Chapter III

The Bitter Taste of Victory

Archie had quickly figured out the mileage: the car had only gone three and a half miles on its last time out. They had cast a search net out in the four square mile area with Three Brothers right at the heart of the search grid. Their suspect lived within the area. It was not, as they had first hypothesized, Rusty Hancock the boyfriend, but another man. The youngest of the Three Brother's team, a mechanic named Trevor Wendell.

Trevor lived in a rougher neighborhood, a city built housing project where there were still racially driven shootings between neighbors, the drug of choice was homegrown crystal meth, and police were definitely not welcome. The whole area was on a work out scrub of concrete that bumped right into the desert, right under the airport airspace. Cheaply built walls were tagged with gang signs and young twenty-somethings were gathered on what seemed like every corner, staring them down.

Sara wasn't the only one feeling the tension in the air. Catherine had the warrant in one hand and her other on her gun. Even the hard-assed street cops they'd brought along looked around with wary eyes.

Greg leaned forward and quietly asked her if he should get their Kevlar Vests out of the back of the Denali they'd come in. Sara, somewhat reluctantly, shook her head. They were law enforcement, they couldn't afford -- she wouldn't allow herself -- to be afraid of a bunch of street punks. Catherine, confident as always, double-checked the address with one of the uniforms and he nodded. The uniform's nametag said C. Tristian and the livid scar on his thick-corded neck spoke of a brush with death.

His baritone voice was gravely and his dark eyes hard, "That's the place, it's pretty quiet actually. I don't think we'll find any witnesses." Greg lowered his dark sunglasses, "How are you going to miss a woman screaming or a dead body being dragged around?" Tristian shrugged, "We've got thirteen unsolved homicides out of here in the last three months, you tell me."

Sara pushed her glasses up onto the bridge of her nose. The dark tinted Ray-Bans hadn't slipped any, she just needed something to do with the hands she so wanted to jitter and shake. "He lives with his mother?Tristian nodded, "Yeah. Father's doing a nickel for possession and sister has a few entries in her jacket for shop lifting but the rest of the family was clean until now."

Greg looked to Catherine for guidance and Sara looked at her because it was expected. Catherine was, after all, the senior CSI and their supervisor. Sara could sense more than see the six-five cop roll his eyes behind their backs.

Catherine tossed her red-blonde locks and turned back towards the house. "All right, let's go."

Officer Tristian took the lead and it was he who banged on the door with his fist, "Alice Wendell! LVPD! OPEN UP!"

There was some shuffling inside and Sara could hear muttered curses. She, like Greg and Catherine hung back and watched Detective Vega and Officer Tristian serve the warrant and deal with the outraged woman. Officer Tristian led the woman to the sidewalk and she stopped long enough to sneer at them. Sara only stared at the raving woman and quietly wondered to herself that if Trevor was "the good kid" she didn't want to meet the rest of the Wendell brood.

It took only minutes for Vega and Tristian to clear the house. They spread out, Greg took the main common rooms, Catherine went to tackle the bedrooms and Sara went through the hall, looking for any trace evidence of Cheryl Montinegro or her death.

One of the open doors led down to a basement of some kind. She paused before she went in, "Catherine, there's a basement."

She heard the heel clicks and waited for Catherine to back her up. It was shift policy; no one checked a basement or attic by themselves. There were too many hiding places and not enough exits for one person to safely process. Gil and Nick had learned this the hard way. Though the officers had already cleared it, Sara drew her gun and knew that behind her Catherine did the same. The basement had been partially converted to another bedroom. From the car magazines spread on the floor by a single recliner, both women quickly concluded that this was Trevor's bedroom.

It was sparsely furnished with a mattress and box springs on the concrete floor, a working television on top of an older, broken set, a worn looking recliner. One wall of the room was taken up by a washing machine, a dryer, and a chest freezer. Sara quickly looked around. Though she could see no bloody knives lying around, she did spot something shoved in the space between the old Maytag washing machine and the dingy white washed walls.

"Roll of plastic." She snapped a few shots of it in place and then pulled it out. "Can't be sure if it's an exact match, but visually speaking, it's the same kind of plastic I found in the car."

Catherine walked around the small room. "A couple of car magazines, a skin magazine and a half eaten sandwich, it could be Greg's place."

Sara chuckled half heartedly as she moved her flashlight around the dim room. "I've got blood."

Catherine pivoted on her heel, "Where?" Catherine followed the beam of Sara's mag-lite to the chest freezer. It wasn't all that unusual, she had one herself, though hers wasn't as old nor did it have a pad lock on it. She could not fathom why anyone would lock a freezer.

Though neither of them carried bolt cutters with them, there was a rusted old set shoved in a storage closet. Sara gave it a test run and it squeaked and protested, but the oversized loppers were more or less in working order. It took three tries to cut all the way through the cheap padlock. Sara pulled the broken lock off and stepped aside so Catherine could open the freezer up. Sara watched the lid come up and felt what little hope she'd had for their case extinguish without even a puff of smoke.

On top of long frozen bags of peas and freezer-burnt half gallons of ice cream was the body of Cheryl Montinegro. Her eyes were closed and frost had coated her dark eyelashes. She was in the fetal position, her clothes were gone, and her unprotected skin had gone pale white with tinges of blue. She was quite dead. As Catherine radioed the new development in, Sara looked at the inside of the lid and felt her stomach lurch. There were claw marks, frantic and bloody fingernail scrapes through the frost and into the plastic and metal of the lid. The freezer was old, not the type that had a latch that you could open from the inside. Cheryl hadn't bled out, she'd been alive when she'd been put in the freezer. She had fought to escape the frozen, airless, and dark dungeon: her cold grave.

Sara looked down at the eighteen-year-old woman, barely more than a girl. In her last moments of death, she had curled into a fetal position in the tiny, cramped frost lined space. It was times like these when Sara wondered why she had been able to escape the car and survive the desert when children died. Why had she survived when Cheryl hadn't.

Sara pulled one hand down her face, trying to bring everything back into perspective. This was a murder scene and she had to process it. She unconsciously put her other hand on her chest as if that alone would calm the churning acid in her stomach.

She wasn't exactly sure how much time had passed when Catherine cleared her throat. "Sara."

Sara knew exactly what Catherine was thinking about, Lindsey.

"Are you going to do your job?" Catherine's voice was hard and Sara almost flinched. She shrugged and knelt down to get her camera out of her kit.

Catherine, though, didn't seem satisfied. "You okay? I can call Nick if you want." The other CSI's voice had softened slightly, but Sara jerked her head up anyway.

Sara could do her job no matter what Catherine or anyone thought and she was sick of being asked if she was okay. "I can do my job, Catherine. I'm fine." The 'fine' had come out sharper than she'd intended. The whole thing had come out more forcefully then she'd meant. She wasn't going to apologize though. She watched Catherine's face harden and her ice-blue eyes flash. There was simply too much bad blood between the two women to keep the peace.

At one time, Sara had thought that they had reached some kind of peace. She'd been wrong. She didn't remember doing anything to break their truce. Truth be known, Sara had a strong suspicion it was rooted in her and Gil's relationship. It was something she was willing to talk about with Catherine. After all, just because their reproductive parts were both on the inside, didn't mean they were friends.

Neither woman would back down and apologizing was absolutely out of the question. After all, there was no reason to break a long running tradition. Sara turned away and started to snap pictures of the grisly scene. Her eyes were less likely to leak tears and her brain less likely to stew if it was behind a camera.

Behind her Catherine grumbled, "What the hell is the matter with you now?"

Sara grit her teeth and didn't answer. Mentally she was already berating herself. This was exactly what she had needed, another pissing match with Catherine Willows. Damn.

Without insect life, accurate internal body temperature, or lividity to follow, David Phillips hadn't been able to pinpoint an exact time of death. Not that it mattered all that much. They had a slam-dunk case. They had a solid case against Trevor Wendell -- he would go down for murder. It was a bittersweet victory, though. Sara watched David wheel the body out in a black cadaver bag. If they, she, had been a little faster and a little smarter, they might have been able to save Cheryl.