3
"Okay…" Grissom looked at a map of the area around the Strip. "First our girl vanishes with a football player at the University…" He stuck a pin at the location of the University in the lower right area of the map. "She gets hit by a car near the cemetery here." He stuck a pin in the map directly northeast across the other side of Boulder Highway.
"And survives…" Sara mentioned out loud.
"Indestructible little minx, isn't she?" Hodges remarked sarcastically.
"Then she's noticed on the Strip by a security guard from the Showboat Casino who promptly loses her." Grissom stuck another pin at that location. "All within five hours."
"She's fast too."
"She's got to have someone helping her." Sara spoke. "She's been connected to all these disappearances and there's never been a body found. Someone else has to getting rid of them for her. "
"Okay…" Grissom started postulating. "Let's say the human sludge is part of a hereditary disease. Now, some of these diseases are fended off but not cured by taking healthy cells or organs from normal people. Maybe, just maybe, she's taking what she needs to survive."
"But the whole body?" Hodges remarked. "Even Count Dracula wasn't that greedy."
"I know where you're going." Sara thought it out. "Maybe she's carrying and getting rid of body parts, but still… we're still missing a whole body. She's can't be carrying off more than ninety to ninety-five percent."
"Hodges…" Grissom turned to his trace expert. "Run the sample again. See if there's anything in that genetic soup that belongs in the body that isn't represented." Grissom turned out the room for his office. Passing him on his right side, Nick was studying a map of the area around the Winchester Rest Stop. Divided by Spring Mountain Road, the region was several square miles of inhospitable rocky and difficult wilderness with few structures and unfriendly animals. His mind was around Maddie Franklin either curled up alone or being sheltered by a human like animal. Maybe his lab tech of choice could tell him something.
"Mandy…" Nick tried charming Mandy Simms, the DNA tech. "What you got for me?"
"You make me sound like a drug dealer." The pretty brunette chuckled a bit and stepped backward for the file. "The hair…" She started. "Is not human, but it is primate."
"Give it to me." Nick saw himself busting one of the mysteries of mankind. "You have nothing quite like it, have you?"
"Well…" She didn't want to bust his cryptozoological balloon. "Of the primates, it's very close to chimpanzee… but not quite. It also has characteristics with human hair."
"Sasquatch hair, I knew it."
"Nick," Simms paused and leaned over the counter. "Human beings and chimpanzees are at least seventy percent DNA compatible. Chimps are sometimes given human blood in surgery. If you want my opinion, it's a large chimp."
"Have you seen the footprint we got?" Nick looked around for it. "I've seen chimps. I've been around them. They don't have feet like that, plus… I measured the depth. It would have weighed over eight hundred pounds. The largest chimps top out at two hundred pounds."
"Nick…" Mandy resisted him. "Don't you think I want this to be something cool? I just think there has to be another explanation."
"Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once said…" Nick responded like Grissom. "That if you eliminate every possible answer that the last answer no matter how incredible has to be the correct one."
"He was talking about a criminal investigation." Mandy looked at him. "Not the mysteries of mankind."
Responding to another call, Sara grabbed up Greg and responded down to the Doubletree Hotel on the Strip. From the start, it sounded like a dead body had been found at the hotel. Carl and Dana Price were local residents who had checked in for a night away from their kids. Dana wanted to briefly hit the downstairs stores, but her husband wanted to relax. When she got back to her room, her husband seemed to be missing, and then she found the evidence that drove her to the brink of fear. The hotel manager called the police and they notified the crime lab. With their arrival, Dana Price was noticed crying in the hallway as an officer took her affidavit. Curious and morbidly fascinated hotel guests watched as Sara Sidle lead the way in her police vest and toting her forensics kit ahead of Greg Sanders. It was a year into his fieldwork and he was still getting used to the procedure. Sara stepped first into the Price's room and looked at the disturbed bed. With Greg taking pictures, Sara pulled the sheet back to reveal a large gelatinous stain of red goop in the center of the bed, a Rolex watch to one side of it. Sara stared at it in disbelief.
"One guess as to who's been here ahead of us." Greg spoke to Sarah looking back at him.
"Can we talk?" Brass appeared at Grissom's door back at the forensic offices of the police department. The bug man had the glass jar of his beetles open to feed them dried beef.
"Of course…" Grissom resealed his bug jar and placed them by his fetal pig. "New results in my case?"
"The British would call it a sticky-wicket." Jim stepped forward into the dimmed room. "I got Bobbitt's priors from California…" He placed each fax down by state. "Oregon, Montana, Texas, Missouri, Tennessee, Illinois, Ohio, New York and Maine, the Canadian Mounted Police wants us to send them our files."
"How many people has this girl killed?" Grissom started researching the case deeper.
"Oh, it gets better." Brass was still musing over the turn the case was taking. "When Bobbitt was in Chicago, her murders were covered by a tabloid reporter named Carl Kolchak. Have you heard of him? No, forget him… he's not important. The point is… that was in 1975."
"How old is this girl?" Grissom read police files of mysterious red stains at crime scenes going back forty years. "I though Bobbitt was supposed to look like Kelly Clarkson?"
"It gets even better!" Brass chuckled at how this case was evolving the more he delved into it. "Turns out, Bobbitt may be an alias. We've got girls matching her description under the names Lisa Parker, Lisa Wilder, Lisa Welch, Lisa Bathory, Lisa Borden, Lizzie McMahan, Sondra Greenberg… I guess that's for killing Jewish guys, and we got one Lisa Bobbitt from New York City who went to the women's wing at Rykers in New York State for being a slasher, and she was knifed to death just eight months ago, and she doesn't even look like our Bobbitt." He handed over the actual New York Bobbitt's rap sheet; she looked nothing like their supposed Idol clone.
"Maybe it's a ritualistic thing…" Grissom tried to fathom the logic from this barrage of back-stories.
"Okay," Brass thought about it. "I hadn't though of that, but where does this degenerative disease come in."
"Well," Grissom eyed a Xerox scan of the Kolchak newspaper article where he accused Bobbitt of being a succubus. "Maybe it's hereditary, maybe her family's part of this cult going back this far."
"Grissom…" Sara had returned to the department just behind Greg taking his evidence to the lab. "Do you like Britney Spears songs?"
"Which one?" He looked up.
"Oops, she did it again…."