CSI Mortal Wounds

by Max Allan Collins

  She threw her hands up. “Okay, you take the bathroom. I’ll take the bed.”

  Glad he didn’t have to enter the DNA cesspool that he knew existed on those sheets, Warrick entered the bathroom. On the right, the sink was clean. Next to it, on the counter, the signs of an exceptionally neat man. A washcloth had been laid out, a razor, toothbrush, toothpaste, and a comb lay on top of it, each one approximately an inch apart. Behind them stood deodorant, shaving cream, mouthwash, and after-shave, each with the label facing front, each item about one inch from its neighbor, soldiers at attention. Warrick took quick photos of the bathroom, then passed the camera to Sara, who did the other room.

  Lifting the wastebasket onto the counter, Warrick peered inside, thinking how his job seemed at times two parts scientist, three parts janitor. All he found was the tamper-proof shrink wrap from the mouthwash bottle and some wadded-up tissues…but one of the tissues had a lipstick smear.

  “He had a woman here,” Sara called from the other room.

  Warrick looked quizzically at the tissue, then into the mirror, finally out into the other room to make sure Sara wasn’t just messing with him, but she was nowhere in sight. He said, “I’ve got a tissue with some lipstick in here, says the same thing.”

  “Lipstick on one of the glasses and a cigarette butt with a lipstick stain in the ashtray. I’m betting our victim didn’t smoke Capris.”

  Exiting the bathroom, Warrick studied the skinny cigarette in the bag in Sara’s hand. “Not exactly a macho cigarette, is it?”

  “Unless John Smith wore lipstick, it’s not his brand.”

  Warrick almost smiled, and Sara put the evidence bag inside her kit, then moved to another, smaller, black briefcase. Opening it, she pulled out what looked like a telephoto lens with a pistol grip on it.

  “I see our friend RUVIS made the trip,” Warrick said.

  “Yep,” Sara said, flipping the switch on the gadget—Reflective Ultra-Violet Imaging System. “If John Smith and his lady friend had sexual congress in this bed, RUVIS will show us.”

  “You make it sound so political.”

  The machine had been on for less than ten seconds when Sara let out a long sigh.

  Warrick asked, “What’s wrong? Didn’t you find anything?”

  Sara rolled her eyes. “What didn’t I find? These sheets are covered with stains.”

  She handed the RUVIS to Warrick. He turned toward the bed and looked through the lens. With only the UV illumination, the bed looked like a giant camouflage blanket as the stains shown up like large white flowers in half a dozen different spots. “Busy guy if those are all his.”

  “You think they are?”

  “Nope. Remember when Mike Tyson got busted?”

  “Sure,” Sara said. “Indianapolis.”

  “Right. The criminalist who investigated spoke at a seminar I went to. He said the suite went for eight bills a night. And the hotel was less than a year old.”

  “Yeah?”

  Warrick turned off the RUVIS and set it back in its case. “How many semen stains do you suppose he found?”

  Sara shrugged.

  “One hundred fifty-three.”

  Her eyes widened. “A hundred and fifty-three?”

  “Yep…and none of them were Tyson’s.”

  Making a face, Sara said, “I may never stay in a hotel again.”

  “I heard that,” Warrick said, and went back to work in the bathroom. He pulled some hairs from the shower drain, but found nothing else. Within minutes, he rejoined Sara in the other room. While she continued to take samples from the bed, he bagged the Palm Pilot, the papers, the champagne bottle, and glasses.

  “You know,” Warrick said, in the bathroom doorway, “Grissom never once mentioned anything to me, about, you know…me working an investigation in a casino.”

  Still hard at it, Sara said, “Well, that’s Grissom.”

  “Yeah. I just wasn’t sure he would ever trust me again.”

  Studying him now, Sara asked, “Warrick?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is it tough for you?”

  “What?”

  “Being around it. A casino, I mean.”

  He looked at her for a very long time. “No harder than a recovering alcoholic working a crime scene in a liquor store.”

  Her gaze met his. “That hard?”

  A slow nod. “That hard.”

  Awkwardly, she said, “Look, uh…if I can help…”

  “If anybody could help,” he said, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  They continued working the scene, silently.

  4

  T he Las Vegas Criminalistics Department—housed in a modern, rambling one-story building tucked between lush pine trees—was a rabbit warren of offices, conference rooms, and especially labs, with a lounge and locker room thrown in for the hell of it. This washed-out world of vertical blinds, fingerprint analysis, glass-and-wood walls and evidence lockers was strangely soothing to Catherine Willows—her home away from home.

  Catherine had managed to pick up her daughter Lindsey from school, have a quality-time dinner, and even catch a couple hours of sleep before coming into work a little after nine in the evening.

  Now, a few minutes after ten, her eyes already burned from the strain of studying the computer monitor. Buried in the minutiae of an unsolved missing persons case—this one a fifty-two-year-old white man named Frank Mayfield who had disappeared thirteen years ago—she sensed someone standing in the doorway to her left.

  She turned to see Grissom there, briefcase in one hand, the other holding a stack of file folders and a precariously balanced cup of coffee. In a black short-sleeve sportshirt and gray slacks, he managed to look casual and professional at once. He held the door open with a foot.

  “You’re in early,” he said.

  “Trying to figure out who our mummy is.”

  His eyes tightened. “And you are…?”

  “Going through missing persons cases, back ten to twenty years ago. The preliminary report says Imhotep died about fifteen years ago.”

  He was at her side now, the coffee cup set down on the desk. “How many cases?”

  “No more than grains of sand in the desert,” Catherine said, stretching to release the tension in her spine. “You know, there’s been over thirty-two-hundred missing persons calls in the last two years alone.”

  Grissom shook his head. “Any luck?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Is this kind of fishing expedition productive?”

  She smirked, shrugged. “I’ve got to do something. Can’t use DNA or dental until we at least have some idea who our guy is.”

  He sat on the edge of the desk. “Got anything at all?”

  “A ring with an ‘F’ in diamonds inlaid in it.”

  Grissom’s eyebrows rose; he liked that. “First name or last name?”

  Catherine shrugged again. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Any other engraving? To so-and-so, from so-and-so? With love?”

  “No. Just an effin’ ‘F.’ ”

  Grissom raised an eyebrow. “Do we know how the victim died?”

  “Shot in the head.”

  “…Funny.”

  “Ha-ha?”

  “The other kind—our hallway corpse was shot in the head.”

  Another smirk. “Well, nothing separating the corpses except maybe fifteen years.”

  Grissom pressed. “Have you fingerprinted him yet?”

  “I was waiting for Nick to come in. Our mummy’s in pretty bad shape. One foot already fell off when they were hauling him out from under the trailer.”

  “I hate when that happens.”

  “I figured it would be easier processing the prints with two of us.”

  Nodding, Grissom said, “Good call. But you’re here now, and Nick isn’t—how about I lend a hand?”

  “Or a foot?” Her sigh turned into a yawn. “I appreciate the offer—I can use a change of scene. It’s
like searching for a needle in a hundred haystacks.”

  Grissom nodded, hefting the stack of files. “Let me put this stuff in my office and we’ll get right on it.”

  Turning off the computer, she rose; he was already back to the door, but had left his coffee behind. Detail work on a crime scene was Grissom’s strength; but in daily life he had a hint of the absent-minded professor.

  Joining him at the doorway, she said, “Hey, thanks for the coffee, Grissom.”

  He frowned at her, as she seemed about to drink it. She handed him the cup. “I’m kidding. Come on.”

  In the hallway, between sips of coffee, Grissom said, “Sometimes I can be a little thoughtless.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. Not just any guy would walk a girl to the morgue.”

  And soon that was where they stood, blue scrubs over their street clothes, John Doe #17 outstretched on a silver metal table in front of them, his hands still bagged at his sides.

  “I can’t believe we already have seventeen John Does this year,” she said.

  Putting on a pair of glasses, Grissom moved forward; he didn’t seem to have heard her. Catherine stood back a little as he studied the corpse. She knew he loved this part of the job—he was much better with dead people than live ones. There was something almost innocent about Grissom, something pure in his love for investigation and the search for truth.

  But even more, Grissom loved to learn. Each new body presented the opportunity for him to gain more knowledge to help not only this person, but other people in the future. Wherever his people skills lagged, the criminalist made up for it in a passion for serving the victims of crime, and compassion for the grieving survivors.

  At first, he took in the whole body. Catherine got the impression that Grissom wasn’t so much seeing the body as absorbing it. Stay curious, he always said. He circled the metal table, observing the mummy from every angle.

  “Your killer did us a big favor hiding the body the way he did,” Grissom said.

  “You didn’t crawl under a rotting trailer to get at him.”

  His eyes flicked to her. “You know if we lived anywhere but the desert, there wouldn’t have been anything left but a few bones.”

  She nodded. “Your bugs got cheated out of their buffet.”

  He stepped in next to the body and pressed gingerly on the abdomen. “Feels like the organs might still be intact.”

  Grissom with a body reminded her of how Lindsey had been when Catherine had given her that glass tea set last Christmas, the little girl examining each item, careful not to damage or crack the tiny pieces as she inspected each one. The criminalist did the same thing with the mummy, poking here, prodding there, bringing the work light down to more closely examine a section of the chest.

  “Okay,” he said finally.

  “You through?”

  He looked at her sheepishly. “Sorry. This is your deal—where do you want to start?”

  Before they could move, Dr. Robbins, the coroner, walked through the swinging doors, a set of X rays in one hand. “Oh, sorry—didn’t know anybody was in here.”

  “Bad place to be startled, Doc,” Catherine said with a half-smile.

  Around sixty, bald with a neatly trimmed gray beard, the avuncular Robbins—like them, he was in scrubs—slid his arm out of the metal cuff of his crutch and leaned it against the wall.

  “What have you got, Doc?” Grissom said.

  “Cause of death.” Robbins stuck the first X ray under a clip on the viewer and turned on the light. The fluorescent bulbs came to life, illuminating a side view of the skull of John Doe #17 with several dark spots readily apparent. The second X ray the coroner put up showed the back of the skull with only two dark spots. He pointed to that picture first. “These two dark spots are your entry wounds.”

  “Are you sure?” Grissom asked, eyes tight.

  Robbins looked at Grissom the way a parent does a backward child. “Why wouldn’t I be sure?”

  “Have you got the right X rays?” Grissom was having a closer look—much closer. “Is this John Smith or John Doe #17?”

  “The mummy, of course, John Doe #17,” Robbins said, more confused than offended, now. “I don’t even know who John Smith is.”

  “Victim from the Beachcomber,” Grissom said. “Two entry wounds vertically placed almost precisely one inch apart. Just like this….”

  Catherine frowned, shook her head, arcs of reddish-blonde hair swinging. “The same pattern? You’re kidding.”

  Grissom twitched half a frown back at her. “When do I kid?”

  “Well,” Robbins said, “there’s no mistake, I haven’t even seen the other corpse yet. Hell of a coincidence.”

  “I don’t believe in coincidences,” Catherine said. “There’s always a way to explain them away.”

  Grissom shook his head slowly. “I don’t deny the existence of coincidence—particularly when our corpses are separated by so many years.”

  Mind whirling, Catherine said, “Do we have two cases, or one case?”

  Grissom’s eyes almost closed; his mouth pursed. Then he said, “We have two victims. We work them as two cases. If the evidence turns them into one case, so be it. Until then…we live with this coincidence.”

  “But we keep our eyes open.”

  Grissom’s eyes popped wide. “Always a good practice.”

  Pointing to the other X ray, Robbins indicated a dark spot on the right side of the forehead. “Here’s a good place to start looking—there’s one of your bullets. Embedded itself in the skull.”

  Grissom asked, “And the second one?”

  “EMTs found it on the gurney when they brought him in. Little devil just rolled out.”

  “Where’s the slug now?” Catherine asked.

  “With the other evidence,” Robbins said, picking up his crutch again. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I better go make the acquaintance of Mr. John Smith.”

  After the coroner left, Catherine and Grissom got down to work. They carefully unbagged the hands.

  Grissom said, “Killer took the fingertips. Thinks he stole the victim’s prints.”

  “I love it when we’re smarter than the bad guys.”

  He raised a lecturing finger. “Not smarter—better informed.”

  “You think we should rehydrate the fingers?”

  Studying the desiccated fingers, he finally said, “It might help raise the prints.”

  Catherine set out two large beakers, each a little more than half full of Formalin; behind her, Grissom was rustling in a drawer. When she turned back, Grissom stood next to the body with a huge pair of pruning shears.

  Taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly through her mouth, Catherine moved into position next to the mummy.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah.” No matter how many times they did this, she never learned to accept it easily. At least this would probably be better than the times he had made her wear the skin stripped from dead hands as gloves, to provide fingerprinting pressure.

  She held the leathery right hand still as Grissom stepped in and lopped it off. Catherine flinched a little, the sound echoing in her ears like the snapping of a pencil. She took the hand, slipped it into one of the beakers and they moved to the other side of the body and repeated the process with the left hand.

  Setting the shears aside, Grissom said, “I can’t get over the similarity of those wounds.”

  Slowly, Catherine turned the mummy’s head so Grissom could see the bullet holes.

  He stared at the wound. “You know what Elizabeth Kubler-Ross said?”

  “About what?”

  “Coincidence.”

  “Why don’t you tell me.”

  He gave her an unblinking gaze, as innocent as a newborn babe, as wise as the ages. “ ‘There are no mistakes, no coincidences—all events are blessings given to us to learn from.’ ”

  “I thought you didn’t deny the existence of coincidence.”

  “I don’
t accept it, either.”

  “Identical wounds, over a decade apart. And from this we learn…?”

  He shook his head. “Just keep digging. It’s two separate cases. We treat it as two separate cases.”

  Was he trying to convince her, she wondered, or himself?

  Catherine examined the wounds. “It is funny.”

  Nodding, Grissom said, “But not ha-ha. Sooner you find out who this guy is, the sooner we can lay the coincidence issue to rest.”

  “Nick and I will be all over this.”

  Grissom granted her a tiny smile. “Keep me in the loop, Catherine.”

  She nodded and watched him leave. Something in his manner didn’t seem right, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it; he seemed vaguely distracted, even for Grissom. She told herself to keep an eye on her boss.

  In the meantime, she’d hunt up Nick and if he didn’t have any ideas, she’d go back to digging in the computerized records. The hands would take about an hour to rehydrate.

  Nick sat in the break room, sipping coffee, a forensics journal open in front of him.

  “Hey,” he said to her.

  “Hey,” she said.

  She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat across the table from him. “Where have you been?”

  He turned to the clock on the wall. “You mean since the shift started three minutes ago?”

  Following his gaze, she looked at the clock. She grinned and shook her head. “Sorry. I came in early. Tired, I guess.”

  “I thought we were going to do the mummy’s prints.”

  “Been there, done that. Grissom helped.”

  Nick frowned. “I wanted to lend a hand.”

  “So to speak.” Catherine shrugged. “Grissom offered.”

  Nick was already over his disappointment. “Well, he’s the best. Learn anything?”

  “I’ve got the mummy’s hands in the Formalin now—we can look at them later.”

  He grinned at her. “Isn’t that an old movie?”

  “What?”

  “The Mummy’s Hands?”

  “His hands are only part of the show. We found one of the bullets in his skull. Popped up in the X ray.”

  “Just one?”

  She nodded. “The other fell out on the gurney. We’ll wait for Robbins to dig the one out of the skull, then take them both to the firearms examiner.”