the local paintball course at 9 A.M, so they left Max's house at 8:30 A.M to get there early, riding their bikes down the street together.
She used her key to gain access to the paintball course. The girl's father saved the owner of the course's life back in Afghanistan. The owner then gave the girl a key and full access to the paintball course of the property whenever she wanted. The two friends had wanted to get down to the course before anyone else to set up her sniper's nest.
You see, her father was a sniper with the United States Marines, and he taught her not only to shoot but how to be a dead shot. To maximize the distance that she could get from her paintball gun, she had her dad crank up the air pressure the last time that he was stateside.
Being a sniper for USMC, the girl's father had taught her to pick her position. To get the best odds of hitting her target without getting spotted. The position that she chose was up at the top of four stacked cargo containers.
This location had the perfect advantage point because she could see the entire property. The girl had strategically placed flags all over the course so that she could easily and correctly adjust her aim with the wind.
The paintball course was on one side, and the firing range on the other. A row of cargo containers separated them. She was on the highest one. The bottom two containers were filled with concrete, which made them essentially bulletproof.
The owner of the course had given the girl carte blanche of the paintball half of the property since her father saved his life in Kabul. She had spent the last two months creating the perfect urban ghillie suit, just like her daddy used on his missions. Her suit was blue to match the containers on the course accurately. It was more of a blanket than a suit.
She wanted to be invisible to everyone and pick the other kids off one by one with her friend's help. His task was to lure the others as close as possible for her to take out from her spot. She could see over the rows of containers that were only one high, which made up the courses maze-like floor plan so she could hit them without having a clear shot on the ground level.
Chapter 2: A Girl Attacked
It was about 8:50 A.M. by the time she gets to the top of the containers. This place was her favorite spot on the property since she could see just about everywhere on either side of the property.
She just placed her bright pink backpack on the roof of the container and had begun to take out her supplies for the day. Her blue, ghillie blanket suit was laid out on the roof. Her fluorescent pink paintball ammo, extra ammo, and an extra compressed air tank were also laid out on the top of the container.
Finally, she starts to get settled down when someone that she had neither seen nor heard knocks her down. Her attacker then violently turns her over, bringing her face to face with a muzzle of a handgun.
Grabbing for the gun, she tries to get away from him. Biting and scratching at her attacker's arms than bang the girl is shot in the abdomen.
She clutches at her stomach with her right hand and falls first to her knees then to her stomach. The girl is lying on the roof bleeding when she attempts to crawl away, dragging her body behind her.
Her attacker was pacing and walking around, trying to figure out what to do with her. Walking around and talking to himself. When her shooter was looking the other direction, she reached out for a piece of metal that she holds close to her wound. She silently hoped and prayed that her attacker wouldn't see, and she holds on to it for dear life.
Her assailant kicks her off the containers. That caused her to slam into the ground with a loud and painful thud. The average height of a single cargo container is nine feet six inches, so falling about thirty-eight feet meant that she had really fallen three and a half stories. That distance caused the girls left forearm to snap when she tries to break her fall.
Her right hand was still holding her stomach and was, therefore, under her body. When he kicked her off the container, she was trying to drag herself to safety, so her legs were still straight out behind her. Her shooter then disappears as rapidly as he had appeared.
It was a little after 9 am when Lucas McGraw, who's father owned the property, William Lewis, Maize Monroe, and Sarah Rossi, had all showed up. All of the other kids were together when they heard a single gunshot.
It was her best friend, Max, who had led the others to investigate where the sound had come from. Poor Max could just stare as his best friend since preschool lay bleeding at his feet.
He could barely say, "I need to call 911." He quickly pulls his cell phone out of his pocket as he dials the emergency number.
"911 Emergency, what's your emergency?"
"My friends and I are over at McGraw's Paintball and Gun Range on Flagler and Mayfield. We heard a single gunshot, and I found my friend. I think they shot her since she's not moving, and she is bleeding."
"Is she breathing."
"I don't believe so because I don't see her breathing."
"Does she have a pulse?"
"I don't know, but I don't think so."
"Don't move an officer is en route."
Chapter 3: Horatio For The Save
Miami Dade Police Department Lieutenant Horatio Caine was heading in to work for his first day back to work since he almost died from an overdose of Fentanyl.
When he heard over the police radio about a possible 10 71, shots fired over at McGraw's Paintball and Gun Range on Flagler and Mayfield. He had just passed it half a block behind him, then he radioed his location and sped up. Pulling a fast U-turn, he raced to the scene.
One of the kids, Maize Monroe, was waiting in the parking lot to take the arriving officer to her friend. When Maize had brought the officer to her friend, she returned to the parking lot to take the next officer to her friend.
Upon arriving at the scene, Horatio had to push some of the kids back to give himself more room to check on the girl.
Getting the other kids back, he quickly returns to the victim. Starting on the assumption that she was dead Horatio radios, Frank Tripp, to ask his friend to bring his kit from inside the Hummer.
Tripp was just pulling into the paintball course's parking lot. Right after Tripp places the kit on the ground near Horatio, he had quickly put on a pair of latex gloves.
He quietly kneels down and gently turns her over since she had landed on her stomach. With his hands gloved, he carefully unbuckles the girl's protective vest to check her injuries.
Slowly and gently, he moves her black t-shirt out of the way and wipes away the blood with a clean white handkerchief to get a better look at her injury. The blood quickly flows back over to cover the wound again.
Thinking to himself, "She shouldn't actively be bleeding still, unless..." With this realization, he turns around to face the other kids.
Quickly asking the children, "Did any of you check her for a pulse?"
Max answered for the group with a quiet "no, but she wasn't moving, and she fell so far we just assumed that she was dead. Why?"
With that answer, Horatio moves up to check for a carotid pulse. Not only did Horatio feel a barely palpable pulse, but he noticed that her head was actively bleeding. It was at this moment that Horatio hears a barely audible moan come from the girl bleeding in his hand.
He quickly screams to Sergeant Frank Tripp, "She's alive, get me a medic."
Horatio pulls out the penlight that he keeps in his pocket to shine it in her eyes to check for possible brain damage.
"Fixed, dilated and unresponsive to light," Horatio makes a mental note. This was not good news he told himself.
At this point, Horatio looks down and notices the girl's medical alert bracelet.
Horatio read the inscription to himself, "My name is Piper O'Shea. I'm mute".
"That explains why nobody heard her cry for help," he told himself.
"Piper, sweetheart hang on. We have help coming so stay with me. Do you hear me… Piper, just stay with me," he gently tells her, all while holding her head in his hands.
"The Ambulance is ten minutes out." Frank Tripp didn't need to relay the message to his friend since he had heard the dispatch.
Horatio said, "she doesn't have ten minutes" to nobody in particular.
His training as a Palliative care nurse and all of his years as a forensic expert, he knew that the girl didn't have any time to spare.
Horatio also knew it would take the ambulance a lot more than ten minutes to get her to the hospital. The bus, as they call them, was ten minutes out, which means it would take them ten minutes just to get to the scene. Add to that five minutes to get her ready to transport and an additional ten minutes to drive back to the hospital. The bus would take twenty-five minutes to get her to the hospital.
Calculating the time the bus would take to get her to the hospital, Horatio asks Tripp to help him get the girl to his Hummer. He was going to take her since he could get to the hospital in less than half the time. If he used his sirens and took the side streets, he could get her to the hospital in less than half the time.
As slowly and carefully as he could, he gathers the girl into his arms and resting her head on his shoulder so it wouldn't hang backward. By now, she was unconscious and unresponsive.
Piper was just barely holding on to life. Horatio carries her to his Hummer, where Tripp opens the back door and helps Horatio lay her across the backseat.
"Piper, sweetheart, don't worry I'll get you to the hospital, please just stay with me. I beg you just hold on and stay with me." He pleads with the girl as he rushes her to the hospital.
Driving to the hospital, Horatio thought back to what her friend Max had told him while he carried the girl to his car.
Her friend said, "Her dad is a Marine sniper. Piper saw her mother's murder when she was just two and a half and that the girl never spoke since the day of her mother's death."
On the way to the hospital, Horatio calls Eric Delko, Calleigh Duquesne, Natalia Boa Vista, Ryan Wolfe, and Walter Simmons to process the scene and collect the evidence.
Tripp was already on the scene since he was closer than Horatio's team was. No one on his team was able to talk to their boss since he was with Piper at the hospital.
Tripp had volunteered to stay back to secure the scene and wait for Horatio's team.
Chapter 4: A Crime Scene Talking
Once at the scene, Eric Delko and Calleigh Duquesne slowly and carefully climb up the caged ladder to where the girl had fallen from.
When they get to the top, they see her sniper's perch and her pink paintball gun with bright pink, almost florescent ammo ready for what was supposed to be a fun day of paintball wars.
Calleigh noticed from the high point tiny flags placed all over the property, which aided Piper in calculating her sniper hits. Calleigh thought to herself, "This girl takes her paintball wars very seriously with her little sniper's nest, all of this extra ammo, and air tanks."
"This is very high. I'm shocked that the girl is alive," Calleigh tells Eric as she looks down at the ground three and a half stories below.
"She's strong and a bit too stubborn to die, kinda reminds me of someone else that we know," Eric chimes in with a subdued chuckle.
Indeed Calleigh knew that he was talking about Horatio. Their boss had been shot and injured too many times to count. By all accords, he should have died a long time ago. Horatio was simply too stubborn to die.
Calleigh was still looking for the bullets shell casing, but it was nowhere to be found. The suspect was not very good at covering their tracks. Evidence was everywhere on the top of the container.
The team had essentially two crime scenes with one at the top and one at the bottom. One scene was much bigger and one much smaller crime scene at the bottom.
The scene at the bottom of the containers was not much. It was just two small pools of blood: one where her head hit the ground and one where her body had impacted the ground.
Horatio had left the girls protective vest where he had taken it off to assess her injuries. The safety vest itself was relatively intact. It did have a bullet hole in it that Calleigh could only guess was from a .357.
The last piece of evidence at the bottom was the shell casing that the CSI's had no idea how the casing ended up where it did. The girl was shot at the top. The casing was found thirty-five feet away from the containers on the ground level.
Eric had noticed the footprints from a couple of men's combat boots in the dirt up on top of the containers. He calls Calleigh over to take some swabs of the blood also found in and around the shoe prints.
While she was at it, she took samples of the dirt in hopes of finding out where the shooter had been before shooting the girl. Eric took casts of the boot prints in the hopes of identifying the shooter that way. The shoe prints did have very distinctive wear patterns on them.
Ryan and Natalia were gathering evidence on the ground at the bottom of the containers. While scanning for anything that shouldn't be there, Ryan had noticed something shiny on the ground, nowhere near where the young girl had landed.
Somehow the bullet casing ended up thirty-five feet from where the girl had landed. Grabbing a small scale, he took several photos of the evidence: a close range, mid-range, and far range photo.
All before he picked up the casing with his latex gloves and put it into an evidence bag and sealed it up, noting that the bullet's shell casing was from a .357. Nobody knew how the casing had ended up on the ground, let alone how it ended up so far from where the girl had landed.
Chapter 5: Witnesses Questioned
The seasoned team of CSI officers could just process the crime scene as they found it. Horatio would never allow them to speculate without looking at the evidence.
Walter interviewed the kids that were there with Tripp's assistance. Not one of the kids saw anything, and they only heard a single gunshot but nothing else. The kids were together the whole morning, so what one saw and heard the rest saw and heard.
The kids didn't have any relevant information to the case, but the property owner did have something very interesting to add.
After talking to the kids, Tripp had partnered up with Eric to interview the owner. The owner was identified as Gunnery Sergeant Tobias McGraw.
The Gunny told the pair of officers, "I've known that family since before the girl's mother was killed. Her mother and my ex-wife were very close friends. Her dad and I were both in the sandbox together."
"He was a Marine sniper, and I was a SEAL. He saved my life when we were on an assignment in Kabul. A suicide bomber had ambushed us, and I was hit with shrapnel in the back. Her dad was the team's sniper whose job was to keep us safe, but the bomber was just a six-year-old little girl."
"Who would have thought that she would be strapped with a bomb? I certainly don't blame her or her father. Her dad protected the team until reinforcements arrived."
"Actually, if it were not for the warning from the bases canine, the casualties would have been much higher than it was. He saved my life that day, and the canine saved everyone's life. When he got back, I told him that his daughter would have full run of the paintball course when she turned 13."
"Piper would have full access to both sides of the property when she turned eighteen. If she had an adult with her now, she could access the full property. Her thirteenth birthday was last month."
"She could do anything she wanted and go anywhere she wanted on the paintball half of the property. I even put up a caged ladder up to the top of the containers since that was her favorite place to hang out."
"She would be up there any chance that she got. Piper had a funny habit of crashing a lot of paintball parties. She would wait until only two contestants remained, then she would take them both out with a well-timed sniper attack. That is why I made her have such bright pink ammo so everyone else would know that it was her and so it didn't count during their wars. I must admit that the girl had fantastic instincts when it comes to shooting. She never missed."
"I am beyond devastated by what happened. My youngest son and I are going to the hospital to see her when we are done here." The Gunny finishes and turns his wheelchair around to go out of the interrogation room door.
Chapter 6: The Hospital
Both Eric and Tripp were very comfortable writing Gunny Sergeant Tobias McGraw off as a suspect since he couldn't possibly climb the caged ladder and shoot Piper being confined to a wheelchair.
When the pair get to the hospital, Horatio was met with Dr. Alexx Woods. He told her about the incident and everything that happened at the scene.
Alexx just smiled while saying, "Baby, everything is going to be okay your safe now. She had hoped that the girl could hear her even though she was comatose.
"She has an intracranial hemorrhage, and we have to take her into surgery now, or we will lose her," Alexx tells Horatio.
His heart sinks since he knows the girl's survival chances were less than 50%, and only about 20% have a complete recovery, so the odds were stacked against Piper in the first place.
Horatio could only wait and pray that she survived this. Piper was in surgery for five hours. When Alexx finally comes out to speak to him, he was a nervous wreck.
While waiting for Piper to get out of surgery, Horatio had thought that her name and story sounded familiar. He had to remember, so he had Ryan do a background check while he stayed at the hospital. He didn't want to leave the girl alone for even a minute until she came out of surgery.
It took a while, but Horatio finally remembered why the girl's name was so familiar.
Her mother, McKinzie, was a beautiful young woman with flaming red hair and dark green eyes. She was murdered ten years before on a cold rainy Christmas Day at home, and her two and a half-year-old daughter was left hiding behind the couch.
Horatio was the officer to had who found little Piper cowering in the corner behind the family sofa. The toddler was covered in her mom's blood.
Police had been at the scene for a while. Horatio heard the toddler crying behind the couch over the noise from the TV. Horatio turned off the TV and, in doing such, heard a tiny cry coming from behind the sofa.
The woman's husband was overseas with the United States Marines working as a sniper for the Corps.
Her case went cold, and they never found the killer. Her attacker had broken a back bedroom window and had crept up on the mother.
Piper was hiding because she didn't want to take a bath. That was the only conclusion that they could make since the water was still running when Horatio got on the scene. They never figured out what the mom was doing and why the little girl was not in the bath.
They knew that she had been beaten and raped before she was shot in the head point blank with a Sig Sauer P226 .357. The toddler had seen the whole thing, but luckily, the killer didn't know she was there.
Mercifully the girl was spared any physical harm. The forensic evidence at the time was practically nonexistent, just a few drops of foreign blood and a single fingerprint. Both the print and the blood came back as an unknown, and with no suspect, the case went cold.
The surgeon relieved pressure in her brain by drilling a borehole in the back of her skull. He also removed the bullet lodged in her intestines.
The slug was not the only thing lodged in her body. She also had some big and some small fragments from her protective vest. When the bullet tore through her vest, it took shattered pieces of hard plastic with it. The tiny pieces made the injury look much worse.
After surgery, Alexx ordered full X-rays of her head and body since she had fallen nearly four stories to be on the safe side.
X-rays showed several skull fractures and a partially collapsed lung. The doctors also thought that she had an incomplete spinal fracture, as well as at least three broken ribs, and her left forearm was snapped on impact.
Falling about thirty-eight feet the equivalent of three and a half stories, Piper had landed so hard on the ground that the doctors were worried she had fractured her spine despite landing on her abdomen.
The skull fractures were caused by striking her head on the ground on impact. Her body hit first snapping her left forearm, then her head, which had initially landed on her arm, bounced off of it and landed on the ground very hard. It was a secondary impact.
Taking her back into surgery, they stabilize her spine in case it was fractured and set her arm with plates and pins as well as re-inflating her partially collapsed lung.
"She's lucky to be alive, but the next forty-eight hours will be critical. If she survives the next two days, she will probably make it," Alexx says to Horatio.
When Horatio tries to notify her father about what happened, he was told: "Master Sergeant James O' Shea is out on a mission, and he could therefore not be contacted until his mission had been completed."
This left Piper alone for the foreseeable future. Horatio was not going to leave the girl alone since her father was serving overseas.
The next forty-eight hours seemed to go at a snail's pace. The doctors would come in every few hours to check her vitals. Otherwise, it was just Horatio and the girl alone in the room.
"She looks just so peaceful right now," Horatio thought to himself.
Chapter 7: Piper is Gone
After about forty-two hours, Horatio felt safe enough to leave her for a few minutes while the nurses checked her vitals. He was quite hungry by now.
Horatio had not really eaten in forty-two hours just what the vending machine had. He went to the vending machines and would grab a snack to eat while the nurses came in to check Piper's vitals.
Horatio had just arrived at the Cafeteria in the hospital to get his lunch. He neede to call his team to get an update on the young girl's case since he had not checked in with his team in quite a while.
Horatio just couldn't fail the girl again. He was not going to let Piper's shooting go cold since he feels like he failed her all those years before when he allowed her mother's brutal murder to go unsolved.
When he gets a hold of Eric, Horatio learns that the team was able to get blood and even some trace evidence at the scene. The trace evidence included palm prints, shoe impressions, and some bloody fingerprints with ridge details.
When Eric asked his brother and boss, " Does Piper had any blood or skin under her fingernails."
Horatio was dumbstruck. He had done what he and his team always had given the medics a hard time for. Horatio had gotten tunnel vision and been so busy trying to save her life that he never checked under her nails to find trace evidence.
Rushing back to her hospital room, Horatio asked for a piece of paper and pulled out a sterile scraping tool from his kit. He had brought in his kit just in case. Horatio needed to gently scrape under the fingernails of the unconscious girl to remove any foreign tissue in hopes of ID-ing the perpetrator.
When he found some foreign tissue, Horatio wanted to rush the results through CODIS. He just had to solve the case.
After he had handed the bindles containing the samples to Eric in the hospital hallway and Eric had left the hospital, Horatio hears the sounds of Piper's monitors all going off at the same time.
The girl was crashing and seizing from her head trauma. He was losing her, and he was totally powerless to do anything about it. He couldn't will her to live. He couldn't force her to live.
Piper was not responding to anything that Alexx was trying. She was really dying. For more than forty-five minutes, the doctors tried everything.
Charging the defibrillator to two hundred joules, they shock her heart then listen for a heartbeat. When they felt no response, they increase it to two hundred fifty joules. Shocking her heart again but still get no response, so they inject Epinephrine and check if her heart responded to the drug.
Her heart monitor was still flatlining with a long monotone beep. The doctors increase the charge on the defibrillator to three hundred joules and try again. Piper's heart still was not responding.
The doctors again try a drug to restart her heart with drugs this time they use Atropine into her IV, but they still got no response.
Alexx was going to have to call time of death if Piper didn't respond in the next five minutes. With time for one last Hail Mary, Alexx injects intra-cardiac Adrenaline directly into Piper's heart, but with no response, Alexx was forced to make the call that she was dreading but had to make.
"Time of Death 7:54 A.M," Alexx says to the room of dejected nurses.
Nurses and doctors alike have a hard time accepting having to call TOD on a child.
Now Alexx had to tell Horatio that Piper was gone. She just knew that Horatio would be devastated by failing the family a second time.
Alexx tells Horatio that Dr. Tom Loman would be up in an hour to take Piper down to the Morgue.
"I'll just stay here till Tom comes if that's okay, Alexx," Horatio tells his old friend.
Alexx didn't have the heart to tell him no, so she allowed it. Horatio just sits in Piper's room, looking at the young girl in front of him. With his head in his hands, he just quietly cries.
No more than half an hour after the time of death is called Horatio could swear that he had heard someone else that was breathing in the room.
Who could that possibly be since it was just him and the body of a thirteen-year-old girl who was declared dead? Horatio looked closely at her chest only to see what he thought was a slight rise in it.
"How can that be she's been dead for half an hour," Horatio thinks to himself.
Chapter 8: Piper Talks
Coming closer Horatio just sits there quietly, watching her breathe. Without taking his eyes off her slowly yet steadily rising and falling chest and clips, the heart monitor to Piper's middle finger and turns the machine on before he calls his friend. He was quickly reassured that he wasn't crazy by the steady beeping of a normal heart rate. Quickly he calls Alexx on his cell phone.
When Horatio got through to Alexx, he yells, "Alexx, she's alive. Piper's breathing, and her heart is beating."
Alexx couldn't believe what she was hearing, so she comes running in and checks Piper's vitals before quickly leaving them alone again. The child had healthy vitals, and Alexx couldn't explain it, but the girl was back.
Piper was alive, but she was not responding to anything that the nurses and doctors were trying. Three days into her coma, the girl again began to crash.
Needing room to restart the girl's heart, she pushed her friend out of the child's room.
Alexx demanded a nurse, "Gloria, get the crash cart."
Charging the defibrillator to two hundred joules, she shocks the girl's heart. Feeling for a pulse with her stethoscope, the nurse shakes her head no. She recharged the defibrillator to two hundred fifty joules. Piper jolts with the electricity running through her body. Again the nurse shakes her head no. The child was not responding.
Desperately Alexx cranks the defibrillator to three hundred sixty joules. She completely skipped three hundred joules. This time Piper's heart responds with a normal pulse.
Piper's eyes finally open, and her bright green eyes meet Horatio's ocean blue eyes. She just lays there, blinking at her hero before they smile at each other. She doesn't stay awake very long. Waking up from a coma and presumed death is exhausting.
Horatio lets her sleep through the first night before he attempts to ask her some questions. She doesn't talk but effectively lets Horatio know that she wants a piece of paper to write on.
"Who are you?" "What happened, where am I?" She writes.
Horatio answers as best as he could.
"My name is Horatio Caine, and Sweetheart, you were shot and fell three and a half stories. You're in the hospital. Try not to move since you broke a couple of ribs, your left arm, you partially collapsed a lung, and you also fractured your skull, and we think you fractured your spine."
When Piper heard about her possible spinal fracture, she started to panic. "I can't feel my legs," she wrote to Horatio. He quickly presses the nurse call button on her bed.
When the doctor comes in, Horatio tells her what Piper wrote. The doctor calmly tells her that they think she had an incomplete spinal fracture, and only time will tell if she would regain use of her legs, but they could bring her bed up a little so she could sit up for a while.
They didn't need to worry since she could still move her legs. Mind you. She had to tell her body to move her legs since she couldn't feel them. She did regain feeling in her legs within a week.
"Sweetheart, what happened to you? Can you remember anything?" Horatio asks her.
Laying in her hospital bed, Piper quickly recounts what happened at the top of the container and what she remembers.
Piper gives her hero a beautifully written testimony. "My friend Max and I were going down to McGraw Paintball and Gun Range to meet some friends. I got to my special spot on top of the containers getting my sniper perch ready when someone knocked me down. They force me to face them."
"We wrestle over the gun. It was a Sig Sauer P226, My dad taught me to recognize handguns by sight, and I know it was a Sig Sauer P226. I can't remember what it was chambered in."
"Anyway, we fight over the gun. I bite and scratch him before he shoots me in the stomach. I fall to my knees then to my stomach. He walks around on the top of the container talking to himself. I couldn't understand what he was saying because it sounded all muffled."
"When his back was to me, I grabbed the bullet shell casing that had landed near my head. Daddy and I watch Forensic Files, and I know the importance of the casing, and I didn't want him to take it with him."
"I think he kicked me off the containers since I remember seeing the ground coming. I tried to break my fall with my arm. I remember you talking to me. You were telling me to hold on. Your voice was very grounding to me. I remember you shining a light in my eyes. The next thing I remember is you watching me when I opened my eyes. You look so familiar." Piper finishes the recounting of her shooting with a question to her new hero.
Horatio tells her that her named sounded familiar, too, so he had a coworker look into it. "I was the Crime Scene Investigator that was assigned to investigate your mother's murder. I was the one who found you hiding behind your couch. I picked you up and carried you outside since I didn't want you to have to see that. I'm so sorry that I couldn't solve her case."
"That's okay I don't blame you," she writes to him on her little note pad.
Chapter 9: The Between
While they waited for the analysis of evidence to come back, Horatio and Piper had time to kill at the hospital. She was finally able to tell him some personal things.
Without batting an eye, she calmly writes him something, "When I was dead, I saw some people that I didn't know, but they knew you. A very pretty lady told me to tell you that she loves you and misses you. I think her name was Marisol. Someone with a really funny-sounding name told me that you need to stop blaming yourself for his shooting death. I think it was your brother who said he's sorry. He didn't tell me why he was sorry just that he was."
When she finished and handed him the piece of paper, Horatio just looked at her with his mouth open.
"What are you saying, did you see my wife?"
"Was the funny name Speed?" he asks her.
She just answers with a nod and writes yes and yes.
That first night out of the coma, Piper was too exhausted to dream, but the next night Horatio had noticed that her eyelids were twitching relentlessly. Her body didn't move that first night, just her eyelids.
The following nights slowly got worse and worse. At first, it was only her hands that were twitching, but it didn't stay isolated for very long. By the fourth night, her whole body was thrashing in her hospital bed.
During the fifth night, Horatio was asleep on the chair that the nurses had brought in for him only to be awakened by a blood-curdling scream.
Jumping to his feet in an instant, Horatio quickly sits on the side of her bed. When he attempts to reach out and touch her arm in her horror-stricken panic, she strikes the side of his face.
He was not expecting her to react that way, so instinctively, he recoils when he feels blood trickling down his cheek. Wiping the blood away with the back of his hand, he lovingly looks up at her and realizes that she is still in a dream state and was fighting for her life.
Her eyes were so wild with fear. He could only see the terror in her normally soft bright green eyes. He knows what she needed and what he needs to do.
Slowly but firmly, he draws her close despite her fighting him. Then he just holds her close with his left hand, gently holding the back of her head. Eventually, Piper slowly calms down until she just collapses into his arms and just sobs.
When she finally relaxes enough, he gently reassures her, "Piper, sweetheart, you're safe; it's alright, Sweetie, are you okay?"
Horatio lovingly asked her, she answered with a silent nod. When he asked her if she wanted to talk about what just happened, she responded with an adamant shaking no. With lots of gentle reassurance, Piper was eventually able to fall back to sleep. That night went by without any more added excitement.
Chapter 10: A Child's Fear
The two of them would spend the next week playing card games and talking about nothing in particular. Horatio was impressed with the girl's penmanship. The fact that she never spoke meant that she had to have impeccable writing skills.
When she was in school, her teachers just loved her, and she was a straight-A student. She would sit front and center. If she had a question, she would write it down on her pad of paper and raise her hand. The teacher would come over-read her question and answer it to the whole class without singling her out.
Every day, Horatio would ask Piper if she wanted to talk about her nightly dreams, but every day she would shake her head no. She did, however, write to him, saying that she didn't feel safe going to sleep since she knew what would happen shortly after she fell asleep.
Horatio was getting worried about her since Piper didn't feel safe going to sleep because she knew what would come soon after she fell asleep. After five nights of her ever-worsening night terrors, he left Piper in her room and stops Alexx in the hall.
"Do you have someone who could come and talk with Piper, she's been having night terrors every night and refuses to talk about them. I'm getting a little worried. She said that she doesn't feel safe falling asleep."
Alexx responds to Horatio's question with a quiet nod, yes. Alexx sent a friend who specialized in kids who have night terrors.
The lady named Rose Greenwood, came to talk with Piper when Horatio left for about an hour and a half to go to the lab and check-in with everybody in his team.
Rose came in and just talked to the girl and asked her if she would draw her dreams in an attempt to help the girl understand what was happening in them. Piper really wanted to understand what was happening in her dreams and what they meant.
After Rose had left Piper's room, Rose ran into Horatio at the elevator door. When he glanced down at Piper's drawings, he immediately recognized what he was seeing. "Those are pictures of her mother's brutal murder," he tells Rose.
Quietly telling himself, "no wonder she would wake up screaming and didn't want to talk about it."
Horatio finished talking with Rose and promptly returned to Piper's room. He had brought her back a grilled cheese lunch from the Cafeteria. By now, he knew that it was her favorite lunch. Piper had been so young when her mother was murdered. There was no way that she could remember the details, let alone process them.
The events of the last week had brought up long-buried memories. Her mind remembered what she saw when she was just a baby. She remembered what had happened to her mom, but she couldn't process it until now.
When Rose had explained to Piper that what she was drawing was her mother's killing, it helped the girl understand. Eventually, her night terrors would fade away completely.
When Piper's testimony corroborated the evidence, Horatio and his team all felt confident that they would catch her shooter soon.
Chapter 11: Evidence Speaks
The evidence showed that Piper had climbed up the containers without anyone knowing exactly what she was going to do. She was taking out her ghillie suit and her extra paintball ammo when someone knocked her down.
The shoe-prints show that her attacker violently turned her onto her back, where she came face to face with a handgun.
Definite signs of a struggle before her attacker pulled the trigger, shooting her in the stomach. It left her holding her stomach when she saw the bullet casing and grabbed it. Her shooter then paced the length of the container before he kicked her off it. This caused her to land on the dirt with a painful thud.
By the time her friends found her, she had been on the ground for about 5 minutes. It hurt to breathe, so she kept her breathing shallow. Piper was really struggling to stay conscious at that time.
Horatio shows up two minutes later, and Tripp was there two minutes after that. If it weren't for the blood dripping down the top container, no one would have known she had fallen about 38 feet to the ground below.
If she had not been wearing the protective gear for paintball, she might not have survived the fall. She was a mute from the trauma of witnessing her mother's brutal murder. No one would have known that she was in danger. Not saying a word for close to a decade, no one would have recognized her voice anyway.
Her head had impacted the ground after her body but with enough force to cause a brain bleed and blown pupils. If Horatio hadn't carried her to the Hummer and driven her to the hospital like a maniac, she wouldn't have survived.
She did suffer a couple of broken ribs, skull fractures, a possible incomplete spinal fracture, a fractured left arm, and she partially collapsed a lung when she hit the ground.
Calleigh ran Ballistics, and they came back to a cold case of a homicide of a decade ago. Her mother was shot and killed with the same gun as was used on her. How can that be? What are the odds of that happening?
This realization caused the team to run the blood from Piper's shooting against the blood from her mother's shooting. The results were not quite what the team had thought.
It came back a familial match to the person who had shot Piper. Not directly related but a distant male relative.
With Horatio staying at the hospital with Piper, Eric took charge of the case. He was filling in his brother in law and boss several times a day.
Natalia was in charge of the DNA tests.
Calleigh was in charge of Ballistics. Eric had trace evidence, and Ryan had fingerprints. The newest member of the team, Walter, was in charge of going back and forth to the crime scene to gather more evidence and interview witnesses.
When Natalia ran the blood evidence of Piper's shooting through CODIS, which took several days, she got a hit to a cold case. Pulling up the file, she was floored. Handing Eric the results, she waited to see his reaction. Without saying a word, he called Horatio.
His brother had to know that both cases are not just connected once but twice. The gun was the same, and the shooters in both cases were related.
This was Horatio's chance to solve a cold case and bring this family closure from a decade-old trauma. The team simply needs to follow the new evidence since the forensic field had changed so much since her mother's homicide.
Horatio's gut instincts tell him to run the DNA from the shooters of both cases through the military DNA database. This database was set up to help them identify military dead, but someone in the DOD owed him a favor.
Horatio was trying to keep that favor but decided that he was going to call it in. When the results came in, Horatio was shocked. The shooters in both cases are distant male relatives to someone that they had already interviewed.
It took about a week. But the DNA swabs that Ryan put through the DOD database came back as being related to a Gunnery Sergeant Tobias McGraw, the owner of the paintball facility who they had already interviewed.
Tripp and Eric brought Tobias back in for further questioning. As soon as Eric told Tobias the evidence, he stopped talking to the police and demanded to speak to a Judge Advocate General lawyer.
When the JAG lawyer finally arrived, Eric was allowed to ask questions. The CSI team just wanted to know if Tobias had a son and another male relative.
Tobias's JAG lawyer told him he probably should answer the questions since none of the evidence pointed to him directly. If Tobias didn't answer the question, the CSI's could get him on obstruction of justice.
Tobias also felt that he should answer the question since he owed the family of the victim that much. Piper's father had saved his life in Kabul about twelve years ago.
"I have three sons and a brother, but I will not help you arrest them," he tells Eric. Figuring out his son's names was easy enough. The team just put his last name into the school district's registry of students and got the names.
His sons were living with his ex-wife. Eric and Tripp brought in each son one at a time to ask them questions. The youngest son was Piper's age. They were in the same class, and he was at the scene of Piper's shooting. He did, however, have a rock-solid alibi. He was with all the other kids the whole morning, and the other boys would vouch for him, which they did.
Tobias' oldest son Jamison was twenty-two and was away at Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City; he was training to fly the F-22 Raptor. This was as solid of an alibi as you can get. The base is six hundred miles away, and Jamison didn't have any leave.
The only person that it could be would be the middle child. The team had enough evidence to get a warrant to search Tobias' business since the teen worked at the family business after school and at the time of Piper's shooting as well as his ex's house.
The CSI team had to split into two teams, one team to search the business and another team to search Tobias' ex's house.
Eric and Calleigh went to the paintball course, and Ryan and Natalia went to the ex's house. Eric and Calleigh found the kid hiding deep in the paintball facility inside one of the many containers near where Piper had been shot.
When Eric and Calleigh had arrested the sixteen-year-old, whose name was Timothy, his father and the family lawyer met them at the police department. The lawyer advised Timothy not to answer any questions, but he talked anyway. He wanted to tell his story and didn't want to lie anymore.
Chapter 12: Suspect Confesses
He tells Eric and Tripp, "Her father got my dad paralyzed it's his fault my parents divorced, and I wanted to hurt him, but he's a Marine sniper who was on active duty and overseas. Piper was here; I could hurt her, and that would just kill her father. When I shot her, I didn't want to leave her way up on the containers since they would never find her body, so I kicked her off the containers. Why did she not die, she should have died."
Well, both Eric and Tripp were not expecting that. Now the father of the suspect was more shocked than the officers.
"It wasn't her father's fault for anything. It was no one's fault. The bomber was a six-year-old little girl. He couldn't shoot a child that young. I don't blame him. Your mom and I were barely holding it together long before my accident. How could you shoot Piper, she is one of Lucas's best friends, and her father actually saved my life by covering the team with gunfire preventing other insurgents from getting the rest of us, and he put his body over mine guarding me with his life."
Tripp just looks at Eric stunned. The father continues, "I will not be bailing you out this time. You're on your own," before wheeling himself out the door.
Eric and Tripp had no more questions to ask him. The evidence would speak for itself. They matched Timothy's boot prints to the prints at the scene. His blood and hair were found under Piper's fingernails, and her blood was found deeply embedded in the soles of his boots. He had tried but failed to destroy the blood on his shoes.
The tread made it impossible for him to remove all the blood from the bottom.
The team didn't have the gun yet, but they had a signed confession, so they didn't really need the gun, but it would help them with the case. T Horatio provided the final nail in the suspect's coffin.
He showed Piper a photo array, and she picked the suspect out as her shooter. Lucas's brother Timothy who was much older than Piper and Lucas were was never home when Piper was over, so she didn't recognize him as her friend's brother.
Horatio had placed a photo line-up in front of Piper and asked her if she could identify her shooter from the photos. Nodding an adamant yes, Horatio gave her the photo line-up.
Without any promptings from Horatio, Piper quickly picked Timothy out of the line-up as her shooter.
Being a good investigator, Eric had handed his card to the kids who were at the scene of Piper's shooting telling them if they need anything or if they think of anything that they could call him anytime.
The night after Timothy was arrested for shooting Piper, Lucas called Eric late at night. Timothy still refused to say where he had gotten the Sig from.
Lucas tells Eric, "I think my uncle George was involved in one of the shootings. I overheard him talking to my dad about his gun being stolen from his house. Apparently, my uncle had shot Piper's mom, and he would have gotten away with it if my brother Timothy had not stolen the gun and used it to shoot Piper. He's going to the paintball property to get rid of the weapon."
Eric called Horatio about the tip and told H that he would meet him at the property. Horatio called Tripp to gather some of his most trusted officers to meet Horatio and Eric at the paintball course to apprehend the suspect.
Horatio was eager to tell Piper that both cases where closed. Telling her, "I have to leave for a little while because my team needs me at the lab."
In reality, he was going to apprehend her mother's killer.
Horatio got to the location before Eric, so he started to sweep the property. Gun drawn he began to clear the buildings of people. Eric had to be sure to call out his boss's name when he walked up behind Horatio. Eric didn't want to get accidentally shot by his boss.
Horatio was a little surprised that Tripp had only brought a single canine unit to sweep the property. Tripp, however, was confident with his choice of officers to bring to the scene since he knew that this officer and her canine could find anything.
With Eric beside him, Horatio clears the rest of the buildings. Tripp and the canine officer paired off. Eric and Horatio had already paired off to clear the property. The pairs had split to cover more ground alone. At the back of the property near the scene of Piper's shooting, Eric walks into the suspect.
The suspect pulls his gun on Eric and starts shooting. Horatio heard the shots and flanked the suspect. Before Horatio has a chance to shoot the suspect, he clearly hears a primitive wolf-like snarl of a canine. The sound of the dog growling distracted the suspect long enough for Horatio to get the drop on him.
As Horatio pulls the trigger of his Sig, the suspect drops but not before pulling the trigger one last time. The last shot from the suspect hits Eric in the right shoulder, and Eric falls onto his back.
Witnessing Eric get shot, Horatio has a flashback to the last time Eric got shot. Quickly flashing back to reality, Horatio rushes to Eric's side. Eric didn't need an ambulance, but he did need a medic.
With the suspect down, Horatio can hear Tripp thank the canine unit for the help.
"Anytime, Frank, call us anytime that you need help," the officer tells their mutual friend.
As the officer walks away, H looks up to see the back of a red-haired female leave the scene with her blue and brown dog. Even from the back, the officer looks familiar to Horatio, but he couldn't figure out why.
With Eric stabilized, Horatio drives them back to the hospital once Dr. Tom Loman, the ME, arrived to take possession of the suspect's body.
The bullet inside Eric's shoulder matched the bullet that was pulled out of Piper's intestines and the one that killed her mother. They were confident that they had the murder weapon.
Both George's and Timothy's fingerprints were found outside of the gun. They were also on the inside of the gun's magazine. George's and Piper's mother's blood were found on the bullets inside the magazine.
Chapter 13: A Father Returns
Horatio gets to the hospital to tell Piper that he had closed both her shooting and her mother's homicide. "Your friend, Lucas's uncle, had killed your mother, and his older brother Timothy had shot you. Lucas asked me to tell you that he was sorry and that he really prayed that you wouldn't hold his family's behavior against him."
When Piper hears about Lucas's fears, she writes Horatio, "Of course I can you can't pick your family and family is everything."
Right after that written conversation with Piper, Horatio hears a loud confrontation at the reception area of the ICU Going out in the hall. He tries to see who it is that is causing the commotion.
There standing in front of the nurse is a tall blonde man wearing his Marine uniform. That was the only proof that Horatio needed, he approaches the man and asks if he is looking for Piper.
Saying "Master Sergeant O'Shea over here, your daughter is in this room." Right as Horatio walks her dad into her room, they hear Piper speak for the first time in a decade.
Her first words were "Daddy," and her dad drops to his knees, crying.
Both Horatio and her father were shocked that she spoke. When asked about it, Piper responds
"I was talking non stop the day mommy died."
"When I talked, too much mommy would say, "What was that."
"We made a game of it. She would say, What was that, and I'd be like all quiet like what was what. Mommy never told me it was safe to talk, so I never did. When I died, I saw mommy. She said to me that truth and justice always prevails. I didn't believe it since both cases weren't solved yet. You told me that you solved both cases right before daddy came," pointing to Horatio.
Extending his hand to Horatio, her daddy just says, "thank you. You gave me my little girl back."
Master Sergeant O'Shea went and sat on the edge of his daughter's bed. With her daddy by her side, she whispered something in his ear.
Standing up and walking over to Horatio, he says, "my little girl wants to tell you something."
"Sweetheart, what is it," Horatio asks her.
She motions for him to come closer before she whispered something in his ear.
Throwing her arms around his neck and kissing him on the cheek, she says, "thank you. You've done more for me than you can imagine."
Before Horatio leaves the hospital, he tells her dad, "If you ever need anything to call him anytime."
Walking back to his Hummer Horatio was beyond relieved, "It took a decade to solve, and Piper had to get shot, but I solved the one case that I couldn't shake."
His team is usually able to solve most cases, but this case was one that they couldn't solve until these last few weeks.
Horatio drives home finally after not being home for a few months. Eric and his team would bring Horatio a change of clothes every day, but Horatio himself had not been home since Piper got shot. He didn't want to leave the girl alone. When her dad got stateside, Horatio was finally able to go home.
Horatio went back to work and started to work on the team's new case, but it was an easy case since the killer did not attempt to cover his tracks. His team solved this case in record time. Horatio was glad to be home until he got a phone call very early on a Friday.