Sin City

Finally, Brass said to Grissom, 'We can't exactly go door to door with a picture of this, and ask if anybody recognizes her.'

They were near the flat-bottom boat. Grissom was staring at the torso, as if waiting for it to speak up. Then he said to Brass, 'There's a body of evidence, here.'

'Are you kidding?'

Grissom tore himself away from staring down at the torso to give Brass a withering look. Then he returned his eyes to the evidence and said, 'Look at the edges.'

The criminalist pointed first to the waistline, then the jagged cuts to the thighs. Warrick and Nick were looking on with interest.

Grissom was saying, 'We'll figure out what made the cuts-that will help. She'll talk to us…. She already is.'

Nick took pictures while Warrick carefully searched the boat for any other trace evidence. Once he had photos of the torso, where it lay in the boat, the two CSIs removed it from the snarled anchor chain and gently turned the body over.

Nick winced. 'That left a mark…'

'Gris!' Warrick called. 'You're gonna wanna see this!'

Striding over from where he'd been conferring with Brass, Grissom called, 'What?'

Warrick raised an eyebrow and gestured in tadah fashion at the torso.

Glancing down, Grissom saw intestinal tissue sticking out of a slice in the back, like Kleenex popping out of a box.

Brass joined the group. 'Something?'

'Whoever cut her up made a mistake,' Grissom said. 'He tried to cut through the pelvic bone. Whatever he used got jammed up, and when he pulled it out, the blade snagged on the intestines.'

Warrick didn't know which was grislier: the torso, or the glee with which Grissom had reported the butcher's 'mistake.' But Warrick also noted Grissom reflexively referred to the unknown killer as 'he.'

In the hour it took the CSI team to finish, the paramedics showed up, as did news vans from the four network affiliates. Uniformed officers held the reporters and cameramen at a distance, but there was no way Brass would get out of here without talking to them.

Gil Grissom did not envy Brass this part of his job. The CSI supervisor watched as the detective moved over to the gaggle of reporters. It was a calculated move on Brass's part: if the cameras were focused on him, they'd be unable to shoot the body being loaded into an ambulance.

Grissom watched as the four reporters and their cameramen vied for position, each sticking his or her microphones out toward Brass's unopened mouth. Grissom recognized Jill Ganine. She had interviewed him more than once, and he liked her well enough, for media. Next to her, Stan Cooper tried to look like he wasn't shoving Ganine out of the way. Kathleen Treiner bounced back and forth around the other two like a yappy terrier until her brutish cameraman managed to elbow in next to Cooper and give her some space.

Ganine got out the first question. 'Captain Brass, is that the body of Lynn Pierce, the missing Vegas socialite?'

Leave it to the press to ask the question none of them had spoken. And just when had Born-Again suburban mom Lynn Pierce become a 'socialite,' anyway?

Grissom wished the TV jackals hadn't jumped so quickly to the conclusion that it was Lynn Pierce; more than that, he wished he could keep himself from making that jump. The torso could, after all, be any of hundreds of missing women. Evidence, he told himself, just wait for the evidence and all will come clear.

'We have no new information on Lynn Pierce,' Brass said.

Cooper jumped in. 'But you did find a body?'

Brass seemed unsure how to answer that. 'Not entirely true,' he finally said.

That was a nice evasion, Grissom thought; but as he listened to the reporters and the detective play twenty questions, Grissom kept his eyes on Ned Petty. Working carefully, the innocent-looking reporter was nearly around the tape line set up by the uniformed officers, as he and his cameraman moved toward the ambulance. The reporter was to Grissom's right, and slouching as he moved, no one-other than Grissom-seeming to notice Petty closing in.

Slipping behind the ambulance, to block the media's view of him, Grissom moved around until he was hidden by the ambulance's open back door, waiting.

With the body bag riding atop it-the rather odd shape of its contents plainly visible through the black plastic- the gurney was rolled by the EMS guys to the back door of the ambulance. Petty stepped forward, his microphone held up as he said, 'Clark County paramedics load the body…'

'May I help you?' Grissom interrupted pleasantly, stepping out from behind the door and directly into the path of the cameraman's lens.

Petty didn't miss a beat.

The reporter swiveled, said, 'On the scene is one of Las Vegas's top crime scene investigators, sometimes the subject of controversy himself-Gil Grissom. Mr. Grissom, what can you tell us about the victim?'

And Petty thrust the microphone toward Grissom, like a weapon.

Maintaining his cool, Grissom gave the camera as little as possible-a blank face, and a few words: 'At this point, nothing.'

Petty fed himself the mike, saying melodramatically, 'That didn't look like a human body on that stretcher.'

The mike swung back toward him, but Grissom said only, 'That isn't a question.'

'Do you believe you've found Lynn Pierce?'

Another shrug, this one punctuated by a terse, 'No comment.'

Finally the ambulance doors closed behind him, the paramedics all loaded up now, and the ambulance left-no siren; what was the rush? But the newspaper contingent made a race out of it anyway, peeling from the lot in pursuit of the emergency vehicle.

Having the scene to themselves again, Nick, Warrick, and Grissom gathered their gear, and left, finally letting Lake Mead start the process of getting back to normal-tourists would soon enjoy the sunshine shimmering off the lake, unaware of the gruesome events of the morning.

That night, a few hours before the official start of his shift, Grissom-blue scrubs over his street clothes- slipped into the morgue where Dr. David Robbins still had the torso laid out on a table.

A whole body, a female body, Lynn Pierce's body. She is already dead. In a sparse bathroom, the body sprawls in a tub, unfeminine, undignified. A chainsaw coughs and sputters and spits to life, then growls like a rabid beast.

First it gnaws through the arms at the shoulders, then the legs below the hip sockets. The gnawing blade eats through the neck, severing spinal cord, nerves, and muscle. The body is limbless, headless.

The animal feeds on, but its keeper aims too low and the saw grinds to a halt in the middle of the pelvic bone and that blade is pulled out savagely, bringing with it a rope of intestine. With a snarl the blade shivers back to life, and this time the keeper aims higher, severing the body, just above the navel.

Pieces are packed into garbage bags with something to weigh them down, and hefted into the trunk of a car, driven to Lake Mead, loaded onto a boat beneath cover of night, dumped into the dark waters, here, there, scattered to the sandy bottom to never be found-save for one piece somehow freed, escaping the depths, floating, armless, legless, finding its way into the boat of the Fish and Wildlife man.

As Grissom approached, Robbins looked up. The pathologist had been at Grissom's side for so many autopsies they had both long ago lost count. Robbins, too, wore a blue smock.

'You know,' the coroner said, gently presenting the obvious, 'the DNA test is going to take time…no getting around that.'

Grissom shrugged. 'I came to find out what you know now.'

Using his single metal crutch, Robbins navigated around the table. 'I could share my preliminary findings.'