Glancing at her watch, Catherine said, 'We call it a night.'
'We haven't even identified her yet,' Warrick said to Catherine, but his eyes cut to Brass. 'First twenty-four hours-'
'We don't even know,' Brass interrupted, 'if we have a homicide…. And if we did, can you point at any evidence that's time-sensitive here?'
Catherine shook her head.
After a moment, so did Warrick.
The detective held up his hands in front of him, palms out, his way of saying this was neither his fault nor his problem. They all knew that Sheriff Brian Mobley had put the kibosh on overtime except homicides, and even then on a case-by-case basis. Mobley was eyeing the mayor's seat in the next election and wanted to be seen as fiscally responsible, and that meant cutting most OT.
Catherine said to Warrick, 'If it was up to me, we'd work this straight through-since homicide seems a possibility.'
Brass, who'd had his own share of battles with the sheriff over the years, said, 'We're all slaves to policy. You're on call, as usual-something pressing comes up, your beeper will let you know.'
'I think our vic deserves better,' Warrick said.
'Is she a vic? Do we even know that, yet?…Get some rest, come in tonight and look at this again, with a fresh eye.'
In the rider's seat of the Tahoe, Catherine sat quietly, letting Warrick brood, and drive.
Truth be told, for Catherine the moratorium on overtime was sometimes a blessing of sorts. Sure, she wanted to find this woman's killer…if the woman had been killed…as much as Warrick or God or anybody; and she knew damn well the longer they waited, the colder the trail.
On the other hand, Mobley's penny-pinching gave her the chance to spend a little more time with daughter Lindsey after school. As much as she loved her job, Catherine loved her daughter more, and Lindsey was at that stage where the girl seemed to have grown an inch every time Catherine saw her.
But this was a homicide. She wouldn't say it out loud just yet, but she knew in every well-trained fiber of her being that some sicko had left that woman out here as meal for the coyotes.
And that just wouldn't do.
When she came in that night, right after ten, Catherine Willows was already dragging. She'd slept through the morning, catching a good four hours, but did housework and bills in the afternoon, then spent the evening helping Lindsey with her homework. The latter, anyway, was worth losing a little sleep over.
Until Sheriff Mobley's recent fiscal responsibility manifesto, the CSIs had worked whatever overtime was necessary to crack the case they happened to be on. Catching a case on the night shift meant that certain tasks just couldn't be accomplished during their regular shift. And the level of cooperation with the day shift was less than stellar-Conrad Ecklie, the supervisor on days, considered Grissom a rival, and Grissom considered Ecklie a jerk. This did not encourage team playing between graveyard and days.
Now, with OT curtailed, the CSIs just had to try to cram more work into a normal shift. Although the new policy might pave the way for Mobley's advancement, Catherine knew that rushing to cover so much ground in such a short time could lead to sloppiness, which was the bane of any CSI's existence.
Her heels clicked like castanets on the tile floor as she strode down the hall toward the morgue. When she arrived, she found what she had hoped to find-Dr. Robbins, hard at work on her case. His metal crutch stashed in the corner, the coroner-in blue scrubs, a pair of which Catherine would put on over her own street clothes-hovered over the slab bearing their Jane Doe, a measuring tape in his hands, sweat beaded on his brow.
The balding, chubby-cheeked coroner, his salt-and-pepper beard mostly salt by now, was the night shift's secret weapon. His sharp dark eyes missed nothing and, despite having to use the metal crutch after a car crash some years ago, he moved around the morgue with a nimbleness that ex-dancer Catherine could only envy.
'Getting anywhere?' she asked lightly.
He shrugged without looking up. 'Catherine,' he said by way of acknowledgment, then answered her question with: 'Early yet.'
For all the time she'd spent studying the dead woman under her flashlight beam, Catherine moved in eagerly for a good look under better conditions. Crime scene protocol had meant Catherine had left the woman in her fetal position; now the nude female was on her back on a silver slab.
Her flesh ashen gray, Jane Doe had a pageboy haircut, wide-set closed eyes and full lips that had a ghastly bleached look. A nice figure, for a corpse.
'Funny,' Catherine said.
'What is?'
'She kinda looks like Batgirl.'
Robbins glanced up, then returned to his work.
'From the old TV show,' Catherine explained. 'Not that you'd-'
'Yvonne Craig.' Robbins flicked her a look. 'You don't want to play Trivial Pursuit with me, Catherine.'
'I'll keep that in mind. Sex crime?'
'No evidence of it. When she died, she hadn't had intercourse in a while.'
Catherine gestured to the woman's waist. 'What about the visible panty line?'
'She died clothed-marks from a bra too.'
'Cause of death?'
'Asphyxia, I would venture.' He thumbed open one of Jane Doe's eyelids and revealed red filigree in what should have been the white of an eye. 'She has petechial hemorrhaging in the conjunctivae.'
Catherine leaned in for a closer look. 'That's asphyxia's calling card, all right. Strangulation?'
'Strangely, doesn't appear that way-no ligature marks, no bruising.'
Catherine pondered that a moment. 'So…you've ruled out what, so far? Suicide?'
He smiled. 'Unless you know a way she might have killed herself, then stripped off her clothes.'
'Where are we, then?'
He shrugged. 'As I said…early. Printed her and gave them to Nick to run through AFIS.'
Nick Stokes was another of the graveyard shift CSIs. He'd been working his own case last night, so he hadn't joined them on the trip out to Lake Mead.
'Nick's in already?' she asked.
'Few minutes before you. Closed his case before he went home last night and was looking for something to do.'
'We all feel a little lost without Grissom around,' she said, attempting to be sarcastic and yet not completely kidding.
'Couple of odd things that will, I think, interest you,' he said. 'Have a look. No charge….' He pointed to the victim's right arm.
Catherine moved around where she could get a better view. The victim had an indentation in her left arm above the point of the elbow-a faint stripe, resembling a hash mark.
'And here,' Robbins said, pointing to the victim's left cheek, which had been out of sight at the crime scene.
'Any ideas?' asked Catherine as she looked at a small, round indentation that appeared as if the tip of a lipstick tube…or a bullet, maybe…had been pressed into the woman's cheek.
Again Robbins shook his head. 'I was hoping you might have one…. Found postmortem lividity in the buttocks, lower legs and feet, as well as the left cheek. I checked your photos and they show her lying on her left side.'
Catherine shrugged. 'That's the way we found her.'
'Well, it almost looks like she was in a sitting position, after she died.' Robbins then abruptly changed the subject. 'Tell me-how cold did it get last night, anyway? What did the temp get down to?'
Thrown by this seemingly out-of-left-field question, Catherine shrugged again, more elaborately this time. 'Chilly but no big deal. Forty, maybe.'
Robbins shook his head again, but this time it was more an act of bemusement than disagreement. 'Body's pretty cold-colder than I would have expected.'
'She was cold to the touch last night, too.'
