Sin City

'All right,' Nick said, coming around from the back. 'Found what?'

'Blood.'

Nick leaned in. 'Where?'

Warrick showed him.

'I think we have a crime scene,' Nick said.

Warrick said, 'I think we have a crime scene.'

They got a photo of the blood speck, after which Warrick carefully scraped the tiny dot into an evidence bag.

Grissom strolled in and looked through the open driver's door. 'Clean car.'

'Too clean,' Nick said.

'And yet not clean enough,' Warrick said.

'Give,' Grissom said.

They explained what they had found so far.

'What's next?'

'Luminol,' Warrick answered, shrugging as if to say, What else?

'If there's one spot of blood in that car,' Grissom said, nodding, 'there's probably more.'

When they sprayed the luminol on, any other blood would fluoresce. No matter how carefully the car had been cleaned, blood would glow blue-green at even one part per million.

'Before you hit that interior with luminol,' Grissom said, 'are you otherwise through in there? Anything else you found? Noticed?'

Nick could sense they were being sucker-punched, but nonetheless he shrugged and said, 'No, that's it.'

Warrick, though, said, 'Why, Gris? You got something?'

Grissom leaned inside the car for a look of his own; his eyes were everywhere. 'How tall was Lynn Pierce?'

Nick thought that over. 'Five-four?'

'That's right,' Grissom said, withdrawing himself from the vehicle. 'And if she was five-four and drove her car to the airport and left it parked there…why is the driver's seat all the way back?'

Nick and Warrick traded how-the-hell-does-he-do-it looks.

Grissom asked, 'Or did you move the seat, Warrick? Going over the interior?'

Warrick shook his head.

Grissom turned to Nick, asking pleasantly, 'You?'

Another head shake.

Grissom looked at Warrick. 'Thoughts?'

Warrick sighed to his toes, holding up his hands in admission of frailty. 'I'll fingerprint the power-seat button…then we hit the interior with luminol.'

'Smart thinking,' Grissom said, then he turned and left.

'I hate him,' Nick said, admiringly.

'Yeah,' Warrick said. 'He's good.'

The power-seat button stuck out from the side of the seat like a tiny shiny peanut. Warrick dusted it…and found out it too had been wiped.

'This is starting to piss me off,' Warrick said as he reached for the luminol. 'Every time we get hold of something, it grins and gets away.'

Warrick started at the floor and worked his way up, spraying the luminol on the driver's-side floor mat, the seat, and then the headrest. Instantly, the surfaces became dotted with bluish green pinpoints.

'Nick,' Warrick said, 'you gotta see this.'

Nick peered in from the passenger side. 'Uh oh…I don't think Lynn Pierce caught her flight.'

Gravely, Warrick shook his head. 'Flew apart, maybe….' He sprayed luminol over the backseat and the passenger side, but all the blood seemed to be concentrated in the driver's seat. 'Let's get the seat covers off, and see what's underneath.'

The two used utility knives and, whenever possible, followed seams, to cause as little damage as possible, preserving the seat covers. Nick climbed in the back and attacked the driver's seat from the passenger side, while Warrick knelt on the floor next to the car and started cutting the edges on his side. In short order they had the covers off the seat, the back and the headrest.

Then they were staring in disbelief at the foam rubber cushions. Dark stains spread ominously from the headrest down the back to a low spot on the back edge of the seat.

Finally Nick said, 'Somebody got shot in the head…would be my guess.'

'Educated guess,' Warrick said, eyebrows lifted. 'Damn…. Let's find out if it was Lynn Pierce.'

'We got hairbrush hairs,' Nick said. 'But DNA testing is going to take a while.'

'Then the sooner we get the ball rolling with Greg, the better…. After that, let's talk to Gris-but I think I already know what he's going to say.'

Warrick shot Polaroid photos of the interior while Nick took a small scraping from the seat to use in a DNA test. After stopping by Greg Sanders in his lab, they called on Grissom, who was buried in paperwork in his office.

They explained their findings and showed him the photos of the blood-spattered seat. Grissom stared at the photos long enough to make Nick uneasy.

Finally Grissom said, 'All right…first thing, line up one of the day shift interns to start calling the glass companies in town.'

Warrick nodded. 'To see if anybody's replaced the driver's side window of a white '95 Avalon in the last few days.'

Nick, nodding, too, said, 'On it.'

Grissom studied one of the photos again. 'It's probable that fragment of glass you found came out of the original window.'

'Yeah, that's our take on it,' Warrick said.

'But we need to know, don't we?' Grissom tossed the grisly photo on his desk and his grin was a horrible thing. 'And now we get a search warrant and go over the Pierce house again. Only this time…we do it right.'

Nick tilted his head. 'But we don't have enough to arrest Pierce-do we?'

The CSI supervisor considered that for a long moment. Then, he rattled off his mental findings, clinically: 'There's the tape where he threatened to cut up his wife and there's blood in the car, but there's no body, no weapon, no DNA match for a while-I don't think we can even speculate on a motive, yet.'

'In a bad marriage,' Warrick said, 'you won't have to look very hard.'

'But we haven't looked yet,' Grissom reminded them. 'And the DA isn't going to want to even talk to us, if we don't find something better than what we have now.'

'That's a crime scene,' Nick said, frustrated. 'Broken glass, blood spatter…'

Warrick was nodding, punctuating his colleague's points. 'Nick's right, Gris.'

Grissom said, 'I'll go along with you on that, Nick-that's a crime scene…but what's the crime? Who's the victim? Isn't it also possible that the short dark hair and the fingerprints belong to a victim who isn't Lynn Pierce?'

Warrick rolled his eyes and asked, 'Who else could it be?'

'Or maybe it's not a victim at all. Maybe it's the daughter-maybe she or her mom had a nosebleed.'

'Ah, man,' Nick groused, 'you don't believe that!'

'I don't believe anything yet, Nick. The evidence will show us the way-we just need more of it.'

Warrick leaned a hand on the desk. 'Odds are the blood is Mrs. Pierce's, Gris. I mean, we can't find her, she doesn't seem to be using any of her credit cards or her phone card-the blood's in her car…'

'The odds say it's her,' Grissom agreed. 'But we don't play the odds. We put all our money on science….