Chapter XIII

Rape?

The more she worked the case, the more baffling it became. The rushed tox report came back and floored Catherine. She paced her small, shared office, four steps, turn and four steps; she was wearing a hold in the floor in front of her desk. Her victim, twenty-two year old Dedrick Marsh, had a blood alcohol content of one-point three, well over the limit, and flunitrazepam, a benzoduazepine that went by the much more recognizable street name of ruffies. He had begun to feel the effects in the usual fifteen to twenty minutes. He'd become woozy, detached and easily controllable. Marsh had slipped into a drugged sleep and never woken up. It had been, she read, a triple dose, he had gone into a coma and his twenty-something year old heart had stopped. Catherine was willing to bet he had been alive and awake enough to feel the pain, though. She looked through the digital photos she'd taken. There were half moon indentions and cuts in his palms. Even drugged, he had been terrified and in pain, but hadn't been able to do anything in his incapacitated state. He had been so out of it, the bastard hadn't even bothered to tie the poor man down.

Catherine felt nausea hit her in the gut, a rolling greasy wave of empathy. She leaned against the wall of her office, resting her palms and forehead against the cool wall. She hadn't been raped. She knew that, the evidence had all been negative. She was not a victim, but the knowledge that she would never know exactly what happened after John Mayer had wrapped his set and before she woke up in a dingy, dirty motel room haunted her. The suffocating fear wrapped around her and squeezed the breath out of her every time she jacknifed up in bed after every single nightmare. She was not a victim. She had a victim down in the morgue. She stood up straight and pushed her hand through her bangs. She schooled her face in the passive expression she'd learned from Gil and sat back down in her chair behind her shared desk. She looked at what she knew about Dedrick Marsh's case.

He had been wined, without being dined, drugged, mutilated and then killed. The SAE kit, complete with anal swabs, wasn't back yet and the file from Sara's similar case had yet to be located, it was probably lost in the waves of paper work that had been sent to central filing. She had called Brass, who had worked the case, but had yet to hear anything back. With nothing else to do while the various tests were run, Catherine turned back to her computer again. She needed to run her vic's name. He might have a car they could track down or something that would lead them to the killer. The search came back with a positive. The rapsheet she'd pulled on Marsh either simplified or further complicated the situation, Marsh had been under investigation for rape by LVPD.

Marsh hadn't been a huge guy, he weighed in at one-eighty nine and all of it appeared to be well defined muscle. There was an UNLV Rebel in a tight red body suit on his arm with the three numbers 'one-eight-five' Marsh had been a wrestler before he'd been busted. She paced off her office again.

Doctor Robbins had shown her pictures of what, he called, the device. It took a sick and twisted woman to shove that inside her. He said he was as positive as he could be, pending full autopsy, that this device had been employed in the murder. Catherine shuddered; it was probably one of the most completely and truly fucked up things she'd ever seen. Had the woman been coerced into using it? If so, for what reason? Was it about revenge, or was it random? She was half-way into yet another turn when someone knocked on the open door.

Sofia Curtis, decked out in black and like a disgruntled statue, stood in her doorway.

"Where's Sara?"

Catherine turned to meet the Detective eye to eye, "It's her night off. I had a few questions about that double you worked with her though."

Sofia leaned her shoulder against the door jamb and crossed her legs at the ankle. She pulled a toothpick out of her pocket and took it out of the wrapper. "Shouldn't Sara be here, I mean it is was her case." She rolled the toothpick in her teeth and put her hands in her pockets. "Things couldn't have changed that much since I've left."

For a minute the two women were locked in a stare, both women were ready to duke it out. Lucky for all concerned, Greg, coffee in hand, ambled by, "Hey Sofia, Catherine, heard we caught another Bobbit-ish case?"

Both women broke away their respective glares and looked at the young CSI. He was dressed for lab-work in jeans and a dark blue tee shirt, which was not exactly out of the normal for Greg. He also had one eye, his left one, shut and squinted tight.

Catherine, temper short, blinked at him, "Greg what the hell is wrong with your eye?" If she had to fill out one more lab accident form, she was going to go insane.

For a moment, Greg attempted to look sheepish. He opened his left eye, but then quickly shut it back with a hiss of air through his teeth. "Liquid breath mint in my eye-don't ask."

Sofia tried not to laugh, "Yeah, okay, Greg, Jim sent me down here since it looks like the cases might be related. Vartan was downright giddy when he found out he was switching cases with me."

Greg nodded and was blinking his eye quickly, a tear coming out, but he was apparently working through whatever pain he had inflicted on himself, with a breath mint of all things. "Cool. I'll call Sara." Catherine opened her mouth, but was quickly cut off by Sofia. "She can't come in tonight, but she'll want to know that the case is open again."

Catherine rolled her eyes, "Fine. Whatever. While he's going all gooey over Sidle, you can run a more thorough background check on my vic. His name is Dedrick Marsh."

Greg, who had been playing with his cellphone, looked up. "He's dead? Damn. Guess that case is closed."

Sofia, who had just come on to the case, raised an eyebrow, "What case?"

Greg looked from one of them to another, "It's months old, but still in the papers. He was accused of raping a stripper-turned-freshman, kicked off the wrestling team and out of school. That's why UNLV hired like fifteen new security guys, Mick was pissed. The Marshes were fighting it tooth and nail and the school paper was deadlocked between supporting the girl and condemning her. It's a mess."

Sofia looked from one CSI to another, "Erica Green was a student at UNLV and she was on the soccer team."

Greg had his cell phone to his ear, cradled against his shoulder, "Now I'm definitely calling Sara." He either didn't notice or pointedly ignored Catherine's tight jaw and grinding teeth. Either way, Sofia gave him points for sheer bravery.

The campus was bustling; it was just before eleven in the morning, prime time for classes. Young adults rushed around her one by one, two by two and pack by pack. The dominant colors of the crowd was faded blue denim and UNLV's scarlet red. Mick conveniently had glossed over the fact that the campus had been in the middle of a controversy. Their star wrestler, an Olympic hopeful, had been accused of rape. Then again, she mused as she dodged around a group of lingerers, there had been no reason to connect an expelled man with an off-campus double murder. Now, though, there was. There was a huge connection. Somehow, someway, the deadly anti-rape device had found its way to campus. Sara looked around at the young women. They were all so fresh, hopeful, and full of potential. One in ten of them, she knew, would be sexually assaulted by the time they turned thirty-five and another tenth of them were, statistically speaking, assaulted before the age of fifteen. Sara turned a circle, looking at the in-between-class crowd. Some of them might be in possession, or even wielding, if that was the right word, a deadly weapon right now.

Greg had filled her in on the specifics of the case; he had probably gotten a little too specific for Catherine's taste. The two cases, the double and now the wrestler in the motel room, were different. The first had been an obvious snatch off the street and rape gone wrong and the other had been planned. Marsh had been lured, drugged, and then assaulted. Their killer though, had not gotten away exactly clean. She wasn't sure about physical evidence, but they had definitely left a vital clue for them to follow: their incompetence. If the overdose had been an accident, it showed that the perp was an amateur, someone who had never employed date rape drugs before.

She leaned towards that possibility, because a planned overdose would have been easier to pull off and hide if the killer had used GHB or Ketamine. GHB was harder trace because its traces disappeared and were broke down by decomposition within hours. Ketamine, on the other hand, was a much wider used party drug that wouldn't have looked as suspicious. This perp had just jumped into the big bad world of date rape with only a rudimentary understanding of what he was doing.

In the end, though, dead was dead, and everything came back to UNLV. It was, besides the device, the common thread in the two crimes. Both victims had been athletes too. Erica had been the Women's Soccer Team goalie and Dedrick had been a wrestler. Sara made a mental note to schedule an appointment with the school Athletic Director. Two dead athletes in less than a week was more than a coincidence. Something wasn't quite right in Rebel Country.

Author's Note: This chapter would have been up some time ago, but had other ideas.