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?'
'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.'
He sipped his coffee. 'What do we do in the meantime?'
'Back to the computer for me. I've been going through missing persons cases that somehow involve the initial 'F.' '
'Seems worth doing. I think I'll go through the guy's effects-maybe I can find something.'
They finished their coffee, sharing a little small talk, and exited the break room, moving off in opposite directions.
Nick went into the morgue to study John Doe #17's clothes more thoroughly. Though the suit had survived fairly well, it had now become part of the mummy, in essence, his second skin. Head wounds bleed a great deal, which was the reason for the dark stain on the back of the jacket.
The clothes gave the mummy a musty smell, not exactly the aroma Nick would have expected to find coming from a dead body. He took scrapings from the bottom of the mummy's shoes in hopes that Greg Sanders, their resident lab rat, could tell him something about where the man had been walking before his death. He picked lint out of the mummy's pockets and bagged that. Anything that might give them some kind of hint to who this long- dead murder victim was.
Next, he studied the two dollars and fifteen cents in change: six quarters, five dimes, two nickels and five pennies. The newest was a 1984 quarter, the oldest a 1957 nickel. The coins, except for the '57 nickel, were all pretty clean and Nick dusted them but lifted only two usable partials.
The ring yielded no prints, but did have a set of tiny initials carved into it-not an inscription. He knew enough about jewelry to recognize they probably belonged to the jeweler that crafted the piece and not the victim. Well, at least that gave him something to go on. It would still be a few hours before he'd be able to find any jewelers in their stores.
Finally, he looked at the bag with the cigarette filter remains. Not much left after fifteen years, but more than he would have expected. Filters never biodegraded-an environmentalist's nightmare, a CSI's dream. Taking the bag, he wandered back toward the lab to find Greg Sanders.
Nick found the skinny, spiky-haired guy, as usual, poring over his microscope. Though well into his twenties, Sanders always had the cheerfully gleeful expression of a kid with a new chemistry set.
'Studying the DNA of another prospective soul-mate?' Nick asked.
Sanders looked up, eyes bright. 'Dude-science can be used for better things than putting people in jail.'
'Marriage and jail-I sense a connection there.'
Sanders batted the air with a hand. 'Some guys are boob men-some're leg men. Me, I'm an epithelial sort of guy.'
Nick held out the bagged cigarette. 'Swell-'cause I need DNA on this.'
Picking it up, holding it to the light, Sanders said, 'Ugh-grotty! How long has this baby been part of the ecosystem?'
With a shrug, Nick said, 'I don't know. You tell me.'
'Take a number. Got a backlog. Gonna be a while.'
'What else isn't new?'
Sanders shot him a look. 'Hey, I'm only one guy.'
'I know, Greg, but who else is ready to loan you
All business now, Sanders said, 'You just hit the top of my list.'
The files rolled by one after one, blurring into each other, the coffee growing more bitter with each cup, and
