his metal crutch touch the floor.
'You're pulling a Grissom, aren't you?' Robbins asked.
'I prefer to think of it as a Willows.' She held up a small blue piece of rubber that looked a little like a pudgy bullet, rounded at one end, flat on the other end, barely an inch long.
'What do you have there, Catherine?'
Carefully brushing the hair away from the face of the victim, Catherine placed the rounded tip of the rubber nipple against the dead woman's cheek.
The indentation matched perfectly.
Smiling triumphantly and holding up the blue rubber object between thumb and forefinger, Catherine said, 'Doctor, you are looking at a frost warning device found in Kenmore chest freezers sold at Sears.'
'So,' Robbins said, 'she was kept in a Kenmore freezer.'
'That's the theory. Give us girls a hand, would you?'
'My pleasure.'
Grunting, Catherine said, 'Here-let's sit her up…'
'Okay…'
They lifted Missy's corpse so that she…it…was now sitting on the slab, leaning a little left toward Robbins, almost as if Missy were trying to lay her head on Robbins' shoulder, restfully.
Then, while Robbins held Missy more or less upright, Catherine removed the other item from the bag, a metal rack covered with white plastic, designed to sit across the opening of the freezer and hold smaller items.
Catherine held the tray to the hash mark on the back of Missy's arm.
'Shit,' Catherine said.
It didn't match.
Perplexed, she stepped back. 'Why didn't that work?' she said.
Robbins looked at the corpse's arm, then at the rack and finally back at the arm. 'Flip the rack,' he suggested.
She did, then placed it against Missy's arm-perfect!
'That's more like it,' she said with some satisfaction. 'Now we know what kind of freezer we're looking for.'
She helped Doc Robbins lower Missy back down. As the coroner covered his charge carefully, and eased the slab back inside the vault, he asked, 'How are you going to track down the specific unit?'
She shrugged. 'Frankly, Doc, I have no idea. I'm just happy to put a couple of the pieces together, and start making out a picture. What do you think? Should I go door to door?'
He closed the vault, consigning Missy Sherman's remains to cold storage-again. 'How many Kenmore chest freezers with racks and little blue plugs are there in Vegas?'
'Haven't the foggiest. No database I know of would be any help at all.'
'What about sales records?'
'Possibly,' she said, 'but if we go back to when Kenmore started using the blue plug and the rack, that might be a year ago or it could be twenty. Haven't checked, yet.'
'If it's twenty,' Robbins said, 'I would imagine Sears has sold its share here in Vegas.'
'And who's to say the freezer was sold in Vegas? Hundreds of people move here every month, bringing their freezers and other things along in the back of their covered wagons.'
Robbins nodded. 'No offense, Catherine, but I'm glad I don't have your job.'
Catherine glanced toward the vault where Missy resided. 'You may find this hard to believe, Doc, but I don't spend much time envying you, either.'
He smiled at her. 'Nice work, Catherine.'
'Thanks. Later, Doc.'
For almost five minutes, Catherine raced around CSI HQ looking for Warrick and Nick, going room to room with no luck. Finally she found Warrick in the fingerprint lab.
'You wouldn't be in here,' she said hopefully, 'if you hadn't found something in that Lexus.'
Warrick reported his findings, concluding, 'The hair and fibers are at Trace, and I'm doing the print off the mirror.'
'And?'
'And it doesn't belong to either Alex or Missy Sherman.'
'Dare I hope…? But it could be someone from the car wash.'
'Could be,' Warrick admitted. 'And we won't be able to print and eliminate any of them until the car wash opens in the morning.'
'You don't have to wait till morning to run it through AFIS, though.'
'That's my next step…. You've got that look, Catherine.'
'What look?'
'Cat? Canary? What have you come up with?'
She told him what she'd learned about the freezer.
'Sweet,' Warrick said. 'Forward movement. Gotta love it.'
Nodding, she said, 'Stay on those prints.'
'Try and stop me.'
She was barely out the fingerprint lab door when her cell phone chirped; she answered it.
'It's Nick.' In the background, she could hear the familiar howl of the Tahoe's siren.
Talking and walking, she said, 'Where are you rolling to?'
'Murder scene! I think you need to be in on this.'
'We're focused on the Sherman woman. You've gone solo before, Nick-what's the problem?'
Nick worked his voice up over the siren: 'Radio chatter I been listening to, street cops think it's a strangulation. But no ligature marks!'
Like Missy Sherman.
'Who's the vic?'
'As-yet-unidentified woman about Missy Sherman's age. If she's a thawed-out corpse-sickle, too, we could have a whole 'nother deal, here.'
Just what they needed: another serial killer.
'Where's the crime scene?' Catherine said, almost yelling into the phone, which leached siren noise.
Nick was almost yelling, too. 'Charleston Boulevard-all the way out at the east end.'
'Nick-there's nothing out there.'
'Just our crime scene…and some houses, up the hill.'
'I'll grab Warrick and we'll meet you there.' She clicked off without waiting for his response.
In the Tahoe's front passenger seat, Warrick said, 'This damn case didn't make any sense when it was just a missing person turned murder. Now you're telling me it might be a double homicide?'
Deciding not to get him stirred up with her serial-killer notion, Catherine-behind the wheel-shook her head. 'We don't know the murders are connected.'
'Then why are we heading out to the crime scene?'
She shrugged. 'Back Nick up.'
After that, the pair drove mostly in silence, Warrick unsuccessfully fiddling with the radio trying to scrounge up the same kind of chatter Nick had overheard. They surely would have arrived at the scene a minute or two sooner if Warrick had been driving, but his race-car tendencies made Catherine nervous, so she'd slid behind the wheel. She had enough stress right now.
Soon, she was easing to a stop near Nick's Tahoe. They exited their Tahoe into the chilly night with field kits in latex-gloved hands, their breath visible. Streetlights didn't reach this far past the end of the paved road and halogen work lamps had been set up near the body.
Charleston Boulevard dead-ended at the foot of a mountain, near where several half-million-dollar homes nestled on a ridge, modern near-mansions with a view on rocky, scrubby desolation. Little more than a hundred yards to the south from the houses, near the entrance to a construction road that led off around the mountain, a ditch on the very edge of the desert had become a dumping ground for trash-bulky waste items like carpeting and old sinks, and-tonight-the nude body of a slender white woman around thirty years old.
