Fandom:
CSI
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: GSR
Summary: Another
serial killer strikes Las Vegas--but this one has a twist.
Disclaimer: Most of the characters and situations in this story belong
to Alliance Atlantis, CBS, Anthony Zuicker and other entities, and I do
not have permission to borrow them. No infringement is intended in any
way, and this story is not for profit. All others belong to me, and if
you want to borrow them, you have to ask me first. Any
errors are mine, all mine,
no you can't have any.
Spoilers: through "Bull"
Note: this story includes the non-graphic deaths of children.
*********
Sara eventually had to go to the university
library for the books she wanted, and in the end they didn’t do
her much good. “There’s too much information,”
she complained to Reyes a few evenings later, as they absorbed coffee
before the start of shift. “Rosaries are crammed with
symbolization. It could mean a dozen different things.”
The supervisor added creamer to her coffee. “Can you trace the manufacturer?”
Sara grimaced. “There’s no brand name on the ones
found with the victims. There are literally thousands of
companies making the things, and I get way too many hits when I enter a
description. They aren’t just sold in stores, either;
churches carry them too.”
Reyes nodded sympathetically. “Did you check to see if there were similar murders elsewhere?”
“Yeah. Nothing.”
Before Reyes could reply, Ronnie stuck her head into the breakroom. “Hey, Sara, it is a serial.”
She frowned at the rookie’s excited face. “What are you talking about?”
“I was just talking to Lawrence, he’s coming off shift
now. They caught a case just like yours two days ago.”
Sara and Reyes exchanged a glance, and as one headed for the
door. “Communication around this place sucks,” Sara
grumbled, and pointed a finger at Ronnie as she passed her.
“Good work, Lake.”
“Yes indeed,” Reyes seconded, hurrying after Sara and
catching her arm. “Let me handle Ecklie.”
Sara slowed at the mention of the assistant director, and let her boss
take the lead. Ecklie had been surprisingly decent about
Sara’s affair with Grissom, she gave him full credit for that,
but the two of them were still fundamentally at odds.
He thinks I’m a threat, and I know he’s a kiss-ass.
Reyes, however, had a gift for diplomacy, and with that and a touch of
judicious flattery she got Dayshift’s official cooperation with
the rosary murders. She had to fight a little harder to get Sara
assigned the lead on the cases, but in the end Ecklie gave in.
The reports and evidence were turned over to Sara.
First, however, she went down to the morgue. The latest victim’s body had not yet been released.
The Dayshift coroner was gone, but Dr. Nat was just pulling on her
scrubs. “What’s up?” she asked as Sara came
in. “I don’t think I have anybody of yours down here
tonight.”
Sara shook her head. “I’m here about the Baby Doe case from two days ago.”
Nat put her hands on her hips as she thought.
“Hmm--right. Drawer Four--I’ll go find you the
paperwork.”
As Nat went to rummage in the file cabinet, Sara opened the
drawer. Baby Doe was really an undernourished four years old,
rather than an infant, and had the features of someone of
Hispanic-South American Indian descent. He had been washed as
part of the autopsy, but there were old bruises on his arms and legs
and a half-healed contusion on his scalp.
Nat came to Sara’s side, handing over a file. “Not
pretty,” she said somberly. “Long-term abuse,
including sexual, but none of it perimortem. Looks like the one
person who treated him gently was his killer.”
Sara thumbed through the reports. Diphenhydramine, evidence of
smothering, a rosary in one hand. No one had come forward yet to
report this child missing, let alone claim his body, and Sara felt her
skull grow heavy again at the further evidence of neglect.
“I don’t understand his choices,” she said, half to
herself. “All these kids are different ages, genders,
races. Usually a serial has a specific type, but the only thing
these kids have in common is that they’re all six or
younger.”
Nat made a thoughtful sound. “Maybe the killer thinks they
have something in common. I mean,” she gestured at the
small, still form, “anybody who does this has to be sick in the
head. What if he’s imagining the commonality?”
Sara smiled sourly. “So now I have to figure out what a serial killer is imagining? Nat, you’re not helping.”
Nat turned her hands palm-up, shrugging amusedly. “Hey, I just handle the scalpel.”
The photos on the lightboxes were trying to tell her something, Sara knew; she just couldn’t figure out what. I’m missing something. I don’t know enough.
What is it?
The figure on the central medal was almost certainly a saint, but while
Sara had loved to read about saints as a child, she couldn’t
recognize many by sight, and the old stories had become somewhat hazed
by time.
This time the knock made her look up at once. Grissom was
standing in the doorway, leaning one fist against the frame.
“You didn’t stop by,” he said mildly.
“New case?”
Sara narrowed her eyes, thinking, then made a decision.
“You know more about rosaries than I do,” she said
abruptly. “Tell me what I’m looking at.”
She stood aside so Grissom would have room to examine the photographs.
She waited as he perused each one carefully. Sara had hesitated
to ask Grissom about the rosaries, even though she knew he was far more
expert on the subject than she; for some reason, she was still cautious
about offending his religious sensibilities, despite his reassurances
to the contrary. She’d grown up in a home that had had
nothing to do with either faith or religion, and they were still
somewhat unknown territories for her.
“Saint Nicholas,” Grissom said, his finger hovering over
one photograph. “Patron saint of sailors, merchants, and
pawnbrokers.”
“Sounds...interesting.” Sara moved to stand beside him for a better look at the enlarged image.
“He’s one of the historical influences behind Santa
Claus,” Grissom explained easily. “He’s also a
children’s saint.”
Now that makes sense.
Sara nodded; she’d known the first fact but not the second.
“That explains why there are three of them around him.”
“You should look up the story. Technically speaking, you know, these aren’t rosaries.”
Sara blinked. “What?”
Grissom pointed to the beads. “See how these are in groups
of three? A rosary has groups of ten. This is actually what
is known as a chaplet.”
“I did not know that.” Sara frowned at the
photos. How had she missed that detail while researching?
“It’s not something a non-Catholic would necessarily be
aware of.” He frowned at the photos.
“That’s odd...”
“What’s odd?” Sara pulled down one of the photos and stared at it, counting beads.
Grissom lifted one shoulder. “I’ve never heard of a
Saint Nicholas chaplet. But I’m hardly an expert any
longer.”
“I’ll read up on them,” Sara said absently. “Thanks, Gil.”
“Don’t stay too late.” He squeezed her arm and stepped away.
She didn’t look up until he reached the door again, but as he
glanced back, she raised her head and tapped her lips with one finger.
His smile was brilliant.
The fourth case was as maddening as the others. Greta von Hillman
was two days short of seven years old. Her family had moved to
Las Vegas three years prior, and she had just been diagnosed with
cystic fibrosis. She was found on a Sunday afternoon, thirty
hours after she’d left her home to go to play with a friend who
lived only two blocks away.
Needless to say, she had never arrived there.
Sara knelt over the body, silently cursing whoever was murdering
children, and wishing she’d had time to grab a scarf on the way
out of the house. Not that it would have gone with a vest anyway, but oh well…
If Oguntayo, who was taking the weekend Dayshift this week, had noticed
the reddened area on Sara’s throat, he was saying nothing; but
then, that was normal for him anyway.
Focus, Sidle. Getting interrupted in the middle of a necking session wasn’t that unusual. “Any signs of trauma?” she asked Oguntayo.
He rolled the little form gently onto its side, then back down again,
shaking his head. “Nothin’ obvious.”
They both knew that an autopsy would be needed to confirm his
pronouncement, but the small crystal-bead chaplet folded in
Greta’s hand told them that he was most likely right.
Sara scanned the girl’s clothing, a quick pass for trace that
wasn’t there, and hissed to herself. “I want this
guy.”
Oguntayo’s grunt was agreement. With care, he enfolded the
corpse into a body bag, and Sara began to canvas the area without much
hope of finding anything. Fortunately for her, the dump site was
small, a scrap of dusty ground between a post office and its back
parking lot.
Just as well, since I’m on my own today--
The work was tedious and frustrating, but on one level Sara
didn’t mind working solo. The killer was good; any slip-up
would be minor, and if she went over every inch of the scene herself
she would know that nothing had been missed. Ronnie was shaping
up to be a decent CSI, but she wasn’t there yet.
Sara did miss working with people she could trust to handle a
scene. Dr. Reyes was an expert, but she didn’t usually work
with Sara; it was easier to have the two senior investigators on the
shift handle different cases and trade off Ronnie between them.
She was hot, sweaty, and irritable by the time she was done, but Sara
managed to finish the scene before the sun went down. She had
found three shoeprints that were almost certainly not the
killer’s, collected a small selection of trash that would all
have to be tested for DNA, and wondered for the thousandth time what
the motivation was behind the killings. They weren’t
escalating in violence or frequency; there were still no signs of
injury on the victims that could be attributed to their kidnapper; and
no one working on the cases had yet been able to find any connection
between the children, except that they were all below the age of seven.
Well, that and the fact that they were all murdered in Las Vegas.
It was a relief to get to the air-conditioned lab. Sara dropped
off the trash at DNA and stopped to change her shirt before heading
down to the morgue. She pushed through the doors to find Dr. Nat
undressing Greta’s body.
“Hey,” Sara greeted her, fresh sorrow welling up under her
breastbone. Somehow the sight of Greta’s long blonde braids
hit her hard; they were so carefully plaited and tied, the loving work
of someone’s hands.
“Hiya.” Nat barely glanced up from her task.
“Got a bit of trace this time, off the front of her
t-shirt.”
She nodded at the pan sitting on the edge of the autopsy table, and
Sara picked up the little paper bindle within and opened it, hope
blooming.
“No skin tag, I’m afraid,” Nat went on, folding
Greta’s shirt and sliding it into a larger bag. “But
you might get lucky on comparison.”
Sara snagged a pair of forceps from Nat’s array of equipment and
lifted the hair into the light. It was short and silvery, and as
she examined it Sara felt her anticipation morph into embarrassment.
“Why the blush?” Nat asked from across the table.
Sara shook her head and carefully replaced the hair in the
bindle. “Um…I think I probably contaminated the
scene.”
It wasn’t really a cause for shame; as Locard’s principle
noted, any contact between two objects resulted in exchange, and all
crime scene investigators knew that they themselves contaminated scenes
just by processing them. There was no way to prevent it; the goal
was to keep the contamination as minimal as was practical.
It’s not like we can
process in bunny suits. Efficiently, anyway. And
that’s why we have a compliance database.
Still, she couldn’t know without further examination, so Sara sealed the bindle again.
“Hair of the fiancé? What were
you up to before you came in?” Nat asked, eyes twinkling, and
Sara tried to glare at her, willing the heat in her face to die down.
“Wouldn’t you like to know.” She dropped the bindle into her labcoat pocket.
Nat snickered. “Can’t say as I blame you. I
love older men.” She untied Greta’s left sneaker,
sobering. “This’ll take a while, but preliminary
findings indicate the same M.O. as previous victims. Minimal
bruising around the mouth.”
“Check for needle marks.” Sara looked sadly on as Nat
removed the other sneaker. The smaller victims had been given the
diphenhydramine by mouth, but they still did not know how the older
girls had been sedated. “This one is definitely old enough
to know better than to take food from a stranger.”
“Old enough doesn’t mean smart enough,” Nat pointed
out, carefully peeling off the small socks. “But yeah,
it’s not likely. I have a theory, though.”
She finished undressing the body with gentle swiftness, handing the
clothes to Sara to bag, and began examining Greta’s greying
skin. “I couldn’t find anything on Trisha
Tomlin,” she explained, “but by the time I saw the body it
had already been washed, and nobody would be looking for this because
diphenhydramine is only readily available as an oral medication.
But...”
Her gloved fingers paused on the body’s upper arm, just below the shoulder. “Here.”
Sara bent, squinted, and reached for a magnifying glass. Through
it she saw the faintest trace of something glistening on the skin,
already collecting bits of dust and lint.
“Adhesive. A patch?”
“I’m guessing yes.” Nat held the limb steady as
Sara set up the morgue’s camera for a close shot of the
area. “A kid this age might know not to eat something a
stranger offered, but a sticker or a temporary tattoo--“
Sara snapped several photos. “Can you confirm this?”
“Won’t take too long.” Nat smoothed a hand over
the long braids, her eyes dark, and Sara took the film and the bags
with a nod of thanks, leaving Nat to her work.
Ronnie helped her process the clothes and other evidence. It was
a bit embarrassing to have to explain to her that the most solid clue
they’d yet found was most likely cross-contamination, but Ronnie
merely shrugged philosophically. “Hey, it happens,
that’s what you told me before.”
Sara, remembering the rookie’s slip on a bloody floor that dropped her onto a fresh corpse, had to concede.
There was something to be said for being senior, too; Ronnie
didn’t try to tease her about the hair. Even Greg
wouldn’t have let that one go by. But then, Ronnie
hadn’t been witness to Sara’s years of interaction with
Grissom, either...
Ronnie peered at the hair, now firmly fixed on a microscope
slide. “With no skin tag, though, we can’t tell for
sure, can we?”
Sara nodded in approval. “That’s why it’s still
labeled as possible evidence. If a similar hair turns up on
another body, we can compare.” She rubbed her forehead
wearily with the back of her wrist, bleakly hoping that there would be
no further bodies but knowing that her wish was most likely
futile. “Without DNA, though, it’s useless at the
moment.”
Ronnie made a vaguely agreeing noise, holding one of the sneakers under
a brighter lamp for a better look. After a minute she spoke
again.
“Whoever this is...he has to be pretty good at forensics.”
“Yeah.” It was a thought Sara did not enjoy. It
was possible for a layman to be this careful, particularly if they were
the brand of obsessive that so often characterized a serial killer, but
with each fresh corpse the odds grew that the murderer was or had been
part of the law enforcement community. Sooner or later, laymen
always missed a spot.
Be honest. Forensics
investigators miss spots too. It takes a lot of experience to
think of everything, every possible contingency.
Experience, and a mind tuned to a scene, ready to consider all
angles. Sara knew investigators like that--she used to work with
them, after all, and had been taught by the best of them. Still, I guess if I were going to stage a scene I’d put a lot of thought into it ahead of time.
She put the hair away and moved on to Greta’s shirt. It was
beginning to look as though the only thing that was going to trip up
this killer was random, unavoidable chance.
He...or she...always chooses
places without security cameras or casual observers. He
doesn’t keep his victims for long, so there’s less
opportunity for transfer; in fact, he might not even take them anywhere
personal, just drug and smother and place them within a few hours.
Sara looked at the evidence neatly placed around the table. The
trash was with DNA, and she really didn’t have much hope that
anything would turn up with that; it was most likely already on the
scene when the killer had placed the body. “Ronnie,”
she said, “I have an assignment for you.”
Ronnie looked up from the shoe, setting down her magnifying glass. “Sure, what is it?”
Sara reached out and took the shoe. “I want you to find out
where someone would buy diphenhydramine patches.”
“Ooh, Internet research.” Ronnie’s eyes lit; a
true geek, she loved to chase leads online, and was expert at it.
“Thanks, Sara!”
Interlacing her fingers and cracking her knuckles theatrically, Ronnie
hurried out of the room in search of a computer terminal. Sara
watched her go, amused and a little proud, and went back to work.
“How’s your case going?” Grissom asked that morning,
when he came home to find Sara nursing a cup of tea in the living room
instead of curled up in bed.
“Nowhere,” she said flatly, hearing her own frustration in
her voice, though her spirits lifted slightly as he bent down to give
her a kiss.
“Some cases are like that,” he said, resignation in his
tone, and his hand brushed lightly over her hair as he went to lay down
the files he’d brought home from the lab. “But if he
screws up the slightest bit, Sara, you’ll catch him. I have
faith in you.”
She smiled sourly, cradling her cup and watching him as he toed off his
shoes and left them neatly paired against the wall.
“That’s what it’s going to take, at this point--him
making a major mistake. I hate to admit it, Gil, but this one is
scary.”
Grissom sat down at the other end of the couch, half-facing her, and
they were both silent for a moment, remembering the last serial killer
to defeat them so soundly. Natalie was never a pleasant memory.
But in the end...they had won. A hard victory, but theirs.
“Want to talk it out?” Grissom offered. “A fresh perspective might help.”
Sara swallowed a mouthful of tea. “Sure.”
She gave him the particulars of each case, laying out the deaths like
puzzle pieces, keeping the emotions at bay for the moment. The
careful presentation, the lack of any usable trace; the gentleness of
the murders, the chaplets.
“It’s as though the killer specifically doesn’t want
his victims to suffer,” Sara mused at last. “Sedating
them keeps them from even knowing they’re going to die.”
“It could also be a way to keep them from fighting,”
Grissom noted practically. “But you’re right.
Whoever he is, he’s not getting the usual thrill from the
kill.”
“The chaplets are key, that’s obvious.” Sara
set down her empty mug. “But I don’t know what they
mean.”
Grissom nodded. “There are really too many meanings
attached--it could be remorse, but the killer could also be acting from
some sort of religious impulse. He might even see himself as a
representative or incarnation of Saint Nicholas.”
Sara groaned. “That’s all we need, a serial who
thinks he’s Santa Claus.” She gazed at her
fiancé, noting the shadows under his eyes despite his interest
in her cases, and reached for his stockinged feet, lifting them into
her lap and beginning to rub the left one. “Is he seeing
these kids as heretics of some kind? I mean, two years old is a
little young to be a confirmed heathen...”
Grissom groaned in turn. “Sara...you know I can’t think when you do that...”
His face was now a picture of bliss, eyes half-shut as Sara dug her
thumbs into his arch. She chuckled, pleased.
“Really? Not even if I told you there were bugs on the last
one?” she teased.
He peered blearily at her, but she could see the twinkle. “Huh?”
Sara laughed out loud, and kept going.
It was later, when he was snoring softly behind her and the morning
light was brightening around the edges of the shades, that the idea
rose to the surface of her drifting thoughts, pulling Sara from her
drowsy state.
There is one commonality.
It was a fragile idea, and Sara extracted herself carefully from
Grissom’s embrace, not wanting to wake him. Grabbing one of
his shirts, she pulled it on and padded out to her study, booting up
her laptop and waiting impatiently to go online.
The case details were all firmly implanted in her memory, she
didn’t need to look anything up. But all prospects of sleep
vanished as she turned the idea over in her mind.
Roger Hsien, his parents about to begin a messy divorce.
Trisha Tomlin, whose violent father was due to be released from prison.
Baby Doe, still unidentified, who had been abused all his short life.
Greta von Hellman, just diagnosed with an unpleasant and eventually terminal disease.
The patron saint of children.
What if the killer is saving them?
Four samples was really too few on which to base so slight a theory,
but four was all Sara had to go on. Opening her browser, she
began to research Saint Nicholas.
Three hours later, her eyes were blurring and her printer was out of
paper, but she had a sketchy basis for her theory. Nicholas was
an early saint of the church, and so factual details about him were
few, but countless rescues of endangered children were attributed to
his intercession. He was even said to have resurrected the three
shown on the medals, after they were slaughtered by a butcher.
Being an agnostic and a skeptic, Sara did not place a lot of faith in
the idea that the man had actually existed, or done even a tenth of
what was now attributed to him, but she knew her disbelief didn’t
matter.
What matters is what the
killer believes. And if he’s Catholic, he may even believe
that these kids will be resurrected someday.
She stared at the image on the screen, a bearded man stamped in
metal--hardly more than a crude image, but carrying so much power and
symbolism for so many.
Who are you?
Why are you doing this?
She had no answers.
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