Chapter II

Another Day at the Office

When Sara arrived at the Lab, two hours before her shift was set to begin, she was immediately bombarded with information. With the last of the precious first forty-eight hours slipping away, the entire staff was working on the Montinegro Kidnapping. Though the fingerprints were still coming back, there was already a sense of defeat in the air; AFIS had yet to come back with any hits. A picture of the dark haired Montinegro girl was taped to the clear case board in the conference room and Sara stopped to look at it. There were also documents, notes and pictures posted up. One of the cars had given up a single strand of hair that was morphologically similar to Cheryl. Sara made note that the car itself was waiting in the garage for a more thorough examination. Jim, she saw, had already followed up on the name the car had been rented under. Surprisingly enough, John Smith turned out to be an alias.

Sara shook her head in disgust. They had linked victim to car, now they needed to link car to kidnapper, and they were running out of time. She took a deep breath and tried to center herself as she walked towards the garage. She knew that if she waited, Greg or Nick would be more than happy to process the car instead of her. She looked down at her arm, despite the fact that her cast and splint had been removed months ago, her elbow was bent at a ninety-degree angle and her wrist was held stiff. She straightened out the limb and pushed her hands into her pockets.

In the garage, she pulled the navy blue coveralls over her black slacks and tank top, pulled her hair back, and gloved up. She stared, the whole time, at the car. Jumbled memories went through her mind and the grinding in her stomach intensified for a moment. Sara stared at the car with unreadable eyes and fists clenched so tight her nails dug into her palms. She would get through this.

Sara squared her shoulders and looked over the notes that Helen Myers, a lack luster Day Shift CSI II, had left her. Because of the lighting in the garage and the difficulties it posed, this car, like all of the cars they'd processed on site, had only been given a quick visual inspection. Pondering that thought, Sara went over to the metal lockers and pulled a bottle of luminol out of the left-most one. She hit the overhead lights and pulled a flood light over to the trunk. Going on instinct, she sprayed down the carpet and then turned out the floodlight. It wasn't blinding, but there was a faint glow from around the edges of the carpet. Sara furrowed her brow and snapped pictures as the glow faded. She turned the bright flood light back on and stared at the gray carpet. Because the car was a rental, there was no spare. Mitch, the eldest of the brothers owning the company explained that it was simply easier to send someone out to fix a flat on a rental than to worry about theft. That meant the space usually reserved for a flat was empty. She put her hand flat on the carpet over the general area where the spare would have gone and she heard plastic crackle. She looked for a lose corner in the carpet, and tugged it up. She didn't need luminol to see that the heavy duty plastic that had been shoved underneath the carpet was covered with blood. After taking several pictures, she carefully took the plastic out and laid it on the concrete floor. The sheet was about six by six feet. It was a common sort of plastic that was used for everything from professional construction sites to do-it-yourself painting projects. Hell, she had a roll of it in her junk closet at her apartment. Of course, this piece was not run-of-the-mill anymore. There were grass and soil stains that had traces ground in. There was the blood evidence everywhere and, of course, there would be fingerprints.

Her own fears forgotten, Sara searched the rest of the car, luminoling the interior, vacuuming, hoping for trace. She dusted the metal interior of the trunk, and had already left a text for Archie. She would need him to dump the car's GPS system for information about its last trip.

By the time Catherine and the boys had arrived for shift, Sara was already halfway done with the sheet. She had taken photos, laying out markers by smudges, voids and the full and articulated footprint in dried blood. On her hands and knees -- the sheet was too large for a table so she'd laid it out on the floor -- she was dusting for prints carefully. She had put the dirt, grass and grease samples she'd pulled from the plastic on top of Hodge's pile, and had handed the blood, hair and semen samples to Wendy and the DNA specialist was already running them priority.

Working clockwise from what she had unofficially termed the top or head of the plastic, basing that on the fact that she had found several long hairs there, she was carefully dusting, marking, photographing and lifting fingerprints, partials and even smudges. She might have continued working for several more hours, but the lights started to flick on and off above her.

"Give me just a second." She, in a practiced move, lifted the print tape with a slow and careful tug and pushed closed the two halves over the print. Sara held up the captured print to the light and looked at it. It was a finger, the middle finger if she wasn't mistaken, and it was crystal clear, a perfect transfer. She quickly labeled it, and then jotted down in her notes that according to her calculations of head and foot, she'd found Print 12 at about five-o'clock, two feet from the center of the sheet. She initialed the evidence and put it aside. Only then did she look up and over her shoulder.

Greg Sanders, clad in blue jeans and a black tee-shirt, smiled over at her and pushed off of the door jamb he'd been leaning on. "What is all this?"

Sara put her canister of print powder and brush down and wiped her sweaty brow with her wrist, unknowingly smearing black powder across her forehead. "Found it in the empty spare tire well in the trunk. Blood evidence, trace and now I'm lifting prints."

Greg nodded and came over to offer her a hand up. They both took a couple of steps back away from the evidence and Sara began to strip her now contaminated latex gloves. She walked over to the table where her cellphone, beeper and watch were. She had taken off her watch for fear it would scrape against the plastic.

She squinted at the time and winced ever so slightly. "I missed the meeting?"

Beside her, Greg grinned, "You so missed the meeting."

Sara blew out a breath, "Catherine and Grissom mad?"

Greg shrugged and tossed the used latex gloves into the trashcan one by one. "Grissom is well, he's Grissom. Catherine on the other hand." He ran a finger across his throat, "I suggest you run."

Sara rolled her eyes, "Well, when I hand over the evidence I might only have to jog away."

Greg grinned and looked back over at the sheet, "You want help with that thing?"

Sara stretched and grunted when she felt one of her vertebrae pop. "With the plastic, no, I've got most of it done already." She grinned, "But if you would like to go underneath the car and print the oil pan, and then go under the hood and get a sample of the oil, it would help."

Greg stared at her for a moment. "And I'm doing this because?"

Sara started to pull on another pair of gloves from the box on the counter. "The plastic sheet has a pretty big grease and oil stain on it. Now generally if a car leaks that much oil, it's going to end up sitting on the side of the road."

Greg nodded, "Yeah, like my first car. Ker-pow half way to grocery store one day, engine locked up." He, too, was pulling on coveralls.

Sara walked back to the sheet, "So I figure that stain, which is more of a splatter than a pool, is from over flow when someone was changing the oil in this or maybe another car."

Greg zipped up the baggy coveralls. "And do we have bloody fingerprints?"

Sara nodded, "We do."

Now Greg really smiled and got his own canister of print powder. "Match prints from the oil pan to the bloody ones on the plastic sheet, and we'll have a warrant."

Sara nodded, "Archie is working on backtracking the car's last trip too."

Hours later, with prints found, matched and identified, Sara handed Jim Brass the file. "He works for Three Brothers as a mechanic by day and takes the exact same class at the Learning Annex as the Montinegro girl by night."

Jim clapped her on the shoulder and tucked the folder under his arm. "Good work, Kid. We're going to the shop to pick him up. You want to come along for the ride?"

Since she had been the one who had dragged an ADA and a Judge out of bed at seven in the morning on a Saturday, done the leg-work and broke the case, she would usually jump to go in for the take-down. There were more important things to do this time. Perps came a dime a dozen, there was only one Cheryl Montinegro. She shook her head, "No, Catherine has a lead on where the girl might be. I'm heading out with her and Greg in a few minutes."

Jim nodded and already had his hand on his radio as they quickly walked down the halls towards the parking lot. "You be careful out there, okay?"

Sara patted her holstered weapon, "You too, Jim."

She felt the Captain's eyes follow her out. Jim was a dear friend, and in moments of weakness, she thought about confiding in him. Luckily, pride always won out over weakness. She didn't want to see any more pity in people's eyes when they saw her. Gil was bad enough as it was.