“And the classes are indoors, right?”
“Grissom’s will be,” she admitted. “There may be some outdoor crime scene stuff, but you don’t bring people in from Vegas to teach criminalistics in the snow.”
“Thank you. You make my point—I’m tellin’ you, Cath…that could’ve been us on that trip.”
She nodded. “If I hadn’t declined…and you weren’t such a baby.”
“Hey—that’s cold.”
“See? Bellyachin’ about the weather already.”
Finished with her examination of the corpse, Catherine rose and faced her partner. “Time to go to work, before I start thinking you don’t love your job.”
He shook his head. “You can love your job, and still need a little R&R.”
“Well,” she said, as they headed back to the Tahoe, “how about, for fun, you find us a usable tire track on the shoulder of the road, before all these people tromping around turn Lake Mead into a dust bowl.”
Catherine snapped off photos as fast as the flash would recharge, little pops of daylight in the night, two photos of each angle, for safety, covering the body five ways: from the right; the left; top of the head down; bottom of the feet up; and overhead.
Warrick poked around the side of the road, occasionally bending, now and then taking his own photos. Finally, satisfied he’d found all the pertinent, usable tire tracks, he spritzed them with hair spray to hold them together, then got his field kit and mixed up some goo—casting powder and dental stone—so he could cast some of the different tracks he’d marked.
Catherine didn’t think about it, but nobody spoke to them while they processed the scene—and this was not unusual. Crime scene investigators, working their scientific wonders, created in those around them a quiet reverence, as if all the kneeling she and Warrick were doing was praying, not detecting.
Or maybe it was the dead woman, in the midst of the CSI rituals, who inspired the silence.
Over on the blacktop, Brass interviewed the ranger who’d found the body, while the uniformed men stood around and did their best to look official. Truth was, once the CSIs had shown up, a uniformed cop at a crime scene usually had just about the most boring job in the law enforcement book.
Under the bright light of some portable halogens, Catherine went over the corpse as carefully as she could—nothing seemed wrong, other than a few nibble marks on the arms and legs where the coyotes had begun. No signs of struggle, no skin under her fingernails, no black eyes or bruises—nothing to say this woman wasn’t just sleeping, except for the absence of breath.
An indentation showed the curve of the victim’s panty line, but Catherine could find not so much as a thread for evidence. It was as if the sky had given birth to Jane Doe and let her fall gently to the sandy ground—stillborn. Finally, as night surrendered the desert back to the sun, Brass approached with cups of coffee for the two criminalists.
“Life’s blood,” Catherine said as Brass handed her the steaming Styrofoam cup.
Warrick saluted with his and took a sip. “Here’s to crime—without it, where would we be?”
Brass raised both eyebrows and suggested, “In bed, asleep?”
They watched as the ranger climbed into her Bronco—she paused to nod at them, professionally, and they returned the gesture—and then she slowly pulled away.
Using her coffee cup to indicate the departing vehicle, Catherine asked, “She seemed competent.”
“Yeah,” Brass said with a nod. “We got lucky, having her find our girl.”
“She see anything?”
“Nearly hit a coyote with her Bronco.” Brass shrugged one noncommittal shoulder. “About all she saw was coyotes, gathered around the corpse.”
“Singing Kum-bayah,” Warrick said dryly.
“Did those little doggies mess up your crime scene much?”
Catherine shook her head. “Hardly any marks on the body.”
Eyes tightening, Brass asked, “What’s that tell us?”
“Our vic probably did not just wander out here and die,” Warrick said.
Brass looked at him.
“She’s barefoot,” Warrick continued, “and there’s no bare footprints anywhere. You don’t have to be an Eagle Scout to figure, if she was wandering dazed and nude, coyotes woulda got to her before she made it this far into the middle of the park. Somebody dropped her off.”
Brass returned his gaze to Catherine. “That how you see it?”
“Makes sense to me,” she said. “Lady Godiva’s probably a dump, all right…but if the coyotes were around her and the ranger scared them off, she couldn’t have been on the ground for very long, or else there wouldn’t have been much left after the coyotes chowed down.”
Frowning, Warrick asked the detective, “Ranger didn’t see or hear a car?”
“Nope,” Brass said. “She did mention that five bucks buys a car a five-day pass to the Lake Mead recreation area. Tourists can come and go as they please, whenever they please.”
Warrick said, “Ever wonder what it’s like to do this job in a town not crawling with tourists?”
“Oh but that would be too easy,” Brass said. His sigh started in his belly and dragon-breathed out his nose. “Could be any car and it could be anywhere by now. You said there were no bare footprints—how ‘bout shoeprints?”
“No,” Catherine said, “whoever brought her in must’ve blotted them out, when they were leaving.”
Almost to himself, Warrick said, “Ten million tourists a year visit this place.”
“Yeah,” Brass said grumpily. “Fish and Wildlife guy told us so, last time we had a dead naked woman out here.”
Last autumn a woman’s torso had been dredged from Lake Mead.
“We caught that guy,” Warrick reminded Brass.
“How about cars?” Catherine asked. “How many in the park now?”
Brass offered up a two-shouldered shrug. “No records. It’s a vacation spot—casual. Your guess is as good as mine.”
Catherine frowned. “So they never know who’s in the park?”
“Just happy campers—happy anonymous campers.”
“So,” Warrick said. “We have a dead naked woman…no ID, nothing around the body, and the only evidence we have is a track off a tire that could belong to just about any vehicle.”
A grin put another crease in the rumpled detective’s face. “And that’s why you guys make the medium-sized bucks.”
They exchanged tired smiles, which faded quickly as the trio watched two EMTs struggling to maneuver the gurney bearing the black-bagged body down to the road. The EMTs loaded the black bag—the woman finally clothed, in a way—into the back of the ambulance, closed the doors with two slams that made Catherine start a bit, then climbed in around front. The flashing lights had been on when the vehicle barreled in, and now came on again, automatically; but the driver shut them off, and the vehicle rolled away.
No hurry, not now.
“What’s next?” Warrick asked.
Glancing at her watch, Catherine said, “We call it a night.”
“We haven’t even identified her yet,” Warrick said to Catherine, but his eyes cut to Brass. “First twenty-four hours—”
“We don’t even know,” Brass interrupted, “if we have a homicide…. And if we did, can you point at any evidence that’s time-sensitive here?”
Catherine shook her head.
After a moment, so did Warrick.
The detective held up his hands in front of him, palms out, his way of saying this was neither his fault nor his problem. They all knew that Sheriff Brian Mobley had put the kibosh on overtime except homicides, and even then on a case-by-case basis. Mobley was eyeing the mayor’s seat in the next election and wanted to be seen as fiscally responsible, and that meant cutting most OT.
Catherine said to Warrick, “If it was up to me, we’d work this straight through—since homicide seems a possibility.”
Brass, who’d had his own share of battles with th
e sheriff over the years, said, “We’re all slaves to policy. You’re on call, as usual—something pressing comes up, your beeper will let you know.”
“I think our vic deserves better,” Warrick said.
“Is she a vic? Do we even know that, yet?…Get some rest, come in tonight and look at this again, with a fresh eye.”
In the rider’s seat of the Tahoe, Catherine sat quietly, letting Warrick brood, and drive.
Truth be told, for Catherine the moratorium on overtime was sometimes a blessing of sorts. Sure, she wanted to find this woman’s killer…if the woman had been killed…as much as Warrick or God or anybody; and she knew damn well the longer they waited, the colder the trail.
On the other hand, Mobley’s penny-pinching gave her the chance to spend a little more time with daughter Lindsey after school. As much as she loved her job, Catherine loved her daughter more, and Lindsey was at that stage where the girl seemed to have grown an inch every time Catherine saw her.
But this was a homicide. She wouldn’t say it out loud just yet, but she knew in every well-trained fiber of her being that some sicko had left that woman out here as meal for the coyotes.
And that just wouldn’t do.
When she came in that night, right after ten, Catherine Willows was already dragging. She’d slept through the morning, catching a good four hours, but did housework and bills in the afternoon, then spent the evening helping Lindsey with her homework. The latter, anyway, was worth losing a little sleep over.
Until Sheriff Mobley’s recent fiscal responsibility manifesto, the CSIs had worked whatever overtime was necessary to crack the case they happened to be on. Catching a case on the night shift meant that certain tasks just couldn’t be accomplished during their regular shift. And the level of cooperation with the day shift was less than stellar—Conrad Ecklie, the supervisor on days, considered Grissom a rival, and Grissom considered Ecklie a jerk. This did not encourage team playing between graveyard and days.
Now, with OT curtailed, the CSIs just had to try to cram more work into a normal shift. Although the new policy might pave the way for Mobley’s advancement, Catherine knew that rushing to cover so much ground in such a short time could lead to sloppiness, which was the bane of any CSI’s existence.
Her heels clicked like castanets on the tile floor as she strode down the hall toward the morgue. When she arrived, she found what she had hoped to find—Dr. Robbins, hard at work on her case. His metal crutch stashed in the corner, the coroner—in blue scrubs, a pair of which Catherine would put on over her own street clothes—hovered over the slab bearing their Jane Doe, a measuring tape in his hands, sweat beaded on his brow.
The balding, chubby-cheeked coroner, his salt-and-pepper beard mostly salt by now, was the night shift’s secret weapon. His sharp dark eyes missed nothing and, despite having to use the metal crutch after a car crash some years ago, he moved around the morgue with a nimbleness that ex-dancer Catherine could only envy.
“Getting anywhere?” she asked lightly.
He shrugged without looking up. “Catherine,” he said by way of acknowledgment, then answered her question with: “Early yet.”
For all the time she’d spent studying the dead woman under her flashlight beam, Catherine moved in eagerly for a good look under better conditions. Crime scene protocol had meant Catherine had left the woman in her fetal position; now the nude female was on her back on a silver slab.
Her flesh ashen gray, Jane Doe had a pageboy haircut, wide-set closed eyes and full lips that had a ghastly bleached look. A nice figure, for a corpse.
“Funny,” Catherine said.
“What is?”
“She kinda looks like Batgirl.”
Robbins glanced up, then returned to his work.
“From the old TV show,” Catherine explained. “Not that you’d—”
“Yvonne Craig.” Robbins flicked her a look. “You don’t want to play Trivial Pursuit with me, Catherine.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Sex crime?”
“No evidence of it. When she died, she hadn’t had intercourse in a while.”
Catherine gestured to the woman’s waist. “What about the visible panty line?”
“She died clothed—marks from a bra too.”
“Cause of death?”
“Asphyxia, I would venture.” He thumbed open one of Jane Doe’s eyelids and revealed red filigree in what should have been the white of an eye. “She has petechial hemorrhaging in the conjunctivae.”
Catherine leaned in for a closer look. “That’s asphyxia’s calling card, all right. Strangulation?”
“Strangely, doesn’t appear that way—no ligature marks, no bruising.”
Catherine pondered that a moment. “So…you’ve ruled out what, so far? Suicide?”
He smiled. “Unless you know a way she might have killed herself, then stripped off her clothes.”
“Where are we, then?”
He shrugged. “As I said…early. Printed her and gave them to Nick to run through AFIS.”
Nick Stokes was another of the graveyard shift CSIs. He’d been working his own case last night, so he hadn’t joined them on the trip out to Lake Mead.
“Nick’s in already?” she asked.
“Few minutes before you. Closed his case before he went home last night and was looking for something to do.”
“We all feel a little lost without Grissom around,” she said, attempting to be sarcastic and yet not completely kidding.
“Couple of odd things that will, I think, interest you,” he said. “Have a look. No charge….” He pointed to the victim’s right arm.
Catherine moved around where she could get a better view. The victim had an indentation in her left arm above the point of the elbow—a faint stripe, resembling a hash mark.
“And here,” Robbins said, pointing to the victim’s left cheek, which had been out of sight at the crime scene.
“Any ideas?” asked Catherine as she looked at a small, round indentation that appeared as if the tip of a lipstick tube…or a bullet, maybe…had been pressed into the woman’s cheek.
Again Robbins shook his head. “I was hoping you might have one…. Found postmortem lividity in the buttocks, lower legs and feet, as well as the left cheek. I checked your photos and they show her lying on her left side.”
Catherine shrugged. “That’s the way we found her.”
“Well, it almost looks like she was in a sitting position, after she died.” Robbins then abruptly changed the subject. “Tell me—how cold did it get last night, anyway? What did the temp get down to?”
Thrown by this seemingly out-of-left-field question, Catherine shrugged again, more elaborately this time. “Chilly but no big deal. Forty, maybe.”
Robbins shook his head again, but this time it was more an act of bemusement than disagreement. “Body’s pretty cold—colder than I would have expected.”
“She was cold to the touch last night, too.”
“And the hair was wet, you said?”
“Yeah—damp.”
“Does it seem reasonable to you that someone might have been swimming in the lake on a night that cold?”
“No…but we run into people doing a lot of things that don’t seem reasonable, Doc.”
“That’s true. That much is true. No pile of clothing found?”
“Not a scrap.”
“Interesting.”
And with this, he fired up the bone saw and got ready to start the more in-depth procedures.
Frustrated, Catherine wandered off to find Nick. She checked the AFIS computer room—no sign of him. Wandering the aquamarine halls of the facility, a glass-and-wood world of soothing institutional sterility, she passed a couple of labs and Grissom’s office before she finally tracked Nick down in the break room. He sipped his coffee and took a bite of doughnut as Catherine walked in.
“Hey, Nick,” she said, trying to sound more nonchalant than she felt. Solving Jane Doe’s murder would be a lot easier
if they could ID her quickly.
Using the Styrofoam cup, Nick gave her a little salute as he finished chewing his doughnut.
Catherine dropped into a chair across the table from him and waited, knowing the doughnut just might be Nick’s dinner. The break room always seemed to be undergoing some sort of massive cleanup, but no matter what either they themselves or the janitorial staff attempted, the room still smelled like one of Grissom’s experiments gone awry. The refrigerator against the far wall held items that looked more like mutant life-forms than food, and the coffeepot was home to a sludgy mass that reminded Catherine too much of things she’d seen on the job.
She asked, “Any luck with AFIS?”
“Nope,” he said, then took another bite of doughnut.
“So we don’t know any more about her now than we did this morning?”
He shook his head. “I put her into the Missing Persons database, but…” He made a sound that was half snort, half laugh. “…you know how long that can take.”
Catherine nodded glumly.
Warrick came in, wearing a brown turtleneck, brown jeans, and his usual sneakers. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” said Catherine.
Nick nodded and finished chewing the last of his doughnut. “I’m on the Jane Doe with you guys, now.”
“More the merrier,” Warrick said. “Anything new?”
Catherine said, “Robbins thinks asphyxia—but not strangulation, and not a sex crime. How about you?”
“Nothing on the tire mark so far, but the computer’s still working.”
A familiar voice squawked on the intercom. “Catherine, you in there?”
She spoke up. “Yes, Doc—with Nick and Warrick.”
“Well,” the voice said, “I have something to show you.”
They exchanged looks, already getting to their feet, Catherine calling, “We’re on our way!”
Nick slugged down the last of his coffee and the three of them moved silently but quickly to the morgue. When they walked in, in scrubs, they found Robbins bent not over the corpse—opened like a grotesque flower on the slab nearby—but a microscope. Immune from Sheriff Mobley’s overtime edict, the doc regularly put in punishing hours, a habit that was helpful to the CSIs in this current Scrooge-like climate.
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