'Help me? Right.'
'We need your permission.'
'What, so you can try to find evidence to lock me up?' She thrust her middle finger at him.
'I'm going to take that as a 'no,'' Grissom said.
He picked the phone up, got an outside line, a dial tone, and-after punching the numbers-was pleasantly surprised to hear the voice of an operator.
'Nine-one-one,' the crisp female voice said. 'Please state your emergency.'
'I need to speak to the sheriff-we have another suspicious death at the Mumford Mountain Hotel. At least one is a murder.'
A long silence ensued and Grissom wondered if the woman had heard him. He was about to repeat himself when she intoned, 'Transferring.'
Covering the mouthpiece, Grissom asked Cormier, 'Who will I be talking to?'
'Sheriff Tom Woods.'
When Sheriff Woods came on the line, Grissom introduced himself and began to explain the situation. He wasn't very far along when the husky-voiced Woods asked to speak to Herm Cormier.
Grissom handed Cormier the receiver; the hotel man held it in a hand as shaky as his voice, saying, 'Hello, Tom-this is Herm…. No, he's for real, a forensics man from Vegas who made it in for that conference 'fore the storm hit…. Yup, happened just like he was saying. You better hear the rest.'
Cormier listened again, then handed the phone back to Grissom. 'Wants you, Dr. Grissom.'
'This is Grissom, Sheriff.'
'Would you continue, please,' Woods requested.
Grissom finished filling him in.
'We're damn lucky to have you there, Mr. Grissom. But the fact is, you're not a peace officer in New York State. You have no jurisdiction. What do you propose we do?'
'I would happily turn this over to you,' Grissom said.
'Lord knows I'd love to help, but the roads won't be open today, for sure…and maybe not tomorrow. Record snowfall, y'know.'
'Right now, I need a search warrant for our suspect's room.'
Amy, sitting with her arms folded, sneered at a wall.
The line crackled while Woods thought about it. Then the deep voice said, 'Here's how we're going to handle this, Mr. Grissom. Would you raise your right hand, please?'
'…Are you deputizing me?'
'I'm appointing you a special deputy for Ulster County. That allows me to get a judge to grant you your search warrant-and allows you to serve it. Your hand in the air?'
Sara grinned as Grissom, feeling a little foolish, switched the receiver to his left hand and raised his right. Over the phone, Sheriff Woods read him the oath, at the end of which, Grissom said solemnly, 'I do.'
'Deputy Grissom, I'll fax that warrant to the hotel as soon as Judge Bell grants it. Put Herm on so I can get the number.'
'Thanks, Sheriff Woods. I appreciate this.' And he gave the receiver to Cormier.
Half an hour later, a fax warrant in hand, Grissom served it on Amy Barlow. Maher stayed behind in the manager's office, watching the prisoner, while Grissom and Sara searched the room. Sara found the boots in a closet; not only did they match the castings from both the crime scene and the lake, multiple dried drops of blood were visible on the upper portion of both boots.
They searched the room carefully but found no sign of bloody clothing that would tie the waitress to Tony Dominguez' death. The hotel would have to be searched, but the likelihood that the boy had taken his own life seemed strong.
Back in the office, Grissom confronted the young woman with the bloody boots. Amy remained adamant about her innocence. 'I still say Tony did it, and a couple boots with a couple flecks of blood ain't gonna convince anybody otherwise.' She gave him a satisfied smile, saying, 'And looks like Tony won't be around to defend himself, either.'
'He won't have to be,' Grissom said. 'We have your boots. We have matching footprints at the crime scene. We found James's…Jimmy's…knife, with blood on it, which I'm confident will match yours. Oh, and we found your bloody gloves and the gun you threw out on the lake…. Next time, Amy, when you throw evidence in a lake, better that it not be frozen over.'
She paled.
But Grissom wasn't through: 'We've got your fingerprints on a coffee cup you served me this afternoon… remember?…and they match the prints on the ziplock bag…the one you put the gun and gloves in, when you tried to hide them in the lake?'
The weight of the evidence seemed to sink her deeper and deeper into the chair.
'Anything you'd like to tell us, Amy?' he asked.
Her voice seemed small, childlike, and not as cruel. 'I loved Jimmy. I gave him everything…I was a lover, a friend, a mother to him…and he throws me over for…a guy?' She shook her head, swallowed, and finally some tears came-no sobs, just crystal trails dribbling down her cheeks. She looked at Sara and said, bitterly, 'Try that out on your self-esteem, honey.'
Sara asked, 'Was it self-defense?'
Now the usual Amy reasserted herself. 'Fuck no! Jimmy was weak…weak in a lotta ways, I see that now. What I was gonna do was beat the shit out of him, for what he did to me. I only took the gun along to scare him, humiliate him like I was humiliated….'
Sara said, 'He hurt you.'
The tears began their gentle trail again; her voice trembled. 'He didn't hurt me…he killed me. He ripped the woman part of me out and stomped on it. He made me feel like a useless, worthless, unwanted skank.'
Grissom asked, 'What happened, Amy?'
She shrugged, taking the tissue Sara handed her. 'I was yelling at him, beating on him. He couldn't feel the kind of…inside pain I felt, but I could at least hurt the outside of his sorry ass.'
'Is that when he pulled the knife?' Grissom asked.
'…He pulled that damned knife and I just looked at him. You know what I said? I said, Well, faggot-looks like you still wanna stick somethin' in me after all!…And he did. Got in a lucky one.' She gestured with her wounded hand. 'So I pulled out the gun and…' She laughed. 'He ran…ran like the scared little girl that he was.'
Sara asked, 'When you hit him, was that a…miss? A mistake?'
'Knowing Jimmy,
Grissom asked, 'Amy…why did you burn him?'
She wiped the tears off her face, drew breath in through her nose. 'I turned him over and he was looking up at me. He was dead, and he was still fuckin' mocking me.' She swallowed. 'And I still hurt inside. So what else could I do? I went back to the toolshed and got the gasoline.'
She folded her arms, as if trying to warm herself; she smiled-a terrible smile.
'When he was burning,' she said, 'finally…I felt better. I felt like I was a woman again.'
Grissom glanced at Sara, who said, 'Then you heard someone coming, right? Heard someone and ran?'
'Yeah.' She looked from one CSI to the other. 'What, was that you two?'
Grissom nodded. So did Sara.
Her eyes narrowed and she bared her teeth, a vicious animal. 'Well, go to hell, both of you…go to hell for spoiling my fun. I wanted to see that prick turn to ashes.'
Grissom looked at Sara and shrugged; she did the same-neither had any more questions for the suspect, who sat, eyes glazed, sinking into the chair, arms tight across her chest, her face as blank as a baby's.
'Herm,' Grissom said. 'Keep an eye on her for a second.'
'Sure thing, Dr. Grissom.'
Grissom and Sara stepped out of the little room, behind the front counter.
'What now?' Sara asked.
'We still have plenty to do. We should process that scene upstairs. Try to determine whether Tony
