The smell of decomposition was almost overwhelming, and Lindsay turned away from the body, burying her nose in her sleeve. Bodies had enough smells, and this particular one was exacerbated by heat and enclosure. She couldn't stop her mind from imagining this woman's final moments, being attacked in her own home, stabbed, shoved into a closet. She shuddered at the thought, her eyes surveying the room, taking in the pictures on the mantle, the well worn couches, the trinkets on the coffee table. This woman had a lot of special things in her life, special people, and she had still died alone.

"No sign of forced entry," Flack noted, checking his small notebook. "No witnesses on first canvas, but Detective Angell just went for another go round."

"Anyone find a murder weapon?" Danny asked, crouching over the body and pushing his glasses up.

"Not so far, but I'll give you three guesses what it is."

"Gee Flack, I got no clue. Linds, you wanna start taking the over alls and I'll do the close ups?"

She nodded at his suggestion appreciating that he remembered her issues with too much blood. She worked clockwise around the room, paying careful attention to disturbed dust and points of entry. Nothing was disturbed and it seemed that the murder had happened right in the middle of the room. She was meticulous about photographing the faux Persian rug from every angle, every height, paying particular attention to the pilling that indicated snags. She tried not to hypothesize too soon, but it seemed pretty obvious that the victim had been dragged from the middle of the room and into the closet. Of course if a murderer was just going to run, what difference did it make where the body was left?

She and Danny worked in silence for a long time, the only sound being the cameras clicking and their kits opening and closing. They took fingerprints and swabs and measurements for what seemed like hours, and had to make two trips to and from the car to get all the evidence together.

Her stomach was growling by the time they headed back to the lab and Danny glanced over at her, raising his eyebrow.

"You hungry Montana, or was that just the beast inside you?"

"I want a milkshake."

"Oh, am I buyin'?"

"You're the boy."

"And this is 1954?"

"Don't be such a square," she said in her best Rizzo voice. He chuckled and shook his head.

"How 'bout this. We get back to the lab and you help me carry all this junk in, including that massive rug, and I will buy you a milkshake."

"Dealio. By the way, when's Austin going on maternity leave?"

"Tomorrow under vehement protest."

"I can imagine."

"She keeps askin' me what she's gonna do, and I'm like "you're gonna have a baby," and she's like "yeah, but after that I'm gonna get bored." I don't know what to tell her."

"She's going to sleep a lot, have no energy and constantly feel like there's a million things to do that she doesn't have time for."

"I'm glad you procreated first."

"Gee thanks?"

"Naw, I just mean it's good to have someone around who knows what they're talkin' about."

"I lie a lot."

"Don't tell me that!"

"You guys are going to be just fine. And if you're not, the kid won't know that."

"I think they call that throwin' 'em in the deep end."

"Don't complain, I had nothing to go on."

"At least you got nieces and nephews and all that. The only diapering Austin has ever done is on your kid."

"Well then her experience is fresh."

"You tell her that when she wakes up at three in the morning suddenly frantic about whether she should use baby powder or diaper rash cream."

"Oh that's just because it's three a.m. She'll be fine and she knows it."

"If you say so."

"I do say so."

"Cause of death is blood loss due to multiple stab wounds," Sid reported, walking around the slab and turning on the monitor. "Three to the neck, none of which managed to get the jugular. Three to the chest and one just below the sternum. I've got the measurements in the report there. I'm no mathematician, but it seems to me that the injuries were inflicted as she was falling to the floor."

"Did you determine what kind of knife was used?" Lindsay asked, scanning over Sid's report.

"Something with serration, possibly. I'll know more once I go in depth. There is one odd wound on her throat, in the middle of a stab wound. "

"Any defense wounds?"

"A fresh fracture on her wrist. I'm assuming she used it to break her fall."

Lindsay sighed and sucked her teeth while Danny took the report from her and looked it over.

"Any trace?"

"There was dirt on the top of her right foot. A small bruise had just started to form underneath and it looks like a shoe print. Maybe the perp stepped on her foot."

"Thanks Sid. Anything else?"

"Not so far. I'll have the final report in a few hours."

They took the few bits of trace from him and headed back up to the lab, where Hawkes was processing what they had brought in before.

"Hey guys, did anything come back on our vic's tox screen?"

"Nothing so far. Why?"

"There were trace amounts of meth on her clothes."

"Really?" Danny asked, looking at the place Hawkes indicated. "Haven't had a case involving meth in… almost a year now."

"Easy and cheap to make, but not much demand for it here. Drug seekers are usually more into cocaine and heroin."

"Meth is more of a west coast thing."

"You know you're in meth country when you can smell it on the wind and know exactly how far away the lab is," Lindsay said with a shake of her head.

"I take it Montana has a meth problem."

"Not really. It's Idaho and Eastern Washington that are bad. Their most notorious meth suppliers will set up their labs in Montana because it's easier to hide there. They cook it and take it back from whence they came. Once or twice they've taken their meth and left their kids. That's always good."

"Wow."

"You haven't lived until you've cuffed a seventeen year old while his cabin lab explodes ten yards away."

"And we just thought you settled disputes over bulls and the price of wheat."

"We're classier than that. It's Idaho where cow tipping and domestic violence go hand in hand. Brings new meaning to the word heifer."

"Back to New York where things actually make sense," Danny said, rolling his eyes. "You think there was a drug motivation behind this? Whacked out, looking for money?"

"That's what I'm thinking. I'm not sure who else would have enough against a little old lady that they would kill her so brutally."

Lindsay and Danny nodded at Hawkes' assessment, then silently went for the rug, unrolling it on one of the tables. They were looking for patterns in the blood drops, and they swabbed everything that showed up under the ultraviolet light, just in case the killer left something of himself behind.

"I've got something," Lindsay said after a while, holding up a small pebble like substance with a pair of tweezers. It was covered in blood and she stared at it, wondering if it had something to do with the crime or if it was a piece of barkdust that had been tracked in weeks or months before. She took a swab of the blood, washed the object carefully, finding that it was dark grey, nearly black, and had a small sliver of wood attached to it. She put it into the GCMS and went back to the rug while the machine did its job.

"You know, this thing is pretty clean," Danny noted, standing back and looking at the rug. "Very little hair and dirt, like it was vacuumed often. I would think that I would be finding more trace from the bottom of a shoe or something, but I'm not finding anything."

"I got a piece of manila envelope," Hawkes reported, holding up his find. "It was right on the top, no fibers holding it down. I think we can assume it's fresh."

"Same with the substance I found."

"Which is?"

"Still processing. Chillax."

""Scuse me?"

She rolled her eyes and went back to the rug while Danny continued to give her a strange look.

"I don't know how Adam understands a word you say."

"Where do you think I learned all those words?"

"If you start sayin' whuddup…"

"What is it with men and catchphrases?"

"We don't all have catchphrases," Hawkes said with a chuckle.

"Whuddup, boom, and Flack's new 'that's it,' complete with tie straightening. I feel like we should make crime lab bumper stickers."

"I dig your Flack impression Linds."

"Thank you, Hawkes. I've been working on it."

"Pencil lead, a manila envelope, and dustings of meth."

"Do I look like Kreskin, Danny?"

"C'mon Lindsay. Mental leap here. Even I made it already."

"Well you're going to have to help me out."

"Remember how we said the guy was probably looking for money to support his habit?"

"Yeah."

"Who has money? Retirees. But they don't usually hand it out unless it's for a good reason. And you know what a good reason is?"

"It had better be coming up."

"A pledge drive."

"A pledge drive?"

"Yeah. You know when you're a kid and your school does a fun run or something, and you get people to give you a nickel for every lap around the track."

"A nickel? I didn't think you were that much older than me."

"But you know what I'm talking about."

"Yeah. The things I usually begged out of by faking an injury so I could sit on the benches and count people's laps instead."

"Why does this revelation not surprise me?"

"Because you know me that well. You're thinking whoever did this went to collect money for a fake pledge drive and she refused."

"Sid did say that the funky stab wound in the throat was the right size for a pencil. And that trace you found came up as graphite."

"It's plausible. But where's the pencil? And the knife, we never found that."

"You thinking we need to go back to the house?"

"Maybe," she said, checking her watch. "It's getting kind of late. You wanna send a team or go ourselves?"

"We'd better just go. We know what we're looking for. I'll have you home at a decent hour."

"A decent hour was an hour ago," she said, sliding into her coat. You'd better drive fast, I'm exhausted."

"You sure you wanna go then?"

"Yeah, let's get outta here."

It may have been spring but it was cold once the sun fell, not to mention wet, and once they finished inside without finding anything, they moved out into the yard with flashlights.

"We shoulda thought this through Lindsay," Danny said, stepping over a pile of something a dog had left.

"What, you think we're going to miss something just because it's dark out?"

"Perish the thought. Wait, I think I got somethin' over here. Come hold this rosebush back."

"Way to be the man, Messer," she grumbled, leaning against the house and holding the rosebush back with her foot.

"Ya put your right foot in," he chuckled, earning a glare from her while he carefully extracted a bloody kitchen knife from under the bush. "So you think it was Colonel Mustard or Miss Scarlet?"

"I can't believe you're making Clue jokes at three in the morning."

"Ug, it's that late already? Austin's gonna kill me."

"She'll be too tired to kill you. She might smack you a few times though."

"You want to keep looking? If the perp ditched the knife, he mighta ditched the pencil."

"Okay," she yawned, watching him bag the knife.

"You gonna make it?"

"Yeah, I'm fine."

They spent another half hour in the yard before finally deciding that they needed more light to work. They got into the car and he turned the heater on while she yawned a few more times.

"Geez Montana, you used to be able to go for two days straight with no sleep."

"I haven't had a full night of sleep since Colton was born. And the rest of the time it's pretty exhausting anyway. Good exhausting though. Don't want to scare you."

"Speakin' of scared, thanks for bein' there for Austin lately. She's not exactly the most open person on the planet, so just getting a little bit outta her takes some work. She tells me stuff, but I don't get it usually. And her mom…Austin just doesn't say much."

"No, she doesn't."

"Thanks for listenin' when she does."

"She's my best friend. She'd do the same for me."

It was close to dawn by the time she got home. The apartment was quiet save for the hum of the fridge and the slow drip of the sink that Adam still hadn't fixed. She peeked in on Colton who was sleeping soundly with his arms thrown over his head. She replaced his blankets and kissed him, then tiptoed into her own bedroom where Adam was sleeping much the same way. She changed her clothes and slid into bed, smiling when his arms came around her.

"You're home late."

"I'm sorry."

"S'okay. I figured you would be when you called earlier. You guys make any headway?"

"We found the murder weapon and called it a night."

"What time are you going in?"

"I just came home for a nap," she said by way of explanation, sighing as he rubbed her shoulder. "I'll get up around seven. Or maybe eight."

"Go to sleep babe."

"Adam?"

"Yeah?"

"I don't want to be alone when I die."

"Linds."

"I know."

He pressed a kiss to the back of her neck and held her tightly until they both fell asleep.

A/N: Case continued in the next chapter. I am too tired at the moment.