Brass's voice stayed remarkably even and sarcasm free. "We were kind of hoping you could tell us."
"Certainly." The file was still on Glenda's desk and she thumbed through it, then said, "Mr. Black's establishment." She found half a smile somewhere. "I should've known-they're the biggest mortuary in Las Vegas. They do most of the funerals involving clients with money. And this Rita Bennett? If it's not too disrespectful for me to say so?…She was loaded."
"We know," Brass said.
"Does that make this more suspicious?" Glenda asked, eyebrows knitted.
"You know," Grissom said, "I think finding the wrong body in a coffin is suspicious enough."
She was pondering that as they went out.
Nick had bagged two more of the short black hairs, as well as a thin white fiber, and tested the maroon drops (just to make sure they were blood), before Sara finally ambled back into the garage.
"What does our friend AFIS have to say?"
Sara shook her head. "Not chatty yet-Jacqui loaded the prints into Missing Persons, too."
"Anything?"
"Not so far…but it was just getting started."
Nick sighed and gestured toward the girl in the casket. "Well…time for the coming out party?"
"Why not."
Sara pulled over a gurney and locked down the wheels. As she did, Nick put his latex-gloved hands under the body's shoulders and lifted her up and out; there was some resistance before the head finally tore loose from the pillow, leaving behind a glob of dried blood and some hair.
Looking at the back of the woman's head, Nick could see the reason for the blood: a small black hole, no bigger around than a ballpoint pen.
"Entrance wound," he said.
Sara snatched up the camera and snapped four photos of the tiny aperture. "No exit?"
"Doesn't look like it."
She raised an eyebrow. "Small caliber, huh?"
Nick nodded. "Twenty-two, maybe."
"Or a twenty-five?…No sign of defense wounds."
Nick twitched a grimace. "She didn't see it coming."
"Maybe that's not such a bad thing…. The killer-we agree there's a killer now, right?"
"We agree there's a killer now. Right."
"The killer? He or she went to a whole lot of trouble to get rid of the body. This wasn't some random act."
"Not hardly." Nick trained tight eyes on Sara. "If the killer didn't know her, if it was just a thrill kill or something…why not just leave her where she dropped?"
Sara set down the camera. "Point well-taken-the killer must have known her."
"That makes sense, but Grissom'll want more."
"He's not the only one."
"Yeah?"
Sara nodded at the dead girl. "She wants it, too."
The two of them lifted the girl out of the coffin and carefully laid her on the gurney. To Nick, even though he held the heavier end, the young woman felt feather light. It was said that when a person dies, their body weight drops by twenty-one grams; but this vic seemed to have lost much more than that.
Releasing the brake on the gurney, Sara prepared to take the body over to Doc Robbins for the autopsy. "Coming, Nick?" she asked.
"Not just yet. Now that it's empty, I want to go over this coffin…."
"Good thought. You want me to come back, and help?"
"No, that's okay. I got it-not really room enough for two of us, nosing around in there anyway. You see what the autopsy has to tell us, and I'll catch up with you."
She said, "Sure thing," then pushed the gurney across the garage and through the doors into the corridor.
Alone with the coffin and vault now, Nick went to work. He started with the casket: They had been very careful about touching it while they worked, and so the first thing to do was to fingerprint the box; their own prints would be on both the casket and the vault-no helping that. They had expected to find Rita Bennett inside, so, obviously, hadn't been particularly careful about not leaving fingerprints. Once they found the other woman, though, they had pulled on the ever-trusty latex gloves….
He dusted the coffin all down the lip of the lid, along the handles, and around the locks. Normally, the only prints he would expect to find would be his and Sara's; but with the sealed vault protecting the fingerprints from the arid desert air, he hoped to get luckier than that. It was a time-consuming job, but whenever he found something, he'd transfer it to tape and move on. In the end, he collected more than two dozen prints. How many would prove to be his and Sara's remained to be seen.
With the outside of the casket done, Nick moved back to the interior. Using his Maglite, he combed the satin lining, looking for any clue that might lead him to identify either the victim or the killer. Having gone over the head end of the coffin thoroughly (while the body was still inside), he now began at the foot. Several small pieces of something black-dirt, he decided-were visible, where they had probably hidden under the heel of the girl's shoes. It was possible the dirt had come from Rita Bennett's shoes, too, but the Bennett woman would likely have been buried in clean, perhaps even new shoes, whereas the girl had been murdered, not prepared and spruced up for burial. Either way, he took photos of the dirt, then bagged it.
Next, Nick moved on toward where her knees had been, then her waist, her back, and, finally, again to the pillow. He was going around the edge one final time when he saw a fiber hung up in a tiny flaw in the wood. Using his tweezers, he picked up the fiber and examined it more carefully-white, and less than an inch long. To Nick it looked like plain old-fashioned white thread; but he knew that David Hodges, CSI's resident trace expert, might well give him enough info to start a Plain Old-Fashioned White Thread website. He bagged the thread and then went over the casket one more time, this trip taking an alternative light source along for the ride….
The blood showed up under the UV light, all right, but he found nothing else. Spraying Luminol on the pillow didn't help either: The blood that he'd already seen-the drops and the small patch under the woman's head-was all there was to find.
Finally finished with the casket, Nick stared at the empty vessel, as if waiting for a wraith to rise up and reveal all to him. Unlikely as that prospect might be, he sure could have used the help.
He had precious little to go on. He moved on to the cement vault, but there was even less there. The vault would have already been at the cemetery, and the casket sealed inside there. The possibility remained that the body could have been transferred right before it went into the vault; but the concrete wrapper had been exposed to the desert climate far more than the casket sealed within, and Nick was not confident of finding anything.
Still, he went over it inch by inch. He dusted for fingerprints, went over the outside and the edges for signs of blood, and examined the inside with both his Maglite and an ALS.
And came up empty.
He cleaned up, stored the evidence, then caught up with Sara in the morgue. Though the garage had been air-conditioned, Nick's hard work had him sweating, and when he strode into the morgue, the chill of the room gave him a shiver.
Sara stood opposite Dr. Al Robbins, the body on the steel table between them. The unknown girl was naked now, her clothes in evidence bags on a nearby counter, where Sara had put them.
Sara had put on a powder-blue lab coat and latex gloves as she assisted Robbins with his duties. Following suit, Nick took a blue lab coat off a hook and slipped into it. As he crossed to the table, he pulled on a fresh pair of latex gloves.
A rather tall, balding, salt-and-pepper-bearded man, Robbins was looking at less than twelve months before his tenth anniversary with the LVPD. A man who seemed composed of equal parts cool professionalism and warm compassion, Robbins moved with the aid of a metal cane, which now leaned, as it often did when he was working, in a corner near the table. The father of three and a devoted family man, Doc Robbins had a daughter whose age would not be far removed from that of their nameless victim.