Sin City

came home, and went back to Lil Moe's well after dark. I drove my SUV on that trip.'

'Then what?'

'I carried Lynn inside the house, down into the basement and…cut her up with my chain saw.' Finally Pierce's cool mask began to crack; tears started rolling down his face, though he didn't seem to notice. 'I wrapped her up in the shower curtain, or anyway pieces of it, then put the…packages in garbage bags, along with the chain saw. I folded the bloody tarp up and put it in another bag. I used rocks from a garden next door to Lil Moe's to weight them down. After that I spread more garbage bags on the floor of the SUV and put her in there. I picked up Lil Moe's boat…there's a trailer hitch on my SUV…and went to Lake Mead. I just rode around dropping bags into the lake until they were all gone. It was…peaceful. A beautiful night.'

'Is that all?'

Pierce sagged. 'Isn't that enough?'

Soon a uniformed officer came in to escort Pierce away, while Brass joined the CSIs in the adjacent observation room.

'How's that for chapter and verse?' Brass asked, pleased with himself.

Grissom said nothing, his face blank but for a tightness around his eyes.

'What's the matter, Gil?' Brass asked, a bit exasperated. 'He copped to it! Life is good. We got the bad guy. Which is the point of the exercise, right?'

Grissom twitched something that was almost a smile. 'We got a bad guy…but we don't have Lynn Pierce's murderer.'

'What? Gimme a break! The son of a bitch confessed.'

'The 'son of a bitch' lied,' Grissom said.

Warrick stepped up. 'That was one elaborate lie, then, Gris….'

'Like all effective fiction, it had elements of truth…. For example, he cut up the body all right, that part of the confession was true. He just didn't kill his wife.'

Nick's eyes were tight and he was smiling as he said, 'You notice he didn't start crying, till he talked about cutting her up? Killing her, he was cool as a cuke.'

Brass looked like somebody had poured water on him; of course he looked like that much of the time. Still, his aggravation was obvious as he said to Grissom, 'Do you have any idea how much I hate it when you do this to me?'

Grissom smiled his awful angelic smile. 'I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Jim…but the evidence doesn't lie.'

'People do,' Nick said.

'Pierce does,' Warrick said.

Brass held up palms of surrender. 'Okay-tell me why.'

Grissom's expression turned somber. 'Pierce said he stood outside the car and shot his wife through the car window, correct?'

'Yeah.'

'We know from our tests that there was hardly any glass inside the car, and the blood was confined to the driver's seat. If Lynn Pierce had been shot from the outside, the glass would have blown in and her blood would have been splashed and spattered all over the passenger side of the car. And he said it happened in the garage. That garage was clean.'

Brass's face managed to fall further. 'So we still have a killer out there?'

'Yes,' Grissom said with a nod. 'But we know who it is.'

'We do?' Brass asked.

Warrick's expression, and Nick's, asked the same question.

Grissom raised a lecturing forefinger. 'You recall when we arrested Pierce, he made that drawn-out, unnatural confession to his daughter?'

'I'll say we recall,' Warrick said. 'Nick and I both thought that was way beyond weird.'

Grissom asked, 'And why would a father confess to murdering mommy, in front of darling daughter, unless…?'

Nick's eyes popped and his head went back, as he got it. 'Unless they were getting their stories straight!

'Damn,' Warrick said. 'And right under our nose.'

'We need to go back to the castle, one last time,' Grissom said. 'The queen is dead, and the king is covering up for the princess.'

16

BY THIS TIME, CATHERINE AND SARA WERE BACK. Grissom took the two into his office, where they filled him in on the wrap-up of their own case. Both of them looked a little shell-shocked, and Grissom told them to take the rest of the night off.

'You'll talk to the psychologist tomorrow,' he told Catherine.

'Great,' she said with a humorless smirk.

'And then the shooting board.'

'It was righteous,' Sara said, shaking her head.

'I'm sure. Go home, you two, and get some rest.'

Catherine was studying Grissom. 'Well, what are you so excited about?'

'Me? Excited? I don't get excited.'

'Sure you do…finding bugs at crime scenes, for example…or when you're coming down the home stretch of an investigation.'

He owned that he, Brass, Warrick and Nick were about to search the Pierce homestead one last time.

'We're coming along,' Catherine said.

'Absolutely, we're coming,' Sara said.

'No. Go home, I said.'

'Shift isn't over,' Sara said.

'It's a big house,' Catherine said. 'Four more hands to find evidence….'

Less than half an hour later, Brass and the night shift CSIs again stood in the foyer of the Pierce home-all of them: Nick, Warrick and Grissom…Sara and Catherine, too.

Grissom was looking hard at Catherine, who stood there with field kit in hand. 'Are you sure you're up to this?'

'No,' Catherine said, 'I'd rather sit at home thinking about what I'm going to say to the department shrink tomorrow.'

'I'm going to take that as sarcasm,' Grissom said.

'Why don't you,' Catherine said. 'Can we get started?'

Grissom led them into the living room, where everyone snapped on latex gloves, including Brass; all five CSIs had their field kits. With the family gone, the house was deathly quiet, almost tomb-like. Despite the high that accompanied what Catherine had described as 'the home stretch,' Grissom felt remorse slithering through his belly, regretting not only what had happened to Lynn Pierce, but for what would happen in the coming hours….

Nick asked, 'Do we think that .44 was the murder weapon?'

'A strong possibility,' Grissom said.

'I'll tell you what's a strong possibility,' Warrick said. 'Strong possibility that gun's in a garbage bag at the bottom of Lake Mead.'

'Not if this family's concerns about Kevin Sadler were real,' Grissom said.

'Which means it may still be here,' Warrick said.

'Where?' Nick asked.

'Yeah,' Sara said, mildly mocking, 'just ask Grissom-he'll know.'

But Grissom's expression had turned cagey. 'Where is the one place in this house we haven't looked?'

'You kiddin', Gris?' Warrick asked. 'We've turned this place upside down, like twelve times.'

'Gil,' Brass said, 'I'm here more than I'm home.'

'Remember that first night?' Grissom asked. 'What was the one thing Pierce requested we do?'