Chapter XVI

Evidence

Catherine had photographs blown up and closely cropped, the physical bindled and bagged, evidence and the corresponding reports from the various lab techs lined up like toy soldiers on the lay out table before her. All the details of Dedrick Marsh's twisted murder were spread out in front of her. To the untrained eye, it was a random assortment of angle shots, pale waxy fleshed limbs and blood pools. To Catherine it laid out a story, or part of one at least.

There was a stamp on the top of Marsh's left hand, it was a smudged, generic 'Paid' stamp in fluorescent orange. He had been at one of the city's many clubs before he'd died. Though she could immediately rule out some of the larger clubs, there were still hundreds of clubs and bars, some of which were underground and popped up in different places every single night. In essence, he could have been anywhere, or he could have been nowhere, there was no way of accurately telling. There were, happily enough, a few pieces of evidence that did add something to her investigation. There were several dark hairs, some shed from the head and a few shorter, curlier pubic hairs. When they had a suspect, a warrant, and a chance, Wendy could compare the profiles. Until then, it would sit in the cooler for preservation. There were fingerprints, mostly smudges and partials, most specifically one clear and perfect thumb print. It wasn't in the system, Mandi had run it through AFIS twice, but again, when they found a suspect, it would cement the case.

Catherine looked over at the uni's canvas report. Nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything and nobody knew anything, all three monkeys in a row. Of course, combine that with the diluted blood in the motel room's bathtub drain and she knew without a shadow of a doubt that the killer had cleaned herself up before leaving. The number of smudges also suggested that the killer wiped things down before she left.

They were looking for a brunette woman who thought she could outsmart them. There were only about a million women, give or take, who fit the description in the city, not counting transgenders and dye jobs. Of course that left the UNLV connection, if it was a connection at all. Sometimes, some cases were just flukes. Statistical anomalies that jumped up and bit you in the ass, she had seen her fair share of cases like that. Brunette female who had a holier then thou art complex, that sounded incredibly familiar. Despite an earlier promise to herself not to think about, Catherine's brows knit. Sara had never mentioned the fact that she had dated one of the world's most in demand fashion models. Of course, there weren't many conversations one could interject such a fact into, but still.

Sara Sidle, queen of the nerds, and Alex Dupree, arguably one of the most beautiful women on the planet. It just didn't make sense. How had they even met? Sara wasn't the type of women who went to fashion shows, hell she'd never even seen Sara read a fashion magazine. All the woman had in her apartment had been Forensics Journals, Physics journals, gun magazines and one single issue of Fitness Today, and books, an innumerable amount of books. They had obviously been an item back in San Francisco. A white-hot item, if that kiss was any indicator.

Kiss: Sara had kissed another woman. That wasn't what bothered Catherine, not by a very long shot. Sara was fooling around when she and Gil were supposed to be an over-the-moon-happy couple. Sara was little better when that EMT that had used her as his side-dish.

For a very self-gratifying moment, Catherine let her anger simmer and bubble while she looked over the many reports and mentally recorded any similarities between her and Sara's - that two faced bitch - cases. She was halfway through the documents when logic and reason started seeping back into her thought process. Sara hadn't met Alexandra Dupree with open arms. It had been a very frosty reception after they ended the kiss that Catherine knew good and well Sara hadn't instigated. She would love to hear the story behind that.

Speaking of Sara, why had Wendy flagged a copy of the blood-work for her? Flagged with a neon-pink post-it-note with Sara's name in big block letters, Wendy was rarely so insistent about things. Catherine shuffled the assorted DNA reports and pushed her reading glasses closer up on her nose. At first inspection, it was a normal cross-and-type non-genetic blood comparison, which was standard procedure in double homicides. On second, and closer look, the third of three entries for comparison had been referenced from the compliance database: Sidle, Sara; blood type B-. Why would Wendy compare Sara's blood work to Stewart Finnegan and Erica Green's? She leaned her hip against the layout table and tilted her head as she read. She spotted Wendy's looped cursive writing near the bottom of the report, beside the last column. 'One less thing to worry about.'

Catherine looked back to the top where the columns were labelled and then ran her finger down the paper, dragging her nail across the three entries. Each of the three people typed had come up HIV and AIDS negative. Catherine tapped her manicured nail against her lip, both were painted an identical shade of burgundy. The only reason Sara would have been tested was if she had come into contact with their blood, and since she knew damn well there were only a few ways that could happen, there was only one logical conclusion. Miss Workaholic, 'My close rate is eight percent higher than yours' had a fucking accident on the clock and hadn't reported it to her direct supervisor.

Catherine felt her pulse jump. "Son of a bitch." As if she didn't have better things to do than check on Sara Sidle's boo-boos.

A quick trip to her office would give her access to the inter-office email. If there wasn't an accident report waiting for her approval in her in-box, she would have a legitimate reason to yank Sara into her office for a dress-down that the other woman had more than earned.

Unfortunately for her and very fortunately for Sara, there was an email from Doctor Albert Robbins detailing the incident that had taken place in the morgue. Catherine stewed for a moment on that. Since it had happened in Robbin's part of the building, it hadn't been Sara's place to file the report, anyway. Damn it.

The report, signed by Sidle and Robbins as witnessed by Detective Sofia Curtis and Dave, my hadn't it been crowded down in the autopsy bay that night, was by the book, it had even been spell checked. Catherine bared her teeth at the report. She still had to make a note in Sara's file and then make sure it got notated in her hard-copy jacket. Oh the joys of being a supervisor. A quick succession of harder than absolutely necessary keystrokes later had her logged into the LVPD Personnel Database. Another quick pounding of keys brought up Sara's file. Catherine quickly scanned down the file. Important information such as her social security, birth date, physical description, rank and ID number were listed off in neat rows beside her updated ID photo. Bellow that was her current assignment, CSI III on the Graveyard Shift. Another section had career notations, the most recent listing dealt with Sara's return to full duty after her recovery from her kidnapping. Though it wasn't really her area, and snooping was technically frowned upon, Catherine was Sara's direct supervisor and if there were any more blonde haired blue-eyed lip-locking skeletons in Sidle's closet, Catherine had the right to know about them. It was caution, or maybe just bold-faced guilt that had her standing up, closing her tiny office's door and closing the blinds before she sat back down to look at the detailed file.

She scrolled down the file. There were tie-ins with her reviews and evaluations, probably buffed up by her supervisor-cum-lover Gil and case notations. If Catherine was so inclined, she could pull up any and every case Sara had worked on in her career. Since she knew about most of them, she continued to scroll down.

Jesus, Sara was an Eagle Scout, or whatever the Girl Scout equivalent was. Catherine almost laughed out loud. Early graduation from high school, magna cum laude from Harvard, magna cum laude from Berkley, top of her Academy class, close rate in the high eighties throughout her career, hell in 1998, it had cracked ninety percent, which only a handful of CSIs in the world could claim. Catherine blinked and scrolled back up. Why on earth did it jump from '98 to her Vegas records? Sara hadn't come into Vegas until 2000. She checked again, the last entry from SFPD was dated December 5th of 1998. There was over a year missing from Sara's service jacket. Catherine had her fingers poised over the keys, ready to launch into a further investigation into Sara's file when her cell phone began to vibrate and chime.