Sin City

Nick walked forward to where Brass stood with his arms crossed.

'I thought we had the bastard,' said the detective.

Shrugging, Nick said, 'Grissom's right-the cuter they think they are, the smarter they think they are, the surer a bet that they slipped somewhere.' He looked down, his gaze falling on the end of the trailer. 'Anybody dust the hitch?'

Brass looked at him, a tiny smile beginning at the corners of his mouth. 'Not yet.'

With the luminol sprayed over the cockpit, Warrick turned on the UV light source. He moved from bow to stern on the port side: nothing; going the opposite way on the starboard side, Warrick made it as far as the console before he saw the first glow…

…a fluorescent dot.

His breath caught and he froze, willing the tiny green spot to not be a figment of his imagination. Two more drops to the side, one more on the gunnel, and Warrick knew he was seeing the real thing. Retracing his steps to the center of the boat, he opened the fishbox. Though it had appeared clean at first glance, it now had a tiny fluorescent stripe on the bottom, against the back wall. One bag of body parts had leaked, he thought.

'Got blood,' he called down, coolly. 'Not much, but it'll give us DNA.'

Grissom smiled at Brass. 'If Lynn Pierce's dismembered body took a trip on that boat, we're going to know.'

Removing the tape from the trailer hitch, Nick shone his light on the tape to reveal a nice clean thumb print. 'Got a print off the trailer hitch!' he called.

The quartet locked up the garage feeling pretty good about themselves-they knew to a man that they were finally making progress in this frustrating case.

'Next stop,' Grissom said, 'the home of Kevin Sadler.'

'And more puzzle pieces?' Nick asked.

'Maybe,' Grissom admitted. And then he went further: 'Maybe enough pieces to tell us what picture we're putting together.'

The house, a rambling ranch in need of repair and paint, squatted on one of those side streets that never made it into the 'Visit Vegas!' videos, much less the travel brochures.

Brass unlocked the door and the CSIs moved in, carrying their silver field kits in latex-gloved hands, their jobs already assigned by their supervisor, the detective ready and willing to pitch in on the search. Nick took the kitchen, Grissom the bedroom and bathroom, Brass the living room, and Warrick the basement.

Arrayed with contemporary, apartment-style furnishings, many of them black and white (the walls were pale plaster), the place was tidy, perhaps-like the boat-too tidy. On the other hand, Sadler had been away for some months, and only recently returned; so it was not surprising that the place had been cleaned while he was away (while watching the place, Pierce had let the housekeeper in, the dealer had said), nor was it startling that Sadler hadn't had time yet to get it very dirty, since.

The television in the living room was smaller than a Yugo-barely; next to it, stacks of electronic equipment thumbed their noses at Brass, who knew what little of it was. A large comfy-looking white leather couch dominated the center of the room with chairs set at angles facing the television on either side. Thick white pile carpeting squished beneath the detective's feet, the type that particles of evidence could hide themselves away in; still, Brass knew there was little hope of finding any evidence in here, which (he also knew) was why he'd drawn this room in the first place.

In the bedroom, on the nightstand, Grissom found an ashtray full of smoked joints and, in a drawer of the nightstand, a large resealable plastic bag full of grass. As he went through the closet, Grissom began to realize he wasn't going to find anything to help him in here. He had hopes for the bathroom, but found nothing there, either. To his surprise, luminol showed no blood in the tub…or the sink….

In the kitchen, Nick found some blood in the drain, as if someone had washed it off their hands. And luminol showed a few spots of blood in the sink. He took samples of all of it, but found nothing else.

'You're gonna wanna see this!' Warrick called from the basement.

They trooped downstairs, an eager Grissom in the lead. The windowless room was illuminated by a single bulb dangling from the ceiling, Psycho-style. In the far corner, a shower head was attached to the wall, feeding a drain in the floor a few feet away. Though a curtain rod made a square enclosure, the shower curtain was long gone, bits of it still entangled in the metal rings of the rod.

The latter detail struck Grissom as possibly significant.

Next to the shower, a large sink was mounted on the wall, with a toilet along the same wall beyond that, no walls around any of the fixtures.

With the others looking on, a calm but focused Warrick said, 'I sprayed the shower, the floor, the sink and the toilet with luminol.'

No one said anything as the lanky CSI turned on the UV light. Nor did they speak when the entire room seemed to supernaturally fluoresce before them, freezing even these seasoned investigators into shock.

Shaking his head, Brass finally said, 'Oh, my God…'

His expression grim, Grissom hung his head, the vision of it playing before his closed eyes.

Pierce has a key to the house. He comes down here, into this cement dungeon, with the body of his wife. He places her in the shower like the lump of flesh she's become, and goes back upstairs for his chain saw. Soon, he returns, and fires it up….

Trying to keep the mess to a minimum, he begins a one man assembly line, cutting off a piece of his dead wife, then cutting off part of the shower curtain-with scissors?-and wraps it up like a piece of meat from the grocery store. Then he puts the pieces in garbage bags, taking care to weight down each bag-rocks? sink weights?-before he ties it off.

All the time he's doing this, Pierce has no emotional response to the fact that he's chopping up his wife. It's a job-nothing more. He has had so many bodies stretched out before him on his massage tables that the human body has no surprises for him-bones, muscles, fat, his fingers know them all so well.

If anything, he takes a grim satisfaction that he's obliterating Lynn's identity, this new identity, this born-again prude who replaced the woman he married. It somehow isn't enough to just kill her-she had been so concerned with spiritual matters, so obsessed with the heavenly world beyond this one, well, he would just relieve her of that cumbersome suit of flesh, removing it from existence: no body, no Lynn.

He also relishes outsmarting the police. If they somehow do come after him, and he is cornered, he will blame that squalid little dope dealer.

'Sadler did it,' he will say. 'Drug deal went bad for him, and he was desperate for cash-and I owed him money, and couldn't pay up.'

But Sadler was in jail, when your wife disappeared, the cops would say.

'That's what Sadler thought you would think,' he says. 'The perfect alibi-but he had one of his 'homeys' do it for him.'

And of course the police will believe him-in Pierce's mind, who wouldn't take the word of an upstanding white citizen over that of some black drug dealer?

But even dead, Lynn proves to be a pain in the ass-she pisses him off one last time, when he tries to slice through the pelvis, and the saw jams up in the bone, dragging the intestines out as he pulls the saw free. He feels foolish, for a moment, supposed expert at anatomy that he is.

But the moment passes, and before very long, he's finally finished down here. He cleans up the blood, making a thorough job of it, convinced he's left no traces for investigators to find. He loads up his SUV with his chain saw and his bags of 'meat,' hauls the saw and the bags over to Sadler's boat in the nearby storage shed, takes the boat out under the cover of darkness, onto Lake Mead, and rides around the rest of the night, dropping bags-and a chain saw, and maybe a gun-over the side.

The only thing Pierce misses is that one of the bags has a pinhole leak, dripping blood in the fishbox, on the deck, and on the gunnel before he finally gets it over the side. His subsequent thorough cleaning of the boat cannot remove these blood trails; but he does not know that.

Nor does the anatomy 'expert' foresee the pelvic piece, still filled with gas, breaking free from its weighted bag, starting for the surface only to be caught up in the anchor chain of the Fish and Wildlife worker, Jim Tilson.

All Owen Pierce knows is that he has one last thing to do: he must turn himself into a distraught