(Prologue)
Painted an ordinary eggshell-white and bordered with wilted, unkempt garden beds and an uneven sand lawn, the house was tucked in a low-income area on the east edge of Las Vegas. Little about it stood out amongst its neighbors, and the dimly backlit windows revealed little to the unfortunate events that took place within. The only remarkable features of the single-level ranch were the emergency vehicles lining its driveway as well as the narrow street in front of it. The majority of responders had deactivated their lights since arriving, but one cruiser remained lit up, pulsing red and blue reflections against the adjacent houses and mesquite trees.
It was just after three in the morning, and from the moment crime scene investigators Sara Sidle and Greg Sanders navigated into the neighborhood they acted on both instinct and skill. Every detail, however minor, was noted and filed away in their sharp minds. They watched as curtains of neighboring houses shifted periodically, their residents suspicious but curious. Emergency personnel were enjoying their small break, standing around and conversing before they were dispatched somewhere else—this time, hopefully to the aid of somebody they could actually save.
Captain Brass of the LVPD waited at the yellow crime scene tape. He greeted them, lifted the tape as they ducked under, and led the way into the house.
The odor caused all three to wrinkle their noses.
Any person that has dealt with death in person is well aware that the scent of decomposition comes in many forms. Not all are as obvious as the word brings to mind, such as rotting corpses seeping their byproducts into surfaces beneath them. Within hours, in fact sometimes even mere minutes, the smell of death introduces itself subtly. Cells begin the dying process and break down, releasing a scent that is both sweet and bitter and reeks of mortality.
"Deceased's name is Dominic Schultz, thirty-two years old. He rents the place. Just moved in a few months ago, and he's already two months behind on payments. The landlord—Mrs. Laughner over there," Brass gestured to a woman talking enthusiastically to a uniformed officer as they passed, "came by to collect, saw the tenant's car in the driveway, and knocked on the door. When Schultz didn't answer, she ventured into the backyard to look for him. After peaking in the back window, she called us."
"Does she normally come looking for rent money after midnight?" Greg asked.
"Said she could never get ahold of him during the day."
Sara and Greg exchanged a skeptical look. They planned to question the woman but wanted to process the area of the body before the coroner removed it.
The small house was tidy despite its disrepair. It was free of dust and clutter and scantly decorated. The structure was deeper than it was wide. The entryway and kitchen shared an open area, and a long, claustrophobic hallway lined with doorways to closets, bedrooms, and a bathroom separated the front and the family room at the rear of the house. The furniture was modest, mismatched probable secondhand store finds.
"Friends, family?" Sara questioned. There were no pictures in frames on walls or the refrigerator; nothing to indicate that Mr. Schultz maintained any close relationships. At least, not ones he wanted to be reminded of.
"According to the few neighbors that would talk to us, Schultz was the only person they ever saw coming and going. I have guys calling numbers from his cellphone to try to track down any family."
They reached the living room, where the scent was strongest. It had vaulted ceilings with giant mahogany-stained beams stretching its expanse and was easily the most attractive room of the place.
Ignoring, of course, the body suspended in its center.
Schultz was average-height and build with short brown hair and youthful features. He had died in his boxers alone so it was easy to see that there was no sign of blood-pooling in the legs that should have occurred if he had been there an extended time. Sara and Brass continued into the room.
"He hasn't been dead long," she observed. "Why wasn't he cut down?"
Brass sighed. "Responding officer—a rookie—checked a pulse, said it was obvious he was dead. He didn't want to contaminate the scene."
"Well, if Schultz wasn't dead then, he definitely is now," she remarked, peering closely at the body.
"I'll have a talk with him."
"Where's David?"
"Running late. Eight-car pile-up on the other side of town, five dead."
"Hmm." Sara craned her head to look upward.
The decedent hung from a beam, a rope fashioned into a shoddy hangman's noose about his neck. A toppled ladder lay a yard from his dangling feet. Sara frowned as her eyes traveled the taut rope and the discolored, lifeless flesh beneath it.
Her heart thumped a bit harder as the disturbing scene summoned memories she would rather forget.
Greg.
Sara spun around too quickly, catching Brass's attention and causing his eyebrows to lift. She saw that her partner hadn't made it further than the doorway. To a stranger he may have appeared to be absorbing the scene, but Sara knew better. His skin had paled and he seemed about to drop his kit.
"Hey," she said, and Greg's eyes flew to her, wide and startled. "Why don't you check out the rest of the house? I'll focus on this room."
Greg paused briefly before taking a deep, shaky breath. He nodded and backtracked into the hallway. After a moment, Brass turned back to Sara.
"There's nothing in the other rooms. This is it," he gestured around. "It's a suicide, Sara. I expected this would be an open and shut case."
"We have to investigate all possibilities. You know that," she said, wishing he would leave it alone.
Still not connecting the dots, Brass suppressed an eyeroll. "All right well, I'm going to wait outside for David. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not be in here all night."
Sara quickly processed the room while she waited on the coroner. She wanted badly to find and talk to Greg, but knew that the better decision was to finish the scene as fast as possible so they could leave this house.
She and Greg had been friends for over a decade and had become more almost a year ago, after a devastating incident bonded them like never before. Both still suffered emotional and physical repercussions, which were only amplified when the details of a scene hit too close to home.
She was nearly finished documenting the living room when her cellphone rang. It was D.B. Russell, the manager of the night shift at the crime lab.
"Are you two just about finished over there? Once you drop evidence off back at the lab, come to my office. I've got new scenes for both of you."
"Wow, busy night, huh?" Sara asked absentmindedly as she labeled evidence bags. "We're almost done here. Maybe another twenty minutes?"
"What's taking so long? Seemed straight forward."
"I think it is, but I had to—" She stopped and spun when she heard a floorboard creak outside the room. Greg and David Phillips, the coroner, stood in the doorway. When she turned, David waved at her and she smiled in return. "Like I said, D.B., we'll be heading back in twenty minutes."
She disconnected and tucked the phone into her pocket, shaking her head.
"What's got his panties in a bunch?" David asked, stepping into the room and looking grimly up at the body.
Sara shrugged. "More cases are coming in. Needs me and Greg on new assignments once we're done."
"Busy night," David acknowledged, repeating Sara's assertion from moments ago. "Sorry I'm late. That pile-up was a wreck."
The investigators both scowled at him and he held up his hands.
"Guess it's straight to business, huh?" He looked back up at the body. "So, why isn't he cut down?"
"That's what I said," Sara agreed. "Brass told me that the responding officer said it was clear the guy was dead and didn't want to contaminate the scene."
David shook his head. "Would you mind giving me a hand?" he asked, looking to Greg.
"Oh I don't think—" Sara started, looking desperately to him. "Greg, you did that thing to your back didn't you?" She was grasping at straws and cast a line to give him an 'out'.
But Greg didn't bite. He looked confused, tilting his head but flushing slightly. "Uh, what? No. I'm fine, I can help you, Dave."
Also confused, David shrugged before pulling a pocket knife from his bag. "You two get all the pictures you need?"
"Absolutely," Sara confirmed. She still watched Greg warily, but he had already pulled on a fresh pair of long gloves and was in position to catch the body.
"Alright, here we go." The assistant coroner reached high, needing to stand on his toes to access the rope just above the dead man's head. The sharp blade cut through the rope with one swipe, and Greg grunted as he took on the weight of the body.
The two carefully lowered the man to his back on a tarp on the floor. Greg stepped back as David took a liver temperature and felt the man's jaw. "Body's at 94.8, and rigor's just setting it. Time of death was probably two and a half to three hours ago."
Sara glanced at her watch, then to a notepad she had jotted notes on. "So, around midnight. Landlord called 9-1-1 at eleven-fifty, and the responding officer arrived in three minutes."
"That's quick for this neighborhood." Reaching under the corpse's neck, David felt the spine there. "Looks like the ladder created a decent drop, but his neck doesn't feel broken. He might have been revivable when the landlord found him," he noted sadly.
Greg's wince was almost imperceptible.
They helped David bag the body and load it into his vehicle. After he left, Sara and Greg returned to the back bedroom.
"The rest of the house, and the perimeter is done. What can I help you with?" he asked. His eyes followed the gently swaying, severed rope hanging from the rafter.
She scanned the room one final time, assuring herself that she found everything there was to find. The evidence pile was small because as Brass and D.B. had said, this was likely a straight-forward case. There was no sign of foul play, only the scant belongings of a lonely and depressed man who spotted a way out of his chronic discontent and decided to take it.
"Nothing. That's everything." She gathered the bags and her kit and headed past Greg. "Let's go."
The first half of the drive back to the lab lacked conversation. Greg drove, and had raised the volume of the radio as soon as they buckled in. Sara let him have some time to think, if that was what he needed. However, knowing they didn't have much time before they were both caught up in other cases, she finally reached over and turned the music down.
Greg frowned but said nothing.
"Would you like to talk about it?"
After another pause, he spoke quietly. "I'm sorry I didn't help you more with the scene."
"That's not what I'm referring to, and you know it."
He focused intently on driving for some time, knuckles white as he gripped the steering wheel. Finally he looked fleetingly at her, defensive. "Talk about what, then?"
"Well, how did you feel about that scene?" she prompted carefully. No matter how it was worded she always felt like a therapist trying to get him to talk.
Greg sighed tiredly. "I'm gonna go out on a limb here and call it a suicide."
She only stared at him and he growled in frustration. "Fine, it sucked. It grabbed me and shoved me back in time to that…place, and I lost it. But I'm in the field, and that's where I want to be. I can't expect to be sheltered out here. I'll deal better next time. Yeah, the scene sucked, but I'll get over it."
He took a few deep breaths as they pulled into the parking garage of the crime lab. After backing the SUV into its reserved spot, Greg added almost as an afterthought: "But, that guy's family? They won't."
Greg rarely spoke with such emotion, and the small outburst was also quite out-of-character. After unbuckling, Sara turned and leaned across the gap between them. She hooked her arms around his shoulders and kissed his cheek. "When we find them, we'll at least give them answers and some peace of mind. It's all we can do."
"Yeah." He turned to face her and their noses almost brushed together. "Somehow it's a lot more satisfying when there's a bad guy to blame."
She smiled sadly, agreeing with him. "Do you want to sit here a while longer? Say we got caught up in traffic or something?"
He shook his head. "No. Let's drop this stuff off and see what Russell has for us next."
A/N: HI! I know it's been a humongous amount of time between this fic and its 101k word predecessor, Just Getting Started (in NO way related to the 2017 Morgan Freeman film—I promise). I wanted to get a good amount written before starting to post. You could probably get away with reading this without reading the first? I currently have 49k words written for this, but it is very much still a WIP. So, expect delays between chapters, and periodic whumpy one-shots when my muse runs off. Also, expect this fic to be teeming with Greg angst and whump, just like my others.