Chapter: 8
Sister Moves In

With physical therapy and her brother's help, Renee is on her feet relatively fast after she wakes up. She is still at the hospital and is sitting up on her own. Physical therapy has her walking with the help of a spotter and a metal hand railing. Horatio's team still has a crime to solve since they have hit roadblocks, and the case had gone a little cold.

While Renee is now awake and able to talk, the team has renewed hope to reignite the case. They hope that maybe Renee can give a detailed description of the suspects that attacked her. When Renee tells the team that she would be able to describe her attackers accurately to the police sketch artist, the team is more than thrilled.

When the sketch artist is sitting with Renee and drawing what her attackers look like Horatio thought that one of them seems very familiar to him. She can describe the two people that beat her, and one of them is the person who had shot her. Eric put the sketches of the suspects into the system for facial recognition. Horatio is not surprised by the results of one of them.

The one that had shot Renee, David Kolcheck, is the suspected leader of a group of Serbian Mercenaries. He is very familiar to the team since they had been trying to nail him for murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and attempted murder for quite a while.

The team had arrested Kolcheck on multiple occasions, but they never had enough to nail him with until now. This time he attacked the wrong person and made this case more personal to Horatio than any other case. He tries not to let any cases become personal, but in this case, he couldn't help it. Nothing is going to stop him from solving this case.

The sketches of her attackers are shown to the news media in the hopes that the general public would be able to find her attackers. The team can only wait and hope that someone calls in a tip to the hotline.

While still at the hospital, Renee sits bolt upright when she remembers that at her house, she had installed hidden security cameras. She had already turned them on for the night that she was attacked.

The cameras would have caught it all on camera. This could provide the team with some added detail. Maybe even identify some missing forensic evidence that they might have missed.

Renee tells her brother about the surveillance cameras she had put in a few weeks before she was attacked. Horatio said to his sister, Sweetie; the attackers had shot the outside surveillance cameras before they make their entry."

Still, she insists, "You don't understand H. I installed hidden cameras inside the light fixtures. Equipped with low light resolution and night vision."

Calleigh has Benton accompany her back to the house to have access to Renee's hidden cameras. It is a closed-circuit system, so Benton needs to be at the house to get the footage.

When Benton gets his hands on the footage, he does see the entire assault. Unfortunately, the footage is in night vision, which is all green. He isn't sure he can get anything usable for the case.

With Renee medically able to walk but needing assistance and physical therapy to do it, Horatio insists that she and the dogs move in with him so he can help.

She is very reluctant to do that but ultimately relents and agrees on the condition that he doesn't let her interfere with his work.

Horatio then realizes that he will never win the argument, so he accepts his sister's counteroffer.

Renee is powerful in all aspects of the word. She doesn't let her physical limitations stop her from doing as much for herself as she can. With this characteristic, she does overdo it on occasion.

The physical therapist would come over to the house every other day and give her exercises to strengthen her legs, but Renee's real motivation to get better is Charlie and Echo. Her dogs need her there. They require her leadership to thrive.

To kill time, Renee starts to teach, Echo how to find and alert to forensic evidence. Being a very young and active working dog, Echo needs constant mental stimulation to not only survive but to thrive.

So with her brother's help, Renee gets Echo alerting to shell casings as well as finding evidence that will link a victim to the suspect.

Echo's nose can detect amounts of blood and other trace evidence that no human could. Amounts so small only a microscope would be able to find. Soon she is alerting to 99% of the evidence that Horatio's team set up in mock trials.

Renee wants to thank Horatio for helping her through all of it. For being there for a person, he never met who ends up being a long lost sister. She is going to get in contact with Echo's breeder in Louisiana and acquire a full-bred Catahoula puppy to donate to the CSI team.

She will personally train the dog to do all aspects of the work the team will need.

Every five years, Echo's breeder would breed one litter of Catahoula Leopard Dog crossed with the Rhodesian Ridgeback to sell to NOPD to work in their K-9 program. Since Echo is three, he is not due for a cross litter for two more years.

When Renee calls the breeder, he tells her that he has a little boy who has all the makings of a great working dog. The breeder tells Renee that the puppy is a little boy version of Echo. The pup has Echos personality but is the reverse color pattern.

As soon as she hears that, Renee agrees to buy the pup. When the breeder hears about what had happened to her and why she wants the puppy even though she still had many working years left with Echo, he tells her that he will not sell the puppy but will instead donate the puppy to the MDPD for use as a forensic evidence detection canine.

After she hears that Renee is filled with gratitude and tells him thank you very much for your generosity. This gift will have to wait for a while since the pup is only about a month old, and Renee still needs to get well enough to be able to walk on her own without any assistance.

The breeder will always keep the pups who are destined to do tracking until the pups are nine months to a year old. He wants to get the pups ready by training them young and early to track through the bayou. They also need to solve her attack.
Horatio is starting to get discouraged by the lack of forward momentum in the case. Renee, however, is always permanently optimistic. Renee's personality closely matches Calleigh and her personality. By this time, the two are becoming good friends.

Renee tells Horatio that they will get a lead soon, and sure enough, the team gets an anonymous call identifying a group of Serbian Mercenaries who are bragging at a local biker bar about attacking a police officer and beating her to death when the cop wouldn't give up her partners location.

This leads to an entirely different predicament. This means that even if they catch the Serbian Mercenaries, they still will not give up the person who had hired them. The Mercenaries probably don't even know who hired them. They are just hired, hitmen.

The new development means that the case just got a whole lot more complicated.

The anonymous caller tells the tip line the name of the bar that the Serbian Mercenaries were bragging in. Horatio and the team are all too familiar with this particular bar.

The team busted several drug dealers dealing out of the bar. They know that they can't just burst through the door and demand answers. The CSI's would need both a warrant and a lot of reinforcements.

Reinforcements are easy enough for Tripp to get since Renee is a cop, and cops take care of their own. The team doesn't think that they have solid enough evidence to get a warrant.

They need more than just an anonymous tip to who the attackers are. The team requires physical evidence that points to the attackers' identity.

Renee reminds the team that they still have a missing bullet. She tells the team that she shot one of the attackers. She goes on telling her brother's team that she trained Echo to alert to DNA evidence.

This gives Horatio a genius idea. He wants to take Echo back to the house and see if she can find the missing DNA evidence.

The team is hopeful that the canine can find the evidence that they have yet found. That being the missing through and through bullet from the attacker that Renee had shot.

Horatio is very hopeful since he knows Renee loads her gun every night, and her DNA will be on the bullet as well as the DNA of the person that she shot. He needs Renee's help to tell him how to ask the dog to search.

Renee already taught Echo to listen to Horatio while she was recuperating at her brother's house. This will be a test to see if Horatio and Echo can work together to solve a case.

With a few hours left of daylight, Renee hands her brother a bullet from her gun inside an evidence bag and tells him first to get a sample of the suspect's blood and put the two scents together in a single evidence bag.

Horatio now just needs to take the canine to her house, where he is instructed to have Echo take a good sniff with the command, "Seek."

This will send Echo smelling around until she hopefully locates the missing spent bullet.

Horatio hopes that Ryan will be able to find usable DNA from the person who was shot as well as Renee's fingerprints since she loads her gun.

Horatio's idea turns out to be pure genius. Within minutes of being at her house, Echo performs just as Horatio had hoped.

She pinpoints the exact location of the bullet ten times faster than any of Horatio's lab equipment could have been able to do it. The slug had been dug out of the wall. It was either dropped and kicked, or it had been thrown. That causes the bullet to roll into the heater vent clear on the other side of the room.

The DNA that Ryan can get from the bullet that Renee had fired through the shoulder of one of her attackers matches Kolcheck as one of Renee's attackers.

This new evidence can secure Horatio the search warrant that the team needs to search the bar and the entire property since Kolcheck is reported to live in a trailer at the back of the property.