He never made it to the morgue, and neither did the aforementioned ladies. On his way, he was informed of an equipment malfunction in the materials lab by a pimply-faced young guy with large glasses, and two rather large front teeth. For however long he stared the only word he could manage to drag up in his mind to describe him was "pipsqueak". And the maintenance wore no name tags...
"It's not a dangerous malfunction," Pip was saying. "Just a delaying one. Can you write me a ticket for it?"
Arms folded across his chest, and deceptive southern glare in place like nobody's business, Nick inclined his head back towards his former office, snickering to himself as he turned to go that way. But in the middle of the ticket preparation, the news came in.
"Nicky?"
It was Brass. Very much the businessman as always, and very weary looking...
"Hey, Jim, what's up?" Nick asked, fastening the ticket to its clipboard and turning it over to Pip. "Get my lab running as soon as you can, Pip."
"Oh, it's–"
"Uh huh. Thank you."
Brass nodded after the eager young maintainer, but his expression was grim when he looked back at Nick. "We've got a homicide. A middle-aged-looking guy found dead on the floor of his suburban house. Neighbor called it in. Couldn't stand the smell."
Nick sighed, and leaned against the chair on his palms. "Yeah. I was hoping there wouldn't be any of that..."
"Sure. Me, too. But that's why we're here, isn't it?"
As he disappeared around the corner, and Nick reached for his phone to message Sara, he couldn't help wishing that Brass had kept that particular opinion to himself...
"So, some suburban residents smell something weird... and they, what, go and peek in a neighbor's window?"
Up front, Nick and Sara exchanged sideways glances at Morgan's rookie-sounding question from the back.
"Don't you ever investigate anything out of the ordinary?" Nick answered with a smile.
"Yeah. All the time. It's... how I make my living."
"Then, it sounds pretty legitimate to me," said Sara, grin reflected in the window.
She didn't look as enthusiastically tolerant as she had when they'd left home that morning. HIS home, he meant... But she did look like she was getting by. Her hand was on her head, and her elbow propped up against the windowsill on the department car. She was humming along with whatever garbage was on the radio that he hadn't adjusted, and there was the slightest twinge of a smile still hanging at the corners of her lips from her answer to Morgan's dumb question.
But that faded quickly when they arrived at the scene. As it usually did when the realization came to them that they would, again, be investigating the circumstances that lead to somebody's death... The doors to their car slammed behind them, and Brass climbed out of the one ahead of them with an assigned officer for the day. Neither of them looked too excited, either...
The crowd split on their way up the stairs. The scene was taped off by the officer Brass was relieving, but Nick registered the smell long before the friendly wave of the departing cop. It was pretty strong, even from the sidewalk... and he wondered how it had taken so long for someone to call it in.
That became pretty apparent from the inside. It wasn't just the smell of a decomposing body. The sheer number of alcohol bottles definitely contributed. As did the rotting food and unashamedly-smeared blood on the furniture. Some of it looked like it could have been there for years. He winced against the unpleasantness of it, and Sara coughed into her arm. Morgan's eyes widened, and she blinked purposefully at the sight in disbelief.
"There is no way this guy wasn't single," was all she said.
"10-4. But I highly doubt that's what killed him," said Nick.
"Yeah, that was probably the sheer lack of personal hygiene," Sara sputtered. "Look, Nick, I know it's against department policy, but could we open a window? I want to live longer than this guy did, and we'd have to go all the way back to the department to get safety equipment–"
"–I'm with you," replied Nick. "Just don't tell anyone my eyes are watering. It'd make me sound bad if someone took it the wrong way."
She grinned momentarily. "I wouldn't think of it." And ran for the windows...
Accompanied by Morgan, they both had pretty much every window in the house open by the time they were done. He, in the meanwhile, gave the room a once over with his flashlight. While it was pretty clear there was a lot of evidence to collect, he wasn't exactly sure it was the kind of evidence they were looking for.
His feet carried him one step at a time, slowly forward until he was over by the couch. The victim's body was positioned on his back, staring straight up at the ceiling with all his limbs splayed. One hand was wrapped around what Nick didn't doubt was the last bottle of alcohol in the place. His first picture, and great place to swab for DNA, and dust for prints.
"Okay. So... now that the air is flowing again..."
It was Sara. She knelt down by him and the body, and leaned over his shoulder to look at what he was doing. "Find anything?"
"Just the basics. You girls sure covered a lot of ground in just a few seconds..."
"Well, when you have the motivation..." she teased.
"Mmm. Can't argue with that. Where's Morgan?" he asked.
"She's upstairs. She's looking at the bathroom. He seems to have done... a LOT of projectile vomiting up there."
"Nice," he joked. "Why don't you go ahead and start on the perimeter, then."
"Sure thing. Supervisor..."
As she rose to her feet, her face was all smile. And she glanced back over her shoulder before disappearing through the front door with her kit. He scratched the back of his neck and rose to his own feet, to see what else might be hiding in plain sight. Surely, in this mess, there was something... Somewhere...
Although the front yard was bare, the back yard through her for a loop. As she rounded the corner of the house, she was faced with the surprising sight of children's play equipment. She stopped where she was, and let her arms go limp, the kit banging the side of her leg lightly as she did. And above the slide on the end of the jungle gym? More blood...
She sighed, and decided to go and look into that first, as it was the most visible evidence. But while she sprayed it down and collected some of it via swab, she started to think that it was kind of old. Not old enough to be non-visible, obviously... But old enough for the time factor to be worth consideration. Any number of childhood accidents could have put it there.
As she leaned over the edge of the gym, she was briefly temped to use the slide to get down. But as she looked around to make sure nobody was watching her, something caught her eye in the sandbox, glinting in the sunlight. Deciding to take the slide anyway, she went to photograph and retrieve it from its grainy resting place, shielding it from the light with her hand to get a better look at it.
"What the hell...?" she muttered to herself.
It was a Rollex watch. And a pristine-looking one, at that. Neither blemished nor faded... She couldn't help raising her eyebrows a little bit at it while she dumped it into the evidence bag from her kit. Either a multi-thousand dollar watch had taken a wrong turn somewhere in the course of its inanimate life, or someone with a lot of money was really lacking in brains.
She stood up, and looked around at the forlorn, abandoned appearance of the yard. It made her feel almost as much so... The wind blew softly, but still loudly enough to make a slight rushing noise. The yard hadn't been properly kept. The only reason the grass didn't grow taller was because it was burned, and thin. Only around the edges of the fence was there any indication of vegetation... And, as she stepped up on the wooden picnic table, she could see that there were no other fences in the yard. Something had been very wrong, there...
The sound of a creak broke her reverie. Then, without further warning, the table snapped from under her. She gave a short shriek, and landed in the middle of a pile of wooden planks.
"Ah..." she groaned for a moment, and sat up with her hands clasped around her knee. "Bitch..."
From upstairs, the sound of a wooden clank faintly reached Nick and Morgan's ears. They exchanged a short glance, but Morgan didn't seem to think much of it. She went right back to work, anyway...
But Nick edged over from the banister he was dusting to the window to peek out of it. Sara was standing in the middle of some wooden planks scattered around her. She looked a little confused, and she gave her knee a little shake. Then she limped over to her kit, and went digging in it for some other tools like nothing had happened. He couldn't help laughing; so it had been for as long as he'd known her. Going on fourteen years, now...
"Hey, Nick?"
He turned from his thoughts, and gazed over at the tiny thing she held in her fingers.
After a moment, he gave up. "What is it?"
"It's a diamond. Or, well, probably not a real one. But it looks like a jewelry piece."
"Bag it," he commanded. "We'll take it back, see if we can find anything. Any guess on what it might have come from? 'Cause I wouldn't know. Being such an inexperienced individual with jewelry..."
"You mean, a man?" she teased.
"Oh, ha, ha," he mocked. "But, yeah, I suppose you could say that."
She grinned a little wider at the corner of the floor she was photographing. "I don't know, either. It looks like it came from something very small..."
"So, what, like a ring?"
"Yeah. Or..." she paused, thoughtfully. "Or an earring."
"An earring... I suppose anything's possible. But I doubt it's connected to our case. A diamond earring is probably not a man's."
"So, you don't think he could have had any female company here?"
Nick squinted out the window again. Sara must have found what she was looking for, because she was gone... "I don't think I could ask a hooker to take money from this guy if he was buying the hooker for me."
She laughed at that, and stuffed whatever she had found in the corner into a bag. "Looks like at least one hooker didn't have your standards. I've got semen."
"A hand doesn't count," he joked. "They just do what their owners do."
"Guess we'll find out at the lab, then," returned Morgan. "How's Sara doing?"
He snapped the lid back over his camera lens. "How should I know?"
"Well, you keep looking out the window at her..."
He raised his eyebrows automatically. And then realized how thankful he was that he'd been looking away from her when he did. "I just want to make sure everyone comes back to the lab in one piece."
"Still worried about her, huh?"
"Yeah..."
Morgan clicked the lid of her kit shut. "Well, you've been with her a long time..."
"We've all been together... Or, well, you know what I mean."
"I do."
She stopped, and bit her lip. Like she wasn't sure she wanted to say what was on her mind...
"What?"
"Well... Sometimes I've wondered... I know it can't always be easy. All the change you've seen here..."
"It's fine," was the answer he always defaulted to.
"Well... Yeah, but... is it? Really...?"
He shrugged, and stepped up to the very top of the stairs. "I've never had a problem with ya. That's what you really wanna know, isn't it?"
Her silence was answer enough. But he couldn't help a slight chuckle.
"Look... I know I've been kinda hard on Russell, and even your dad from time to time–"
She snorted.
And he glared. "–but we're all a team. And like you said, I've seen a lot of different configurations. It's really not always easy... Especially when you take a demotion in the mix..."
"Bet that sucked the most," she remarked, and then took a deep breath. "Well... Then if it's alright with you, I'm going to head back to the lab. See what I can find with what we've got..."
"Alright. Bring Sara with you. Go take a moment or two. I'm gonna stay here and drudge up the rest of this mess."
"Sure. Enjoy the blood swabbing."
He put his hands on his hips, and smiled viciously at her from behind his beard. "And you have fun processing all that vomit."
She gagged a little, but still managed a wave before disappearing down the stairs.
"David!" called Sara.
He looked over at her from the front steps he was descending. "Oh. Hey, Sara. How's the, uh... case?"
His voice sounded weird... and it took her a moment to realize that that was because he had an old, wooden clothes pin attached to his nose. She knew she'd feel bad for laughing later, but she couldn't help it.
"What did you do?"
"I couldn't take it," he replied defensively. "Just because your nose is readjusted to it..."
"It isn't," she said. "I've just been outside. And I've got some things I need to show Nick..."
"No need," came Morgan's voice. "He's sending us back to the lab."
"Back to the lab?" she repeated. "Why?"
"Process what we've got, see where we're at."
"No way. I'm not going back to the lab yet." She frowned, stubbornly. "This place is a mess, and he can't do all this himself."
Morgan and David looked at each other for a moment, with irritating disbelief all over them.
"Why not?" tried Morgan. "He's done it for years."
"He'll miss something. This is a large scene to cover alone."
"Exactly," said Morgan. "Which is why he'll probably still be here if we hurry up and go. When we get back, it'll be his turn."
She grabbed Sara's hand and started leading her off towards the car. "But–" Sara began to protest.
"Oh, don't worry about it," she interrupted dismissively. "I think he just doesn't want to go back and talk to IA. He'll take his time, believe me. He won't let the case suffer. You've known him longer than I have."
"Not the point..." Sara muttered, before allowing herself to be shoved into the front seat.
But in spite of how much sense Morgan's blunt statements had made, Sara did not look away from the house until they had driven around the block. By then, she was sure, Nick had gone to look over the body with David.