Author's Note: I hope everyone is enjoying their holidays. I certainly did, apart from tending to manic shoppers who waited till 30 minuites before the store closed on Christmas Eve to do all their shopping, of course. Now between figuring out my new ipod and arguing with itunes, I decided on a last minuite gift for everyone. It's an update, just like you wanted! See, Santa did get your letter.

Chapter XX

On Scene

Fluorescent yellow crime scene tape stretched across the inner courtyard of the Lady Luck Luxury Motel. Sara, heavy chrome-toned field kit in hand, lowered her dark glasses a fraction to study the scene in the late morning sun. There was a crowd pushing against the taped-off perimeter. They were being held in check by a couple of uniformed officers that looked like they had left the academy just the day before. There were innocent bystanders, people who had been forced to leave their rooms and beds before they were ready. The press had caught wind of the scene - the vultures listened to their police scanners as religiously as she did - and there were cameras, microphones and reporters in the crowd. There were also looky-loos - the people who couldn't resist the macabre pull of a fresh crime scene. Sara, out of habit, put down her kit and took a small digital camera out of the case that had been dangling from her wrist. No one was paying her much attention; everyone was focused on Sofia who had just made her way under the tape. Sara looked from the space beyond the tape back to the crowd. Sometimes the crime didn't stop at the tape. With that in mind, Sara shrugged out of her Department issue black vest and put her laminated Crime Lab ID in her pocket. She took pictures, discreetly and without a flash, of the crowd. You never knew who the looky-loos really were. She moved around, kit and vest left with one of the uniforms, to get a shot of all the faces.

She knew that Super Dave and Sofia were already inside, but this was the third Device Killing scene and she wanted pictures. She saw Catherine, who had driven in separately, walk through one of her shots and duck under the tape, and knew that she needed to hurry before someone realized that she wasn't just another bystander.

A few minutes later, camera and it's memory card secure in her kit, Sara put her vest and ID back on and went under the tape. The u-shaped building around her was stucco white and the pool in the center of the courtyard was bright blue under the sun and smelled faintly of chlorine. She sidestepped the pool of vomit on the cement and went to the wide open door that was her primary scene. A uniform stood at the door, but looked away from it, his jaw rigidly set. She could smell death coming from the room and knew, even before she stepped foot inside it, that this murder was going to be somehow worse than the others. She stopped and mechanically put paper covers over her boots and latex gloves over her hands, and looked over the room's threshold as she did. She hated being right.

The wall behind one of the two full-sized beds was a chaotic mess of blood spatter, cast off and something that she couldn't immediately identify. The bed itself, complete with corpse, was awash in blood, most of it pooled between the man's legs.

Dave, who was bent over the body, looked up briefly, "One slightly used dead body. I have no idea why they keep leaving these things laying around."

He pulled the long thermometer out of the dead man's abdomen and scrawled down his readings, "He's only been dead nine hours, that's practically fresh, you know?"

Sara took her sunglasses off and put them into the soft protective case before sliding them into her back pocket, "You're rambling, Super Dave."

The Coroner blushed, "Oh sorry, it's just-"

She smiled and patted him on the back as she joined him. So where is everybody?"

Dave made another note in his concise, cramped handwriting. "They're both out with the witness, the roommate who found the body. Catherine told me to tell you to start processing the vic when you got in."

Sara nodded, "Do we have a name?"

Dave stood up and backed away so she could process the body. He looked down at his notes once more, "Preston Abernathy from Savannah, Georgia. He's in town for an insurance convention of some kind."

Sara looked around, the beam of her flashlight made a slow circle around the room, highlighting several things. "Wow. I will not be looking at my insurance guy the same way again." She got her camera, the Nikon she used for official crime scene photos and did her usual pre-shot check to ensure the camera was in good working order. With David out of the way, she began to capture the gory mess that had been Preston Abernathy's body. Her first shot was from the right side and captured the profile view of his body. From there she got shots from the other side, from an angle, and then she started doing sections: the bloody mess between his legs, the smashed remains of his face and skull, the blood spattered wall. Though blood spatter was not her specialty, she could still read the murderous tale scrawled there. The first hit had most likely not been bloody, but the next had caused the medium velocity spatter and the left to right streak of cast off. The hits had been violent, viscous and Sara looked down at the body that David needed to remove. Preston Abernathy hadn't deserved this.

She stepped back away, "Take him away, Dave, special processing on him, okay."

She didn't watch David and his assistant put the Abernathy in the heavy black body bag, zip it up and haul it away. She was much too busy staring at the carpet. More specifically, she was staring at the white flecks on the dark blue carpet.

She was on one knee bent over almost double with tweezers in her hand when Catherine and Sofia came back into the room. "id David take the body already?"

Sara mumbled off a yes, then pursed her lips as she very carefully picked up the white wax. The grooves in the shed, not spilled wax, were the disjointed and torn apart whirls and swirls of a fingerprint. The fingerprint of their killer. If they could reconstruct the print, lift it and match it to the print they'd found at the Marsh crime scene, they would have concrete, irrefutable evidence to tie the two murders together. When she'd collected the last piece of the fragile wax, she looked up.

"She's accelerating." It was the first time she had officially voiced her opinion that they were dealing with both a she and a serial. She stood and looked to the other two investigators. "Multiple blunt force traumas, and again, heavy damage to the penis."

Catherine nodded, cool as a cucumber, "n my initial walk through I found blood in the bathtub. Who wants to bet she wiped her prints again?"

It took conscious thought for all parties to refer to the killer with female pronouns. Only three percent of multiple murderers were women. Sara wished she could say that she had never seen such brutality spring from another woman, but that, of course, would have been a blatant and boldfaced lie. Women were often more bloodthirsty then men, and this case laid that out in spades. " found a possible print. We'll have to see what Mandi can do with it."

Sara looked over at Sofia, "Witness tell you anything?"

She watched the blonde detective blow out a sigh and run her fingers through her hair, pushing the lose locks back, "Yeah, I sent him to the station, he's going to sit with a sketch artist. Apparently, they met the girls at Jackpot, but he's known our vic for several years. They work together. Vic was the family man, witness was the bad boy. They both went home, so to speak, with someone, but the one with a wife and son ends up dead. Mr. Luken is shaken up, to say the least."

Sara turned around, newly bundled evidence in hand, "Two girls?"

Sofia chuckled, "Ah yes, our witness, Bryce, met a woman too, he thinks her name might have been Amy, or quite possibly Alli, it was definitely an A name, end quote."

Catherine scoffed, "Sounds like a real nice guy." She was staring at the blood spatter on the wall. "Medium velocity spatter with cast off. Rough estimate gives it at least four hits, possibly five, but no more than six from what the pattern tells me. You'll need to bag the sheets and comforter."

While the first part of her monologue had been pointed at no one in particular, the last sentence was a none too gracious command to Sara. Sara had already known this of course, she had worked a few crime scenes in her decade or so of experience.

Sofia stood for a moment more, taking in the dark ambience of the blood-strewn room motel room, then turned to leave. One foot out the door, she paused. "There's something missing."

Sara looked around, "I don't see it."

Catherine too looked, "Everything's here, down to the minibar."

Sofia shook her head again and walked between the edge of the bed that was their main scene and the standard hotel room air conditioning unit. She looked down over the side table. "Two candlesticks, really ugly candlesticks, three tables. An unlit candle on the one side, burnt down one in the middle, and a drop or two of wax on this table." She bent down, took a latex glove out of her pocket and used it to pick up an only partially melted white candle, "And a candle."

Catherine took a step closer to the wall, "And a spray of white wax under the blood."

Following the other two women's lead, Sara moved by Catherine and picked up one of the heavy wood and faux-marble candleholders. "This will make a good tool-mark comparison, but it isn't the murder weapon. Our killer took that with her."